Some Commentaries on Property Issues

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-11-29 21:46:55 wrote

I suppose it would be impolite not to throw my own hat in the ring, but before I (eventually) get around to a critique of the post itself, I suppose I might as well put my own cards on the table so you know where I’m coming from on this (as well as on a number of other issues I’ve raised in the past).

Overall, I’d say I probably lean closest towards the free market / self-ownership / homesteading-for-exclusive-use private property consensus. I do, however, want to offer up a few caveats regarding “bugs in the system” and other implicit assumptions that often get presented as part of a package deal with those ideas (though usually not explicitly stated as such).

To start off, I disagree with the assumption that excluding a given plot of physical volume is, in and of itself, a neutral-value act. While the right of exclusion may entail a concrete benefit to the homesteader doing the excluding, it also imposes costs on everyone else who “loses out” by not claiming it first.

The easiest cost to demonstrate (and the only one I’ll be discussing at some length tonight, due to time constraints) is the “detour cost” – if the excluded volume intersects the least costly route of travel between point A and point B, then it imposes on the traveler the difference between that and the next least costly route. Assuming an idealized flat plane (so that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line) and a rectangular plot of land bisected by the least costly route:

(Behold my perfect, beautiful, not-to-scale diagram: https://i.imgur.com/BSLsbYn.png )

If we assume that the velocity and rate of energy expenditure remain on average constant throughout the trip, then the cost in terms of time, distance, and total energy expended can be computed with a little trigonometry if you know the dimensions of the property in question and the angle of the course correction.

Of course, the natural topography of your typical planetary surface is not an idealized flat surface, rather being a sphere with often extreme local variations in relative elevation and surface clutter. This makes the variables a little fuzzier compared to the idealized case, but it certainly doesn’t improve them.

…And holy cow, that took a lot longer to write than I thought it would :\ Part II of God-Only-Knows-How-Many (I’ll try to be brief…) will probably have to com tomorrow night.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-11-30 11:57:43 wrote

I believe that the rejoinder would be that you’re only entitled to value you have a right to, and thus have no legitimate complaint about the loss of value that you don’t have a right to - that you enjoy through mere coincidence. To offer a simple example, you may enjoy the sound of the morning hymns at your local church drifting across the property line and in your window, but you can’t rightfully complain when they change the service time to after you leave for work.

The thing to understand here is that terra nullius isn’t everyone’s property, it’s no-one’s property. On land you own, you have the right of transit because you own that right. On a road, you have the right of transit because the odocorp or the Ministry of Transport grants you one.

On terra nullius, you don’t have the right of transit. What you have is the shadow of a right that exists because there’s no-one who can exclude you, and like all shadows, it vanishes in the light of a substantive rights-claim.

tl;dr if you cared about that particular route, you should have “roadsteaded” it by noting your customary use, possibly in conjunction with your neighbors - which is how most cattle paths, hiking trails, footpaths, etc., etc. came to be there , and the collections of neighbors that roadsteaded them are the ultimate parents of the modern odocorps.

(Similar “commonsteading” principles also are how such things as common grazing land, etc., functions.)

[This is somewhat complicated in that a lot of homesteading takes place inside polities’ claims rather than on pure terra nullius; so in the Empire, that means that you’re not actually homesteading from first principles, but under the aegis of the Homestead Act, and the title you end up with is sub Mandamus, not allodial. But the same basics apply: the Empire lets you wander by courtesy on untitled land until someone performatively claims and files a title on it.]

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-12-01 06:43:56 wrote

I believe that the rejoinder would be that you’re only entitled to value you have a right to, and thus have no legitimate complaint about the loss of value that you don’t have a right to – that you enjoy through mere coincidence. To offer a simple example, you may enjoy the sound of the morning hymns at your local church drifting across the property line and in your window, but you can’t rightfully complain when they change the service time to after you leave for work.

That’s a fair point, but it’s also a little beside the point I’m trying to make; even if you lose the “right” and consequently the value of free access when someone else lays claim to property, that’s still a cost that limits your options. And the aggregate effect of all those costs still adds up and produces the potential for perverse incentives attached to landholding, such as doing a bare minimum of homesteading without plans for further development specifically to lock other people out of access to that property and make it harder to claim property beyond.

