The question is not whether I have a problem paying or not, but the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things. If you can’t exclude this use, you can't dictate terms for use. You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case…
The question is not whether I have a problem paying or not, but the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things. If you can’t exclude this use, you can't dictate terms for use. You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case? What principle distinguishes our claims? Or can I just call myself the government and tax myself and spend it however I like?
The practical consequences have been discussed. Sure, the government *can* do lots of things, including things they have no excuse to do. I need an excuse to exclude, they do not. Why?
>the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things
I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. So, sure, take the stick and make a spear from it. Further, I can't use the stick /as a spear/ without your consent, since /you/ made it a spear. But, without further argument, you still don't own the material. And you can't exclude me from using unowned things, like the material out of which the spear is made, which, frankly, I would find more useful as firewood. Why does your use prevail over my proposed use, if the material really is originally unowned?
So we need the further argument. They may not endorse it, but 10240 expresses well an idea I am inclined to agree with, so I am just going to quote them (with some word changes): "if you turn $10 worth of raw materials into a tool worth $1000, you can keep the extra $990 of value. But it's consistent with this to argue that [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], in order to possess (and, optionally, transform) them, rather than let you take them for free on account of being the firstcomer. And if you've paid $10 for the raw materials, you do fully own whatever you turn them into. Now, some natural resources are so abundant that their market value is 0". . . . including the stick you took, since there are so many others lying around for me to use as firewood instead (IF that is really true, which it isn't, sometimes).
First Try is closer to what I am thinking. But consider: "The surface of the earth was not created by any human being, so nobody starts with a right to exclude any other human from any part of it. It follows that such exclusion is a rights violation". Agree with first inference, not with the second, /if it is unqualified/. Suppose—motivated by Locke's proviso—our only obligation in the state of nature is never to better our own position by worsening that of others (so I agree that we are not just talking about past exclusions). Excluding others from land benefits me and worsens the situation of others, and this is no accident, so, nothing else considered, I benefit myself /by/ worsening others, which is prohibited. Unless I provide compensation so that they are NOT made worse of by the exclusion. So, strictly speaking, all that follows is that exclusion /without sufficient compensation/ is a rights violation. This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you.
I agree that quasi-Lockean principle does not have kind things to say for someone who is blind or crippled. FWIW, libertarian though I am, I still think there is an (enforceable) duty of easy rescue, and I presume they will fall under this additional principle. (Even Locke thought that the destitute required support).
Second Try I think is less plausible. I agree that you have the (temporary) right to the land upon which you are standing (on the basis, as you say, of self-ownership), and ultimately on the same basis a right to the land upon which your wheat is growing (though people can still walk gingerly between the plants, no?). But not this bit: "I build a fence around my wheat field. ... You have a right to be on the land but not a right to damage my fence—mine because my labor produced it". Suppose you build a really good fence, that keeps everyone out. This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. You cannot use your fist (which you own) to violate anyone's rights (and if you try others can do unfriendly things to it), and nor can you use your fence (ditto). You need to provide compensation, but, in that case, it is the compensation that justifies your exclusion, not the labor you put into the fence.
"This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you. "
You have a house which is worth $100,000 to you, $150,000 to me. A bargained sale will end up with a price somewhere between those numbers. Instead, following out your logic, I seize the house by force and give you $100,000. According to what you wrote I haven't violated your rights since I compensated you.
Is that your position?
"This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. "
My standing where you would like to shoot is an act of exclusion too. If I don't compensate you are you entitled to shoot in my direction?
There are lots of cases in which A makes B worse off without violating any rights — bidding against B for the house B wants to buy or courting and marrying the woman B wanted to marry and would have if A didn't exist. My claim is that my fence is in the same category. You are worse off because I have arranged things such that you cannot do something you want to do without violating my rights. It doesn't follow that I owe you compensation.
>I seize [your] house by force and give you $100,000. According to what you wrote I haven't violated your rights since I compensated you. Is that your position?
No, since my argument relates to original acquisition of hitherto un-owned things, not to the house you mention, which I presumably own.
>My standing where you would like to shoot is an act of exclusion too. If I don't compensate you are you entitled to shoot in my direction?
