Political Theory

Re: An issue with homesteading

Southern — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 22:06:33 GMT

Suppose I live on an island and use the trees there for fire to warm myself. But then comes a lumberjack to the island and cuts all the trees on the island. I didn't homestead all the trees on the island, yet my ability to warm myself as night has disappeared. This can significantly hurt my health. There is a contradiction here. On one hand it seems that the homesteading principle doesn't give me any legal standing here. On the other hand I'm pretty sure most people in such situation would not recognize the cut trees as property of the lumberjack. It doesn't seem just.

What do you think?

I think this scenario is missing some important information. Did you just sit idle while the lumberjack cut every last tree on the island? Did you do anything to protect or express your ownership of the trees, such as marking them with some sort of symbol or fencing them off? If not then I dont know how you could claim they were yours after the fact or that the lumberjack was in the wrong by cutting them.

The point is that just thinking to yourself that you own something is not enough. Nor is simply planting a flag on something and declaring it is yours for all eternity. You must actively express and protect your claim. In a sense this is mixing your labor with the property. It is your responsibility as property owner to assert your ownership, if you abandon that responsibility then you abandon ownership.

In your example it sounds as though you sat idlely by, claimed no ownership over any of the trees and let him cut them all down. Dont see how you could be upset when there was no firewood.

Re: An issue with homesteading

Jack Roberts — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:44:33 GMT

I just want to point out that this is currently a problem with a government. I can point you towards several documentaries that cover this very same scenario. In fact i recently watched one that showed how native Americans in Canada are trying to prevent a millennium old forest from being destroyed. So clearly government does not realy help in this sort of scenario.

Re: An issue with homesteading

Eugene — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:26:58 GMT

tunk, your reasoning is correct. I argue that there is no ability to avoid some kind of Socialism with homesteading. See this post: http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/28150.aspx

"In a free market society no one cares how you use your property. But with regards to homesteading soddenly this becomes an issue, because an unhomesteaded property is like public property, it is limited and has potentially many claimants. That's why there is a sort of socialism when it comes to the allocated of unhomesteaded resource."

Re: An issue with homesteading

Clayton — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:25:24 GMT

@tunk: My bad, I thought you were trying to say the interests of innocent children must be weighed against the interests of the homesteader of the island.

Clayton -

Re: An issue with homesteading

tunk — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:09:35 GMT

Clayton, either I communicated poorly or you misread my post. Did you actually think I was arguing for welfare? The problem of the "$10 wasted on the free-riding boyfriend sitting at home playing Wii is $10 that could have gone to another family in genuine hardship" is exactly the point I was trying to make. I also wasn't saying anything about whether the lumberjack would appeal to charity for children when trying to justify his actions in court.

Re: An issue with homesteading

ThatOldGuy — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:12:41 GMT

Oppenheimer's Theory:

Origins of the State

Theories of the State

The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically

Re: An issue with homesteading

Clayton — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:07:18 GMT

This sounds a lot like Oppenheimer's conquest theory (in contrast to Locke) of the origins of the state. Are you familiar with it?

No. A link is welcome if you have one.

Clayton -

Re: An issue with homesteading

ThatOldGuy — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:27:11 GMT

Clayton:
I am, however, somewhat nervous about suggesting that places like China or Afghanistan don't or didn't have rule of law and that this is responsible for their poverty. I think the root cause of socialism an ingrained acquiescence to what I call threat-based social order - the threat-based social order is an inherently centrally-planned social order. Even worse, it's a social order where basically everybody agrees that social order is and ought to be centrally-planned.

I think rule of law can be interpreted as rule of (private) law. Most of what de Soto and Stossel were talking about in that video revolved around recognized property rights. De Soto stressed legal sanction of property rights only insofar as it led to a recognized ownership of property that would demonstrate something beneficial for credit purposes and so on. In that sense, it's not so much an absence of common law that is responsible for poverty as much as it's an absence of recognition of private property rights. Of course, socialism (and its many derivatives) are systems of institutionalized aggression towards property rights -or what you call, and not without reason, threat-based social orders-and these system destroy wealth by definition and lead to poverty as a result.

Clayton:
I suspect that there is some kind of oscillation back and forth between threat-based social order and cooperative social order.

[...]