And while I do agree that you have no legitimate complaint about value you lose the right to, I believe that there are certain subsets of value you don’t lose the right to when someone else claims a property that enjoys the benefit of that value – something I’ll expound on a little more in part 2.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-12-01 14:31:50 wrote

That’s a fair point, but it’s also a little beside the point I’m trying to make; even if you lose the “right” and consequently the value of free access when someone else lays claim to property, that’s still a cost that limits your options.

Which is true. On the other hand, while acknowledging the reality of “externality opportunity cost” - and noting that it, technically, applies to not just property claims but every time someone does anything that affects the phase-space of your future choices, which covers nearly all actions it’s possible to take, including inaction - I suspect this is where the Curia shrug and invoke the Beyoncé Principle:

“If you liked it, you should have put a ring^Wtitle on it.”

From a certain perspective, after all, property titles are just means by which we reserve options on segments of the future choice phase-space that we particularly care about.

such as doing a bare minimum of homesteading without plans for further development specifically to lock other people out of access to that property and make it harder to claim property beyond

I’m taking a brief moment here to point out that non-development is not necessarily a bad thing. “Nature preserve” or whatever the local equivalent is of “national park” is a perfectly legitimate thing to homestead. See the Outer Planets Aesthetic Collective.

Or even - and this is regarded as bad form, even if lawful - the Galactic Friends of Life et. al.'s practice of patch clamping, which is to say, buying a small volume of land and festooning it with externality, typically pollution, detectors in order to sue the hell out of anyone disturbing the local environment.

Beyond that, I ain’t touching this with a barge-pole, on the previous-postly-commented grounds that Snidely Whiplash doesn’t live here.

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-12-01 15:18:55 wrote

I’m taking a brief moment here to point out that non-development is not necessarily a bad thing. “Nature preserve” or whatever the local equivalent is of “national park” is a perfectly legitimate thing to homestead. See the Outer Planets Aesthetic Collective.

I consider that “development” of a sort (especially in that context – even if it’s not ‘tilling the soil / building on the land,’ you’re still using it to produce knowledge (and or possibly leisure opportunities)).

I’m referring more to the Walder Frey style of “non-development,” where you, for instance, lay claim to the only feasible bridge-building site on a river (and / or the riverfront on either side for miles in either direction) specifically so you can play King of the Crossing with anyone who has business on the other side.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-12-03 10:10:49 wrote

Not really non-development, though, is it? You’ve built and are maintaining a bridge, and is not the road-owner entitled to his tolls?

(Which tolls generally face some competition from every other bridge-builder, pontoon-lasher, tunnel-digger, boat-owner, and ford on the river. Walder Frey had the advantage of feudal law and the ability to murder the competition, something not generally available as means of excluding competitors in more civilized societies.

Hope you found something homestead-worthy to do with all those miles of riverbank and managed to do it to all of them before anyone else turned up nearby…)

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-12-03 11:54:53 wrote

I’ll elaborate on it in more depth when I get around to expounding on my second Big Contention, but as a preview I’ll offer this:

I fully agree that he is entitled to any profit that he has legitimate title to, as a result of his labors in providing a valued service using capital he has legitimately obtained – and not a penny more.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-12-04 10:05:36 wrote

There is also the opposite of an opportunity cost, which I suppose we could call an opportunity profit.

Specifically, if an opportunity cost is defined as the value of a forgone activity or alternative when another item or activity is chosen, an opportunity profit is the value you gain by choosing to do something (implicitly: that other people have thus far chosen not to do).

That’s your legitimate reward for having built the bridge that no-one else chose to build: the proper reward for having demonstrated foresight and a bit of hustle.

(In virtue ethics terms: because it’s Right Action. In utilitarian terms, if we must, because rewarding foresight and hustle functions as a general incentive to get shit done.)

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-12-03 09:22:35 wrote

After some reflection: You know, I find it a little curious that you’re so vehement about insisting the eldrae would never allow it to happen yet unwilling to have them condemn such behavior as wrong in itself.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-12-03 10:00:38 wrote

Please excuse the following excessive frankness:

Any vehemence involved is probably mine alone, because I have been on the Internet with libertarian inclinations long enough to have heard about a zillion variations of the exclusion belt (in particular) and every other “gotcha” argument (in general), almost as often as I’ve heard references to Somalia, and rarely if ever offered in good faith. (To the extent that in RW political arguments, I now treat them as killfile-on-sight heuristics.)