This is not true, at least as I meant my neo-Lockean Proviso. The crucial difference is that my standing where I am is not /intended/ to prevent you standing there (though it has this side-effect—unless, of course, that /is/ what I intend, in which case you may or may not have the right to physically move me on). By contrast, your building your fence /is/ intended to prevent others from entering "your" land, and is in that sense an /act/ of exclusion.
>There are lots of cases in which A makes B worse off without violating any rights
My view is certainly not that it is never permissible to make others worse off, just that, in the state of nature, you cannot make yourself better off by intending to make others worse off. No-one marries with the intention to exclude others, so the fact that others miss out is their bad luck. However—admittedly—plenty people pollute without intending make things worse for others (though the polluters know that this will be the effect), so, according to the Proviso, that /is/ permitted. Another inconvenience of the state of nature, I guess.
"No-one marries with the intention to exclude others"
On the contrary, nearly everyone who marries does.
More relevant, why is intent so important in your view? And does "by intending to make others worse off" mean "the objective is to make others worse off" or "the objective is to make yourself better off but you know that one result is to make others worse off"?
Only the latter applies to my fence and it applies to my marriage as well if I know that there is another suitor who might succeed if I drop out.
I'm drawing on the familiar distinction between benefiting oneself by intentionally targeting someone with a harm (eg, terror bombing), and doing so while merely foreseeing that the same harm will be a side-effect (cf, strategic bombing). So understood, it is easy to see why one may think that the first is wrong, even if one accepts the second, since it involves /targeting/ someone—with all the connotations of that term.
So—au contraire—this is exactly what your fence is like, since (like the terror bomber) there is no benefit of building it if there is no-one else around, and you would strengthen it if it failed to deter people, etc etc. Its objective is to keep people out, and (unlike the strategic bomber) this harm to them is not some coincidental side-effect, that you would be happy not to occur if only it could be managed. And you want to do this to keep them from land that you admit is not yours. This exclusion can be made good only by nullifying the harm through compensation.
Yes—whoops!—marriage /is/ an exclusive relationship, so that complicates things. Same applies, though. What I /meant/ was that, in this case, your attitude to third parties during your pursuit of your beloved is the opposite. Presumably, you would still have pursued her even if he was not interested, and you would not have tried to prevent him from pursuing her, etc etc [OK, I admit it, for some people these things are false, but, I want say, they are behaving badly]. The complication is that you are pursuing an /exclusive/ relationship with her, but this overall pattern occurs in other contexts. When you eat some fruit (say), you engage in a particularly intimate relationship with it that necessarily excludes others, but your intention is strictly to eat the fruit, not exclude others from it (eg, you'd still eat the fruit even if no-one else wanted it, etc etc). So too when you seek an intimate relationship with your beloved. I /think/ this is all consistent.
Suppose some of my courtship tactics are designed to demonstrate my superior suitability as a husband vis a vis my rival. I wouldn't do those particular things if he wasn't also courting her. My objective isn't to make him worse off — that's a side effect of achieving my objective.
Similarly with my fence. My objective isn't to make him worse off, it is to keep him from doing things to the land, such as building a house on it, that would prevent me from planting wheat on it. If I could achieve my objective without making him worse off, perhaps by pointing out a better location for his house, I would do so. Making him worse off is a side effect of my means for achieving my objective.
We may be in agreement about the fence, /given the details you have just added/. I say that you can appropriate some plot of land so long as you compensate those excluded. One way of doing that is by offering to renounce your rights over an equivalent plot of land ("pointing out a better location for his house"). If he refuses to accept this reasonable offer, then that is on him so long as your offer remains, and so his being worse off is only a side effect of your action, and your fence is justified.
The courtship example is more of a problem for me. The key point is that there would be no (net) benefit to you of engaging in the courtship tactics you mention, and you would not do so, if your rival were not interested in her, etc. As my neo-Lockean account stands, this implies (i) that you are intentionally making him worse off, and therefore (ii) that this is wrong without providing compensation. Now, if the first point were mistaken, if your making him worse off really were a mere side effect, then that would be OK by me, since then I would not have to say that your tactics are wrong. But I don't think that is correct. Your tactics display a competitive motivation, of trying to /defeat/ the other, and that clearly means that you are targeting your rival, in the sense I introduced in my previous comment. So it seems I have to say that you may not employ such tactics, and more generally that competitive tactics in the state of nature are impermissible, and that /does/ seem implausible.
