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Your yard was not there naturally, unless you call a section of untouched forest "your yard". Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. Th
by pitaj 7y ago
Your yard was not there naturally, unless you call a section of untouched forest "your yard".
Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. That is how property is created in the first place: homesteading involves investing your labor into untouched land to own it, as one example.
- reroute1 7y agoNo, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor. Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.
- bediger4000 7y agoYes, that's true, even if the "improvement" is merely to define property lines and locations. If property lines aren't there, it effectively doesn't exist. I mean, yes, some chunk of continental crust exists, but it's not "property" if you can't define it.
- reroute1 7y agoIf you completely redefine "improvement" and "labor" then sure.
- pitaj 7y ago> No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor. The initial labor is what creates the property. It can then be traded and whatnot. But it was not property before the initial labor that transformed wild land to something useful. > Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there. There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that? Land exists before improvement, but it is not property until improved through labor by people. That's just how the property rights on which our civilization is based work.
- wolfgke 7y ago> There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon_Treaty&oldid=912023917 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon_Treaty&oldid...
- reroute1 7y agoExactly physical land exists, and the only "labor" required for it to be property is for people to agree on it being property. How does this constitute real labor or improvement? Intellectual properties are generally more creative based endeavors and should be protected as such IMO
- LiquidSky 7y agoThat's what nonsensical libertarian dogma insists, sure, but that pseudo-religious tripe has no relation to or bearing on reality. Property is created when someone uses force to claim ownership of something. That's it. Anything else is post-hoc justification for said claim. You can indeed own that untouched forest if you can hold it with force. That's the ultimate basis of property, no matter how libertarians try to mask it: the imposition of force on the existing natural world to create artificial division of ownership.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't call names in arguments or take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It just makes discussion tediouser and nastier. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html