12. Property, The Appropriation of Raw Land
As we have stated previously, the origin of all property is ultimately traceable to the
appropriation of an unused, nature-given factor by a man and his mixing his labor with this
natural factor to produce a capital good or a consumer's good. For when we trace back
through gifts and through exchanges, we must reach a man and an unowned natural resource.
In a free society, any piece of nature that has never been used is unowned and is subject
to a man's ownership through his first use or mixing of his labor with this resource.
How will an individual's title to the nature given factor be determined?
If Columbus lands on a new continent, is it legitimate for him to proclaim all the new
continent his own, or even that sector as far as his eye can see?
Clearly, this would not be the case in the free society that we are postulating.
Columbus or Crusoe would have to use the land, to cultivate it in some way, before he could
be asserted to own it.
This cultivation does not have to involve tilling the soil, although that is one possible
form of cultivation.
If the natural resource is land, he may clear it for a house or a pasture, or care for some
plots of timber, etc.
If there is more land than can be used by a limited labor supply, then the unused land
must simply remain unowned, until a first user arrives on the scene.
Any attempt to claim a new resource that someone does not use would have to be considered invasive
of the property right of whoever the first user will turn out to be.
There is no requirement, however, that land continue to be used in order for it to continue
to be a man's property.
Suppose that Jones uses some new land, then finds it is unprofitable and lets it fall
into disuse.
Or suppose that he clears new land and therefore obtains title to it, but then finds that it
is no longer useful in production and allows it to remain idle.
In a free society, would he lose title?
No, for once his labor is mixed with the natural resource, it remains his owned land.
His labor has been irretrievably mixed with the land, and the land is therefore his or
for his Assigns in Perpetuity.
We shall see in later chapters that the question whether or not labor has been mixed with land
is irrelevant to its market price or capital value.
In catallactics, the past is of no interest.
In establishing the ownership of property, however, the question is important, for once
Since the mixture takes place, the man and his heirs have appropriated the nature-given
factor and for anyone else to seize it would be an invasive act.
As Wolofsky and Levasseur state, nature has been appropriated by him, man, for his use.
She has become his own.
She is his property.
This property is legitimate.
It constitutes a right as sacred for man as is the free exercise of his faculties.
It is his because it has come entirely from himself, and is in no way anything but an
emanation from his being.
Before him there was scarcely anything but matter.
Since him and by him there is interchangeable wealth.
The producer has left a fragment of his own person in the thing which has thus become
valuable, and may hence be regarded as a prolongation of the faculties of man acting upon external
nature.
As a free being, he belongs to himself.
Now the cause, that is to say, the productive force, is himself.
The effect, that is to say, the wealth produced, is still himself.
Who shall dare contest his title of ownership, so clearly marked by the seal of his personality?
Some critics, especially the Henry Georgists, assert that while a man or his assigns may
be entitled to the produce of his own labor, or anything exchanged for it, he is not entitled
to an Original Nature-Given Factor, a Gift of Nature.
For one man to appropriate this gift is alleged to be an invasion of a common heritage that
all men deserve to use equally.
This is a self-contradictory position, however.
A man cannot produce anything without the cooperation of original nature-given factors,
if only as standing room.
In order to produce and possess any capital good or consumer's good, therefore, he must
appropriate and use an original nature-given factor.
He cannot form products purely out of his labor alone.
He must mix his labor with original nature-given factors.
Therefore, if property and land or other nature-given factors is to be denied man, he cannot obtain
In the question of land, it is difficult to see what better title there is than the first bringing of this land from a simple, unvaluable thing into the sphere of production, for that is what the first user does.
was, he takes a factor that was previously unowned and unused, and therefore worthless
to anyone, and converts it into a tool for production of capital and consumers' goods.
While such questions as communism of property will be discussed in later parts of this book,
it is difficult indeed to see why the mere fact of being born should automatically confer
The problem will be clearer if we consider the case of animals.
Animals are economic land, because they are equivalent to physical land in being original
Nature Given Factors of Production
Yet will anyone deny title to a cow to the man that finds and domesticates her, putting
her to use?
For this is precisely what occurs in the case of land.
Previously valueless wild land, like wild animals, is taken and transformed by a man into goods
useful for man.
The Mixing of Labor gives equivalent title in one case as in the other.
We must remember also what production entails.
When man produces, he does not create matter.
He uses given materials and transforms and rearranges them into goods that he desires.
In short, he moves matter further toward consumption.
His finding of land or animals and putting them to use is also such a transformation.
Even if the value accruing to a piece of land at present is substantial therefore, it is
only economic land because of the innumerable past efforts of men at work on the land.
