It might be charged that our theory of justice in property titles is deficient because in the real world most landed (and even other) property has a past history so tangled that it becomes impossible to identify who or what has committed coercion and therefore who the current just owner may be. But the point of the “homestead principle” is that if we don’t know what crimes have been committed in acquiring the property in the past, or if we don’t know the victims or their heirs, then the current owner becomes the legitimate and just owner on homestead grounds. In short, if Jones owns a piece of land at the present time, and we don’t know what crimes were committed to arrive at the current title, then Jones, as the current owner, becomes as fully legitimate a property owner of this land as he does over his own person. Overthrow of existing property title only becomes legitimate if the victims or their heirs can present an authenticated, demonstrable, and specific claim to the property. Failing such conditions, existing landowners possess a fully moral right to their property.

Still thinking in 2D. Tsk.

No easements?

Tom, not sure what you’re on about. Either it is settled and homesteaded property or it isn’t. In which case easements may obtain, if it isn’t… maybe.

“Second, it is by no means clear that the Indians are the rightful owners of anything like the entire United States. Under libertarian law, they could justly claim only those parts of the land that they homesteaded, or occupied, not hunted over. They owned those paths that they used to get from their winter to their summer places. This is based on the Lockean-Rothbardian-Hoppean homesteading theory. I estimate that they owned, in this way, at most 1 percent of the land in the United States.”

http://mises.org/daily/3431

While the United States army was mostly successful in wiping out the indigenous population, there remain “heirs” to tribes representing most of the land area of the United States.

I very much doubt that Rothbard or anyone on this forum would advocate ceding all land in the United States to Native groups, and I am interested to learn a libertarian viewpoint on reconciling that issue.

Excellent question! Guard has identified a seeming paradox w.r.t. property. I don’t know of any literature that adequately handles this issue.

But you do.

Consider Rothbard’s statement “Surely, any endorsement of a ‘free’ market in slaves indicates the inadequacy of utilitarian concepts of property and the need for a theory of justice.” He is correct that there cannot be a free market in slaves. Nonetheless, a Wertfrei analysis of supply & demand holds, in that: the fewer the supply of slaves, the greater the price; the lesser the demand, the lower the price. These and other analyses are valid, from a purely technical (and amoral) perspective. Can one deny the validity of such calculations, on the ground that slavery should not exist?

So Rothbard’s view is tenable with regard to economic policy, but does not contradict treating economics as a Wertfrei science.

This cannot be the fundamental premise, since without any actual real estate on which to exist, you own neither your body nor its production; you exist entirely at the pleasure of whomever owns the land on which you live. It follows that one of the two alternatives is indeed the case:

“There are only two alternatives: either

1. a certain class of people, A, have the right to own another class, B; or
2. everyone has the right to own his equal quotal share of everyone else.
allowing class A to own class B means that the former is allowed to exploit and, therefore, to live parasitically at the expense of the latter; but, as economics can tell us, this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for human survival: production and exchange.”

We are definitely living under the “parasite” model at this time. I would like to know how one would justly provide for everyone to have a place in which to exist without resorting to something like the second alternative, the “communism” model. Anyone know any good resources on this?