Brush Fires of Freedom

Under this philosophy, what is to stop someone from building a house in your backyard?  Or moving into a vacation home you no longer use?  Nothing?  What set of criteria do you apply to determine if the land is being "used", and who gets to decide whether these criteria are met?  One could assert that one is "using" land by leaving it as a buffer between one's house and the highway, and another could say that it is "unused" and want to "use" it to build on.

Your argument is based on a bunch of inrequired ad hoc a priori beliefs. You consider geography as something that is always privatized, and that private roads should be forced to be made collective property. Not always. The atmosphere is considered unprivatizable, and humans have the ability to use airplanes. So if private road companies charge a fee, you still can escape, so that is not a problem.

What do you consider a "road" is? Do you consider your neighbor a road? Do you consider a private park a road, and they so they must be collectivized? Do you consider your neighbor's private sidewalk or river a road and that needs to be privatized? This can get very arbitrary, and everything might be considered "essential rights" and must be privatized. You are on a slippery slope.

What property do you consider "unused". Do you mean "unpossessed"? How do you determine it? If you see an empty baseball field or empty swimming pool or empty private park, do you have the right to use THEIR property? Humans lack perfect information to judge which property is "unused," so that can get pretty arbitrary.

If the swimming pool is actually a chemical storage tank storing chemical waste, you would die. If the private road is actually a runway for airplanes, you are killing the people in the airplanes. Humans lack perfect knowledge, and "judging" what can be privatized without consent of the owner, it is your risk.

If you actually want to collectivize "unused" property, then the owners might, for example, put many fences around their property to prevent "homesteading." The owners might otherwise put electronic devices on the land physically preventing foreigners standing on it by using technology to detect the DNA of the human. They might put nuclear waste on the land to prevent homesteading of it. Your dictatorial judgement of what should be privatized would lead to malinvestment.

And it is perfectly legitimate for the owners to sell their "abondoned" property because it would prevent shortages and conflicts. If you force the owners to charge zero cost for "homesteading", many people would rush to the land and would stir up many fights. This is not "surplus value."

JonBostwick, you overgeneralize. You consider all non-tangible contracts to be illegitamate. If you pay someone to write a book or to make a computer program, are you not allowed to do that perfectly voluntary agreement? That is a comparative advantage. Time is precious.

You dictatorially arbitrary "define" what goods or services should be collectivized or not. There is no clear line between knowledge and tangible goods.

You are believing that the "rent" and the "use-value" of land to be costs arbitrarily determined by the owner. You are false. The "exchange value" of land is actually the cost of rent divided by the interest rate. So rent is perfectly justifiable, otherwise you have to buy the whole land without paying rent. (the "exchange value" is much greater than the "rent")

"The homesteading theory of property."

You misinterpret the homesteading theory of property. It is NOT applied to owners selling the land and "going to abondon it". It is applied to ALREADY abondoned property. There is a great difference between them. It does not say that you have no right to rent. It only considers already abondoned property or property colluded by capitalists and the state, which is legal to apply homesteading theory. However, voluntary rent and other non-feudal land claims cannot be homesteaded.

That's why I hate left-libertarians.

@JonBostwick: You cannot argue with libertarians about intellectual property when you call it "property." They will instinctively leap to its defense. Call it for what it really is: government-granted monopoly on concepts.

@Carrie and Sequitur: The problem with so-called "intellectual property" is that it often infringes on other people's individual private property. According to the most extreme of copyright proponents (I call them copyfascists), the mere presence of their original content in your private property is forfeiture of your right to tinker and do what you want with that private property.

Under copyright, you do not own anything. A state-sanctioned entity does.