There is nothing like a week at the beach to relax and refocus. The water, the waves, and the fun are a vacationer’s dream, creating the perfect place to drift between musing and being amused.
I really enjoy observing individuals interacting, using scarce means to obtain very personal ends. Many times, these observations lead to greater understanding, reinforcing or challenging beliefs and ideas.
For me, our family trip to the beach this summer provided such an opportunity – it provided an opportunity to study the process acting man uses to establish property rights absent government interventions.
Consider the beach in the early morning sun. The sand is rippled but devoid of form, with evidence of yesterday’s labor wiped clean by the nightly action of wind and wave. As individuals, families and groups begin migrating to the empty expanse on the edge of the surf, the first arrivers homestead, what is for them, the very best spot. They stake out a claim by planting umbrellas, unfolding chairs, and spreading blankets and towels. And as pails are emptied of plastic shovels and tools, adults and children begin mixing labor with sand and water to form castles, trenches, and other structures and designs.
Subsequent arrivals naturally note the delineated property lines established by those who arrived beforehand. As these folks begin staking out their own claims, volleyball nets appear and Frisbees take flight.
All of these activities further define and refine property boundaries as acting man and women homestead in a peaceful and orderly process, without the need for interventions from the state, nonetheless.
None of what follows is theory or law; it is simply observations of human action. But, if what are sometimes referred to as natural laws are truly natural, they should be found guiding the natural course of human action. And they do.
No one owns his view
This is easy to observe. The early homesteader sets up his chair some distance from the water, but in full view of the pounding surf. As latecomers stake out their claims, both early and late arrivals understand that a view cannot be homesteaded. A latecomer can set up anywhere between the early-occupier and the surf, as long as existing property boundaries are respected.
Furthermore, all beachgoers understand that if someone wants a continuous, open view of the water, he had better place his chair at the edge of the surf and make ready to move with the tide – that is if he can relocate to a space not already homesteaded.
Finally, anyone has the right to stop and stand in front of your chair – though outside your borders – for any length of time, for any reason.
You can homestead more than your physical property
While it is true that the early-established volleyball court is defined by it boundaries (either physical boundaries furrowed in the sand, or assumed boundaries created by the footsteps of players), the owner of the volleyball court also homesteads the right to have his ball bounce in then-unoccupied areas. Latecomers therefore have to accept the occasional errant bounce, but earlier homesteaders have a right to complain.
The same holds for the tossed Frisbee, etc. Homesteaded property rights include more than just visible boundaries.
Mixing your labor defines your property
If you want to secure rights to an area of sand, build a castle or other physical structure. On the beach, such structures provide secure property rights, until they are abandoned or the wind and waves once again erase them from view.
Usufruct rules
While you can homestead areas of sand, you cannot enforce secure borders. In other words, you cannot stop folks from entering your property as they move about the beach. This does not provide for aggression or destruction, just the free movement within your borders. Of course, your physical structures are secure from intrusion; no one can step into your castle grounds unless invited.
Abandoned property is subject to homesteading
If you physically leave the beach area, you have abandoned your property and your property rights. This opens up your area to homesteading by anyone. The same holds when the incoming tide has destroyed your castle. Once the tide recedes, the area is again open to homesteading by all.
It all just conventions
What I have described are not laws, they are self-enforcing conventions. And I have seen them in actions on every beach I have visited, in many different countries of the world.
Just as important, while sitting on the sand, I have never seen someone appeal to the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion to settle a property dispute.
Of course, observations on a beach do not define and justify an ethical system of property rights (such as that proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe). But neither do those observations disprove the existence of an ethical system of property rights. They simply show that, absent interventions by the state, acting man, left to his selfish ends, tends to organize his means in a way that agrees with the concept of property.
In this, we should not be surprised.
{ 28 comments }
Great read; Definitely an apt example.
“No one owns his view.”
No kidding. It’s just a positive externality. However a couple of questions:
1. What then of solar panels? Is this not energy collected from a positive externality – the Sun? If someone builds an apartment complex that blocks out the Sun during the peak hours for their neighbours who have solar panels on their roofs, has damage really occurred or did the free ride the people had is now over? Isn’t just the same for rainwater tanks?
2. What if a fight breaks out in the beach analogy? What if, far from breaking up the fight, everyone crowds around egging the fighters on (i.e. no automatically emerging independent arbitrators against violence naturally emerges)?
