The Story of Bill

Bill is a billionaire.
Bill buys a small tropical island off the coast of a city.
Bill was planning to build his retirement home on the island, but hasn’t gotten around to it.
It’s been over a year, and Bill hasn’t even set foot on the island.

Some travelers canoe to the island and discover it’s uninhabited.
At first they were just going to stay for a little while, but the island has some naturally growing fruit trees on it and lots and lots of fish around it, so they built some settlements, and decide to stay for a while.
It’s also close by the city, which they occasionally travel to, to sell fish and stock up on supplies.

A year has passed, and Bill decides to finally journey to, and check up on his island, and discovers the settlers.
Bill is furious when he finds out there are people living on the island.
He tells them to leave, but they refuse.
They say they’ve managed to build quite a nice life for themselves there.
Bill storms off in a huff and immediately notifies the authorities.

A few days pass, and some coastguards confront the settlers and ask them to leave.
The settlers still refuse, and the coastguards threaten them, telling them if they don’t leave, an armed squadron will come in a few weeks and exercise whatever force they deem necessary to remove them.

What right does Bill or the state have to kick them off the island?
The settlers physically set foot on the island long before Bill, and have been living on it for a year.
Isn’t what Bill and the state are doing theft?

Bill is taking something someone physically has, when he himself never physically even had it in any way, shape or form in the first place.
He is paying the state to reserve it for him, but what right does the state have to reserve it for him, they never physically even had it in any, way shape or form either.
And arguably the state had no right to force Bill to purchase the island and pay taxes on it before he built his retirement home there to begin with, but let’s put that aside for now, let’s say the state was privatized, and we’re living in a make believe anarcho-capitalist world.
Still, what right does Bill have to this island, how is it his, and how can it be taken from him?

What is the relevance of the above?

The point is capitalism isn’t so much about life, liberty and property, as it’s about, money.

and…

So if I move into your apartment (“the door was unlocked”) while you’re on vacation, or out of town for a few months, or you’ve fallen ill in your hospital, then I can just tell the police “well he wasn’t using it!!!”

Yeah, right…

Wrong, you don’t see the differentiation between an untouched piece of land and an apartment filled with personal possessions?

There are no “untouched pieces of land”.

In the example, it was undeveloped meaning untouched.

The story is fiction and unrealistic.

In reality, there are no untouched pieces of land.

Your continued participation in this thread is irrelevant.

From whom? How did that person come to possess it? It seems like there’s a contradiction built into the hypothetical.

Let’s say that Bill and Jill stood on shore and looked out to sea to an island that neither had ever visited, and Jill said, “My island, I call it!” and Bill said, “I would like to buy your island.” And then he gave Jill the change and lint in his pocket and they called it a deal.

In that case, I would say your objection works.

Suppose instead that Jill had scouted and mapped the island, verified by aerial survey that it’s uninhabited, claimed the land herself, the state recognized that she was claiming unclaimed land, and her intent was to use that registered claim to seek investors to develop the island. However, due to a run of bad luck she needs cash, so she sells the land for roughly the cost of the scouting, mapping, and surveying, and the state recognizes the sale.

In that case, the objection seems less valid. It seems reasonable and expedient to allow people to claim unclaimed land, to have a central ledger of land ownership to avoid disputes, to allow land to be sold and property rights enforced without a requirement for immediate use. And indeed, common law countries do recognize limits to mere ownership-on-paper, in the form of easements and adverse possession, and those exceptions are very valuable in settling ownership of abandoned land and encouraging its development.

The implication behind land ownership is that there is a military to take and hold said land. Without the defense of a military, your land will be captured by anybody with guns and the will to use them. Hence it is implicit that land ownership implies that same force as the ultimate authority behind its claims. So in other words, individuals and people are not merely claiming land, but claiming land on behalf of a larger society, threat of force, and military order.

So that is the ultimate arbiter of said land. If you cannot defend your land then a higher power will take it at their leisure.

Right.
The less you physically occupy your property, the less right you have to it.
There should be a limit to how long you can be absent from your property.
We can democratically and federally or provincially decide how long you can be absent from your property before it’s considered abandoned.
1 month, 1 year, 1 decade?
I say 1 year.

Or alternatively, there can be limits to how much property you can purchase and pay tax on.
Really a person can’t frequently, physically occupy or use, say more than 10 homes, so he shouldn’t be able to own 100 homes, and if he owns 100, 90 of them should be able to be claimed by whoever is frequently, physically occupying them.
The same principle can be applied to factories, offices, any sort of property.

Of course the number 10 seems arbitrary, why 10?
Why not 9, why not 11 or 11000?
But many if not all laws are arbitrary in this way.
Why did x criminal receive 10 years imprisonment, why not 9 or 11?
Why is the age of consent 16 years, why not 17 or 15?
Why is a blood alcohol level above 0.08 considered drunk driving?
But still we should draw the line somewhere, and then we can democratically discuss where the line ought to be drawn in conjunction with the relevant experts: sociologists and so forth.

