>>Ah, but that's the crux, isn't it? Because even the implication of this sentence is that that nature of "private property" and "the commons" is socially constructed - what can be private, what cannot be.
It's socially interpreted, but I believe there is a natural justice, that promotes functional societies, that reasonable people can recognize, that will end up as the social interpretation via any process that is impartial and deliberative, like courts.
Natural resources are not man-made, and thus are not true private property. But we recognize a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe. We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person to have perpetual exclusive rights to this value-added portion of the matter of the universe, in order so that they may benefit from the value they created.
>We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person to have perpetual exclusive rights
I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all the land, while young people must buy it from them. That is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do not step down from their positions of power voluntarily, then people will force them to step down.
I obviously do not want this to happen so I will argue against anyone who wants earth to be littered with wars over land.
Wars do not break out because people are evil, wars break out because our laws and rules during peace time aren't good enough for everyone. If land is properly allocated to everyone, then borders become irrelevant goals for war. The difference between whether you trade to get indirect access to land or whether you own it should be so slim, that no one ever considers obtaining land forcibly be ever worth it because the peaceful methods work just fine.
>>I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all the land, while young people must buy it from them. That is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do not step down from their positions of power voluntarily, then people will force them to step down.
Land ownership does not fit the definition I provided, which in greater context, is:
"a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe."
Land is not scarce, and appropriating it is not a case of appropriating only that portion of the matter of the universe which one reconfigures into a value-added form.
So I agree, there can be no natural right to private ownership of land. A land tax, therefore, can be justified, as can other forms of state-intervention over how one may manage it.
> Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited.
Ownership of anything by a person is already time limited - limited to a human lifetime.
> If land is properly allocated to everyone
Let’s imagine every person in the world should have an equal holding of arable land (ignores lots of other factors, but whatever!). Assuming 8 billion people and 1.6 billion hectares of arable land, works out to 5 people per hectare.
To be fair, USA needs to a double its population (≈ 2.3 times to 760 million). New Zealand needs to approximately halve it’s population.
For other countries, find your arable land figure (it is in Hectares, left most column of main table is 2016 figure) from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/arable-la... and multiple by 5 to get the fair population and compare that with the actual population.
This sort of approach breaks down as soon as any non-renewable resource, notably land, is involved. You would likely consider a house you have just built on a piece of land as value-added with respect to the land; other people may regard your work as having negative value with respect to the land itself, which is a natural resource, and thus not true private property. And even regardless of the value judgement, because the land is a limited resource, your control over it is necessarily exclusive to others.
The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe. While that may appear to be value-added to you, others may not share your assessment. However, the metal you used has now been removed from its natural condition (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and thus your action has the potential to be a net negative to the rest of the population. It's not clear what rationale they might have for respecting your claim to have added value.
There's no clear reason for land ownership given the notion that you should only own value added, but libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost without such ownership. Nevertheless, for most of human history, the concept that anyone could own land in perpetuity would have been quite strange. Likewise, the concept that one could has also been the source of many of the most bitter conflicts in human history. This doesn't make the idea of owning land particularly compelling, when looked at over the long arc of human history.
>>This sort of approach breaks down as soon as any non-renewable resource, notably land, is involved. You would likely consider a house you have just built on a piece of land as value-added with respect to the land; other people may regard your work as having negative value with respect to the land itself, which is a natural resource, and thus not true private property. And even regardless of the value judgement, because the land is a limited resource, your control over it is necessarily exclusive to others.
It doesn't break down. I consider land to be under the proper purview of the state, under exactly this principle.
>>The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe. While that may appear to be value-added to you, others may not share your assessment. However, the metal you used has now been removed from its natural condition (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and thus your action has the potential to be a net negative to the rest of the population. It's not clear what rationale they might have for respecting your claim to have added value.
Not really. The metal you used is so little that it can't have an appreciable negative impact on others. And the state can in fact charge you for taking that metal out of circulation, and redistribute the proceeds to compensate the rest of society for your extraction of it. But it is not reasonable for the state to simply never allow you to appropriate metal, under any conditions, or demand a right to anything you fashion from that metal, after it has already charged you a fee for your appropriation of it.
Now of course, if you go searching for edge cases, you will find them. A coherent moral philosophy doesn't eliminate the complexity of the world, and the challenge of navigating it. But it does give us a baseline moral philosophy that we can all agree to, and then together try to govern in accordance to.
>>There's no clear reason for land ownership given the notion that you should only own value added, but libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost without such ownership.
A land tax is perfectly consistent with both land ownership being an artificial right, bestowed by the state, and libertarianism.
It is also, intriguingly, the perfect tax, from an efficiency standpoint, according to economists:
It's socially interpreted, but I believe there is a natural justice, that promotes functional societies, that reasonable people can recognize, that will end up as the social interpretation via any process that is impartial and deliberative, like courts.
Natural resources are not man-made, and thus are not true private property. But we recognize a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe. We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person to have perpetual exclusive rights to this value-added portion of the matter of the universe, in order so that they may benefit from the value they created.