@Fjordbit - So, your contention is that we only own the physical forms of the products of our labor, and not their value?  "Thanks spell-checking my book.  I can't pay you, so just copy down the words you fixed for your own use."  "Thanks for the lifesaving surgery, as payment have a cadaver that's had the same operation."

I'm only about an eighth of the way into Progress and Poverty.  So, I'm curious if your ideas come from Henry George.  If so, I hope he explains them a little better.

Is it not possible for the price of copper to be increased through collusion?  For that matter, what would stop one person from acquiring all the copper mines in the area?  Competition tends to drive down prices, but when there are a fixed number of possible competitors, the effect is less certain.  In many industries, new competitors can enter the market at any time.  Not so with natural resources.  That's what I meant by monopolistic control.  There might be more than one mine, but still a limited number.

If you acknowledge land is a scarce resource, perhaps it would be logical to refrain from saying things like "...there are plenty of other sites to set up coffee shops, and plenty of demand."?

The question of ownership of raw land is the real heart of the issue.  Actually, I'm tempted to say I agree with you that it belongs to no one.  However, while you do not accept that "no one" is the same as "everyone", I do not accept that "no one" is the same as "anyone".

I actually do understand now the reasoning behind the homestead principle, at least some forms of it.  If you build a house, you own the house, and if someone wants to remove it to use the land for something else, they have to buy it from you.  That makes sense.

However, land ownership gives you much more than that.  Under a personal property system, you now control not only the house but also the land underneath.  The market price for selling or renting the house will depend heavily on the location of the house.  If we're talking about stakes or signs, you can't even pretend that the value of the property has much to do with your labor.  You say that you only have the right to claim the products of your own labor, but when you "claim" land, you can get quite a bit more from it than you put into it.  At the very least, you gain not only the products of your own labor, but the products of the labor of everyone who works the land in the future.

This is clearly illustrated with practices like sharecropping.  There have been many businesses past and present that basically consist of letting someone else work the land and taking all but a small portion of the product of their labor.  The mechanic can say "Yes, my fees are high, but without someone like me your car would still be broken."  The doctor can say "Yes my fees are high, but without someone like, you'd be dead."  The landlord can say... what?

Actually, the scenario is unrealistic assuming they had the homestead system from the start- by the time the city is large enough to support a coffee shop, all the available land would have been claimed by speculators.  He might have to rent the space for his coffee shop.

Why might some people claim land and others not?  There could be any number of possible reasons.  Maybe the first ten people to arrive grabbed it all, then left it only to their eldest sons.  Maybe some of them happened to be slow runners.  Maybe they were busy doing something productive.  Maybe the city was founded in a less-enlightened time when only certain types of people were allowed to own land, and their descendents have maintained their markers since.

Whatever great qualities the speculators showed - initiative, foresight, creativity, athleticism, they were wasted in pursuit of the arbitrary and non-productive task of pounding in stakes, and so are the fortunes that the successful of them will make in rent.

@Fjordbit - We both agree that a person has the right to own the products of their own labor, yes?

You say that recreating improvements to land elsewhere, the out-bidders have fulfilled their obligation to the previous owner.

This seems to me to be a completely arbitrary gesture; even more arbitrary than pounding in stakes.  I built a mine.  I don't want a useless hole in the ground.  It has practically zero value to me.  Building one would be a waste of resources, and wouldn't mitigate the financial loss I suffered from the loss of the mine that was mine at all.  

Besides, what about the labor of picking an ideal site in the first place?  How are you going to recreate my labor of finding the copper vein?

You know, I think one of the things that's happening in this conversation is you keep assuming a situation where unclaimed land is abundant, I keep assuming one where it's scarce.  Can we agree that both situations are possible?  Different purposes require different types of land, so at any given time some types of land might be abundant while others are scarce.  It doesn't change the moral dimension, though.  Taking something that's abundant may inflict less of a loss than taking something that's scarce, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

Initiative is a great thing when it's applied towards producing value.  It is not, in of itself, something that entitles you to a reward.  No one's being rewarded for their lack of initiative either.  It's about giving them what belongs to them.  Even you would say they all had an equal right to claim that land.  They lost this right when someone else claimed it.  The claimant took something from them.  Whether it was abundant or scarce, they have less of it than they had before.  This is what the claimant should compensate them for.

