Austrian and libertarian correspondences
June 21, 2015
From time to time I get over the transom (look this up if you don’t know what it is) requests for information, for my opinion, on issues related to Austrian economics and/or libertarian theory. Some of these questions, and my answers, might be of interest to readers of LRC. So, I am going to share on an anonymous basis a selection of these correspondences with you. Here’s one such:
Hi Walter. Hope you are well. A friend and I have set up an informal Man, Economy and State reading group. We have some questions and I thought maybe you could help.
These came up in the Property: Appropriation of Raw Land section of ch. 2. (We’re not that far ahead yet. I can barely keep up with all the things I have on the go at the moment.)
1. Is there any minimum to the amount of labor you have to mix with the land to appropriate? For example, say you plow a field once and leave it. Is that “cultivation?” Does this prevent it from ever being used by someone else again? Would that original power have ownership into perpetuity even if he abandoned it and left it to return to its natural state? What if he died and had no issue? (This is a bit like the problem the City of Leipzig (and probably other German cities) has now – the people who were taken away during WWII and died with no heirs, today their property sits unused because ownership is unclear. No one seems to have figured out what to do – the property rights are still held, but the person is gone, has no heirs and needless to say, had no time to assign the property to anyone else. Are those to sit there until the building collapses? Then what to do with the land the now non existent building sits on?)
2. Have you read Robert Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress? In it, one person intentionally irritated the group and created strife – in a sense, limiting other people’s freedom to act. Does this irritation constitute aggression or invasive action? If aggressors can be banished, and on the moon that means being “put outside the airlock” is abandoning land a form of aggression? Can the group appropriate the property of the aggressor who is no longer there? Who, because of his banishment due to his aggression against the group, was put outside the airlock?
3. If you appropriate a section of the sea surface, does that mean you have rights to what’s on the sea floor? What about the resources below the sea floor? I think, with sea-floor oil and gas drilling for example, the oil companies get permission to drill from governments who have appropriated out to, I think, 200 miles beyond the seashore (which is not without its own problems). All this implies government have appropriated the surface, the fish, the sea floor and the sub sea floor resources.
4. I think I heard you discuss the issue with flying over someone’s land – that property right is limited – but why? Especially, if in the previous question, the answer was yes, the surface owners owns down to the centre of the earth, or something like that?
5. If all we ever have when we are born into the world is ourselves, do we have the right to “Standing Room” and if there is none left, what does a newborn child have/do? I guess the question here is – what happens the day nothing is unowned? Where would a child get the resources to produce? As gifts from his/her parents? What about orphans? Or are children trespassers?
6. If we own the land but not the value of the land, and air pollution diminishes just the value of the land (doesn’t vandalize it in any way), then why would we have the right to sue the polluter?
For my answers to these questions, continue reading.
1. Is there any minimum to the amount of labor you have to mix with the land to appropriate? For example, say you plow a field once and leave it. Is that “cultivation?” Does this prevent it from ever being used by someone else again? Would that original power have ownership into perpetuity even if he abandoned it and left it to return to its natural state? What if he died and had no issue? (This is a bit like the problem the City of Leipzig (and probably other German cities) has now – the people who were taken away during WWII and died with no heirs, today their property sits unused because ownership is unclear. No one seems to have figured out what to do – the property rights are still held, but the person is gone, has no heirs and needless to say, had no time to assign the property to anyone else. Are those to sit there until the building collapses? Then what to do with the land the now non existent building sits on?)
Response: Appropriation of land thru homesteading is not a cut and dried affair. It is vulnerable to the continuum problem: Block, Walter and William Barnett II. 2008. “Continuums” Journal Etica e Politica / Ethics & Politics, Vol. 1, pp. 151-166, June; http://www2.units.it/~etica/; http://www2.units.it/~etica/2008_1/BLOCKBARNETT.pdf. East of the Mississippi River, where land is more fertile, you are required to farm “more” intensively than west, where it is drier. How much? It depends upon customs. Readings on this:
Locke, John. 1960. An Essay Concerning the True Origin, Extent and End
of Civil Government, V. 27-28, in Two Treatises of Government, P.
