WEBVTT NOTE Use It or Lose It: Extensions to Lockean Homesteading Theory 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 The following Hans Hoppe is kind of like having the Rolling Stones as your opening act, but I'll do my best. 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:11.000 So the title of the paper has changed something a little more boring, academic, a little less incendiary, 3 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:15.000 introducing temporal attitudes to homesteading theory. 4 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:23.000 And what I mean by temporal attitudes is that homesteading theory talks a lot about acquisition of land, 5 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:32.000 But there is a lot less talked about of what conditions, what time frame land is retained. 6 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:38.000 Okay, so I want to talk about that element of homesteading theory, or introduce that as basically another continuum problem. 7 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:46.000 Okay, so to bring this to something a little more practical, you have this common law principle of adverse possession. 8 00:00:46.000 --> 00:01:16.000 and that is that the original owner of some piece of land neglects it or at least doesn't use it for a sufficient period of time, someone else uses it for that same period of time or a subsequent period of time, just about, usually about 20 years, okay, so we're not talking some loony left-wing theory of if you go out for a sandwich somebody can move into your house, this is, we're talking decades here for the property right to shift, 9 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:28.000 So is this principle of adverse possession compatible with a Lockean system of property rights and I'm going to claim that based on his chapter on property, yes, adverse possession is perfectly compatible. 10 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:34.000 And second, more difficult, is it compatible with a libertarian system of property rights? 11 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:40.000 I realize that libertarian means a lot of things to a lot of people and so I'm going to say possibly. 12 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:46.020 And this depends on, again, what I'm going to call temporal attitudes toward what I'm 13 00:01:46.020 --> 00:01:51.040 going to assert as a continuum problem of re-homesteading. 14 00:01:51.040 --> 00:01:55.680 The homesteading is an awkward word, but everybody kind of knows what it means. 15 00:01:55.680 --> 00:02:01.600 So if these things get a little tedious, re-homesteading, re-homesteadable, it's just because people 16 00:02:01.600 --> 00:02:03.920 kind of know what homesteading means. 17 00:02:03.920 --> 00:02:14.760 Okay, so the sort of customary or even the caricature of a libertarian position on homesteading 18 00:02:14.760 --> 00:02:21.360 is first that an individual acquires ownership in homesteadable land by mixing a sufficiently 19 00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:27.880 large quantity of labor, call this quantity L, with a sufficiently small quantity of land. 20 00:02:27.880 --> 00:02:28.880 Okay? 21 00:02:28.880 --> 00:02:33.480 That's Lockean, that's also libertarian, but what distinguishes what I'm calling a first 22 00:02:33.480 --> 00:02:38.920 The first use, absolutist, or first possession position would be that homesteaded land becomes 23 00:02:38.920 --> 00:02:44.760 the unqualified property of the homesteader into the infinite future. 24 00:02:44.760 --> 00:02:52.220 So this is sort of the conception of homesteading that someone like Robert Ellison uses when 25 00:02:52.220 --> 00:02:58.000 he says that adverse possession is a dent in the libertarian model of property rights. 26 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:04.560 So I'm going to argue that this is just one specification, particular specification of 27 00:03:04.560 --> 00:03:08.920 this continuum problem, or what I'm going to call a continuum position. 28 00:03:08.920 --> 00:03:12.440 The first part of that is exactly the same. 29 00:03:12.440 --> 00:03:15.440 Land is acquired in exactly the same way. 30 00:03:15.440 --> 00:03:21.640 But the second part, that land is retained, that homesteaded land becomes the property 31 00:03:21.640 --> 00:03:25.720 of the homesteader insofar as this land is not chronically neglected. 32 00:03:25.720 --> 00:03:30.680 Again, chronically is contextual, situational. 33 00:03:30.680 --> 00:03:37.720 In the US, chronically in terms of adverse possession means about 20 years. 