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Jon Southall

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A causal action which causes one to be the seller and the other the buyer. The act of gathering it establishes who the seller is, as by gathering it, the ore becomes their natural wages.

 

Land is fundamentally not something that can be gathered up. Of course you can try to dig it up, but what you will get is the dirt, so-to-speak. The dirt would be your natural wage and therefore your private property, but this does not extend to cover the remaining land.

This seems to totally misconstrue what land is. There's a difference between land as the surface of the earth, and land as an abstract space in which to do various activities. You're right that land cannot be treated like a lump of iron, but that's all you've shown. Property, under Objectivism isn't primarily about physical goods, unlike many libertarian notions of property as scarce goods. If you want to argue that property can only properly refer to tangible goods, okay, but understand most of us here distinguish property as a product of our mind first and foremost. Gathering per se is not important as a primary even for iron lumps. What counts is that it goes TOWARDS some product or usage.

 

Start off with: what is land used -for-? If you want to get reallllyyy technical, think of land as a "second-order" property since the dirt itself is irrelevant here. We're 1 step removed, focused on what we need for action. Sort of like how a bank can refer to the building or the abstract institution, or how recipe can refer to the paper it is written on or the process you use to cook something. A space is needed for a lot of work. Sometimes, land has upkeep, and renting it out is only one way to offer land usage as an abstract.

Edited by Eiuol
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"In regard to political economy, this last requires special emphasis: man has to work and produce in order to support his life. He has to support his life by his own effort and by the guidance of his own mind. If he cannot dispose of the product of his effort, he cannot dispose of his effort; if he cannot dispose of his effort, he cannot dispose of his life. Without property rights, no other rights can be practiced"

 

Citing this is a good example to show how closely we agree, but that we do not have a common understanding yet.

 

We are referring here quite clearly to the disposal of the product of man's effort. The product of his efforts is what he was the cause of. That is what he had to work for and produce in order to support his life. That is what property rights apply to. I don't disagree with what is quoted above.

 

The issue I have with the homesteading act is that it rests on a conceptual confusion. I am trying to tease this out here.

 

The conversion of uncultivated land into civilisation occurs only as a result of man's productive efforts, and so civilisation belongs to man. That is not in dispute.

 

There are three situations which are problematic as far as the homesteading principle is concerned:

 

1) The Homesteading Act assumes the legitimacy of a government's custody of uncultivated lands. This assumption is a poor one, history confirms. 

 

A government says it has custody of a territory, which, in this context, will not be owned by anyone and will be uncultivated. There is no reasonable, objective means by which to settle the consequential territorial disputes between that government and any other groups or individuals who assert claims to it.

 

2) Land is a factor of production, not a consequence of it. Working the land, e.g. for five years, does not reverse this fact of reality.

 

The homesteading principle is at odds with reality by granting private property rights to that which was not the result of man's productive efforts.

 

3) Following on from 2). Land is a factor of production. Being granted control of it exclusively gives you the right to prevent others from using that land to produce, unless they meet the terms of your permission. You therefore establish a kingdom of your own, whether on a small or large scale, where if you decide to admit subjects, you can force them to pay you a tax in the form of economic rent, or exile them. Therefore it is just a mechanism for re-establishing on a small scale the injustices of what kings had established on a large scale. Like a kingdom, this claim lasts for as long as you want to be king - in perpetuity if you pass it down to your next in lines.

 

Admittedly I state this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I believe fundamentally this is what the Homesteading principle establishes.

 

Returning to the quote at the top of this comment, I hope it can be seen more clearly now how private land monopolies, even those established via the homesteading principle, are an attack on private property, rather than part of what constitutes it. 

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I hate to say this but it confuses things for me greatly. 

 

In answer to your point 3 with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek replay:

 

Who cares?    If someone is being an ass I can simply walk away and do business with someone else.

 

I do it every day.

 

Governments monopolize.  People cannot unless they are criminals which is a separate topic.   

 

I see reason to separate property into sub categories and have government control of them because a few people can man up and walk away.  

 

...

 

In retrospect that last line explains a lot of Government intervention in economics today. 

Edited by Spiral Architect
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Dan,

 

I'm claiming property rights are legitimate when they concern the product of man's effort.