1. What then of solar panels?
Nothing. The owner of the panels will have to raise the panels until he can capture the sunrays again. Same with rain water tanks although I don’t see how a neighbor could obstruct (mostly) vertically falling rain.
2. What if a fight breaks out in the beach analogy?
Then the fight continues. The real question is how can you stake a claim to property without the means to enforce it? (*cough* gun rights *cough*)
Mises should activate full RSS posting…
It would be quite ‘libertarian’ of them.
“What if, far from breaking up the fight, everyone crowds around egging the fighters on (i.e. no automatically emerging independent arbitrators against violence naturally emerges)?”
Gil, I think you answered your own question- some would indeed resort to violence to resolve disputes; most, I think, would realize the costs of resorting to violence would far outweigh the cost of finding peaceful solutions -and that is precisely when the need arises for independent arbitrators to emerge .
“No one owns his view”
While I immensely enjoyed the article, I’m not convinced on this one point. On a beach it’s certainly accepted that someone is free to set up “camp” between a previous arrival and the ocean. But I don’t believe I’ve ever known someone to plop down directly in front of someone else and open an 8 ft umbrella (obscuring a significant portion of their view) either. I suspect such action would be frowned upon.I KNOW the act of setting up a “wall” or say a large tent, between a beach dweller and the ocean would be considered rude and inappropriate.
In a more formal setting, I very much like Prash’s question about the solar cells. Based on homesteading theory of property rights hasn’t the solar cell owner homesteaded a clear view of the sun? Shouldn’t someone building a tall building to the south of these solar cells have to purchase the right to obscure that access to the sun? To say otherwise would seem to require reverting to the rather absurd “ad column” theory of property that says the owner of a piece of land owns a wedge all the way down to the center of the earth and extending up into space.
I tend to think it should be possible to own views, just as it should be possible to own airspace (to keep tall buildings out of glide-paths into airports for example). If a restaurant installs roof-top seating so it’s guests can eat while enjoying a city skyline, or an ocean view, how can we say they’ve not “homesteaded” that view? If instead they built a runway and planes took off from their property wouldn’t we say it was violation of their property rights to put a 100ft tall billboard directly at the end of the runway?
Her “view”, his “view”, my “view”, your “view”, our “view”. Who’s “view” is it? “Views” are perceptions conjured up in minds as ownership.
I think this example illustrates that the homesteading rule is just a naturally evolved “rule of thumb” for peaceful use of a shared resource. There are lots of “ifs” and “buts” to it; it’s not the steadfast Rothbardian “all you can fence” policy. For instance, no one would think of drawing a giant line around all the beach early in the morning and expect everyone to keep out of “his property”, even if drawing a line in the sand is mixing your labor with it. That’s not how it works. People just come and think: “okay, there’s so much room left. I take what I need and leave the rest to others”. No one complains about changes in the view, because it is assumed that other people have just the same right to lie on the beach and plant their umbrellas; but if someone brings a four-story cardboard wall which blocks the sun completely, and the beach is too crowded to move somewhere else, people will complain. The “abandoned property” concept works for sand castles because they are not meant to last, so people don’t really spend a lot of effort to build them, but there’s no reason to extend this rule to more valuable kinds of property; otherwise it would be okay for burglars to get into your house as soon as you take a holiday or, indeed, as soon as you leave for a few hours. The concept of abandonment is rather fuzzy.
Really, I think there’s something to the “mixing your labor defines property” concept, but it must come from a deeper insight. The homesteading rule is a way of saying “build your own sand castle and don’t kick other people’s sand castles”. In other words, you may have a claim to some of the natural resources your neighbor is taking up, but you have no claim to his labor or its products as such, and no right to damage them, at least not beyond taking your portion of the disputed natural resources.
Could I construct a box around a person’s zone, and provide a small door for them to come and go?
This may be kind of a weird question but…
Are property rights limited to solids (with the exception of gasses and liquids contained in solids)?
It would seem that every homesteader identifies for himself a discrete piece of land (i.e. a solid) with which to do as he/she pleases. The homesteader then gains property rights to this discrete piece of land. Examples are land for homes, farms and buildings etc… If someone homesteaded a gas or a liquid, it would have to be contained in a solid to declare property rights, would it not? How else would one discretely define the piece of gas/liquid with which to assign property rights?