Don't confuse me and fjordbit.  In "my" system, you cannot be outbid.  As long as you pay your tax you have the exclusive right to transfer ownership.

As far as the playground analogy, typed out a long detailed response 2-3 times then deleted it when I felt it was getting too silly.    When you say the money is being shifted needlessly, coming from the community and going back to the community, you're ignoring that it would be the same for all bathrooms regardless of success.  Less profitable ones would be paying more into the community than they're taking out, motivating the owner to either sell them or let them revert back to the commons.  This means that future entrepreneurs can enter into the market more easily.  While they'll pay more overhead in rent, they'll also have smaller start-up costs.  The goal is to make sure that business profits come from production, not from monopoly control over scarce resources.

You may be correct that in a state of perfect competition and perfectly rational actors, market forces might accomplish many of these goals.

Would you say that even if I had marked the land with stakes?  I was never going to do anything with it, so it's no loss when someone else builds on it without permission, right?  And while *I* might not have wanted to set up a coffee shop in Marrakech, others in Marrakech might have wanted to, others in my country might have wanted to immigrate.  Even in your value system, their right to claim it was no greater than mine, so can it be said that my loss was smaller?

How about: one kid draws a line around the only bathroom that doesn't already have a line around it?  The number of bathrooms/resource sites is irrelevant.  If there is a good substitute available, the loss we suffered has been reduced, but not to zero.

In your extreme example, the loss is relatively small, but there still was a loss.

Let me try an extreme example.  Let's say our world is an elementary school playground.  One say, a kid takes some chalk and draws a line around the bathrooms and says "From now on, if you go in here you have to give me something, or I'll beat you up."  Can you really say the denizens of the playground have lost nothing?

The potential to do the same.  Or use that land for any other purpose.

I can agree to disagree about the benefit, but you're right about the rest.  I've been convinced it is a moral necessity to compensate the commons for what you take from them, but the question of how to do this is one to which I'm still searching for an answer.

So, actually, that's not so different from homesteading.  Building an immovable improvement keeps you from ever being outbid without you agreeing to sell your improvements.

Of course this really goes back to the question I asked earlier:  What happens if I default on rent?

You really don't see a difference in value between a hole that leads to copper and one that doesn't?  What about a seaport that's on the see and one that isn't?  If it's the natural nature of these things that's confounding the issue, what about a railroad station that's connected to the tracks, and one that isn't?  A storefront on a crowded downtown street, vs one in the middle of the desert?  Unless you compensate me for my labor in a form that has value to me, you didn't really compensate me at all.

Why didn't I outbid him?  Maybe I had other financial obligations that had nothing to do with the mine.  Maybe I wouldn't sell, maybe he didn't bid, maybe he calculated that it will be cheaper to give me a useless hole in the ground than pay me a fair price for my work.  Perhaps this is the case because the new land is softer than the copper vein.  But that's not really important- even if it's true that he'll be a better miner than me, he still owes me compensation for the improvements I made, right? 

I still can't get my head around the idea of "moving" improvements, or even replicating them.  Aside from the fact that some improvements are pretty much immovable, changing the location of an improvement can destroy its value.

"Sorry, I outbid you on this copper vein, but don't worry, I had my people dig you a mine just like this one down by the river.  Enjoy your big, muddy, copperless hole in the ground.  Well, until it gets flooded, anyway."

That's assuming that the majority of the world practices anarchogeolibertarianism.  If we're talking about starting with, say, one anarchogeolibertarian town, the rent money is as good as lost with all the free riders from other regions who draw from the pool without paying into it.  It'll be too finely diluted to do any good to anyone.