Laslett, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; pp. 17-18 (on
homesteading) http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.htm
“[T]he basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self-owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another’s person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or ‘mixes his labor with’. From these twin axioms– self-ownership and ‘homesteading’–stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free market society.”
–Murray N. Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” Cato
Journal, Vol. 2 (1982): 60-61; http://mises.org/story/2120
“[O]ur existence is due to the fact that we do not, indeed cannot accept a norm outlawing property in other scarce resources next to and in addition to that of one’s physical body. Hence, the right to acquire such goods must be assumed to exist.”
–Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy (Kluwer: 1993): 185.
Block, Walter. 2008. “Homesteading, ad coelum, owning views and
forestalling.” The Social Sciences. Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 96-103;
http://www.medwelljournals.com/fulltext/TSS/2008/96-103.pdf;
http://medwelljournals.com/new/5/archivedetails.php?id=5&jid=TSS&theme
=5&issueno=12
Block, Walter E. 2009. The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human
and Economic Factors; forward by Brad Edmonds; Auburn, AL: the Mises
Institute;
http://www.mises.org/store/Privatization-of-Roads-and-Highways-P581.as
px
http://www.mises.org/store/Privatization-of-Roads-and-Highways-P581.as
px?AFID=14
freebie: http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf
http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf
isbn: 978-1-933550-04-6
on abandonment:
Kinsella, Stephan. 2009A. “A Critique of Mutualist Occupancy.” August
2;
http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/08/a-critique-of-mutualist-occupan
cy/; http://blog.mises.org/10386/a-critique-of-mutualist-occupancy/
Kinsella, Stephan. 2009B. “Left-Libertarians on Rothbardian
Abandonment.” August 22;
http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/08/left-libertarians-on-rothbardia
n-abandonment/
Kinsella, Stephan N. 2009C. “Homesteading, Abandonment, and Unowned
Land in the Civil Law.” May 22;
http://blog.mises.org/10004/homesteading-abandonment-and-unowned-land-
in-the-civil-law/
Response:
2. Have you read Robert Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress? <<yes
In it, one person intentionally irritated the group and created strife – in a sense, limiting other people’s freedom to act.
<< who was this? The revolutionary? He's innocent. That earthling that the young kids were going to "put outside the airlock" for annoying a girl? See continuums, above. It is a gray area.
Does this irritation constitute aggression or invasive action? If aggressors can be banished, and on the moon that means being “put outside the airlock” is abandoning land a form of aggression?
<<I can't see how abandoning land is a violation of the basic
libertarian axiom of the non aggression principle (NAP)
Can the group appropriate the property of the aggressor who is no longer there?
<< not the group, but the victim of the aggressor, or, in case of mere abandonment, the next homesteader.
Who, because of his banishment due to his aggression against the group, was put outside the airlock?
3. If you appropriate a section of the sea surface, does that mean you have rights to what’s on the sea floor? What about the resources below the sea floor? I think, with sea-floor oil and gas drilling for example, the oil companies get permission to drill from governments who have appropriated out to, I think, 200 miles beyond the seashore (which is not without its own problems). All this implies government have appropriated the surface, the fish, the sea floor and the sub sea floor resources.