When we are considering legitimacy of title, the fact that land always embodies past labor
becomes extremely important.
If animals are also land in the sense of given original nature factors, so are water and
air.
We have seen that air is inappropriate, a condition of human welfare, rather than a
scarce good that can be owned.
However, this is true only of air for breathing under usual conditions.
For example, if some people want their air to be changed or conditioned, then they will
have to pay for this service, and the conditioned air becomes a scarce good that is owned by
its producers.
Furthermore, if we understand by air the medium for the transmission of such things as radio
waves and television images, there is only a limited quantity of wavelengths available
for Radio and for Television purposes. This scarce factor is appropriable and
ownable by man. In a free society, ownership of these channels would accrue to individuals
just like that of land or animals. The first users obtain the property. The first user,
Jones, of the wavelength of 1,000 kilocycles, would be the absolute owner of this length for
for his wave area, and it will be his right to continue using it, to abandon it, to sell
it, etc.
Anyone else who set up a transmitter on the owner's wavelength would be as guilty of
invasion of another's property right as a trespasser on someone else's land, or a thief
of someone else's livestock.
If a channel has to be a certain number of wavelengths in width in order to permit clear
Transmission, then the property would accrue to the first user in terms of such width.
Federal ownership of airwaves was irrigated in the 1920s, not so much to alleviate a preceding
chaos as to forestall this very acquisition of private property rights in airwaves, which
the courts were in the process of establishing according to common law principles.
The same is true of water. Water, at least in rivers and oceans, has been considered
by most people as also inappropriate and unownable, although it is conceded to be ownable in the
cases of small lakes and wells. Now it is true that the high seas in relation to shipping
lanes are probably inappropriate, because of their abundance in relation to shipping
It is rapidly becoming evident, however, that airlines for planes are becoming scarce, and in a free society would be owned by first users, thus obviating a great many plane crashes.
This is not true, however, of fishing rights in oceans. Fish are definitely not available in unlimited quantities relative to human wants.
Therefore, they are appropriable. They're stock and source, just as the captured fish themselves.
Indeed, nations are always quarreling about fishing rights. In a free society, fishing
rights to the appropriate areas of oceans would be owned by the first users of those areas,
and then usable or saleable to other individuals. Ownership of areas of water that contain fish
is directly analogous to private ownership of areas of land or forests that contain animals
to be hunted.
Some people raise the difficulty that water flows and has no fixed position, as land does.
This is a completely invalid objection, however.
Land moves too, as when soil is uprooted in dust storms.
Most important, water can definitely be marked off in terms of latitudes and longitudes.
These boundaries then would circumscribe the area owned by individuals, in the full knowledge
that fish and water can move from one person's property to another.
The value of the property would be gauged according to this knowledge.
Appropriating water should be owned in proportion to its rate of use by the first user, that
is, by the appropriation rather than the riparian method of ownership.
However, the appropriator would then have absolute control over his property, might transfer
his share, etc.
Something which cannot be done in those areas, for example states in the West, where an approach
Another argument is that appropriation of ownership by a first user would result in an uneconomic allocation of the nature-given factors.
Thus suppose that one man can fence, cultivate or otherwise use only five acres of a certain land, while the most economic allocation would be units of fifteen acres.
However, the rule of first ownership by the first user, followed in a free society, would
not mean that ownership must end with this allocation.
On the contrary, in this case, either the owners would pool their assets in one corporate
form, or the most efficient individual owners would buy out the others, and the final size
of each unit of land in production would be 15 acres.
It must be added that the theory of land ownership in a free society set forth here, that is,
first ownership by the first user, has nothing in common with another superficially similar
theory of land ownership advanced by J.K. Ingalls and his disciples in the late 19th
century.
Ingalls advocated continuing ownership only for actual occupiers and personal users of
the land.
This is in contrast to original ownership by the first user.
The Ingalls system would in the first place bring about a highly uneconomic allocation
of land factors.
Land sites where small homestead holdings are uneconomic would be forced into use in
spite of this, and land would be prevented from entering other lines of use greatly demanded
by consumers.
Some land would be artificially and coercively withdrawn from use, since land that could
not be used by owners in person would have to lie idle.
Furthermore, this theory is self-contradictory, since it would not really permit ownership
at all.
One of the prime conditions of ownership is the right to buy, sell and dispose of property
as the owner or owners see fit.
If the small holders would not have the right to sell to non-occupying large holders, the
small holders would not really be owners of the land at all.
The result is that on the ownership question, the Engels thesis reverts in the final analysis
to the Georgist view that society and the alleged person of the state should own the
and Land.