Take ownership of your part of the high seas today - with your private rules

[jonsk]

If you want to homestead a part of the oceans and protect it for your children and grandchildren - visit
http://www.itsmysea.com and put a flag somewhere on the high seas (preferably international waters). Its partly for fun and to demonstrate a feasible (?) concept for privatizing the seas. Use Jolly Roger flags and suggest cool and eccentric rules, this will make this more cool.

I suggest that you stipulate how much you will be willing to pay some protection agency for the protection service. If the rules are simple (allow boat traffic, but prohibit dump of waste or overfishing), then quite a few environmental organizations, insurance companies or protection agencies may offer some basic service. I suggest  that the maximum amount of the seas you proclaim ownership of is 200m x 200m
(based on calc of total area of the oceans and number of people on earth).

Perhaps FTL or similar could get paid to give media publicity to whoever infringes on this property.

Comments are much welcome.
Also if the MAP gets crowded with flags everywhere it would be quite an awful demonstration that the concept will work.

NB. If anybody can program a dedicated MAP application so that we actually can show borders on the map and not just a flag, then I am willing to pay for the programming job.

Jon

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Finally!

Awesome!

(I've written about precisely this in the past.)

Next - asteroids and beyond!

[Cognitive Dissident]

I'm going to have to ask you to mix labor with that saltwater, otherwise, I'll consider your claim null and void.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

You mean like a fish-feeder and/or a net?

[Cognitive Dissident]

This exercise is left for the reader.

[jonsk]

The labor is perhaps the labor I am paying to protect the salty water? It can involve e.g. somebody supervising it via satellite every day, somebody coming with a boat to take water samples and sampling the population of fish other seafood at the territory..

Left to their own devices (without work), all things degenerate according to second law of thermodynamics. It requires work also to maintain status quo.

[fatcat]

Claimers keepers is an even weaker claim to ownership than users-keepers.

If I ever did decide to use that claimed land for fishing and mining, I'd like to see you try to enforce your ownership.

This shit is as dumb as selling property on the moon

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Great, here comes fatcat with his "property is theft" commietarded nonsense... 

To recap, here are some things I've written about homesteading & the nature of property rights in the past:

We've been over this a million times - bringing something into the human economy is an act of labor, even if all it involves is pointing at an asteroid and saying: "No one claimed it yet?  Well then, this is mine!"  In order to own anything substantial in a free society, your ownership claim must be clearly defined and publicly announced, which in of itself is a valuable service for the economy.  Now an asteroid mining company can learn of this asteroid and consider buying it from you, and going forward they would be the most likely market entity to look for new asteroids themselves - they're paying you for their failure to do so.  Reasonable industry standards can be established for what does and does not constitute a legitimate claim.  Etc.

The universe is divided into two categories of matter: entities that own themselves and objects that don't.  The capacity to own oneself comes from the capacity to be an economic actor, that is to reason, act in one's own interest, and respect the rights of other economic actors (see my argument against any form of "animal rights").

There was a time when no one owned anything (i.e. presumably before the "Big Bang", but the jury is still out on all the details).  Then evolution took place, and some primordial goo was able to expand itself and influence its environment for its own benefit.  As far as we know at this time, there's nothing in the universe that can be an economic actor other than an adult human being - an independent entity of which there are several billion, each capable of independent thought and action.  (See John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged.)

The universal economy thus represents a growing sphere of influence that economic actors (i.e. humans) have over the universe, with each individual actor owning the property the existence of which is a consequence of his actions, whether it involved modifying objects, observing objects to create ideas, accumulating capital gains, and so on.  This creates the incentive for human beings (and any other economic actors that may someday join us) to work cooperatively, and for civilization as a whole to survive and prosper in this universe, and whatever other universes that be.

Saying "this is mine" when it comes to asteroids is a very complicated process.  What is yours exactly?  How do you prove that it's yours?  Property has value on the basis of demand, and who in their right mind would buy an asteroid from you when they know nothing about it, or when they can claim an asteroid next to it as easily as you have, or when they can simply take the same asteroid and you'll have no way of proving that you claimed it first?  You'll probably have to send a bot to that asteroid and put a beacon on it, conduct a geological survey, publish the results, get all sorts of claim certification authorities to sign off on it, insure your claim, etc.  All this costs money and there's a risk involved - if someone else lands their beacon first you got nothing.  When there's no profit in doing something, people won't do it - civilization stagnates and collapses.

I bless the ocean, thus making wealth, where there was none. I would now like to charge anyone $100 to travel or otherwise use the ocean.