"Bullying" refers to the motivation, not the intrinsic nature of the act itself.  Like, "Marry me, or I'll force your fragile, bedridden mother to move to a new place every day until she dies."

In that case, the system breaks as soon as someone builds a immobile improvement.  Suddenly, you can't access their property without them agreeing to sell it to you.  You can no longer bid up the rent, so it stays where it is forever.

What happens if the owner stops paying the rent, and doesn't want to sell their improvements?

True, there are some parallels, but I think the fact that bitcoin is made by human labor, and the process of acquiring it, whether by mining, buying, or business, adds value to the whole thing, changes the dynamic somewhat.

As to the issue of old claims, let's say for example, it comes to light that my house is on land I bought from someone who's great-grandfather murdered someone for it.  The guy who was murdered had no descendents.  Can I keep the house?  If not, who do I give it to?

Ok, I have some problems with this interpretation.  While awarding the land to the highest bidder is a nice way to solve the problem of how to determine the rent rate, it offers no stability.  A rich person could bully a poor person by bidding them out of their house every so often.  

Moving improvements?  How are you going to move the Empire State Building, or the Hoover Dam, or the Taj Mahal visitor's center?  How are you going to move an orchard without causing considerable damage to the trees in the process?  How are you going to move a section of the tracks of a major railroad?

My interpretation was that by renting land at a rate (somehow) determined by the community, you gain the exclusive right of sale.  That's how you keep the value of your improvements, by selling the right to rent the land when you're done.  A highest bidder system robs you of that, and saying they'll move your improvements has some serious practical issues.

What you say re: the commons is a fair criticism, which I acknowledged in the previous post.  I don't have an answer for that at this time.

The question is, why should being first be important at all?  Another problem is similar to one I brought up very early in the thread.  How do you know whether or not a claim made centuries ago is legitimate, and what do you do if it's not?

Homesteading is a better deal for the first generation of people to settle in an area.  After that, they'll snatch up all the land, and the next generation will have to pay them rent.  The first generation will grow richer and richer, both from rent and from rising land value from whatever the second generation does to improve the community.  The first generation will be a permanent upperclass, and every generation after will be denied the same opportunities they had, and can only hope to get good jobs working their land.

Even though this country is so much richer than it used to be, the opportunity it offers for new arrivals has shrunk considerably.  This is because the first generation has taken everything from the commons, and left future arrivals with nothing.

With geoism, the first generation won't take anything from the commons without compensation.  This means they won't take as much in the first place, so by the time the next generation comes around, there will still be some left to take without artificial scarcity.  Wealth will be in the hands of people who earned it through production, not simply for being first.  New arrivals have the potential to benefit from public spending*.  They would have about as much opportunity as the first generation did.  I'd say most people would find the conditions more "fair" here, since you ask.

*I know that the idea of paying into the commons is a concept that begs further scrutiny.  Like I said, I'm still developing my ideas, so I don't really have a solid idea of how the public purse could fairly compensate everyone for the lost opportunities.

Ok, so what was your question again?

I would say "Whoever filed the claim first."  I do not believe in homesteading.  To me, the question of who marked the land first or who built on it first is irrelevant to establishing ownership.

If the arbitrator and the community recognizes homestead rights, then their answer might be different from mine.

Then whoever doesn't get the land sues the registrar for compensation.  If we both want the land more than the money, maybe one of those "arbitrators" can help us work things out.*

By the way, Fjordbit, that was a very good point about fairtax.

EDIT: * And I know that's a cop-out, but it's one that I've heard AnCaps use many, many times.

Um, recall that I'm advancing the geoist perspective.  I'm still developing my ideas, so I'm not quite a fanatical geoist, but that's kind of been my role in the thread so far.

As such, my answer would be, "Whichever one of us has been paying the tax."

It's going to take more than shoving a few stakes in the ground to convince me that a person "has" a piece of land.  If that person says "If you work here without paying me, I'll kill you." I'll consider it extortion, nothing more.

