If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees. Also, this is not the only thing that governments lay claim on. You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations, even if it's your land. It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property.
Not to say I'm against someone picking up a few branches, just pointing out that this isn't as clear-cut as it might seem.
> If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees
That's not how it happened in the past (with exceptions, of course). Because of the sense of community you couldn't have cut all the forrest all for yourself and call it a day, you wouldn't have been allowed to do that, damn the State, your neighbours and the other community members would have gotten to you first. That's why and how that used to be the custom for centuries before.
> You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations
Industralized societies can do that, but at the (old) community level usually you could not.
> It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property.
I agree, in a way, it's the famous Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, my comment was trying to explain what happens to the people who get lost along the way during that transition (which is still ongoing in some communities in my country, even though by this point the transition is close to complete). For example if you used to get through the winter by collecting fallen wood from the nearby forest (because the Gemeinschaft was allowing it) you cannot do that anymore (because the Gesellschaft is now forbidding it), you'll most probably have to rely on direct financial help from a State authority (in most of the cases local), move out or die out freezing.
And about shared property, we didn't always need a government to impose that, and I'm not saying that from a libertarian/anarchist point of view or anything like that. Past communities and customary rules were pretty good at imposing some sense of collective ownership (I wouldn't call it "property"). Of course, that is almost gone for good, too.
If lots of people start grabbing anything which was traditionally up for grabs, pretty soon we will end up with cleaned-out forests (not good) and people chopping down trees. Also, this is not the only thing that governments lay claim on. You can't dig for coal, extract oil, or do any other mining operations, even if it's your land. It's part of living in a governed society — some thing become shared property.
Not to say I'm against someone picking up a few branches, just pointing out that this isn't as clear-cut as it might seem.