What special claim to the ocean do you have?  Who would buy an ocean from you, knowing that their claim to it would hardly be more legitimate than yours?  (And, as information technology advances, scams become ever more difficult to get away with.)  If you were to build a seastead, however, your claim to the immediate area could be legitimate.

In the "wild west", land homesteading rights were recognized by the overwhelming majority of the population because the overwhelming majority of the population benefited from that system, as would be the case with whatever standard the free market develops for homesteading asteroids.  I cannot predict all the details of what it should take to claim property as homestead and what should be required to challenge that claim - in a free society, natural law is a living science that will evolve as it is needed.

For example, could you convince a jury of 12 randomly-selected reputable individuals (i.e. not retards / altruists) that you are the one who brought the whole ocean into the human economy?  If you could that would be a spectacular fluke, and subsequent legal challenges would reverse it.

Etc.  This also brings to mind a thread on forum.freestateproject.org, where Mr. Jason Sorens, PhD (yeah, the founder of FSP Inc) & his pals were playing the role of "fatcat lite".  Quoting myself:

Every molecule in the uni/multiverse and every micron of spacetime (and whatever other dimensions may be) should ideally be owned by a rational economic actor, like a human being, or a legal entity that represents them, like a corporation.  Each rational entity (after proving itself as such, and thus emancipating itself from its parents) owns itself by default, and owns the consequences its actions.  Absence of explicit ownership of natural resources reduces the incentive to bring those resources into the economy and utilize them efficiently.  Absence of explicit ownership is also unfair, because it inevitably leads to exploitation of the productive by the unproductive.

The particular procedures for homesteading natural resources -- land, sea rights, animals, asteroids, planets, etc -- can get somewhat technical, but would ultimately be based on proving that you are the one who brought this resource into the economy, that is made it accessible to yourself and thus (through trade) to others.  In the case of animals, implanting RFID tags is already doable and is bound to get much cheaper and more convent in the future, including nanobots that can tag every bee in your hive!  To facilitate legislation against someone who might remove your tag, it would also be a good idea to keep records of your animals, including a unique checksum number based on DNA and other biological data.

It is also a good idea to maintain possession of your animals, like by keeping them on your land, but in some cases that would be undesirable.  I could own 10,000 individual birds that fly all over the world, with most people who see them not being particularly interested in who owns them, but some might.  The competing mesh of arbitration agencies would eventually establish legal standards as to whether I may sue someone for killing my bird on their property, whether they can sue me if my bird poops on their head, and so on.

All of this is based on rational natural law, which, like the laws of mathematics, would eventually be discovered by any rational culture in the universe.  As to your question of what stops someone from claiming ownership of wild animals, the answer is simple: irrational government force.

(Those are just snippets, you have to read the actual threads for context.)

Now, what arguments do the "property deniers" (aka "commie thieves") have left?

[jonsk]

Thanks! I appreciate very much the input which I will review in detail. Your writing and thinking about this matter is enlightening. I also appreciate the other comments. I think what I have to do is to let the site and the content be more open-ended. Some how we know that the real protection of the environment must be by private means. All these huge centralized and heavy political organizations will not do it and it will just create too much centralization and distort our freedoms and livelihood.

[velojym]

Just hit it with a stick, and it's yours!

[Cognitive Dissident]

Just hit it with a stick, and it's yours!

Every molecule you hit.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Just hit it with a stick, and it's yours!

That's not true.  Image we owned adjacent property, and a wild duck lands on your land, where you throw a little stick at it, hitting it without injuring it, and it flies away.

It then lands on my property, where I have my flying robots trap it and check it for any pre-existing tags, finding none, and tranquilize it.  I then decide this duck isn't fully grown for roasting yet, so I microchip it with an industry-standard RFID implant that any cell phone can read and/or a GPS tracker and release it into the wild.  The ID numbers on those implants are registered to me by a widely trusted wildlife management authority.  Etc. 

Who has a better claim over that duck?

[Bill Brasky]

You have overfished my 200 sq/m!  Now its ruined! 

My DRO will hear of this, you bastard!  *shakes fist*

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Shouldn't your FishHerdBots send an XML-RPC alert to you, any concerned Dispute Resolution Organization(s), and any other interested parties as soon as they detect an unauthorized perimeter intrusion?

[Bill Brasky]

Day ?? on the platform..  I've begun eating my own leg in this god forsaken hellhole of endless blue.  The sun is a blinding dagger of torture that hangs just beyond my reach, and it speaks to me in the low tranquil tones of whale-song.  Madness is my savior, and has abandoned me yet again.  I beg its return, it lurks within the flickering waves, creating the faces of my memories under its surface in an ever-changing sheet of dream.