Use It or Lose It: Extensions to Lockean Homesteading Theory

0:00The following Hans Hoppe is kind of like having the Rolling Stones as your opening act, but I'll do my best. So the title of the paper has changed something a little more boring, academic, a little less incendiary, introducing temporal attitudes to homesteading theory. And what I mean by temporal attitudes is that homesteading theory talks a lot about acquisition of land, But there is a lot less talked about of what conditions, what time frame land is retained. Okay, so I want to talk about that element of homesteading theory, or introduce that as basically another continuum problem. Okay, so to bring this to something a little more practical, you have this common law principle of adverse possession.

0:46and that is that the original owner of some piece of land neglects it or at least doesn't use it for a sufficient period of time, someone else uses it for that same period of time or a subsequent period of time, just about, usually about 20 years, okay, so we're not talking some loony left-wing theory of if you go out for a sandwich somebody can move into your house, this is, we're talking decades here for the property right to shift, So is this principle of adverse possession compatible with a Lockean system of property rights and I'm going to claim that based on his chapter on property, yes, adverse possession is perfectly compatible. And second, more difficult, is it compatible with a libertarian system of property rights?

1:34I realize that libertarian means a lot of things to a lot of people and so I'm going to say possibly. And this depends on, again, what I'm going to call temporal attitudes toward what I'm going to assert as a continuum problem of re-homesteading. The homesteading is an awkward word, but everybody kind of knows what it means. So if these things get a little tedious, re-homesteading, re-homesteadable, it's just because people kind of know what homesteading means. Okay, so the sort of customary or even the caricature of a libertarian position on homesteading is first that an individual acquires ownership in homesteadable land by mixing a sufficiently large quantity of labor, call this quantity L, with a sufficiently small quantity of land.

2:27Okay? That's Lockean, that's also libertarian, but what distinguishes what I'm calling a first The first use, absolutist, or first possession position would be that homesteaded land becomes the unqualified property of the homesteader into the infinite future. So this is sort of the conception of homesteading that someone like Robert Ellison uses when he says that adverse possession is a dent in the libertarian model of property rights. So I'm going to argue that this is just one specification, particular specification of this continuum problem, or what I'm going to call a continuum position. The first part of that is exactly the same. Land is acquired in exactly the same way.

3:15But the second part, that land is retained, that homesteaded land becomes the property of the homesteader insofar as this land is not chronically neglected. Again, chronically is contextual, situational. In the US, chronically in terms of adverse possession means about 20 years. And so to sort of illustrate this diagrammatically, the first use of absolutist position kind of conceives of homesteading as a one-way street. That you go from the state of nature, apply L units of labor or achieve some requisite Improvement, and then it becomes private property never to cross back across that threshold at L. Whereas I'm sort of trying to better account for the physical realities of homesteading, which is that there's nothing particularly magical about L. It establishes a property right, but through chronic neglect, land can very well pass back toward a state of nature.

4:20And so all I'm asserting is, and again this is contextual and I don't mean for anybody to take it to a silly extreme, that's always a risk, is that after you apply L, there is some requisite amount of labor that you or some proxy, you know, that a maintenance man, if you own an apartment building, it doesn't have to be you in person, has to apply to the land to retain your property right, okay, so that property rights don't automatically extend into the infinite future and that there's some modicum of use or continuous labor mixing that has to be present to retain this property right, okay, and so just to compare these temporal attitudes that the first use absolutist position in some ways is kind of tautological that that the infinite time frame would be inherent in property, that ownership is meaningless except in an infinite time frame or that property would be meaningless except in an infinite unqualified time frame, but again this puts a whole lot of almost magical power on this

5:34quantity L that if you're at L minus one units of labor and you can define a unit however If you're at L-1, then of course naturally, so if I dig a foundation for a house and then I come back 50 years later, you'll have weeds, it'll have caved in, there'll be rainwater, whatever. The idea is that at L-1, land returns to the state of nature, but at least through a first use absolutist prism, after L-plus-one, it doesn't, that it's forever been excluded from and the State of Nature. Okay, so again, I'm simply trying to include this physical reality in that homesteading is a physical act, it's not just an ideological or a philosophical construct, that the continuum position acknowledges the fact that the effect of previous labor mixing is going to erode over time, regardless of how far developed the land is.

6:41And so, essentially, you just have to adopt some rule of thumb regarding the appropriate timeframe for neglect, and at a certain point, the land simply becomes homesteadable. So the question is, is this some sort of major revision to homesteading theory? Is it a total shakeup? Well, first of all, land is still acquired in the same way, through labor mixing. And you've already got continuum problems inherent in even a first-use absolutist position. That is, I mean, what's the appropriate value of L? And as Walter Block notes, that is situational, that certain land may be easier to homestead than other land. So that value of L that a first-use absolutist would put such importance on varies plot by plot, acre by acre.

7:35You also have temporal problems already. So there's already a temporal continuum problem, and that is how fast you have to homestead a piece of land in order to sort of have exclusive right to do so. And so think of someone who wanders into the forest, a homesteadable piece of forest, cuts one limb off of one tree every 10 years and says, no, no, no, you can't develop that land. I'm homesteading it. Everyone would say that's silly. They're not making an honest effort to homestead the land. Now, if he did that once every five minutes till the land was cleared, till the soil, planted corn, whatever, you'd say, sure, he was homesteading.

8:20So there's already this temporal element in homesteading theory. So I'm simply suggesting that a fully libertarian position can also include this temporal nature of ownership. Okay, so that was the hard one. The easier one, at least from my perspective is, is adverse possession lock-in? And this isn't the only place where lock tends to focus just as much on just acquisition as waste, spoilage. So I'll just read the quote. So it will perhaps It must be objected to this, that is his scheme for property acquisition, that if gathering the acorns or other fruits of the earth, etc., makes the right to them, then anyone may engross as much as he will, to which I answer not so.

9:14The same law of nature that does by this means give us property does also bound that property too. God has given us all things richly, but how far has he given it to us to enjoy, as much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property. Whatever is beyond this is more than his share and belongs to others. So I certainly don't want some central authority deciding if I'm not enjoying my can opener or my car or my lawnmower, But this is by one's own act that for, you know, in the practical sense of adverse possession, so for 20 years somebody else is using your plot of land and you don't tell them, hey, this is my land, get off.

10:03By your own actions, you're admitting that you are not, in Locksworth's, enjoying the land. You're taking more than your share simply because you are not putting it to any productive use. So there's a utilitarian argument for adverse possession that I don't want to stand on, but I think there's also a libertarian argument that says if labor mixing bestows a property right and the effect of that labor diminishes over time, then the property right in some sense diminishes over time, again, unless you continue to use the land. So my conclusion is that this first use absolutist position is just one temporal latitude, it's at one extreme.

10:51And I don't use extreme pejoratively, it's simply, okay, I've homesteaded and now what's the appropriate timeframe? Well, the appropriate timeframe is the infinite future. So some allowance for this common law principle called adverse possession is both lock-in and again depending on how broadly or narrowly you define libertarian it's also libertarian that it builds on because it builds on this paradigm Lockian and libertarian of labor mixing and that's really the essence of the theory. So the paper the work in progress can be downloaded their comments and questions. Thank you.