Property and water rights?

[Brainwalter]

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Honestly, I don't think you did, but it's not a lack of knowledge on your part, it's a problem with AC. It's easy to say "All rights are given to us by our creator/nature" but it's awful hard to enforce "nature's will."

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You'll notice I didn't say that.

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You can't hate democracy for setting up rights or keeping them from being taken and espouse AC for doing basically the same thing. Having a group outline in a constitution what rights exist and having "market forces" dictate those rights is largely the same thing.

Cody

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It's not democracy that protects individual rights like in your constitution example. That's a different principle called limited government. I am in favor of limited government (more precisely I am in favor of limitation of government). The (hypothetical) constitution set up to protect individual rights is a limitation of democracy, which is the principle that the outcome of a popular vote should be enforced on the entire population. I'm not in favor of democracy.

Conflating democracy and limited government is natural because they're defining and novel features of the US Constitution but they are separate, independent principles and imo it's generally limited government which has allowed the US to prosper, not democracy.

[vhawk01]

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Honestly, I don't think you did, but it's not a lack of knowledge on your part, it's a problem with AC. It's easy to say "All rights are given to us by our creator/nature" but it's awful hard to enforce "nature's will."

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You'll notice I didn't say that.

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You can't hate democracy for setting up rights or keeping them from being taken and espouse AC for doing basically the same thing. Having a group outline in a constitution what rights exist and having "market forces" dictate those rights is largely the same thing.

Cody

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It's not democracy that protects individual rights like in your constitution example. That's a different principle called limited government. I am in favor of limited government (more precisely I am in favor of limitation of government). The (hypothetical) constitution set up to protect individual rights is a limitation of democracy, which is the principle that the outcome of a popular vote should be enforced on the entire population. I'm not in favor of democracy.

Conflating democracy and limited government is natural because they're defining and novel features of the US Constitution but they are separate, independent principles and imo it's generally limited government which has allowed the US to prosper, not democracy.

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I think this is a really excellent, somewhat subtle, and often entirely missed, point.

[pvn]

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Does property rights extend below ground? How far below?

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Huh? Does property rights extend to the east? How far east?


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Why the idiocy? It's a legitimate questions in terms of mineral rights, building rights, and shared water and oil resources. At present you own all land to the center of the Earth under law. He's asking what would be different under AC.

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It wasn't at all clear what he was asking.

Saying that "if you own a plot of land on the surface of the earth, you own the entire cone of earth from that plot to the center of the planet and extending into infinity above" (aka ad coelum) could be one thing, having the notion of property under the surface of the earth could be another.

And ad coleum is NOT a universal concept in propery "under law".

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Does is extend above ground, ie river systems? Does it extend to water that hasn't fallen yet as rain?

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Can you homestead clouds?

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Another silly reply. He's not talking about clouds, he's talking about (for example) building a massive damn on a river system to catch all the water (including that which hasn't fallen yet). Under absolute property rights, it seems to me there should be no reason you can't do this.

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Building a dam doesn't give you property rights over "water that hasn't vallen yet as rain".

And I don't see any reason one shouldn't be able to catch water (unowned water!) which falls on his own property and do whatever he wants with it. Am I missing something here?

A river system is something different. If you have a specific question, why don't you ask it instead of making vague innuendo. The dilemmas of property rights and rivers have been exhaustively discussed in this forum, and most issues people raise seem to be rooted in thinking about rivers as we treat them in the status quo, with nobody owning them.

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Another example: can a farmer on a small river system pump 100x what anyone else does, thereby drying up the flow for some downstream? What proof or recourse can the downstream farmer obtain?

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Exactly the type of "problem" that has been asked and answered 100x here.

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Exploring these things is also about exploring the viability of AC.

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These little quips are my favorite. "We have to be sure you're actually capable of making decisions for yourself! We're not convinced that freedom is a viable option for you." Of course, this is just more of the same, begging the question of who has dominion over others (hint: I do not need your permission or approval to be free) and dodging the burden of proof (we already have dominion over you, so that arrangement must be justified).

[pvn]

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Does property rights extend below ground? How far below?

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Huh? Does property rights extend to the east? How far east?


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Why the idiocy? It's a legitimate questions in terms of mineral rights, building rights, and shared water and oil resources. At present you own all land to the center of the Earth under law. He's asking what would be different under AC.

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from statements pvn has made previously, it can be inferred that in AC land, property rights dont extend underground

(at what point "underground" begins isnt exactly clear, but it wasnt too deep)

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More repercussions from midge's poor framing of the question. If by "property rights don't extend underground" you mean "owning the surface automagically means you own the belowground material" then you've accurately described my positions.

If you mean "you can't own things below the surface" then you haven't. I think you mean the former, but the way I read the OP I was leaning towards midge meaning the latter.