I have been highly intrigued by the idea of homesteading the ocean as a means to define on it property rights. I seeming ran into a conflict when the above dawned on me. There would really be no way to contain a piece of ocean in a solid aside from building impermeable walls down to the sea bottom. However, there is always the option of homesteading the sea bottom and just living above it.
I could not rationalize an alternative when it came to atmospheric gasses (AGW issue). How can anyone define property rights to freely floating gasses?
Perhaps I’m off base, but I’d like to know what everyone thinks.
Thanks!
Also, another thought.
Perhaps property rights cannot currently be assigned to some objects because it is currently too expensive to do so. Land is cheap to homestead: you walk to a spot you like that is open and you plop down. Other things, like gasses, liquids, photon paths (for solar panels) are much more expensive to homestead – requiring the homesteader to build or secure solids around whatever path / fluid is wanted…
JB,
It sounds like you’re taking the idea of “property rights” and mixing up the map with the territory. The important thing to understand is these are abstractions and mechanisms which people use to resolve issues, not absolute, objective facts of reality. Or, rather, property rights is our own interpretation of how people resolve these issues. It doesn’t matter what mechanism we use to attempt to understand it (the map), the facts (the territory) are still the same regardless. The map is only useful insofar as it describes the territory.
It’s silly to sit around the shuffle words around to figure out whether someone can “own” a gas or not. No matter what we finally decide on with regards to it, the reality outside will still be the same.
Hopefully this makes a bit more sense to you now.
I don’t think a view can be so easily dismissed. If somebody desires a view, does it seem right that their desire can be arbitrarily denied? you may as well say that any piece of land is as good as any other.
I’m not sure if the lifeguard would agree about the rights to his view either.
Good article. Invites many situations that may not be able to be ‘fixed’ except by a third party. What if you go for a swim and upon returning find a squatter on your ‘property’? Is it tough luck? Or do you appeal to them to move and if they do not then what…?
I have relatives who paid a large premium to buy land that abutted against a state park to be certain that no one built a massive house directly behind their own, obscuring their view of the landscape they’d designed their dream home around
I’ve seen restaurants suffer because what was a premier overlook of a city skyline was obstructed by someone a block over throwing up a large billboard.
As I said before, if you agree that an airport homesteads the airspace beyond it’s runways out many miles for aircraft to fly through during takeoff and landing, (and need not purchase the land beneath the flight path), then how is a restaurants making use of a view of the city skyline any different? How is someone using solar cells any different? If you “homestead” access to the sun for solar cells shouldn’t the person wanting to build a high-rise next door have to purchase the right to interfere with that access from you? How is that any different than someone who homesteads access to a body of water even if they make no claim on the land between their own and that water. Could someone purchase/homestead the land along the waterside and forbid the original homesteader access?
JB,
One good example of something that’s not matter but which we have property rights in is the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. radio waves and such. Of course no two parties can attempt to use the same frequency to transmit information. Imagine truckers using the same frequency to communicate over a large area that a radio station is using to broadcast Britney Spears music. Everyone’s communication gets all muddled up, and no one is happy. So who has the rightful claim? No one can really claim to own a certain wavelength of light, but people will pretty much respect the person who was using it first, and newcomers will find an unused frequency rather than start a dispute over use of the pre-claimed one. Can there ever be too many people crowding up the spectrum, so that signals interfere with each other? If crowding becomes a problem, the technology improves, so that users can tune more precisely to their wavelengths. (Technology has also allowed humans to greatly improve their use of land, and thus require less of it per person. Would Henry Hudson have ever believed that Manhattan Island would one day hold several million inhabitants?)
And of course, a “spontaneous order” emerges in how the spectrum is divided up. Radio stations are all in one bit of the spectrum, tv stations in another, walkie talkies and CB radios have their space, and now things like cell phones and wireless internet. It really is quite amazing to think how many demands are placed on that spectrum of invisible light, and that some of those uses carry a tremendous amount of information.
Good point, Matt. There are actually a lot of things like that. We don’t take our address, or land-line phone number with us when we move.
Internet addresses are interesting because they very much are owned things, and they even preserve their own value by having to be unique. They also can’t be stolen.
Never thought of the beach in this way before! I will try to appreciate the spontaneous non-violent system of (temporary) property rights next time.
I think beach behavior doesn’t justify over-generalization to free market behavior in other areas. Behavior is often defined by context, and a very special context prevails at the beach.
