Don’t Fence Me In!

From: SS
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 1:53 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Preclusion of property with regards to land mass
Walter, I argue with commies all the time about the idea of homesteading and why its valid that mixing your labor with the land constitutes your right to declare it yours; its not a surprise they reject this analogy on the notion that its unjustified to use violence against people who step foot on your “so called property” because their issue is with the “claim” of the land itself. They defend aggressive violence (the person causing trouble on someone’s “claimed” property) versus defensive violence (the person defending themselves against a possibly violent intruder). To rationalize this further, they essentially argue that say for example I build a big fence around two acres and my house sits on a plot of it, that all the ground area im NOT mixing my labor with by doing things such as farming, building a shed, etc is no justification to use violence against people who in their mind are simply trying to make use of the land you arnt using. At first glance, this seems easy to denounce as a philosophy. Did the fence not take labor to set up and did they do it peacefully without using violence? And obviously this is incomparable with federal government who owns about 85% of Nevada as that is illegitimate homesteading, correct? But I thought your “bagel theory” on the idea of precluding people in the center brings an interesting point into this matter: is there any extent to which me just having a fence up is illegitimately homesteading in the same way that you’re precluding people from homesteading land they want to mix their labor with? Even if it was a legitimate title transfer and I bought say 5000 acres, and I put up a fence around the land and did nothing else, would this be considered precluding? And if we took a reductio ad absurdum of this thought, would there not be some point when you are precluding others from this simply “fenced in land”? I love your thoughts as always! ~SS

Dear SS: There’s nothing wrong with fencing in already homesteaded land, as in your two acre case. But, you can’t, may not, build a fence around the entire US, or even as small an area as Rhode Island, and claim all the land therein, since you didn’t homestead it all. See on this Block, Walter E. 2016. “Forestalling, positive obligations and the Lockean and Blockian provisos: Rejoinder to Stephan Kinsella.” Ekonomia Wroclaw Economic Review. http://ekon.sjol.eu/category/22-3-2016-529

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