And this? I write and worldbuild because I enjoy it. As such, I’ll happily have interesting arguments or explain the way I see certain mechanisms having evolved in their legal environment to cope with various likewise-interesting scenarios, but this particular scenario? Due to many years of gotcha-ing, it has lost all of whatever interest it might once have had. For the most part, I consider it a straw man, and to what extent it’s an edge case instead of a straw man, I’m still not interested in arguing it because it’s spent too long standing next to one and it gives me an ulcer to care about.

I apologize if this is an area you have a deep and legitimate interest in, and in general I do welcome your questions on property as on other issues, but when it comes to this particular aspect: there are homesteaded easements, and they work very well, thank you. That’s all I have to say.

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-12-03 12:13:46 wrote

The frankness is appreciated, certainly

In the interests of honest discourse, I think we’re both on the same side in the balance, and I’ll root for free markets and free trade and freedom of association absent illegitimate coercive interference right alongside you.

That said, while I probably can’t claim the years of experience that you can, I’ve lately (i.e. within the past few years) been doing a fair bit of reading on three-factor economics in general and on the views of men like Henry George, Fred Foldvary, and Mason Gaffney in particular, and while I don’t uncritically endorse everything they say I do think they make an excellent point when they say that since we are corporeal beings with physical bodies and physical needs, advocating for abstract “liberty” is useless without the recognition that it implies the right to be free somewhere definite, and that there are legitimate issues with allodial title as classically understood that allow rent-seeking landlords to benefit almost exclusively from the fact that their property is more valuable by its proximity to services other people produce without contributing anything beyond a trifle themselves and without any obligation to compensate those who are sowing the crop that they are reaping all to themselves – something which, in almost every other circumstance, is rightfully classed as theft or fraud, but somehow escapes scrutiny in this particular case.

Again, I’ll elaborate more on this at a later point, but suffice to say that, yes, it is something I’m rather passionate about.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-12-04 10:45:11 wrote

an excellent point when they say that since we are corporeal beings with physical bodies and physical needs, advocating for abstract “liberty” is useless without the recognition that it implies the right to be free somewhere definite

While I am mostly waiting on your later points, some potentially relevant context here:

I note that even on Earth of today, at least a third (and probably more; this is based on a quick Google) of These United States, plus assorted counties and towns, have free land programs going on. Promise to build a house on it, farm it, or whatever, and it’s yours. (Being here it is of course subject to property tax and various impositions, but the point is, it exists.)

Eliéra has 2.5 times Earth’s surface area, and a slower population growth rate, with all that that implies as to land availability. Which is to say, for the earlier part of history while people might well concede that it’s a fine technical point, since anyone with a little get-up-and-go could go out and homestead themselves somewhere to be free, it’s not a particularly relevant one.

(For the [later] rest of history, this is more likely to attract some distinctive side-eye inasmuch as they have access to, y’know, the vasty deeps of functionally infinite space, mostly empty and unclaimed, with exatons of equally unclaimed resources lying around for the taking. Go up, young man, and hustle!)

((Now, on a related note, the Protectorate of Balance, Externality, and the Commons does charge primary producers for resource abstraction on the grounds that when you mine out an iron vein, there is no longer an iron vein, but considering the assessed value of iron ore in the ground, there’s not exactly a lot there to collect. It’s much more relevant in cases like groundwater, where fees charged to those depleting the aquifer are used to pay people who equivalently replenish the aquifer, and so forth.))

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-12-01 13:42:20 wrote

Idle thought: I suppose the best way to get at the point I’m driving at is to put it this way:

In general, even when an action is not forbidden, the polite and conscientious person is mindful of the inconvenience they may cause others, and will strive to provide something of value in exchange to rectify any possible imbalance.

The impolite person, on the other hand, cares only about their own gain, even if in doing so they incur a loss for others far out of proportion to their own benefit.

@zarpaulus <zarpaulus@gmail.com> on 2017-11-30 09:14:39 wrote

I’m reminded of how Cory Doctorow needed to spell out explictly how “Whuffie” had all the same problems as traditional currencies and few of the advantages.

Why I ended up using a cryptocurrency backed by a mixture of fabricator time, energy and raw materials.