American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

Property rights as conceived by Adam smith, John Locke, and even the most ruthless anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard does not acknowledge the right of ownership of land from merely seeing it and declaring everyone else is blocked from accessing the next place. In all such systems, ownership is first derived from developing or homesteading the land.

People that own undeveloped land purely for the reason of blocking someone else do not have any place in the capitalist system. It is nice someone is working on undoing that, through the mechanisms they have available.

If you did not fight for it you don’t have ownership rights. The state owns the land. The rest of us are mere users of it.

For the many downvoters do this thought experiment: the neighbor country attacks and takes over your country. What is your ownership title worth? Exactly 0. Hence it was not yours to begin with.

Roger Williams and his buddies would (and did) vehemently disagree with this doctrine.

I think you need to remember that Lock and Smith were writing in a century when "they're not using it (by our definition), so we can just go take it" was the legal underpinning by which the english colonies mostly justified forcing the natives off their land and that sort of interpretive creativity had been used for hundreds of years by the various parties in England seeking to get one over on each other.

Now, there's a lot to be said for "default" public access to/through un-posted, unimproved land and there's an even stronger argument in favor of landowners (public included) being required to have some legal access to land they own but the american system where the land owner has fairly unlimited right to kick other people off his property (of course the .gov excepts themselves) arises out of the disputes that the historical english doctrine (there's a word for it but escapes me) causes.

I think people buying up land strategically to block access to other land is obviously bad and the whole corner crossing thing should have been a joke, but this is a very thorny and complex problem.

I believe what you're referencing in the second paragraph more closely describes adverse possession, than the initial creation of the property right from mixing land with labor.

We call it adverse possession now but they had some different old timey term for it (the name escapes me) and the laws that they inherited from the english were far, far, more favorable to the possessor than what we have now because it was all built around the reality that the peasants who would be the ones working the land might have some rights but never really owned shit at the end of the day and that if some peasant who had the right to use some spot wasn't using it then the next guy was free to use it productively because at the end of the day the lord/church/crown/village whatever would extract their cut regardless, more productivity, more cut for whoever. Papering over "but you said I could graze my animals there" vs "yeah but you weren't using it" type disputes makes sense in that context.

What happened in parts of New England was people were expanding into native territory, the natives would show up appeal to these people's governments "hey, one of your assholes built a farm where I hunt, tell that guy to GTFO" and sometimes they'd win but usually the .gov would say basically "you weren't using it in any way we recognize, piss off", basically using the historical doctrine they got from England (which you can't really fault them for in the absence of other doctrine, though clearly their strategic vision was lacking), until eventually, farm by farm and pasture by pasture so much had been taken that the natives were so squeezed a lot of them cast their lot in with King Phillip. And after that the various lawmaking bodies started saying things like "hey maybe that weird Roger guy was onto something with his whole 'they're using it their own way, we oughta pay em for it' schtick" and writing protections for dis-used property into law and restricting what we now call adverse possession so as to reduce/prevent such disputes from reaching a boiling point going forward.

And TBH I think legally things would have gone that way anyway. The sort of adverse possession laws that make sense in a country of mostly landless peasants who have rights and permissions but don't actually have final say because they don't own the land are going to be very different than the sort of adverse possession laws in an agrarian society where most people own the land they work (i.e. the US 1700-1870ish).

For the N years between now and the neighbor country conquering, the title is worth the value I can get from the legal rights it gives me within the legal system of my country. That's more than zero, even if it doesn't last forever.

You can bet on a price but it’s not yours. Unless the state defends it and agrees that the piece of paper you call title is binding.

To the conqueror your paper means nothing.

People make Adam Smith to be some sort of blowhard absolutist, but his actual work is very observational and astute.

> “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.”

Adam Smith inferred that strict property rights were overall good for law and order and developing society, but that in the long run they would lead to inequality (which in his views was an acceptable tradeoff if the overall lot of the poor was improved).

More to your point, Adam Smith was skeptical of commons. The experience in England at the time was that commonly owned land was abused and neglected.

> “It is in the interest of every proprietor to cultivate that, which belongs to himself, and to neglect that, which belongs to all.”

There's really nothing about "capitalism" as a system that is mutually exclusive with also preserving nature. It just needs to be tied into an ownership structure (private or public) that is incentivized to preserve it.

Doesn't that imply that ownership doesn't and can't exist?

What do you own that cannot be taken by force in some way or another?

Some non-physical stuff like happiness or sadness, maybe, except that if you were killed you wouldn't have those either.

It’s not a universal or god-given right. It’s a privilege granted to us by the state we reside in. People sacrificed their lives so that we could enjoy this benefit.

Therefore, when I encounter individuals in my generation who haven’t participated in any wars and assert that they own their land, not the state, I can’t help but believe they require a reality check.