Conversations with Zane Mooneyhan About Austro-libertarianism and Much More
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2021 3:08 PM
Subject: A second Question
One more thing, sorry I bring all my questions to you, you always answer fastest and with the most sources haha. So I was thinking about federally enclosed land and whatnot, and how there is millions of square miles of “federally owned” land, or otherwise controlled by the US govt, where they are preventing people from going in and homesteading their own land. Is there a case to be made that the govt control of this land is significantly inflating land/property prices? And if so would you say the libertarian solution would be to 1. Sell off the land or 2. “free up” the land, allowing people to go in and homestead the property. The second option seems like the correct libertarian solution to me, and I think this whole thing gets overlooked when talking about poverty and capital accumulation under capitalism. I don’t see why there is so much free land, that has not been homesteaded, but merely “captured” and has been taken control of. In this vein I wanted to talk about your principle of ownership being “9/10ths of the law”. If you remember I asked you the question “what if we know someone’s claim to property is illegitimate, but we don’t know who the specific legitimate claim belongs to” and your answer was roughly that ownership being 9/10ths of the law, unless we knew who rightfully owned the land that the current owner is “legitimate”. I had a question regarding this line of reasoning, and applying it to the “state”. It would seem that arguments against the legitimacy of the state become more difficult assuming this line of reason to be true. As one could say the state “possesses” the land we operate on now, and therefore can legitimately set the rules. Now, even if we know the state accumulated this land, and its possession illegitimately, namely through conquest, but we don’t necessarily know who the “legitimate” owners are. So it would seem like the state is operating as a quasi legitimate entity given this line of reason. I would love to hear your thoughts. As always