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:
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.