>I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. <
This is a distinction without a difference. I can’t use things reliably if it violates social norms for me to exclude others from using them in incompatible ways.
>without further argument, you still don't own the material.<
I gave further argument elsewhere. Use is a claim. It can be used as evidence of ownership. It is a weak claim, but not as weak as non-use.
A consequentialist argument could also be made.
And there are various arguments against the alternatives. E.g., against Georgist, do I owe compensation to everyone or only to those who are actually excluded? I cannot pay compensation to everyone, and who is actually excluded depends on a counterfactual, so can’t be determined. We could fall back to heuristics or approximations, and say these are less unjust than the status quo. But this depends on establishing that Georgian is more just than the status quo, and that a rough approximation would be sufficient to improve things. This has not been shown.
I’m still waiting for the analogous argument from the Georgists.
That switched from land to spears. In most cases, one sort of land use will exclude most others. Did you answer the question about why my excluding others is a problem, but the Georgists' exclusion of me is not?
I take it this relates to your comment above "You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case?" Well, first, I want to say that the same principle re original appropriation applies to all actors, individuals and governments alike. And, second, my quote from 10240 explains how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned. I don't think the switch from land to sticks is a biggie, since one sort of stick use (eg, as a spear) will also exclude most others (eg, as firewood).
“if you turn $10 worth of raw materials into a tool worth $1000, you can keep the extra $990 of value. But it's consistent with this to argue that [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], in order to possess (and, optionally, transform) them, rather than let you take them for free on account of being the firstcomer. And if you've paid $10 for the raw materials, you do fully own whatever you turn them into. Now, some natural resources are so abundant that their market value is 0"
If so, where is the discussion of how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned? One cannot rent or buy something that is unowned. If it is to be rented or bought, this involves a transaction between the owner and the renter or buyer. How did the owner acquire it, if it truly was unowned previously?
"One cannot rent or buy something that is unowned"—yes, that is a fair point, for exactly the reason you say, that the resources are initially unowned. And so that bit of the passage is not as well expressed as it should be. It should be: "you first give $10 for the raw materials to others as compensation to them for taking the materials, in order to process ...". You give others the money, not because you are buying the materials from them (since they do not own them), but as compensation for your excluding others from the materials (since, initially, you don't own them either). That should make it clearer.
This is just a use of the concept of ownership without using the word. Swapping the definition for the word doesn’t change anything.
We shouldn't argue about names; we are arguing about exclusion, who can do it justly, and under what circumstances compensation is owed (and to whom) for use without permission. If one must pay compensation to some person for the use of a resource, there should be a reason, not just a command.
Georgist norms, if they are just, should be the conclusion of an argument about justice, not the premises. Is the idea that existing norms are unjust, so everyone must submit to the innovation to serve justice? That is a hard sell. Or does the innovation have some beneficial qualities, and so while we are not obligated to do so, we might be persuaded to switch? Or something else?
That only makes sense if everything was always owned. If I can’t own it, why can “everybody”? When/how did they gain ownership so that their claim is better?
The line of argument I am exploring holds that uncreated property starts out as a commons. Nobody owns it — has the right to exclude others — but everyone has an equal right to use it. When someone appropriates some of it he is violating that right by forcibly keeping other from using the land.
Yes, I understand. Perhaps you found some clever argument that defeats the idea even after stipulating one-sided assumptions. I am challenging the assumptions. I want to explore a broader question. If this seems like an unwelcome digression, I apologize.
Why is it interesting to simply assume a framework, as opposed to comparing rivals? The objection is that ordinary property excludes those who have rights under the commons assumption. Why can’t the opposition simply assume ordinary property rights, and object to Georgist taxation? For the argument to reach common ground, we have to find common premises. One side can’t just beg the question and declare checkmate.
Perhaps the answer is that’s Georgists find their assumptions very intuitive, and do not,feel a need to argue for them. They seem confused by the idea that this might be necessary to persuade someone with different intuitions.
If I make a spear, and you admit I made it, and make no claim to have owned the materials I used, how can you claim it as firewood or spear? If we take this dispute to arbitration, my ownership claim based on use is pretty weak. But a weak claim is better than no claim. Why should the arbitrator rule in favor of your taking the spear for firewood?