34 00:03:37.720 --> 00:03:42.640 And so to sort of illustrate this diagrammatically, the first use of absolutist position kind 35 00:03:42.640 --> 00:03:46.960 of conceives of homesteading as a one-way street. 36 00:03:46.960 --> 00:03:53.080 That you go from the state of nature, apply L units of labor or achieve some requisite 37 00:03:53.080 --> 00:03:59.480 Improvement, and then it becomes private property never to cross back across that threshold at L. 38 00:04:00.840 --> 00:04:07.400 Whereas I'm sort of trying to better account for the physical realities of homesteading, 39 00:04:07.400 --> 00:04:12.520 which is that there's nothing particularly magical about L. It establishes a property right, 40 00:04:12.520 --> 00:04:20.120 but through chronic neglect, land can very well pass back toward a state of nature. 41 00:04:20.120 --> 00:04:27.920 And so all I'm asserting is, and again this is contextual and I don't mean for anybody to take it to a silly extreme, 42 00:04:27.920 --> 00:04:39.220 that's always a risk, is that after you apply L, there is some requisite amount of labor that you or some proxy, 43 00:04:39.220 --> 00:04:45.920 you know, that a maintenance man, if you own an apartment building, it doesn't have to be you in person, 44 00:04:45.920 --> 00:04:52.360 has to apply to the land to retain your property right, okay, so that property 45 00:04:52.360 --> 00:04:57.360 rights don't automatically extend into the infinite future and that there's 46 00:04:57.360 --> 00:05:03.640 some modicum of use or continuous labor mixing that has to be present to retain 47 00:05:03.640 --> 00:05:09.480 this property right, okay, and so just to compare these temporal attitudes that 48 00:05:09.480 --> 00:05:14.280 the first use absolutist position in some ways is kind of tautological that 49 00:05:14.280 --> 00:05:21.640 that the infinite time frame would be inherent in property, that ownership is meaningless 50 00:05:21.640 --> 00:05:26.440 except in an infinite time frame or that property would be meaningless except in an infinite 51 00:05:26.440 --> 00:05:34.280 unqualified time frame, but again this puts a whole lot of almost magical power on this 52 00:05:34.280 --> 00:05:42.620 quantity L that if you're at L minus one units of labor and you can define a unit however 53 00:05:42.620 --> 00:05:52.420 If you're at L-1, then of course naturally, so if I dig a foundation for a house and then 54 00:05:52.420 --> 00:05:57.620 I come back 50 years later, you'll have weeds, it'll have caved in, there'll be rainwater, 55 00:05:57.620 --> 00:05:58.620 whatever. 56 00:05:58.620 --> 00:06:05.660 The idea is that at L-1, land returns to the state of nature, but at least through a first 57 00:06:05.660 --> 00:06:12.500 use absolutist prism, after L-plus-one, it doesn't, that it's forever been excluded from 58 00:06:12.500 --> 00:06:13.860 and the State of Nature. 59 00:06:13.860 --> 00:06:18.180 Okay, so again, I'm simply trying to include 60 00:06:18.180 --> 00:06:20.980 this physical reality in that homesteading 61 00:06:20.980 --> 00:06:24.220 is a physical act, it's not just an ideological 62 00:06:24.220 --> 00:06:27.020 or a philosophical construct, 63 00:06:27.020 --> 00:06:32.020 that the continuum position acknowledges the fact 64 00:06:32.260 --> 00:06:35.620 that the effect of previous labor mixing 65 00:06:35.620 --> 00:06:38.580 is going to erode over time, 66 00:06:38.580 --> 00:06:41.340 regardless of how far developed the land is. 67 00:06:41.340 --> 00:06:47.580 And so, essentially, you just have to adopt some rule of thumb regarding the appropriate 68 00:06:47.580 --> 00:06:57.300 timeframe for neglect, and at a certain point, the land simply becomes homesteadable. 69 00:06:57.300 --> 00:07:02.040 So the question is, is this some sort of major revision to homesteading theory? 70 00:07:02.040 --> 00:07:03.620 Is it a total shakeup? 71 00:07:03.620 --> 00:07:08.900 Well, first of all, land is still acquired in the same way, through labor mixing. 72 00:07:08.900 --> 00:07:15.460 And you've already got continuum problems inherent in even a first-use absolutist position. 73 00:07:15.460 --> 00:07:17.460 That is, I mean, what's the appropriate value of L? 74 00:07:17.460 --> 00:07:24.660 And as Walter Block notes, that is situational, that certain land may be easier to homestead 75 00:07:24.660 --> 00:07:25.660 than other land. 76 00:07:25.660 --> 00:07:33.620 So that value of L that a first-use absolutist would put such importance on varies plot by 77 00:07:33.620 --> 00:07:35.260 plot, acre by acre. 78 00:07:35.260 --> 00:07:38.380 You also have temporal problems already. 