How should an Objectivist legal system deal with abandoned property?
At present, governments have various means of disposing of unclaimed property such as bank accounts, cars and occasionally land. Such property can be abandoned for many reasons, such as the death of an owner who leaves no heirs, or deliberate abandonment because the property no longer has significant value. In many instances (no surprise) the government itself will take it. How should an Objectivist society treat such property?
I agree that estate taxes are ridiculous: the taxes were paid on them already.
Maritime law is rich in rules for this.
I find it interesting how specific, deep and broadly accepted these laws are. However, even a titled, large vessel, once it meets the criteria of "abandoned" is simply claimable by a salvage agent (real innovative, aggressive, risk-taking cowboys). I do not know the criteria for the salvage team maintaining claim, or eventually abandoning claim, but there are rules. Once the salvage team has claim, the original owner is out, unless teh owner hired the salvage agent under a specific contract to recover what is possible.
Those cowboys can really be something. Sometimes they recover the entire ship, and it may be refurbished. Sometimes they strip it in place an sink it. One clear issue is if the "abandoned" vessel impedes a waterway. This must be rectified quickly, and changes the calculus.
Cargo, is categorized (stolen from Wikipedia):
Flotsam is floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo.
Jetsam is part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is purposely cast overboard or jettisoned to lighten the load in time of distress and is washed ashore.
Lagan (also called ligan) is goods or wreckage that is lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be reclaimed.
Derelict is cargo that is also on the bottom of the ocean, but which no one has any hope of reclaiming (in other maritime contexts, derelict may also refer to a drifting abandoned ship).
The remote, hazardous marine environment made these rules necessary a long time ago when capitalism and ruled. Seems like a good place to start by analogy for the benign environment of whiny land lubbers.
Now if the owner walked away from the property because he could not satisfy an obligation to it, then the property title passes to whoever laid the obligation on him. Here we deal not with abandonment by death but with foreclosure.
Thus if an owned thing has a title, some person has a claim on it.
Now if it doesn't have a title, then finders keepers, losers weepers. True, or false?
With that in mind we need to rephrase your question. If an object that was formerly owned by someone and that person loses or abandons the object who owns it? You obtain property rights in things by making them useful. As a guiding principle it would be the next person that found the object and made it useful. So if the object has not be made useful by someone the answer would be no one. However under the law we often make rules for practical reasons such as recording deeds makes evidence of ownership more clear and avoids disputes. One place where we can see this is in estates law. When a person dies they abandon their property – a dead person cannot have property rights. Under a pure philosophical response we would say the next person to make, for instance, the land the person who died had property rights in, would be the owner. However, this would be chaotic and lead to fights. As a result, we decide that when a person dies he can say who has the first shot at acquiring property rights in the dead person’s object or we have a statute that does the same thing.
One need not make something useful to have a right in its use. A property right would be a freedom to act with respect to certain existents without obtaining permission from others. Usefulness is not a defining term for property, only an individuals opinion as to some of his property. I would sure hate to have you come to my property and decide whether each bit of it is useful by your standards. I have about 1500 books, with more than half of them not having been useful in several decades. Should they be removed from my house so that someone else could find usefulness in them? By your standards, the extra car that was licensed, insured, and runnable, which I lost because I had not used it for a couple of months, so was declared a junk vehicle, and required to be junked, was justly taken from me due to it not having some proper usage at the time? Should one be free to keep property without demonstrating the usefulness of it to others?
If something is unowned, you can only properly obtain property rights in something by making it useful. It may only be useful to you, but unless you do this you do not have property rights in the object and other can take it.
You are confusing cause and effect.
Rand pointed out that in the case of copyright, the law properly protects the expression (print, performance), but not the ideas. You cannot prevent someone from knowing what they know. That is the "brainwaves" you refer to: they are not separable property, but in and of your person -- at least for the present...
There was a libertarian theorist, Andrew J. Galambos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_... who gave lectures for which he demanded and got people to sign non-disclosure agreements. He prevented them from repeating his ideas, apparently, but, of course, could not prevent them from applying them to their own lives -- which was the purpose of the lectures.
Do you know whether Rand actually tried to stop the Libertarian Party from using the non-agression principle because she thought of it and wrote it somewhere and copyrighted it and the party did not get permission to use her property ? I would suspect that by writing it somewhere it became freely usable for any mind to use it philosophically as in the platform for the Libertarian party?