The question is not whether I have a problem paying or not, but the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things. If you can’t exclude this use, you can't dictate terms for use. You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case? What principle distinguishes our claims? Or can I just call myself the government and tax myself and spend it however I like?
The practical consequences have been discussed. Sure, the government *can* do lots of things, including things they have no excuse to do. I need an excuse to exclude, they do not. Why?
>the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things
I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. So, sure, take the stick and make a spear from it. Further, I can't use the stick /as a spear/ without your consent, since /you/ made it a spear. But, without further argument, you still don't own the material. And you can't exclude me from using unowned things, like the material out of which the spear is made, which, frankly, I would find more useful as firewood. Why does your use prevail over my proposed use, if the material really is originally unowned?
So we need the further argument. They may not endorse it, but 10240 expresses well an idea I am inclined to agree with, so I am just going to quote them (with some word changes): "if you turn $10 worth of raw materials into a tool worth $1000, you can keep the extra $990 of value. But it's consistent with this to argue that [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], in order to possess (and, optionally, transform) them, rather than let you take them for free on account of being the firstcomer. And if you've paid $10 for the raw materials, you do fully own whatever you turn them into. Now, some natural resources are so abundant that their market value is 0". . . . including the stick you took, since there are so many others lying around for me to use as firewood instead (IF that is really true, which it isn't, sometimes).
You might find the argument in Chapter 57 of _The Machinery of Freedom_, linked to in the article, relevant to some of this.
Yes, it is interesting.
First Try is closer to what I am thinking. But consider: "The surface of the earth was not created by any human being, so nobody starts with a right to exclude any other human from any part of it. It follows that such exclusion is a rights violation". Agree with first inference, not with the second, /if it is unqualified/. Suppose—motivated by Locke's proviso—our only obligation in the state of nature is never to better our own position by worsening that of others (so I agree that we are not just talking about past exclusions). Excluding others from land benefits me and worsens the situation of others, and this is no accident, so, nothing else considered, I benefit myself /by/ worsening others, which is prohibited. Unless I provide compensation so that they are NOT made worse of by the exclusion. So, strictly speaking, all that follows is that exclusion /without sufficient compensation/ is a rights violation. This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you.
I agree that quasi-Lockean principle does not have kind things to say for someone who is blind or crippled. FWIW, libertarian though I am, I still think there is an (enforceable) duty of easy rescue, and I presume they will fall under this additional principle. (Even Locke thought that the destitute required support).
Second Try I think is less plausible. I agree that you have the (temporary) right to the land upon which you are standing (on the basis, as you say, of self-ownership), and ultimately on the same basis a right to the land upon which your wheat is growing (though people can still walk gingerly between the plants, no?). But not this bit: "I build a fence around my wheat field. ... You have a right to be on the land but not a right to damage my fence—mine because my labor produced it". Suppose you build a really good fence, that keeps everyone out. This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. You cannot use your fist (which you own) to violate anyone's rights (and if you try others can do unfriendly things to it), and nor can you use your fence (ditto). You need to provide compensation, but, in that case, it is the compensation that justifies your exclusion, not the labor you put into the fence.
"This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you. "
You have a house which is worth $100,000 to you, $150,000 to me. A bargained sale will end up with a price somewhere between those numbers. Instead, following out your logic, I seize the house by force and give you $100,000. According to what you wrote I haven't violated your rights since I compensated you.
Is that your position?
"This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. "
My standing where you would like to shoot is an act of exclusion too. If I don't compensate you are you entitled to shoot in my direction?
There are lots of cases in which A makes B worse off without violating any rights — bidding against B for the house B wants to buy or courting and marrying the woman B wanted to marry and would have if A didn't exist. My claim is that my fence is in the same category. You are worse off because I have arranged things such that you cannot do something you want to do without violating my rights. It doesn't follow that I owe you compensation.
>I seize [your] house by force and give you $100,000. According to what you wrote I haven't violated your rights since I compensated you. Is that your position?
No, since my argument relates to original acquisition of hitherto un-owned things, not to the house you mention, which I presumably own.
>My standing where you would like to shoot is an act of exclusion too. If I don't compensate you are you entitled to shoot in my direction?