 

Land (and other type 2 existents) are not the product of man's effort. So I see private ownership of land as the result of a confusion of what constitutes private property and what doesn't. An undesirable consequence of this confusion is the collection of economic rent, which in natural justice does not belong to the landowner exclusively.

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"In answer to your point 3 with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek replay:

 

Who cares?    If someone is being an ass I can simply walk away and do business with someone else.

 

I do it every day."

 

That might work for you personally but I disagree with the principle that you live by. You could just as easily say, "so what if neighbourhood x is full of robbers that take your money. Why not just go to another neighbourhood instead. I avoid bad neighbourhoods every day".

 

Whilst in practical terms this may be true, it ignores the fact that robbery is a crime and a failure to protect property and inalienable rights results in an uncivilized world where such values go unchallenged.

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  • 2 weeks later...

"In answer to your point 3 with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek replay:

 

Who cares?    If someone is being an ass I can simply walk away and do business with someone else.

 

I do it every day."

 

That might work for you personally but I disagree with the principle that you live by. You could just as easily say, "so what if neighbourhood x is full of robbers that take your money. Why not just go to another neighbourhood instead. I avoid bad neighbourhoods every day".

 

Whilst in practical terms this may be true, it ignores the fact that robbery is a crime and a failure to protect property and inalienable rights results in an uncivilized world where such values go unchallenged.

 

I can't ignore a robber.  I can ignore a plot of land.  Easily.  I did it while driving home :)

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Dan,

 

I'm claiming property rights are legitimate when they concern the product of man's effort.

 

Land (and other type 2 existents) are not the product of man's effort. So I see private ownership of land as the result of a confusion of what constitutes private property and what doesn't. An undesirable consequence of this confusion is the collection of economic rent, which in natural justice does not belong to the landowner exclusively.

 

So if I buy some land and say... Farm it for myself it is private property? 

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I don't understand how I am supposed to live without privately owned land. What is the alternative? Are we supposed to share all land in common? The agricutural revolution would never have happened. Without privately owned land wouldn't we all be nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes reduced to a neolithic subsistence?

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I don't understand how I am supposed to live without privately owned land. What is the alternative? Are we supposed to share all land in common? The agricutural revolution would never have happened. Without privately owned land wouldn't we all be nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes reduced to a neolithic subsistence?

The bottom-line in Georgism is that nobody should benefit from what they see as a grab of specific land. If X grabbed more land than Y, then X owes something to the community (and Y owes... to those who have no land at all). If they both grabbed equal amounts of land, but X grabbed very fertile land that produces twice the crop of Y's land, then again X owes more than Y.

 

In practice, the bottom line is a system of land-tax which charges more for better land. In their ideal world, nobody would gain from the grab. In their ideal world, everyone would be like a renter, renting and from the community at large. One could still have something called property-rights in land, and these would imply a degree of control, as long as one pays one's land-tax. That's not what Objectivism would see as a property-right, but slightly better than the fascist notion, where the government has more detailed say.

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But we already pay property taxes. Where I live, property taxes are 2.65%. Perhaps Georgism might have made sense when taxes were 3% but not today when the government consumes 20%+ of gdp. Let's slash government to 3% of gdp and then we'll talk.

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There's a concrete example of that in practice, today.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=QW8nVePjC5ayoQSH64CYDw&url=http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty&ved=0CBwQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNHFeN6R0dI4pF3My2TwLEeH9u3GfQ&sig2=QKcFPLPZOr9_lvkIcWmqUw

Edit:

To clarify, part of the Space Treaty declares every celestial body to be the "common heritage of mankind". In practice this means that nobody is allowed to claim ownership of any of it.

I really hate to beat a dead horse, but there are plenty of chunks of the asteroid belt which are primarily composed of gold and platinum... Please note the mad dash to utilize them.

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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That should work out just peachy...

Actually, once we do get around to colonizing the solar system, I think those colonists will quickly become a completely different caliber of human being; they won't be able to afford anything less.

The Space Treaty could make things interesting... if they choose to abide by it, once they're beyond the reach of a single gun on Earth.

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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  • 4 weeks later...

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