Property should have something to do with, you know, actually occupying and possessing things.
If we’re to have a state at all, you shouldn’t have to buy land from the state, unless the state itself is occupying it.
You shouldn’t be able to reserve land.
You should just be able to build a home on some land, and immediately start paying tax.

If you haven’t built, or cultivated anything yet, it’s not your land.
So the settlers in this scenario should just start paying a very small amount of tax for their very small settlements, or they may be so small they shouldn’t have to, but no one should be able to make them gather their belongings and move.
Or we could privatize the state, and they wouldn’t have to pay any tax if they didn’t want to, but they also wouldn’t receive any protection.
Also we could do away with tax altogether, and just have the state print its own money within democratically fixed limits in order to fund its projects: police, military and so forth.

Actually there are some parts of North America that’re untouched by people, at least according to some scientists, but they don’t know that for sure.
Nothing has absolutely been touched or untouched, I mean no one has ever touched every square inch of their home or land, no one has ever touched every square inch of an island.
But in the case of Bob, the settlers touched the island before him, so from my perspective, they have more claim to it, particularly the part they’ve built simple settlements on.

A few challenges (or clarifying questions, if I’m misunderstanding you):

Suppose I want to build a sky scraper. To do so, I need to do surveys, inspections, build blue prints taking specific features of the land into account, etc. That all takes time. If I can’t reserve the land, and someone pitches a tent on the land before I complete prep and break ground on my sky scraper, do I just lose out? Isn’t planning disincentivized in that case?

Conversely, could Bill have pitched a tent on the island and then had claim to kick out the settlers?

Can I build a sky scraper in the middle of the grand canyon? On your lawn? In your rose garden? Why not?

Conversely, could Bill have thrown a handful of grass seed on the island and then had claim to kick the settlers out?

@Carleas

From the state.
Doesn’t the state own all land within its borders not privately owned?
I may’ve been confused about that.

:laughing: I don’t think that’s legitimate :smiley:, for all they know, the island is inhabited, or someone else ‘called’ it.
A piece of land ought to become your property only after you’ve done something with it, like build a home on it, or cultivate it, and only the part you’ve mixed your labor with, not the part around it, unless you’ve built a fence around it.

I don’t think you should be able to claim things in this way, or if you can, you should have to build something on just about every square inch of your claim immediately, otherwise all or the part of it you haven’t built anything on goes back to being unclaimed.
I’m not exactly sure what constitutes immediately, should we give people a few days, weeks or months?
The more time we give them, the more unjust it seems, but of course building sophisticated structures requires a lot of time, energy and preparation prior to commencing, and it’d help to secure the land first, otherwise that time, energy and preparation might be squandered.

I’ll give it some more thought.

Maybe there ought to be laws protecting people who live off the grid from political/economic expansion. But if they don’t pay tax, it’s kind of unfair to government and society to protect them.

@Carleas

I think I’m conceding this point, developers need to reserve land before commencing development.

You can’t claim a whole island with a single tent, only the land underneath and around it within a small radius, perhaps with a thousand tents.

I think we need national parks and nature reserves.

My lawn and rose garden are something I’ve developed, so they’re mine.

I don’t think that’s sufficient development to claim any part of the island, even the part touched by the grass seed.

Have your little hissy fit! Ha.

Nevertheless, your so called redistribution of wealth is simply theft.

theft
noun

  1. criminal law
    the dishonest taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession

Your post smacks of New World Order indoctrination and your little tale is silky smooth and deliberately innocuous. Have you ever wondered why in the surveys one has to fill out when the question is asked, not where you live, but how many rooms you have and how many people occupy the premises. So what will happen if your house is bigger than your need? The one with greater need will get it, but because you own it, you will still have to pay the taxes and expenses on it and don’t think because you keep a manicured lawn that this will protect your ass.

“The complex circumstance of our day make it necessary for public authority to intervene more often in social, economic and cultural matters…”

Pope calls for a New World Order.

You could apply the same definition to any dishonest trade - all trade is a redistribution of wealth due to human decision, just as much as “the bad kind” where it’s the government doing it instead of the obedient employees of capitalists acting on their behalf.

You can steal something of someone’s and replace it with something else of equal market value and it would still be theft, but it would also be a dishonest, or non-consensual trade.

Likewise selling something at a profit is the dishonest trade of something for more than it is worth. The buying party is either naively ignorant that this is the case, or knowledgeable that this is the case and therefore only conducts any exchange with reluctance and therefore a degree of non-consent, because if there was no other option, they would have to go without something they may need. This is therefore a dishonest and skewed expression of value on both sides, that better fits the definition of coercion.

A dishonest taking of property (in this case cash) belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession? If you’d even class “time and energy” as someone’s property, I guess capitalists taking that from an employee with the intention of depriving them of it permanently in exchange for less wages than the employee is earning the employer in order to profit from the transaction, then that’s also dishonest.

I guess profit is theft. Or is that some “new world order” bullshit causing me to perfectly rationally explore criminal law beyond its intentions?