Political Theory

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

wilderness — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:25:37 GMT

E. R. Olovetto:
I think that you pretty much got it and I certainly didn't come by it having perfect information and omniscience.

Seeing that's what you meant, and I really didn't understand that concept, ie. continuum problem, then I'd have to say that your post was another excellent one on helping decipher to complexities of legal philosophy and jurisprudence, etc.... You really seem to have a handle on the inner mechanics of this field of thought in general. Good post!

edit: I don't think you need to read that whole article I linked to you. Just so you know. I quoted the potency and actuality part of the article in that post (which I believe was the link I gave you). I think you will be able to understand that short part without the need to read the whole article as the article could have excluded that part and still made sense. So reading the rest of the article isn't vital.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

mikachusetts — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:18:36 GMT

E. R. Olovetto:

You're welcome. Do you know what video it was?

It was one of the Mises pieces on iTunesU, I think titled "Radical Austrianism, Radical Libertarianism."

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

E. R. Olovetto — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:52:53 GMT

I think that you pretty much got it and I certainly didn't come by it having perfect information and omniscience. It is good of you to ask, but I don't want to run this thread too far afield. I didn't forget about what the paper you pointed out to me and I should probably include it when I get around to reviving the slavery thread.

trulib:

Stranger:
You shouldn't get mired in the technicalities of homesteading.

I would usually agree with this, but I think in this case it's quite important. Lots of people care greatly for the environment and to make a good case for environmentalists to become libertarians, we do need to give this some thought. I have a friend whose main passion in life is the environment: preserving animal species, rainforests, wildernesses, etc. She will become a libertarian if I can convince her that freedom is the best way to acheive her goals.

To do this, its not good enough to just say 'buy it'. I need to explain what that means, and I have difficulty because how can you homestead something specifically to leave it in its natural state?

A few years ago, billionaire environmentalist Johan Eliasch bought 400,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest to preserve it. This article says he bought it off a logging company for £8m, and he reckons the whole Amazon rainforest could be bought for $50 billion. I wonder what he means by this. Who are the current owners of the rainforest, that would receive this money? How did they come to own it? What about the parts that no one currently owns? What about the primitive tribes living in the rainforest?

Anyone else got any thoughts on this?

Show her the videos I linked or some of the papers out there and invite her to this thread. If she really cares about the environment, she can at least consider actually understanding another viewpoint. There is definitely a difference between fencing in 100 acres and doing absolutely nothing with it and at least using part of it to spot the rare bird you are trying to protect. The questions about the rainforest are valid, but I am just not up to it right now.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

wilderness — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:38:58 GMT

E. R. Olovetto:
There are continuum problems with a lot of aspects of law... There is still always a level of uncertainty and imprecision on law in practice because nobody acts with perfect information or omniscience.

Are the continuum problems what you define in the second part of what I quoted from you here, ie. nobody acts with perfect information or omniscience? Or did you mean something else or more specific by "continuum problem"?

I didn't know what you meant there due to my imperfect information and non-omniscience.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

E. R. Olovetto — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:39:04 GMT

mikachusetts:

Thanks ER. I try to avoid wrapping my head around homesteading waters (especially in fishing where depth comes into play). I was listening to a Block lecture the other day where he discussed the continuity problems in homesteading as well as in children becoming adults (in essence homesteading themselves). Anyway, it piqued my interest on the subject and wasn't sure if anyone had some earth-shattering thoughts on things.

You're welcome. Do you know what video it was? I watched this series back when I was still a minarchist. There are continuum problems with a lot of aspects of law, but keep this in mind: Legal philosophy and jurisprudence are separate fields, though they are obviously related. The Austro-libertarian, or praxeological, approach to legal philosophy is necessarily qualitative. So, we can identify that there exists continuum problems and it is perfectly fine. Libertarianism is a value-free, universifiable, and timeless system of punishment. A judge or juror's role is different. He must draw on knowledge from both the social and natural sciences; legal philosophy, child psychology, oceanography, etc.

He also must act as a historian and then prescriptively. The difference between polycentric and civil monopolistic law is the body of legislators and the uncertainty they create. There is still always a level of uncertainty and imprecision on law in practice because nobody acts with perfect information or omniscience. A justice company might codify its dealings with regards to each specific topic, like forests, but there is always the chance that a case will require a judge to retreat to the realm of introspection in legal philosophy and diverge from the code.