Response: no. I think the ad coelom doctrine, according to which you do have this right, is illicit. Readings on this:
Block, Walter E. and Matthew Block. 1996. “Roads, Bridges, Sunlight
and Private Property Rights," Journal Des Economistes Et Des Etudes
Humaines, Vol. VII, No. 2/3, June-September, pp. 351-362;
http://141.164.133.3/faculty/Block/Blockarticles/roads1_vol7.htm;
http://www.business.loyno.edu/bios/Blockarticles/roads1_vol7.htm;
http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/block-block
_roads-bridges-sunlight-property-1996.pdf;
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228217518_Roads_Bridges_Sunli
ght_and_Private_Property_Rights?ev=prf_pub
Debate on eminent domain: Walter E. Block vs. Richard Epstein,
http://mises.org/media/1231;
http://blog.mises.org/archives/002009.asp;
http://maroon.uchicago.edu/news/articles/2004/05/04/block_epstein_will
_d.php; 5/4/04; http://www.mises.org/blog/archives/002009.asp
Listen to it: http://www.mises.org/Media/?action=showname&ID=64
Epstein, Richard vs. Walter E. Block, 2005. “Debate on Eminent
Domain.” NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 1144-1169
http://maroon.uchicago.edu/news/articles/2004/05/04/block_epstein_will
_d.php; 5/4/04; http://www.mises.org/blog/archives/002009.asp
http://www.nyujll.org/articles/Vol.%201%20No.%203/Vol.%201%20No.%203%2
0-%20Block%20and%20Epstein.pdf
Nedzel, Nadia and Walter E. Block. 2007. “Eminent Domain: A Legal and
Economic Analysis” Government Law and Policy Journal; Vol. 9, No. 1,
Spring, pp. 70-73; http://tinyurl.com/yw47yk; reprinted as: Nedzel,
Nadia and Walter E. Block. 2007. “The Demise of Eminent Domain” One On
One: A Publication of the General Practice Section of the New York
State Bar Association, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, pp. 49-53
Nedzel, Nadia and Walter E. Block. 2008. “Eminent Domain: A Legal and
Economic Critique” University of Maryland Law Journal of Race,
Religion, Gender, and Class; Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 140-171;
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/academics/journals/rrgc/current_issue.htm
4. I think I heard you discuss the issue with flying over someone’s land – that property right is limited – but why? Especially, if in the previous question, the answer was yes, the surface owners owns down to the centre of the earth, or something like that?
Response: that's the fallacious ad coelom doctrine. The correct libertarian doctrine is that you only own that which you mix your labor with. No one has yet mixed his labor anywhere near the core of the earth, some 4500 miles down from the surface. So, slant drilling would be justified.
5. If all we ever have when we are born into the world is ourselves, do we have the right to “Standing Room” and if there is none left, what does a newborn child have/do? I guess the question here is – what happens the day nothing is unowned? Where would a child get the resources to produce? As gifts from his/her parents? What about orphans? Or are children trespassers?
Response: happily, we are nowhere near that point. In the future, when there are, oh, a trillion people, probably they can all be housed in high rise skyscrapers. But what about a quadrillion people. Well, by then, if the govt doesn't blow us all up, we'll be on Mars, the moon, heck, maybe Jupiter. Plenty of room. The day nothing is unowned will be a glorious day for mankind. No more tragedy of the commons. See on that, this:
Block, Walter E. 2011. Review essay of Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing
the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action.
Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; in
Libertarian Papers, Vol. 3, Art. 21;
http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2011/lp-3-21.pdf
6. If we own the land but not the value of the land, and air pollution diminishes just the value of the land (doesn’t vandalize it in any way), then why would we have the right to sue the polluter?
Response: we would NOT have the right to sue, since the person who harmed us in this way would NOT be a polluter. Maybe, a hippie who painted his house funny colors. The way to deal with that is through condominium agreements or restrictive covenants. See on this:
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann and Walter E. Block. 2002. "Property and
Exploitation," International Journal of Value-Based Management, Vol.
15, No. 3, pp. 225-236;
http://www.mises.org/etexts/propertyexploitation.pdf
Rothbard, Murray N. 1982. "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,"
Cato Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring; reprinted in Economics and the
Environment: A Reconciliation, Walter E. Block , ed., Vancouver: The
Fraser Institute, 1990, pp. 233-279; http://mises.org/story/2120;
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf
Wouldn’t suing be restricted to any harm to the person if the air pollution damages her lungs, for example? What about a rendering plant? Those create horrible smells which may reduce the value of the land but don’t vandalise it in any way, unless you think bad smells are a form of vandalism.
This is the BEST thing ever written on that issue:
Rothbard, Murray N. 1982. "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,"
Cato Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring; reprinted in Economics and the
Environment: A Reconciliation, Walter E. Block , ed., Vancouver: The
Fraser Institute, 1990, pp. 233-279; http://mises.org/story/2120;
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf
Sorry this is so long – I hope it isn’t too much of an imposition on your time. I figure you’ve probably answered all these questions before.
Thank you …
The Bionic Mosquito on Left Libertarianism