Loud Noise a Form of Aggression?

I'm a novice here so please humor me.

So I'm in the back of a lecture hall, I had given up on the day's lesson after my Economics Professor said that even the staunchest of free market advocates would agree the need of government to impose tax in order to control an excess of pollution caused by a factory. Before I lost all interest though he presented a scenario that I've been obsessing over ever since. Perhaps one of you fellows could help me out?

From what I understand, pollution can be consider a form of aggression. Let us suppose that I operate factory that expels its polluted waste into a river. This river is not completely owned by myself and I have several neighbors who use it. Let us suppose for the sake of simplicity that these neighbors can be simplified as a single fishermen whose been using the river as long as I; if not more. My polluted waste has killed fish in the river, and so by having polluted the river I am aggressor against his property (the fish). I must so either pay a bribe (for a lack of better term) to get the fisherman's consent to continue using the river as I am or cease my aggression against his property. 

Now let us take the simple principles in play and change the scenario.

There is a lot of land. On one side is a Hospital and on one is an Candy Store. There exists a parcel of virgin, undeveloped, land between the both of them 'owned' by the Hospital. The Hospital expands and builds a new ward in this undeveloped land, only to discover that the Candy Store makes an unseemly amount of noise (upon further inquiry it is discovered that the noise is coming from the candy making machine so crucial to the Candy Store's existence) that doens't allow it to fully carry out its duties (ex. surgeries); and so demands that the Candy Store stop making noise. Can we consider noise to be a form of aggression against the hospital's property in the same fashion that a factory polluting a river with waste? And if so, is it legitimate for the hospital to demand that the candy store become quieter?

Or, assuming that we can in fact classify noise pollution to be a form of aggression against someone, would we side with the Candy Store on the premise that when the Candy Store owners developed the virgin land and turned it into their property they also made the adjacent virgin land part of their property?  In other words the vacant lot located between the Hospital and the Candy Store was not owned by the Hospital that held an arbitrary deed to it and had never developed it otherwise, but by the Candy Store which utilized it? I'm basing this argument off something I read somewhere else around here about how an airstrip owning also having property claims to the needed airspace in order to operate and so being able to prosecute someone who claimed an adjacent land property and built to such a height that the airstrip could no longer operate properly. 

*cough* Like I said, I'm a novice compared to most of you here, so if anyone with an answer could explain how they reached that conclusion, that would be greatly appreciated.

 

It all hinges on whether at the time when adjecent land became owned by the Hospital (or whoever they bought it from) was the Candy Store already making this noise, or did they start to make it later?

In any case Rothbard covered pollution here: http://mises.org/story/2120. He even mentions noise specifically.


Also in the fish case, the fisherman can only demand compensation from you if you have killed so many fish that he is finding it harder to catch fish than he used to. But if the dead fish killed by pollution make no dent on the size of his catch then he has no ground on which to complain. He will not be compensated for the fish he would not have caught anyway.

 

Michelangelo:

Or, assuming that we can in fact classify noise pollution to be a form of aggression against someone, would we side with the Candy Store on the premise that when the Candy Store owners developed the virgin land and turned it into their property they also made the adjacent virgin land part of their property?

I suppose you could say emitting noise onto unowned land makes that land your property for the sole purpose of emiting noise. That is, you could not sell the land, but you could sell the right to emit noise onto it.

If the land is truly, and completely unused, then the hospital's deed is indeed arbitrary.  If the candy factory owner is the first person to use the land (using it as a sort of "sonic harmful waste disposal area"), then the candy factory owner owns it.

I think you homestead land by transforming it into something better. Not by spilling filth onto it. There is no labour mixed with the land by the virtue of you having thrown garbage onto it.

Michelangelo:

my Economics Professor said that even the staunchest of free market advocates would agree the need of government to impose tax in order to control an excess of pollution caused by a factory

Some people will pollute, therefore an institution with monopoly on violence.

Its a non sequitur. It always is.

Marko:

I think you homestead land by transforming it into something better. Not by spilling filth onto it.

Let's say you homestead a rectangular plot of land, using all of it for working and living.  You also place a trash can on virgin territory in the shape of a small rectangle directly abutting your original plot.  The use of that little extension of land is immensely useful to functioning of the rest of your plot, yet all you're doing with that land is "spilling filth onto it".  Are you saying it wouldn't be yours?

 The land has been improved (transformed into something better) insofar as it is now useful to a human being, whereas before it was not.

It is one thing to place a trash can onto a piece of land and another to just bombard it with garbage/noise. If you organise the land into a real waste depo that is fine, it makes you the owner. But if you just use it as a dump in a redneck fashion then you can not claim exclusivity. If all you do is emitt noise over the land a third party is free to come in and use that same land to grow beets on or to walk the dog on and there is nothing you can do about it.

How much development per say would one require to claim a virgin land as their own? For example, would it be sufficient for the Candy Store to build a fence over the land that claim that is it using it for the purpose of making efficient use of the rest of its land (in this case to make the loud noise that comes with the operating of the machines it uses).

 A simple fence would be good enough for ranchers who used the land as grazing grounds, but not for a candy store - not in any connection with the sound*. The development has to be in some way connected (/beneficial) to the actual (, economic) activity taking place on it, not just some arbitrary "improvement".

Otherwise I can just build doric columns around the prarie and then claim the prarie for myself for having "improved" it with all the greek architecture. Or alternatively just throw crap all over the prarie and call it abstract art and claim it for myself on those grounds.

At least that would be my ruling if I were a judge in a court, but it rings true to me.

 

*The fence would have to be constructed to be pleasing to the eye of the customers, or erected to prevent children from wandering away while the parents are buying stuff, or to prevent burglaries and then rights to land could stem from having erected it. But a simple fence has nothing to do with the sound, building a fence in a way that serves no purpose other than the bogus sound purpose is as arbitrary as just throwing stuff on the ground.