I do understand your point of view and I think you raised a number of very good points that really made me think.  I think our philosophies are more similar than different.  Echoing Explodicle's sentiment, while you may not have convinced me, it was a good discussion regardless.

One point in particular you raised that was fairly thought-provoking is that I am, in fact, implying that governments/communities should have the power that I say landlords have not earned.  Leaving this power in the hands of landlords is not an acceptable solution to me either, but I do acknowledge the dissonance and will keep my mind open to a solution that solves both problems.

Wouldn't it be nice if we all lived in fully formed philosophically unified tribes isolated from each other, and there was always somewhere else to go when we encountered another tribe with an incompatible philosophy?  I live in a world of high population densities where ideologically, ethnically, and religiously fragmented peoples are forced into close proximity, personally.  There's still wilderness left out there, but not all of it is usable for every purpose.  When we need something, there isn't always somewhere else to get it.

What you've basically done there is restate the homestead/AnCap position.  Not really sure what your point is.  What you've written is what the AnCaps would believe, but the two other groups would be no less sincere in their beliefs, and in their eyes the AnCaps would be the aggressors for trying to drive them away from something that they're entitled to, and may need to live.

I guess you're basically saying that in the cases where the AnCap society is defending themselves from outside invasion, they're in the right?  But it's not that clean cut in the real world.  Ideological conflict can occur within a society, and societies are not homogenous in the first place.

That's what it's going to come down to in the end.  Your hypothetical AnCap community can have homesteading, if and only if your security agencies are willing and able to impose it on everyone who has a different idea of land ownership.  Any philosophical justification you can give for taking land is bound to be questioned by people with different values.  Violence is just about the only thing that's beyond question.

We live in a world where the rewards of killing are great, and often the only practical way to stop a killer is to kill them.  I'm not saying the greatest killers SHOULD have the ability to impose their will on other people, I am stating the simple fact that they DO have it.

It may slightly slow down the rate at which land is claimed.  Less and less as people developed better 'marking technology' (I'm picturing jets carpetbombing a field with some brightly colored dye), but it would slow it down.  That still doesn't address the fundamental arbitrariness of it, nor provide any compensation for the people who have their options diminished by the act of claiming.  Besides, there's only so much land in the world, and no matter how long it takes eventually it will all be claimed, creating a landed class with a permanent advantage over the rest.



Put simply: they conquered the land.  They proved that they are able to defeat anyone who would challenge their power.  They reached an understanding with the foreign governments of the world that they alone are sovereign within its borders, and it's this understanding and fear of war that keeps their territory safe from those foreign governments.  It is by their fiat that you are named the owner of a piece of land, and they have the means to enforce it.  I'll freely admit it's more a matter of might than right.

I know you're going to find this objectionable, and I don't think I'll ever be able to convince you it isn't, so I leave you with this: If and when private security agencies start providing a genuine alternative to governments, I'll rethink my position.

All of those things are merely possibilities.  I could have recognized its potential and preserved it in its pristine state when others wanted to develop it, or I could have grabbed it 15 minutes before you would have after overhearing you say you were going to claim it.

Bottom line is, you had access to something.  I decreased your access to that something.  Now, I want you to pay me simply to restore the level of access you had before I entered the picture.

You say that if I hadn't decreased your access, someone else might have decreased it more.  Well, that makes me like one of those armed gangs: forcing on you a protection service that you didn't ask for.  If instead of paying me you choose to go with your second choice of land or domain, I have destroyed for you the difference in value between your first and second choice.  I should be paying you for that, not the other way around.

Let's talk about domains.  If there was no fee for domain name registrations, and they were permanent, I'll bet someone would have written a script to register every single domain name anyone would ever want.  People who wanted to start a new website would either have to do everything he says and pay whatever he wants or be stuck using 30+ character long strings of random letters and numbers.  That doesn't seem like an ideal situation for free market competition.

Instead, there's still a little bit of artificial scarcity of domain names, but even the small yearly fee keeps it from getting that out of hand.  That's what the land tax would do for land.  Claiming land for future sale would still be possible, just not free.