In this Pit thread, Ogre decries a landowner who clearcut a large parcel of old-growth forest which he owned, severely damaging a less-than-common ecosystem for the sake of a small temporary financial gain.
Quite a few people of libertarian bent defended the landowner’s right to do as he chooses with his land. “It’s his property, to do with as he wishes,” seems to be their mantra – and in saying that, I’m not intending to belittle their position. I’d hold up for an example of the opposite extreme the frequent rants about meddlesome HOAs telling people they cannot, e.g., have satellite dishes, stor their boats on their own property in the winter, plant rosebushes or put up picket fences, etc.
It strikes me that issues from zoning are relvant: People would object to putting a porn shop next door to an elementary school, building a boiler factory nest door to a nursing home or hospital, starting a hog farm adjacent to a high-end residential subdivision, and so on. Not to mention the classic issue of rock festivals à la Woodstock, with loud music, crowds, etc., disrupting life in a small community.
So: Proposition: There are limits to what a private landowner may do with his land. They are set by prior law subject to community consensus as to the appropriateness of that law. They may not be overly onerous nor deprive him of the useful value of his land in a financial sense (or not without just compensation for ‘real’ potential loss of use). And they are damnably difficult to define in a few short sentences or paragraphs.
Agree or disagree? For what reasons? Do you have examples of appropriate or inappropriate regulation, to help nail down such limits?
A key issue here is whether you are affecting other people. That could be noise pollution like Woodstock, smell and noise like the hog farm, or moral like the porn shop. And that’s why it’s a community solution. We, as citizens, delegate this to elected officials. If we don’t like the decisions they make, we can elect other people.
Maybe no one? It would be interesting to learn how modern concepts of land ownership arose.
I haven’t given much thought to this topic before, but I recall a discussion with a Swiss guy (or maybe he’d just lived there? no remember). He said something about viewing the inhabitants of a piece of land as that land’s stewards, rather than owners. They get to live there, but they have an obligation to maintain it for everyone alive now and in the future. I’m not sure exactly how this was supposed to work out .
The OP also made me think about Taliban’s destruction of those big Buddha statues in Afghanistan. I suppose that land was “theirs” to do with as they saw fit, but lots of folks were pretty upset. This may have something to do with how legitimate they felt that particular government was. Anyway, the OP was about private land ownership, so this probably isn’t so relevant.
In Monterey county CA I have known of people from the larger cities who bought land in the north part fo the county. May be 1 acre, and the moment they get their building permits in their hands circulate a pittition for 40 acre min for house permits.
Or the guy who used a bulldoser to clear his house sight and stopped his neighbor from building through the coastal commision stating "If I had my way those hills will stay the way god made them.
Or the 30 year old chicken farm that was put out of business by the homeowners of a new housing tract. The county passed zoning codes the chicken farmer could not meet.
Or the airport that has been in the San Jose Area forever, and the home owners in the area want it closed. the airport, and piolets have a fight every few years.
If he’s against private ownership of land, obviously no one (or maybe he thinks it should be common property).
Honestly, private ownership of land isn’t an easy concept to defend. If you’re making a stone tool, you can argue that it’s your property because you put your time, work and skill into making it, but deciding that a piece of land is your property or even can be someone’s property is very arbitrary.
Actually, plenty of cultures have ignored or rejected this concept, including agricultural ones. And even in western countries were the concept is perfectly familiar, there are often traditional limitations to what the right of property of land entails : here, you can’t own a piece of coast, or waterways, or the ground below a couple meters, there, you can’t prevent trespassing or can’t forbid hunting, etc…IOW, land ownership doesn’t prevent other people from keeping some rights to use it (accessing the coast, fishing and navigating, picking berries, planting a tent, whatever…). IOW, we don’t necessarily agree that land can be owned in the same absolute way a car is.
In feudal times, there were a rather restrictive set of obligations that came attached to land: these were known as feudal obligations. If I understand it correctly, peasants were obliged to offer the Lord labor, the Lord was obliged to offer them material support and the King knight service; land tenure often had restrictions on logging, mining, etc.
In the New World, we had free and common socage during Colonial Times: one characteristic of it were that all obligations attached to the land had to be in writing. However, the right of waste (mining, logging) was typically pretty extensive. Still, even then the government had a right to tax the land and certain police powers. Eminent domain came mostly after the revolution.
So, yes, limits on land usage have always existed, though in the Colonial US, they were pretty mild. Source: Hughes & Cain, p. 16, 120 American Economic History.