Nielsio:

The way you create a claim on something is by turning it into something valuable.

A value is only reached by way of transaction, as I am sure that you are aware that nothing has intrinsic value. I think that simply embordering a forest, with say an expedition outpost along the edge or somewhere inside with a road running up to it is sufficient as homesteading. I think that adverse possession is compatible with libertarianism, but it is a matter of convention, custom, and technological consideration. So, this is obviously a situation where you might need to do your best to make your borders clear and well known to whatever local institutions.

This line of reasoning is based on the confusing notion that creation is an independent source of property rights. This error is similar to the confused idea that we own things we mix our labor with because we "own" our labor. We own -- have the right to control -- various scarce resources, such as our bodies and other scarce resources we homestead or acquire from previous homesteaders. We do not own "labor"; labor is just an action, an activity of the body. To be sure, when one first uses unowned property, and thereby homesteads it, he is engaging in a type of "labor"; but we do not need to rely on the confusing metaphor that we "own" our labor. By working to emborder or possess an unowned resource, one thereby establishes a visible link with the property, thus establishing a better claim than any latecomer, i.e. ownership. This chain of reasoning does not imply or rest on the idea that we "own" our labor.

As for creation, it is often maintained that one can acquire ownership of things by either finding (homesteading), contract (acquiring it from a previous owner), or by creating the thing. But this is confused: creation is not an independent source of ownership. In fact, a bit of reflection shows that it is neither necessary nor sufficient. If you own a resource and re-shape it into some new, more useful, more valuable configuration (say, you "create" a mousetrap using your wood and metal; or you "create" a statue by carving up your hunk of marble), then you own the resulting "creation" simply because you were already the owner of the material that constitutes it. So it is not necessary to think of creation as a "source" of ownership rights. Likewise, if you carve a statue into someone else's property, then you do not own the resulting statue; rather, the owner of the marble is entitled to have his marble back, and perhaps damages for trespass. So creation is not sufficient for ownership either.

In fact, the only legitimate ways of acquiring title to a given scarce resource is to either homestead it from its unowned state, or to contractually acquire it from someone who already owns it and who can trace his title back to an original act of homesteading. This fully exhausts all ways of coming to own scarce things. This is because matter cannot be created by man, but only rearranged

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

Nielsio — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:24:38 GMT

Joe:

I don't know why you quoted me. I was just trying to point out to the previous poster that we are talking about unowned land, and therefore when he said "buy it" I said "from who." If nobody owns something, then there is nobody to buy the land from.

I reached the 'from who' point in the latter half of my post.

My post was a more general explanation and only sideways a follow-up on you.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

Joe — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:20:16 GMT

Nielsio:

Joe:

from who?

The way you create a claim on something is by turning it into something valuable.

This means that if I pluck an apple from a tree that I only own the apple and I don't own the tree.

Similarly if you want to walk around in the wilderness that's great but that doesn't mean you own it.

Now if people value a nature park to walk around in, then you can change a piece wilderness to make it suitable for that purpose, and you keep working on it so it's safe and beautiful and stuff. And then you charge people to walk around in it. Or you could pay for it through an association that relies on donations so that people can come in for free. But if you let a piece of it be un-useful for a certain amount of time, then your claim comes into question if others have the capital and desire to improve it.

Or others could buy a piece from you, based on a price that you think is worth it. In both cases of claim-transfer or claim sunset do private arbitrations and ratings come into play; because if you don't sell of a piece for a normal price even though you aren't using it, then this may bring into question your public rating. Because if you really don't have a good claim in something then why shouldn't others be free to take it over, by force if they have to? So that pressure prevents you from asking too much or not giving up anything at all -> the risk of others taking it over without their public rating/standing degrading.

I don't know why you quoted me. I was just trying to point out to the previous poster that we are talking about unowned land, and therefore when he said "buy it" I said "from who." If nobody owns something, then there is nobody to buy the land from.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

Graham Wright — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:55:46 GMT

Stranger:
You shouldn't get mired in the technicalities of homesteading.