Once the centrally-planned social order collapses or fizzles out, the harmonious social order which had been hiding in the shadows comes out into the light of day and once again becomes the foundation for a new growth spurt.

This sounds a lot like Oppenheimer's conquest theory (in contrast to Locke) of the origins of the state. Are you familiar with it?

Re: An issue with homesteading

Clayton — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:14:25 GMT

@TOG: Wow, that was awesome. I really believe the root of all legal innovation and the normative content of law really resides in the common law. I am, however, somewhat nervous about suggesting that places like China or Afghanistan don't or didn't have rule of law and that this is responsible for their poverty. I think the root cause of socialism an ingrained acquiescence to what I call threat-based social order - the threat-based social order is an inherently centrally-planned social order. Even worse, it's a social order where basically everybody agrees that social order is and ought to be centrally-planned.

I suspect that there is some kind of oscillation back and forth between threat-based social order and cooperative social order. As people begin to cooperate and the social order becomes harmonious, progress quickens and the established culture quickly becomes outmoded. With nothing in place to preserve the older, harmonious order, opportunists step in to fill the void and project their ends upon everyone else in society, that is, they impose central-planning and seek to abolish "selfishness" in order to redistribute the productive energies of the masses to themselves (tyranny). As this new social order rigidifies, every aspect of society becomes "top-down" - you don't move unless ordered to move and when ordered to move you had better jump. Quickly, this rigid, centrally-planned society sets in motion the conditions of its own starvation and demise. In the meantime, the cooperative social order (black market) continues to operate and innovate in "the gaps" between the threats and orders of the establishment. Once the centrally-planned social order collapses or fizzles out, the harmonious social order which had been hiding in the shadows comes out into the light of day and once again becomes the foundation for a new growth spurt.

Clayton -

Re: An issue with homesteading

ThatOldGuy — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:38:17 GMT

Clayton,

I came across this just now (consider what de Soto says with respect to trees and corn with respect to my comment regarding marking trees). I thought it was interesting.

Hmm.. I guess copying the URL at a specific time doesn't work anymore. Skip ahead to 11:32 to see what I meant regarding de Soto.

Re: An issue with homesteading

Clayton — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 01:35:51 GMT

There's your problem, or at least one problem. You are only looking at this situation from your own point of view, which is why it seems to conflict with your moral intutions. What if that lumberjack was cutting down all those trees so he could build shelters for homeless children? If he was forcibly prevented from doing this, perhaps your own health might be saved, but if a cold winter struck the next day dozens of innocent children would likely die.

I think it's a mistake to base any argument about rights on extremely shaky grounds like this. You might call it the "tunnel vision fallacy," looking at an issue from a simplistic, narrow perspective and ignoring a lot of complications. Or rather, proposing laws and rights that should apply to everyone under normal circumstances by appealing to a marginal case involving a couple of people. (You could also call it the "sob story fallacy," since it resembles appeals to emotion.) If you think about it, proponents of the welfare state often employ it.

I strongly disagree with your allegory of the lumberjack cutting down the trees for to build shelter for children. In fact, the central problem with modern law is its failure to properly restrict the scope of viewpoints which are allowed to be entered into a legal dispute and it is precisely this dynamic which creates the "sob story" dynamic: but what about the children?

The only points of view that matter in a legal dispute are those of the disputants. Of course, in a hypothetical lawsuit between the lumberjack and Eugene, the lumberjack is free to mention his noble motives (children's charity) but I strongly doubt that - in a private law society - motives would count for much. This is for several reasons. First, they're easily feigned and a convenient "noble motive" is almost always available. Second, a disputant who invokes the interests of others is generally doing so in order to create the appearance that he did not act on his own behalf in order to escape charges of conflict-of-interest or to deflect responsibility for his own actions ("you can't blame me for cutting down the trees, somebody had to build the shelter - ask God why he allowed these innocent children to be homeless").

In the grand view of things, there is a knowledge problem - you only actually know your own ends. Appeals to the ends (or "needs") of others are arbitrary and irrelevant. Your actions are informed by your ends. Therefore, we should want a law that most aligns the individual's own ends with the social order and vice-versa. In other words, society can only be harmonious when simple pursuit of self-interest is aligned with the individual's ends by the "push-back" from the social order in a way that balances the ends of every individual to the extent he is able to express them (act). Statutory law and monopoly courts inevitably represent the ends of a tiny number of individuals who falsely and conceitedly imagine that they can divine the true ends of all or most other people in society.