This is not true, at least as I meant my neo-Lockean Proviso. The crucial difference is that my standing where I am is not /intended/ to prevent you standing there (though it has this side-effect—unless, of course, that /is/ what I intend, in which case you may or may not have the right to physically move me on). By contrast, your building your fence /is/ intended to prevent others from entering "your" land, and is in that sense an /act/ of exclusion.
>There are lots of cases in which A makes B worse off without violating any rights
My view is certainly not that it is never permissible to make others worse off, just that, in the state of nature, you cannot make yourself better off by intending to make others worse off. No-one marries with the intention to exclude others, so the fact that others miss out is their bad luck. However—admittedly—plenty people pollute without intending make things worse for others (though the polluters know that this will be the effect), so, according to the Proviso, that /is/ permitted. Another inconvenience of the state of nature, I guess.
"No-one marries with the intention to exclude others"
On the contrary, nearly everyone who marries does.
More relevant, why is intent so important in your view? And does "by intending to make others worse off" mean "the objective is to make others worse off" or "the objective is to make yourself better off but you know that one result is to make others worse off"?
Only the latter applies to my fence and it applies to my marriage as well if I know that there is another suitor who might succeed if I drop out.
I'm drawing on the familiar distinction between benefiting oneself by intentionally targeting someone with a harm (eg, terror bombing), and doing so while merely foreseeing that the same harm will be a side-effect (cf, strategic bombing). So understood, it is easy to see why one may think that the first is wrong, even if one accepts the second, since it involves /targeting/ someone—with all the connotations of that term.
So—au contraire—this is exactly what your fence is like, since (like the terror bomber) there is no benefit of building it if there is no-one else around, and you would strengthen it if it failed to deter people, etc etc. Its objective is to keep people out, and (unlike the strategic bomber) this harm to them is not some coincidental side-effect, that you would be happy not to occur if only it could be managed. And you want to do this to keep them from land that you admit is not yours. This exclusion can be made good only by nullifying the harm through compensation.
Yes—whoops!—marriage /is/ an exclusive relationship, so that complicates things. Same applies, though. What I /meant/ was that, in this case, your attitude to third parties during your pursuit of your beloved is the opposite. Presumably, you would still have pursued her even if he was not interested, and you would not have tried to prevent him from pursuing her, etc etc [OK, I admit it, for some people these things are false, but, I want say, they are behaving badly]. The complication is that you are pursuing an /exclusive/ relationship with her, but this overall pattern occurs in other contexts. When you eat some fruit (say), you engage in a particularly intimate relationship with it that necessarily excludes others, but your intention is strictly to eat the fruit, not exclude others from it (eg, you'd still eat the fruit even if no-one else wanted it, etc etc). So too when you seek an intimate relationship with your beloved. I /think/ this is all consistent.
Interesting response but I'm not convinced.
Suppose some of my courtship tactics are designed to demonstrate my superior suitability as a husband vis a vis my rival. I wouldn't do those particular things if he wasn't also courting her. My objective isn't to make him worse off — that's a side effect of achieving my objective.
Similarly with my fence. My objective isn't to make him worse off, it is to keep him from doing things to the land, such as building a house on it, that would prevent me from planting wheat on it. If I could achieve my objective without making him worse off, perhaps by pointing out a better location for his house, I would do so. Making him worse off is a side effect of my means for achieving my objective.
We may be in agreement about the fence, /given the details you have just added/. I say that you can appropriate some plot of land so long as you compensate those excluded. One way of doing that is by offering to renounce your rights over an equivalent plot of land ("pointing out a better location for his house"). If he refuses to accept this reasonable offer, then that is on him so long as your offer remains, and so his being worse off is only a side effect of your action, and your fence is justified.
The courtship example is more of a problem for me. The key point is that there would be no (net) benefit to you of engaging in the courtship tactics you mention, and you would not do so, if your rival were not interested in her, etc. As my neo-Lockean account stands, this implies (i) that you are intentionally making him worse off, and therefore (ii) that this is wrong without providing compensation. Now, if the first point were mistaken, if your making him worse off really were a mere side effect, then that would be OK by me, since then I would not have to say that your tactics are wrong. But I don't think that is correct. Your tactics display a competitive motivation, of trying to /defeat/ the other, and that clearly means that you are targeting your rival, in the sense I introduced in my previous comment. So it seems I have to say that you may not employ such tactics, and more generally that competitive tactics in the state of nature are impermissible, and that /does/ seem implausible.
