From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 16:21:41 MDT
At 12:40 PM 6/4/2001 -0700, Anne Marie Tobias wrote:
>As far as ownership... there is a thing called public domain, a
>critical concept that says yuo may own something, but if your
>singular benefit, harms the greater public, then you have to be
>a little less selfish, and we'll work out REASONABLE terms
>to make sure your benefit is weighed fairly against the social
>harm it may impose. Just like the ranch boss, who dammed the
>stream to wipe out those down the valley, so he could destroy
>them and take their property... there are certain acts that may
>be a function of ownership, that still qualify perfectly as unlawful
>and immoral acts.
Electricity is manufactured, not claimed like water. "Claiming" any
manufactured resource is obviously theft of the capital expended. But even
for natural resources, you state a hypothetical case that doesn't make
sense with respect to how these things are actually managed.
Your ranch boss example is odd and doesn't support the point you are trying
to make. Virtually all natural resources, renewable or not, have titular
rights that have been assigned to someone, or to the State by default. In
your ranch boss example, you have two possible scenarios (at least in the
U.S.). First, the ranch boss owns the rights to the surface water in the
stream he is damming, and therefore the people downstream were surviving
off his generosity in letting them use the water; he is under no obligation
to give it to them any more than you or I would be obligated to let
strangers live in our house. The second possibility is that the ranch boss
does *not* have rights to the water, in which case it is a significant
criminal offense *if* someone else downstream can demonstrate a rightful
claim to it and cares enough to take it to court. If the only owner of the
rights to the water is the State, they may or may not care what happens to
the water as no one actually using it has a rightful claim to it. Many
times (most likely depending on your State), the State will assign
unclaimed resources to individuals who ask nicely and fill out the proper
paperwork.
Just about every natural resource you can think of has rights that are
bought and sold, sometimes with the land that it applies to, sometimes
separately. This includes water rights (ground and surface), mineral
rights (alluvial and fixed), grazing rights, timber rights, hunting rights,
etc., all of which is supported by the courts using ancient common
law. Most property owners today have few if any rights associated with
their land title -- if you find gold nuggets in your backyard, they most
likely do not belong to you. However, various resource rights can be
bought and sold (there are sites on the Internet for doing just that in
fact), and many of them are quite cheap to obtain. Many rights in the U.S.
are held by absentee landlords, so what appears to be a "public" resource
may in fact be a privately owned resource that is simply not being used or
restricted by the owner at the current time.
In any case, I don't see how you can justify making generosity mandatory
just because someone is generous once. Only a fool or a con man would make
a business plan that relies solely on the generosity of others. It takes a
whole series of stupid decisions to get to that point, but I don't see how
you can force the resource owner to pay for the consequences, or even
worse, force that generosity in perpetuity.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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