For example, suppose, if we fail to tax a rich man who has plenty, a poor man will be evicted from his home. This seems like a strong intuitive argument for welfare rights, until you consider the possibility that the money that is taxed from the rich man would otherwise be spent to provide a starving African village with a year's worth of sustenance. Perhaps implementing our welfare policy we would end up with more deaths on net than otherwise.

See the knowledge problem above. Welfare is central-planning of charity and suffers from the same calculation problems that any economic central-planning does. The biggest problem with welfare is free-riders - the able-bodied boyfriend who loafs around the house playing the Wii while his pregnant girlfriend picks up their welfare check. Yet old-fashioned charity - face-to-face charity - imposed a discipline on the distribution of charity. Often, the people disbursing charity (church staff, mission staff, etc.) personally knew the recipients of charitable resources. This made it difficult to free-ride because the persons disbursing charity would eventually see through a charade and cut off assistance in order to put the resources to helping those truly in need. No such calculation is possible in the modern system. It is impersonal by design.

It is in charity where it is easiest to see that waste is sin. $10 wasted on the free-riding boyfriend sitting at home playing Wii is $10 that could have gone to another family in genuine hardship. Oh wait, I forgot, the government is funded by magic fairy dust and it has groves and groves of money-trees so waste doesn't matter!

Clayton -

Re: An issue with homesteading

Jack Roberts — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:20:16 GMT

I think this was your best argument yet Eugene.

The person on the island would have to be careful that someone could move to the island that he inhabits and tries to take trees and fruit and similar. It would be within the interest of the person to use technology or any means available to try and solve this problem. If he is unable to prevent someone from visiting the island and making use of it, then there is nothing that he can do to prevent it practically. He can only build a fence around so much land. His best chance would be trying to prevent someone from doing it in the first place. If he catches someone cutting a tree down then the person should confront the person and make the person aware of the conflict. If the person continues regardless of the conflict. Then you would have to resort to legal means. In the case of a massive international lumber jack organisation that can clean the island of trees in 12 hours. I realy don't have a good answer for that.

Re: An issue with homesteading

tunk — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:05:03 GMT

Eugene:
Suppose I live on an island and use the trees there for fire to warm myself. But then comes a lumberjack to the island and cuts all the trees on the island. I didn't homestead all the trees on the island, yet my ability to warm myself as night has disappeared. This can significantly hurt my health.

There's your problem, or at least one problem. You are only looking at this situation from your own point of view, which is why it seems to conflict with your moral intutions. What if that lumberjack was cutting down all those trees so he could build shelters for homeless children? If he was forcibly prevented from doing this, perhaps your own health might be saved, but if a cold winter struck the next day dozens of innocent children would likely die.

I think it's a mistake to base any argument about rights on extremely shaky grounds like this. You might call it the "tunnel vision fallacy," looking at an issue from a simplistic, narrow perspective and ignoring a lot of complications. Or rather, proposing laws and rights that should apply to everyone under normal circumstances by appealing to a marginal case involving a couple of people. (You could also call it the "sob story fallacy," since it resembles appeals to emotion.) If you think about it, proponents of the welfare state often employ it.

For example, suppose, if we fail to tax a rich man who has plenty, a poor man will be evicted from his home. This seems like a strong intuitive argument for welfare rights, until you consider the possibility that the money that is taxed from the rich man would otherwise be spent to provide a starving African village with a year's worth of sustenance. Perhaps implementing our welfare policy we would end up with more deaths on net than otherwise.

Re: An issue with homesteading

Autolykos — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:59:20 GMT

I don't understand what you mean by your last two sentences.

Re: An issue with homesteading

Eugene — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:26:36 GMT

I agree with Clayton. Property rights did not come from heaven. If they don't make sense in some context, then they wouldn't and shouldn't be used by a free society. It is clear to me that everyone in the position of the person in the opening post will not die from hunger or cold because the lumberjack cut all the trees. That person should expect to continue to have uninterrupted access to the resources (at least as much as it concerns other people)