But if everyone owns everything and you take this claim seriously, doing anything is impossible - you can't use what's not yours without the permission of the owner. And it's impossible to get permission of 8 billion people. And even if I ignored this unsolvable practical problem, it still doesn't explain why someone who transformed some…
But if everyone owns everything and you take this claim seriously, doing anything is impossible - you can't use what's not yours without the permission of the owner. And it's impossible to get permission of 8 billion people. And even if I ignored this unsolvable practical problem, it still doesn't explain why someone who transformed something from the state of nature into something useful has equal claim to it as someone who has nothing to do with it.
Involving the government doesn't help either - the bureaucrat who is demanding money from me is also a latecomer.
I didn't say everything was co-owned by everyone in a way that you needed everyone's individual permission. I said that (in one view) natural resources are considered to be initially owned by society, as represented by an (ideally popularly elected) government, meaning that you can use it with the permission of the government.
Also, I *can*, in some circumstances, use things without the permission of the owner. You can argue that I morally *may* not use them—but, again, I don't use this sort of hard-and-fast, principled, independent-of-society's-decisions moral reasoning to ownership of natural resources. It could be said that I have sort of a might-makes-right view when it comes to natural resources; but not really, as I have a preference for having the decisions made by a representative government that takes people's interests into account roughly equally over having them made by a tyrant, or by a shootout between the people who want the land.
While I agree with your comment above that "the firstcomer must compensate the eventual future latecomers for excluding them", this has different implications depending on what, exactly, this compensation consists in. I can think of three possibilities: (1) an amount that just leaves latecomers no worse off than if they had not been excluded—my preference; (2) the amount that would convince the latecomers not to trespass—the market price, typically higher than the first; (3) the amount that would be determined by a hypothetical democratic government—which may differ from the first two, and your preference, if I understand you correctly. My point right now is that only the third is consistent with (some sort of) ownership by society. But, to repeat one of the original problems, if society did not make the land (and more than any individual did), then why suppose that society owns it in any sense? Does humanity already own Mars?
But if everyone owns everything and you take this claim seriously, doing anything is impossible - you can't use what's not yours without the permission of the owner. And it's impossible to get permission of 8 billion people. And even if I ignored this unsolvable practical problem, it still doesn't explain why someone who transformed something from the state of nature into something useful has equal claim to it as someone who has nothing to do with it.
Involving the government doesn't help either - the bureaucrat who is demanding money from me is also a latecomer.
I didn't say everything was co-owned by everyone in a way that you needed everyone's individual permission. I said that (in one view) natural resources are considered to be initially owned by society, as represented by an (ideally popularly elected) government, meaning that you can use it with the permission of the government.
Also, I *can*, in some circumstances, use things without the permission of the owner. You can argue that I morally *may* not use them—but, again, I don't use this sort of hard-and-fast, principled, independent-of-society's-decisions moral reasoning to ownership of natural resources. It could be said that I have sort of a might-makes-right view when it comes to natural resources; but not really, as I have a preference for having the decisions made by a representative government that takes people's interests into account roughly equally over having them made by a tyrant, or by a shootout between the people who want the land.
While I agree with your comment above that "the firstcomer must compensate the eventual future latecomers for excluding them", this has different implications depending on what, exactly, this compensation consists in. I can think of three possibilities: (1) an amount that just leaves latecomers no worse off than if they had not been excluded—my preference; (2) the amount that would convince the latecomers not to trespass—the market price, typically higher than the first; (3) the amount that would be determined by a hypothetical democratic government—which may differ from the first two, and your preference, if I understand you correctly. My point right now is that only the third is consistent with (some sort of) ownership by society. But, to repeat one of the original problems, if society did not make the land (and more than any individual did), then why suppose that society owns it in any sense? Does humanity already own Mars?