From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Thu Dec 24 1998 - 09:53:11 MST
There are many cases where "property" can be usefully defined, beyond the
simple notion of an object or a piece of land being owned.
One example is the radio spectrum. This would be a great candidate.
People could buy and sell frequencies and use them for their desired
purposes. Spectrum will go to the highest bidder, making for efficient
utilization.
It's complicated, because there are a number of technical factors which
have to be considered: frequency and bandwidth, power levels, location,
modulation and antenna design, etc. Fold all these into an n dimensional
parameter space and you can carve up boundaries which identify useful
chunks. You have the initial allocation problem, of course, but once
you get past that, people can buy and sell, and the market determines
the usage.
Today, we mostly handle this by government regulation. This means that
frequencies tend to go to those with political pull rather than to the
most beneficial uses. A market would be a superior approach.
How would this be handled by those who believe in an absolutist or
axiomatic approach to property rights? How can you define what sort
of property is appropriate in the context of electromagnetic radiation?
I would like to hear what your axioms say about it.
More prosaically, we often divide land-based property by usage.
It is common to unbundle mineral rights from surface-dwelling rights.
People may also sell off access rights, so that the owner of some other
lot has in perpetuity the right to pass over someone else's land in
prescribed ways. Once you move beyond the simple concept of land as
property, to land-usage as property, you are well into the abstract
realm.
I mentioned pollution rights earlier; some areas are experimenting
with these. These give polluters the right to generate a certain amount
of pollution. They can be bought and sold, and the result is that those
businesses for which reducing pollution is most expensive will be the
ones which tend to buy the pollution rights, while those which can reduce
more cheaply will tend to sell. This automatically limits pollution
in the most economical manner possible, a result nearly impossible to
achieve with regulation based approaches.
Farmers often have a market in water rights, which allow drawing a certain
amount from a water source (river or aquifer). The amount may vary from
season to season. The market makes sure that water goes to those crops
which provide the greatest overall economic benefit.
Probably the world of finance has produced more forms of abstract property
than any other area. Multiple forms of stocks, bonds, options, futures,
derivatives, etc., all are claims of various sorts on some underlying
property. Now that we have computers, the possibilities are greatly
expanding. The result is an increase in the efficiency of the market,
which benefits everyone.
We will face new challenges in establishing property rights as we
move into space. Already, geosynchronous orbit is a valuable resource.
You can only put so many satellites up there without them interfering with
each other. A market in satellite positions would be a good way to solve
the problem. As with the radio spectrum, there are a number of technical
parameters which have to be included in the property bundles: details
of the orbital parameters, and possibly also radio frequency limits.
Similar issues will arise with asteroid habitats and free floating space
stations. It won't be enough just to have property in the form of land.
Access to energy from the sun, orbits which don't come too close, radio
allocations, all will need to be parcelled out in order to have a smoothly
functioning system. Again, a market is ideal for this purpose, but the
property rights involved go far beyond Locke's mixing of labor with land.
Hal
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