I was wondering if he is asserting that land cannot/shouldnot be owned (as, for example, the concept of most Amerind tribes), or that land can be owned, but only by the state (as, for example, the underlying concept behind so-called Communist Russia).
And private ownership of land is very easily defended. It is defended through exactly the concept from which it usually originates: I’ve got the wherewithal to protect this land from the incursion of others, so I get to say what gets done with it. Now, it is true that this is not the only possible way to treat ownership of land, but to assert that it is somehow unnatural, or even abnormal, to have private land ownership is to totally ignore the reality of most history around the world.
ETA: And please note that there are plenty of cultures that don’t accept as a truism that items should be subject to personal ownership, either. So it’s a bit of a false distinction to assert that a car and a piece of land have some fundamental distinction between them.
Well… If it’s the only justification you can come of up with for your ownership of a piece of land, it’s then perfectly legitimate for me to take it away from you (or do whatever I want on it) if I’m stronger.
Let’s assume we’re both stranded on an uncharted desert island, and that neither of us intend to resort to force or violence to resolve our disagreement. What kind of convincing argument could you use if you wanted to privately own one half of the island and I didn’t “believe” in private ownership of land? If you made, say, a fishing hook, you could argue that it’s the result of your hard work and that you get to use it, but what could justify you drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and stating that I can’t cross them?
I think that’s true, but it has to be much less common than for ownership of land. It’s also much rarer that law grants everybody the right to use in some way or another items you own. I mentioned that it’s quite common in western countries that people can trespass, hunt, whatever, on your land, but they rarely have the right to sleep in your bed, empty your fridge or use your car just because they feel like it.
Michael, is that federal law, state law, something else? I’d be curious as to know whether there are large variations by state. Fed law, of course, would trump everything else.
I think the big issue that gets stuck in a person’s craw is whether these laws are passed ex post facto, or not.
In other words, if there is restriction on logging or whatnot, fine. But I’d like to know that before I assess and purchase the property, not afterwards. Because if it’s done afterwards, the law has just significantly reduced the value of my property in a form of ‘takings’.
On the federal level, most of the restrictions on land use come in through environmental laws, most especially the Clean Water Act, because traditionally the phrase “Waters of the United States” has been interpreted incredibly broadly to include almost any wetland or water body (although the Supreme Court muddied things recently, see Rapanos v. United States). So yes, a land owner could find themselves unable to do something with their property if it is going to have an impact on a creek or wetland or something.
You also have the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment (which applies to the federal government and the states) that prevents, amongst other things, what are called “regulatory takings,” which are regulations that deprive the landowner of all beneficial economic use of the property. I dare say, you would be pretty happy with the current state of the law there, as it has been pretty strongly influenced by libertarian ideals of property rights in recent decades. For instance, the Supreme Court has struck down state prohibitions on development in coastal zones.
On the state level, its impossible to say much more than states have a lot of discretion to enact zoning law and most have pretty strong enabling legislation on the books that allow municipalities to impliment zoning codes. They can go as far as allowing what amount to ex post facto regulatory takings. For instance CT allows certain municipalities to enact what are called Ridgeline Protection Zones which are blanket prohibition of certain activities in those zones (quarrying, for example).
That is sort of any extremely broad over view of the law, hopefully it answers some of your questions.
No-one. That includes the State. I believe that ownership of land is in conflict with rights of equality & liberty. All private property is theft. Private property ownership should be replaced by communally-held use-rights instead.
If/when you get a chance, and not to hijack this thread, could you let me know by PM or separate thread how you believe that “equality and liberty” are conflicted by land ownership, and how that relates to the concept of “theft?”
I give a fishing hook to you in return for exclusive use of 1/2, 1/100 or 9/10 of the island, whatever we decide.
Or, I give a pile of shiny pieces of metal to the local warlord, who cedes the rights to farm a plot of land and provides me with military protection as well.
What’s interesting here is that there’s nothing automatic about me getting to do whatever I want with the land, unless I expressly negotiated that with the local powers to begin with. So the libertarian argument is wholly without historical or conceptual merit.
Cite. Briefly, there is no intrinsic right for an individual to have absolute ownership of the means of production and furthermore such ownership in practice deprives laborers of the value of their labor, so that the ability to turn effort into wealth is stymied. So on Lockian grounds, private ownership of the means of production leads to theft of labor-value. No, I won’t press the point or defend it; furthermore my presentation of Proudhon’s argument might be a little off.
