“It’s silly. And worse, it’s harmful.”

Excellent, I couldn’t have said it better myself!!!

-M

It makes sense that first possessors should be able to claim some amount of land that they can reasonably put to use, but how about this one: We develop advanced nanotechnology and space travel capable of bringing us to a single inhabitable world.

Various groups are working to make the journey, and one of them would be the first to arrive on the planet with self-replicating machines. Within a few days or weeks, these machines have built an infrastructure spanning the new world.

Have these few people effectively asserted a claim based on putting the land to active use? When the next batch of settlers arrives–not to mention the billions of other people who may have wanted to move off the crowded home planet–are they out of luck?

In that situation, it may be hard to find arbitrators with sufficient expertise to judge the matter.

Just thinking out loud. My reading list is always growing but I’ll get to those links — thanks again for sharing them.

See also Rothbard, Ch. 8 of Ethics of Liberty: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/eight.asp “Some theorists have maintained—in what we might call the “Columbus complex”—that the first discoverer of a new, unowned island or continent can rightfully own the entire area by simply asserting his claim. (In that case, Columbus, if in fact he had actually landed on the American continent—and if there had been no Indians living there—could have rightfully asserted his private “ownership” of the entire continent.) In natural fact, however, since Columbus would only have been able actually to use, to “mix his labor with,” a small part of the continent, the rest then properly continues to be unowned until the next homesteaders arrive and carve out their rightful property in parts of the continent.”

and: Rothbard, in Law Property Rights and Air Pollution: http://www.mises.org/story/2120

“In our discussion of homesteading, we did not stress the problem of the size of the area to be homesteaded. If A uses a certain amount of a resource, how much of that resource is to accrue to his ownership? Our answer is that he owns the technological unit of the resource. The size of that unit depends on the type of good or resource in question, and must be determined by judges, juries, or arbitrators who are expert in the particular resource or industry in question.”

What more can an artist need?

I will not accept the enslavement of my fellow man, nor any imposition upon his liberty, as reward for the publication of my art.