>I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. <
This is a distinction without a difference. I can’t use things reliably if it violates social norms for me to exclude others from using them in incompatible ways.
>without further argument, you still don't own the material.<
I gave further argument elsewhere. Use is a claim. It can be used as evidence of ownership. It is a weak claim, but not as weak as non-use.
A consequentialist argument could also be made.
And there are various arguments against the alternatives. E.g., against Georgist, do I owe compensation to everyone or only to those who are actually excluded? I cannot pay compensation to everyone, and who is actually excluded depends on a counterfactual, so can’t be determined. We could fall back to heuristics or approximations, and say these are less unjust than the status quo. But this depends on establishing that Georgian is more just than the status quo, and that a rough approximation would be sufficient to improve things. This has not been shown.
I’m still waiting for the analogous argument from the Georgists.
That switched from land to spears. In most cases, one sort of land use will exclude most others. Did you answer the question about why my excluding others is a problem, but the Georgists' exclusion of me is not?
I take it this relates to your comment above "You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case?" Well, first, I want to say that the same principle re original appropriation applies to all actors, individuals and governments alike. And, second, my quote from 10240 explains how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned. I don't think the switch from land to sticks is a biggie, since one sort of stick use (eg, as a spear) will also exclude most others (eg, as firewood).
Is this the quote?
“if you turn $10 worth of raw materials into a tool worth $1000, you can keep the extra $990 of value. But it's consistent with this to argue that [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], in order to possess (and, optionally, transform) them, rather than let you take them for free on account of being the firstcomer. And if you've paid $10 for the raw materials, you do fully own whatever you turn them into. Now, some natural resources are so abundant that their market value is 0"
If so, where is the discussion of how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned? One cannot rent or buy something that is unowned. If it is to be rented or bought, this involves a transaction between the owner and the renter or buyer. How did the owner acquire it, if it truly was unowned previously?
"One cannot rent or buy something that is unowned"—yes, that is a fair point, for exactly the reason you say, that the resources are initially unowned. And so that bit of the passage is not as well expressed as it should be. It should be: "you first give $10 for the raw materials to others as compensation to them for taking the materials, in order to process ...". You give others the money, not because you are buying the materials from them (since they do not own them), but as compensation for your excluding others from the materials (since, initially, you don't own them either). That should make it clearer.
This is just a use of the concept of ownership without using the word. Swapping the definition for the word doesn’t change anything.
We shouldn't argue about names; we are arguing about exclusion, who can do it justly, and under what circumstances compensation is owed (and to whom) for use without permission. If one must pay compensation to some person for the use of a resource, there should be a reason, not just a command.
Georgist norms, if they are just, should be the conclusion of an argument about justice, not the premises. Is the idea that existing norms are unjust, so everyone must submit to the innovation to serve justice? That is a hard sell. Or does the innovation have some beneficial qualities, and so while we are not obligated to do so, we might be persuaded to switch? Or something else?
That only makes sense if everything was always owned. If I can’t own it, why can “everybody”? When/how did they gain ownership so that their claim is better?
The line of argument I am exploring holds that uncreated property starts out as a commons. Nobody owns it — has the right to exclude others — but everyone has an equal right to use it. When someone appropriates some of it he is violating that right by forcibly keeping other from using the land.
Yes, I understand. Perhaps you found some clever argument that defeats the idea even after stipulating one-sided assumptions. I am challenging the assumptions. I want to explore a broader question. If this seems like an unwelcome digression, I apologize.
Why is it interesting to simply assume a framework, as opposed to comparing rivals? The objection is that ordinary property excludes those who have rights under the commons assumption. Why can’t the opposition simply assume ordinary property rights, and object to Georgist taxation? For the argument to reach common ground, we have to find common premises. One side can’t just beg the question and declare checkmate.
Perhaps the answer is that’s Georgists find their assumptions very intuitive, and do not,feel a need to argue for them. They seem confused by the idea that this might be necessary to persuade someone with different intuitions.
If I make a spear, and you admit I made it, and make no claim to have owned the materials I used, how can you claim it as firewood or spear? If we take this dispute to arbitration, my ownership claim based on use is pretty weak. But a weak claim is better than no claim. Why should the arbitrator rule in favor of your taking the spear for firewood?