The root meaning of "property" is also lost. I have a coin from Cato the Younger. The obverse says PRO PER. He struck them from his own silver on his own authority to buy the (temporary) loyalty of the people of Utica. (There's a lot of PRO words and PER words in Latin, both rooted in PR="first"). We accept it as "for himself" but it just meant "for during" i.e., for the exigent circumstances.
My point is that we build concepts that are represented by somewhat arbitrary sounds. It is something of an accident that we call stuff "property." We could call it "vork." But it is not entirely an accident. The word "property" was invented from PRO PER (as in "right and proper") for a reason, otherwise, it would not have been understood by the people of the Middle Ages. The Romans understood "propertus" only as "haste." The underlying idea, though, is that ownership in property is fleeting, not eternal.
That may be a false idea. The seemingly obnoxious Digital Millennium Copyright Act might correctly identify the fact that intellectual property - Mickey Mouse in particular - never passes to the public domain, but must always belong to someone.
All of that is arbitrary and arguable specifically because, as Irshultis pointed out, you are ignoring the object (person, land, musical composition, etc.) in which these rights are considered.
By your logic, selling my rights to a musical composition is not essentially different from selling myself into slavery, only in degree, not kind. Moreover, your argument - supportable, perhaps from Roman Law - is that a slave still has some rights. I think that most people here would disagree with that.
If the deed holder is a company, and not an individual or sole proprietor, the property should pass to the shareholders of record.
There are ways to establish ownership of property that might appear unclaimed. A government that just takes it is, to say the least, lazy, and to say the most, deliberately stealing.
The Objectivist theory of unclaimed property (as I understand Ayn Rand's brief comments on this) does not allow the government to take the actual property for its own use. The government is only the keeper of title to the property.
How else would you have property title pass by default if the owner dies intestate?
That was one proper way that the airwaves have been privatized (although the government wrongfully continues to "manage" or "oversee" their use). See "The Property Status of the Airwaves" in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. In fact, the Nash Equilibrium auctions brought spectrum rights to new owners at less cost to the individuals, but with greater return to the government.
A simple random number drawing (lottery) would also work, and that also been done.
As a philosophy of reality and reason, Objectivism seeks answers that are based on absolute truths. From that rational-empiricism (the "scientific method"; small-o objectivism), the goal is to find truths that do not depend on tradition, intuition, or revelation.
"Bloodline" might seem obvious to you, but my wife's family has been in America so long that they do not know who the first immigrant was. My four grandparents all came from different places in Europe. My wife and I have this amusing argument about who is "really" a relative. In your case, would you exclude "affines" (what we call "in-laws")? You cannot prove that one way or the other. It is not objective.
At the American Numismatic Association, they went through some minor pain when they wanted to put all 125+ years of The Numismatist online as a benefit to membership. Shirttail relatives of dead authors demanded copyright royalties for the re-publication of the work. It was nonsense.
We can go back and forth on this forever, and it does not make much difference because neither one of us gets to determine the rules for everyone else.
What I read here is a difference between us in mind-sets or world-views. I do not see either of us persuading the other.
By extension, in a "libertarian" society, in which the dominant implicit philosophy is Objectivism, several options are moral. It depends on the actual property in question.
An abandoned lot of land can be occupied and worked and the deed be registered.
An abandoned intellectual property would just advance to the commons. Anyone and everyone could use it. Unlike land, intellectual property is non-rival and non-exclusive. Title comes entirely from the government. It has no "natural" foundation. So, there is no practical means of securing it without a primary owner. If the owner dies intestate, then it has no new owner.
The question of movable property might be closed off by considering that everything on Earth is literally on the Earth. If you find an unowned property with an automobile on it, the automobile is "chattels" on the land, and part of its ownership.
However, it is possible that an objective (or "Objectivist") legal system could delineate moveable property ("chattels" - originally "cattles") from the land itself and allow primary ownership of the land separate from other stuff on it. And a case in point would be an automobile abandoned on a public street. ... or a forklift in an abandoned factory.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
Another consideration is to allow the community to decide by vote what is to be done with said property.
Bank accounts should go to the bank.
Cars should go to the prior owner or manufacturer.
Land should revert to prior owner.
Unless this imposes a financial obligation those parties do not wish to assume. That said, property tax should be unlawful.
Again, above, I cited the case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle versus Jack London. Doyle's estate jealously guarded their rights under UK law, whereas London's works passed into the public domain. As such no one owns them and anyone can use them.
The fact is that intellectual property is non-rival and non-exclusive. So, it must be governed by different laws than land or automobiles. Indeed, cars as "chattels" are separable from the land on which they sit. So, machineries, tools, etc., objective considerations indicate that they should have different kinds of laws, not just rules derived from real estate law.