I would usually agree with this, but I think in this case it's quite important. Lots of people care greatly for the environment and to make a good case for environmentalists to become libertarians, we do need to give this some thought. I have a friend whose main passion in life is the environment: preserving animal species, rainforests, wildernesses, etc. She will become a libertarian if I can convince her that freedom is the best way to acheive her goals.

To do this, its not good enough to just say 'buy it'. I need to explain what that means, and I have difficulty because how can you homestead something specifically to leave it in its natural state?

A few years ago, billionaire environmentalist Johan Eliasch bought 400,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest to preserve it. This article says he bought it off a logging company for £8m, and he reckons the whole Amazon rainforest could be bought for $50 billion. I wonder what he means by this. Who are the current owners of the rainforest, that would receive this money? How did they come to own it? What about the parts that no one currently owns? What about the primitive tribes living in the rainforest?

Anyone else got any thoughts on this?

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

Nielsio — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:53:39 GMT

Joe:

from who?

The way you create a claim on something is by turning it into something valuable.

This means that if I pluck an apple from a tree that I only own the apple and I don't own the tree.

Similarly if you want to walk around in the wilderness that's great but that doesn't mean you own it.

Now if people value a nature park to walk around in, then you can change a piece wilderness to make it suitable for that purpose, and you keep working on it so it's safe and beautiful and stuff. And then you charge people to walk around in it. Or you could pay for it through an association that relies on donations so that people can come in for free. But if you let a piece of it be un-useful for a certain amount of time, then your claim comes into question if others have the capital and desire to improve it.

Or others could buy a piece from you, based on a price that you think is worth it. In both cases of claim-transfer or claim sunset do private arbitrations and ratings come into play; because if you don't sell of a piece for a normal price even though you aren't using it, then this may bring into question your public rating. Because if you really don't have a good claim in something then why shouldn't others be free to take it over, by force if they have to? So that pressure prevents you from asking too much or not giving up anything at all -> the risk of others taking it over without their public rating/standing degrading.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

Joe — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:29:13 GMT

from who?

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

scineram — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:58:27 GMT

Just buy it.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

mikachusetts — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:42:46 GMT

Thanks ER. I try to avoid wrapping my head around homesteading waters (especially in fishing where depth comes into play). I was listening to a Block lecture the other day where he discussed the continuity problems in homesteading as well as in children becoming adults (in essence homesteading themselves). Anyway, it piqued my interest on the subject and wasn't sure if anyone had some earth-shattering thoughts on things.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

Stranger — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:40:58 GMT

You shouldn't get mired in the technicalities of homesteading. It is a principle, not a mechanism, whose purpose is to make action possible.

If you want to acquire or create a large nature preserve, it will be possible to do so through markets.

Whether such a creature is economically sensible is another matter entirely.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

E. R. Olovetto — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:25:43 GMT

Like Joe said, just think of what is done at national parks and such ought to be sufficient "making use of". The key is proof of embordering the area, and there is no need to convince others of its relative value.

If you mark off trails or set up lifeguard stations on one side of a lake, this might not preclude all other claims. We can't give details on every scenario because a lot will be determined by matters of local convention. This isn't a perfect analogy, but consider another question asked here before:

How do surfers homestead a beach?

Well, a right to property is to have its physical characteristics undisturbed. Homesteading questions on the sea can get very complicated. A surfer might only go out 100m into the sea. Say the process of wave formation relies on a sand bar 1000m out. The surfer then has an easement right to the sand bar, insomuch as its shape is maintained, viz. the bar isn't dredged for its sand. He can't though exclude scuba divers or someone laying crab pots.

So, consider the same sort of thing for a forest. Trails wouldn't cover every inch of the forest floor. It isn't possible to just fence in a large area and "keep it wild" in its truest sense. If at the edge of the wild is where you collect fees from survival students or hunters, and you are maintaining the border, this should be sufficient.

Re: Homesteading and nature reserves/parks

mikachusetts — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:10:58 GMT

Even less obtrusive would be creating foot trails or just trimming trees. I'm sure it could be made to look untouched. But looking wild and being truly wild are different things. I guess what I'm looking for is a situation where land could be owned without ever being homesteaded.

That picture looks like fun.