[CallMeIshmael]

Yeah, I meeant the former

[pvn]

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from statements pvn has made previously, it can be inferred that in AC land, property rights dont extend underground

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pvn doesn't dictate what ACland will look like. He can only speculate about things, it is the market that decides. So maybe you should say "property rights MAY not extend underground".

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wait, the market can decide whether or not something has rights?

I was under the impression that in AC land certain rights were taken as indisputable. For example, if the market decides that black people dont have rights, do they not have rights?

edit: or are person's rights indesuputable, but everything else is market driven. Ie. no one has the right to coerce, but if the market decides there are no such thing as property rights then there is no such thing as property rights?

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I'm not sure what we're talking about here. there's a big difference between "people have property rights" and "joe owns THIS piece of property". One is objective and "indisputable" (or, at least, is treated as such for the purposes of a particular moral system by the fact that it's taken as an axiom) while the other is NOT 100% determinable. We can be very, very, very, really, RILLY sure who owns a particular piece of property but there's always a small chance that we're wrong, since humans are fallible creatues. In some cases the uncertainty is greater than others. This uncertainty is the major reason ACism is not utopian.

[CallMeIshmael]

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The market interprets apparent conflicts between people's property rights such as the ones posed. Whether rights are god-given, logically deducible, or social constructs is kind of a moot point imo - the relevant point is that widespread agreement on the basics - property rights and freedom from coercion - are preconditions to anything that could be called AC. Did I answer your question?

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Umm, yes and no.


Lets extend the Judge Judy example.


Assume that someone walks through my property on a daily basis. Often times, he will just sit there for hours. I ask him to leave, but he claims that my property rights only allow me to remove him from my property if it can be shown he is causing some sort of harm.

I take my case to Judge Judy. Is she allowed to agree with him? Or is the idea that owning property allows me to grant access to only those I wish?


How far can this go? Can the market all together abandon the notion of land ownership, declaring all land unownable?


Essentially, if the question of whether or not property rights extand below ground is up the market to determine in AC land, what unalienable rights exist that the market cant change?

[BCPVP]

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But I'd love to hear AC arguments in their own words.

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Those are "AC" arguments in some fairly prominent libertarians' words. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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Is the concept so difficult that you can't describe in a paragraph or two?

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Partly. And if the concept has already been fleshed out by others, it's nice to be able to link it instead of rehashing it and perhaps scrambling some of the message in the process.

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In addition, the "first use" idea has major problems. By the sounds of it, the natural environment must be used to claim ownership. Goodbye national parks and wilderness areas, except those deemed economically useless.

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Seems to me that you're begging the question of whether we need national parks as well as assuming that areas of land can't be made into nature preserves.

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Hello to upstream people hoarding water through dams in order to sell it to those living downstream. Can you say monopoly?

Just curious...do you see why this idea is fraught with problems?

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There may be some challenges (for the umpteenth time, a free society isn't utopia), but the government solution is not without its own host of problems, such as creating tragedies of the commons, decreasing productivity and making the rest of us worse off than we would have been.

[Richard Tanner]

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It's not democracy that protects individual rights like in your constitution example. That's a different principle called limited government. I am in favor of limited government (more precisely I am in favor of limitation of government). The (hypothetical) constitution set up to protect individual rights is a limitation of democracy, which is the principle that the outcome of a popular vote should be enforced on the entire population. I'm not in favor of democracy.

Conflating democracy and limited government is natural because they're defining and novel features of the US Constitution but they are separate, independent principles and imo it's generally limited government which has allowed the US to prosper, not democracy.

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We're talking about seperate things I think. I was using democracy to speak of our (US) government, not the ideal. Yes the US Constitution only limits the governments authority, but it's that same government that maintains the rights of it's people. Much the same as DROs would be responsible for attempting to maintain the rights of their customers.

Singer may be different, but the song doesn't change.

Cody

[Brainwalter]

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I take my case to Judge Judy. Is she allowed to agree with him? Or is the idea that owning property allows me to grant access to only those I wish?

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Now I'm not sure I understand the question. Of course she is "allowed" to agree. Based on your knowledge of AC, what mechanism could exist to not allow her to? If her judgments are out of line with her customers' views then she will lose business as people hear about her violating people's rights and avoid her courtroom.

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How far can this go? Can the market all together abandon the notion of land ownership, declaring all land unownable?


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In theory sure, but this requires the independent courts to abandon the property rights, while their customers continue to value and abide by their decisions. Well how did that happen? Did people continue patronizing courts whose decisions they didn't agree with? Weren't there any courts that didn't abandon property rights, why didn't they gain market share from the quacks?

Or was it that the customers of arbitration (people) stopped believing in property rights? Well if that happens, property rights will be abandoned no matter what the system is - ac, democracy, etc with the possible exception of some sort of autocratic police state.