Your land is your land.
Ownership of real property is an entirely legitimate outcome of an individual person’s self-ownership. A full defense of property rights will have to wait for another time. For now, in brief… In order for the bite of food you are about to eat to be useful to you, it must be your bite of food. In order for the tools you craft to be useful, they cannot belong to everyone; they must belong to you. You need a place to shelter and a section of ground to call your own. If your land, house, bed, or stove belongs to “everyone” or “no one” or someone else besides you, then they are useless to you. These things must be yours, and so long as you did not take them by force from a previous owner, they are yours. Full stop. They are an extension of you, and part of your rightful domain of self-ownership. No one else has any legitimate moral authority to say otherwise. There are several ways by which you can acquire property. You can homestead unoccupied places; produce new things from existing resources; receive property in voluntary transactions with others; or receive property as a gift or bequest. All of these are entirely legitimate. The Lockean Proviso—that one must not hoard all of something, such that there is nothing left for anyone else—is valid, but almost never actually comes into play.All land is not your land.
Property rights are not infinite, however. From a human perspective, Saturn’s moon Titan is unowned. However, I cannot simply claim that all of Titan is mine. If I did, no one would take the claim seriously. There are no grounds by which I can legitimately lay claim to the whole of Titan. The reason is simple: in order to claim an unowned place, you have to be able to do something with that place. That is what we mean by homesteading. You get to claim only that which you can use or transform. This is deep, organic knowledge—the kind that everyone knows intuitively and can only be undone by indoctrination or sophistry. This truth operates throughout the natural world. Wolves occupy an amount of territory that they can use, and packs are pretty good about respecting each other’s territorial ranges. Bears pick a site and dig a den for their wintertime naps. They do not claim every possible site; they claim that which they have transformed into a den, and other bears generally respect the claim. In the same way, a pioneer moving into the wilderness builds a house and fences off a section of land for a flock of sheep or a farm. Thieves might not respect his claim (violating property rights is what thieves do), but everyone else generally does, because he has claimed only what he can homestead. His homestead is an extension of his self-ownership, and it is necessary for his continuance and thriving. But if that same pioneer were to try to claim everything from the Mississippi to the Rockies, we would all laugh in his face. And behind his back. And in the history books for centuries to come. So why don’t we do the same when governments make the same exact claim?Your land is not their land.
Property is necessary for all living things—from a butterfly\s patch of sunlight in a forest to a bear\s den to the house in which you sleep and cook your meals. Animals have quite sensibly developed non-lethal methods for establishing property rights, just as we have quite sensibly developed legal titles and peaceful transfers of ownership. All of this is conducive to continuance and to a general condition of stability and harmony. And all of it can be justified by the needs of self-owning beings, and by the fact that no one has any natural rightful claim to say otherwise. The absence of any such claim is, indeed, the salient fact here. You can search the universe from end to end, and you will never find any natural moral justification for one being to exert authority over another. If such authority is not granted through valid consent, it must be imposed by force. (And consent is only valid when it is voluntary, explicit, transparent, informed, and revocable, which means that voting does not constitute real consent.) Government officials claim to be the ultimate owner of your land. You know you didn consent to that. They know you didn consent. That is why they will arrest you and confiscate your home if you do not pay your property taxes. All they have is force. You can justify individual ownership based on the fact that you need property to live, and that you acquired your property in voluntary exchanges—without theft or violence. The state has no such justification. All they have is the sword, and the absurd claim that everything from river to river or sea to sea somehow belongs to them. In a very real sense, nothing has changed since Alonso Álvarez de Pineda looked at a quarter million miles of wild land and said Yep, all of this is Spain\s now.PS: A reminder for children of the 1980s—the Alamo has no basement. Questions? Input? Concerns? Feel free to email me at chriscook@theadvocates.org