Beach resources are very rarely scarce. There’s no shortage of surf, sand, or sun. In that context, property rights might be emergent not because there is no state, but because violating them requires more effort than acquiring one’s own resources. Just as importantly, perhaps, is the fact that even the best sand castles are not necessary to anyone’s life. The only value they have is an aesthetic worth that is never intended to be a salable good.
At the heights of scarcity, we are familiar with rationing and regulation (risk mitigation and fairness being principle concerns). When scarcity is eliminated, one supposes that it is only natural that property rights would emerge as a consequence of eliminating the motivations behind rationing and regulation.
A couple thoughts: The volleyball game seems to present a bit of a continuum problem. Sure, I understand that if I sit down after the volleyball game has started, I’ve consented to some ball-bouncing, and most people understand this as well, so much so that if someone were to start complaining, the social consensus would be that he is wrong. But what if, instead of a volleyball, the people were throwing something very dangerous, that killed you if it landed on your body? I submit that in that case, most people wouldn’t really care who had gotten there first, and would say they shouldn’t be allowed to throw it.
The basic idea is that new arrivals to the beach do not start moving people around, but accept the rules that have been established already and conform to them. This is well and good, and works for social cooperation, but couldn’t a statist object that it gets us nowhere towards a rational allocation? It seems to leave open the possibility that the first 2 or 3 people to arrive made a mistake, and changes are possible that would be in everyone’s interest, yet which could not be voluntarily arranged.
Regarding the solar Panels question.
go read Free Market Environmentalism
He’s talking about an ad hoc beach. Not a place where buildings and stuff are built.
But if somebody’s homesteaded solar energy (either with Panels, or a Garden) And a new comer Builds something that blocks the sun, that’s a legitimate tort. Just like Wind, and Water right violations.
Solar Energy, is not “the view.”
Tracy
Someone can’t ‘homestead’ the Sun by bunging a few solar panel on a roof. You would have to believe someone with a solar panel automatically creates an ‘solar path’ 93 million miles long and that’s bull. It akin someone who gets a few bucketload of water from a stream ‘homesteading’ the whole stream such that no one can build a dam upstream. Such people are dipping into the ‘commons’ and have homesteaded nothing at all other than that which they have just collected.
Rothbard wrote a great article about property rights, homesteading, and different kinds of easements. Check it out at mises.org.
“No one complains about changes in the view, because it is assumed that other people have just the same right to lie on the beach and plant their umbrellas; but if someone brings a four-story cardboard wall which blocks the sun completely, and the beach is too crowded to move somewhere else, people will complain.”
I think I can agree with this. Maybe you cannot homestead a view, but you can certainly homestead a reasonable expectation to have a view preserved with reasonable accomodation of others and by others.
“But what if, instead of a volleyball, the people were throwing something very dangerous, that killed you if it landed on your body? I submit that in that case, most people wouldn’t really care who had gotten there first, and would say they shouldn’t be allowed to throw it.”
On one hand, if they were there first you should not set up shop near them. On the other hand, there is a degree of reasonableness over the amount of territory which they can extend their claim. If they were throwing around a nuclear volleyball which detonates in a nuclear explosion if it is dropped, then there is probably a case for someone even hundreds of miles away to say that their rights are being violated.
I know there are some that say that no violation occurred until the violation is actually done, but I don’t subscribe to that view. Someone brandishing a knife and threatening to kill you is guilty of a crime even if they do not actually attack you.
This article did a great job describing what I witnessed this past summer at a little beach in the village of Wilmette, Illinois.
The tendency is for peaceful association and this will just become even more refined as civilization advances.
Gil:
Take it up with Walter Block.
Seriously. If somebody built a hovering city over a farmland, you can be sure their would be some lawsuits.
When Block talks about Building Roads over and under property, he talks about how those Roads need to be built in such a way so they don’t interfere with the Rain and Solar rights of the people below that are already using it.
Solar rights a very definitely a type of property right that developed on their own already. Just like Water, Aquafer, and other rights.
Go Read “Free Market Environmentalism”
Tracy
How about the hypothetical situation where someone’s enormous solar panel is sent out into space and blocks sun for the entire earth, threatening all life itself?
Tracy, help people out by actually posting links please.
Free Market Environmentalism by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal
Free-Market Environmentalism by Richard Stroup
Free Market Environmentalism article on wikipedia
This is just a start, there are other articles to find too.
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