As I've already explained, the mere act of homesteading creates value. By getting there and proving that the homesteaded property is mine (i.e. no one got there before me), I've made it more accessible to the people who didn't get there before me, but may now be interested in buying it. I've made an effort to bring this property into the human economy, and my ownership of it is my reward.
You seem to have dodged the issue again.
As I was saying, the "value" you perceive, is merely subjective. While a jury of 12 might recognize one claim more legitimate than another, they are both arbitrary
Even the boundaries within that subjective concept are subjective. How long to you have to homestead before its yours? 10 seconds? 10 hours? 10 years? Any point you pick can only be "this seems okay/fair to me", nothing more.
There's only an arbitrary principle behind it (wealth creation = ownership)
This model would be much more satisfactory if people actually created the atoms, not just rearranged them.
If you build a car, and I smash it to piece with a sledge hammer, theres no objective sense of which is more valuable. I could claim that I have created wealth by making something better out of your car, though under the standards of a car being a vehicle for transportation it would be destruction, but that's exactly the point, it depends on nothing but subjective opinion.
I agree that under certain qualifiers, homesteading can be perceived as value creation, its just I find the value creation model of ownership fairly shaky, given that many people (my shaman blessing the ocean example being one of them) have wildly varying concepts of what is value and what counts as creation of value, or merely steading what value was already there.
What counts as "wealth" is purely in peoples head, so it can never be a standard for becoming owner of previously unowned land, as there would be no legitimate owner in any dispute.
The humanity wasn't created with an instruction manual on how to live rightly, we had to evolve from primordial goo and figure it out for ourselves. We've made many huge mistakes along the way: "divine right" of governments, wars, failure to recognize the property rights of more primitive cultures (or fairly document the exchange of land for trinkets), colonization, altruism, democracy, and so on. But that doesn't mean we can't be civilized and recognize the natural human right to property going forward.
There's been a lot of circle dancing in the rest of your post, so I'll keep this short.
I've mainly been trying to dispute your apparent acceptance that homesteading is some inherently proper way to devise ownership.
I haven't seen shit to see you back up what you think is "natural rights", other than some arbitrary standard you have concocted.
I've said before, I'm perfectly willing to use arbitrary measures of property ownership in the stead of any objetive measure, I just don't feel the need to call i anything other than arbitrary and pragmatic.
As such, I do not believe we have any fundamental dispute.
You seem to be claiming that, whatever people recognize as legitimate, and whatever you count as wealth, and whatever you count as pragmatic is what is right.
To a point I agree with you, although I would prefer to label it as "what will work", rather than what is right.
I much prefer to work from a point of voluntary interaction onwards, as it is axiomatically pure, and
I think somewhere between Zhwazi's idea of no one owning land but everyone getting to use it, and a homesteading idea would be most practical.
Although as I've said before, I don't think either idea is based on any objective standard.
At some point each argument just says, well let's count this as given, and then work from there.