79 00:07:38.380 --> 00:07:43.620 So there's already a temporal continuum problem, and that is how fast you have to homestead 80 00:07:43.620 --> 00:07:49.500 a piece of land in order to sort of have exclusive right to do so. 81 00:07:49.500 --> 00:07:58.460 And so think of someone who wanders into the forest, a homesteadable piece of forest, cuts 82 00:07:58.460 --> 00:08:03.980 one limb off of one tree every 10 years and says, no, no, no, you can't develop that land. 83 00:08:03.980 --> 00:08:05.980 I'm homesteading it. 84 00:08:05.980 --> 00:08:07.160 Everyone would say that's silly. 85 00:08:07.160 --> 00:08:10.040 They're not making an honest effort to homestead the land. 86 00:08:10.040 --> 00:08:17.160 Now, if he did that once every five minutes till the land was cleared, till the soil, 87 00:08:17.160 --> 00:08:20.480 planted corn, whatever, you'd say, sure, he was homesteading. 88 00:08:20.480 --> 00:08:23.680 So there's already this temporal element in homesteading theory. 89 00:08:23.680 --> 00:08:32.240 So I'm simply suggesting that a fully libertarian position can also include this temporal nature 90 00:08:32.240 --> 00:08:34.120 of ownership. 91 00:08:34.120 --> 00:08:45.240 Okay, so that was the hard one. The easier one, at least from my perspective is, is adverse 92 00:08:45.240 --> 00:08:53.240 possession lock-in? And this isn't the only place where lock tends to focus just as much 93 00:08:53.240 --> 00:09:00.800 on just acquisition as waste, spoilage. So I'll just read the quote. So it will perhaps 94 00:09:00.800 --> 00:09:14.800 It must be objected to this, that is his scheme for property acquisition, that if gathering the acorns or other fruits of the earth, etc., makes the right to them, then anyone may engross as much as he will, to which I answer not so. 95 00:09:14.800 --> 00:09:20.800 The same law of nature that does by this means give us property does also bound that property too. 96 00:09:20.800 --> 00:09:25.800 God has given us all things richly, but how far has he given it to us to enjoy, 97 00:09:25.800 --> 00:09:30.800 as much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, 98 00:09:30.800 --> 00:09:33.800 so much he may by his labor fix a property. 99 00:09:33.800 --> 00:09:38.800 Whatever is beyond this is more than his share and belongs to others. 100 00:09:38.800 --> 00:09:47.800 So I certainly don't want some central authority deciding if I'm not enjoying my can opener or my car or my lawnmower, 101 00:09:47.800 --> 00:09:56.200 But this is by one's own act that for, you know, in the practical sense of adverse possession, 102 00:09:56.200 --> 00:10:01.920 so for 20 years somebody else is using your plot of land and you don't tell them, hey, 103 00:10:01.920 --> 00:10:03.840 this is my land, get off. 104 00:10:03.840 --> 00:10:09.400 By your own actions, you're admitting that you are not, in Locksworth's, enjoying the 105 00:10:09.400 --> 00:10:10.400 land. 106 00:10:10.400 --> 00:10:13.960 You're taking more than your share simply because you are not putting it to any productive 107 00:10:13.960 --> 00:10:14.960 use. 108 00:10:14.960 --> 00:10:22.800 So there's a utilitarian argument for adverse possession that I don't want to stand on, 109 00:10:22.800 --> 00:10:30.360 but I think there's also a libertarian argument that says if labor mixing bestows a property 110 00:10:30.360 --> 00:10:35.960 right and the effect of that labor diminishes over time, then the property right in some 111 00:10:35.960 --> 00:10:43.180 sense diminishes over time, again, unless you continue to use the land. 112 00:10:43.180 --> 00:10:50.140 So my conclusion is that this first use absolutist position is just one temporal latitude, it's 113 00:10:50.140 --> 00:10:51.140 at one extreme. 114 00:10:51.140 --> 00:10:56.820 And I don't use extreme pejoratively, it's simply, okay, I've homesteaded and now what's 115 00:10:56.820 --> 00:10:57.820 the appropriate timeframe? 116 00:10:57.820 --> 00:11:03.940 Well, the appropriate timeframe is the infinite future. 117 00:11:03.940 --> 00:11:11.820 So some allowance for this common law principle called adverse possession is both lock-in 118 00:11:11.820 --> 00:11:19.020 and again depending on how broadly or narrowly you define libertarian it's also libertarian that it 119 00:11:19.020 --> 00:11:25.820 builds on because it builds on this paradigm Lockian and libertarian of labor mixing and 120 00:11:25.820 --> 00:11:36.500 that's really the essence of the theory. So the paper the work in progress can be downloaded 121 00:11:36.500 --> 00:11:39.500 their comments and questions. Thank you.