Comments Elsewhere

Anonymous2,

Carson clearly does not hold that you’re entitled to enclose and seize land that someone else has worked (e.g. by clearing it of trees, or wild beasts, or creeps, or whatever) the instant they pause in working it. His understanding of mutualism as applied to land ownership has to do with the conditions under which land can be counted as abandoned (and thus available for being re-homesteaded). You’re attacking a strawman.

In any case, even on a radical Lockean view of land ownership I do not see how the tree-clearer would gain an exclusive entitlement to the copper veins underneath the forest. Homesteading land only gives you ownership of the land you actually cleared and brought into use. It does not give you ownership of everything in the heavens that’s over the parcel you own, nor everything in the earth underneath it.

If I clear the forest and bring the surface of the land into use, that gives me a claim to the surface of the land, not to the copper veins running far underneath it. If someone else figures out a way to get at the copper underneath my land, without interfering with my use of the land I cleared — say they buy an adjacent plot and start digging the pit over there, but then tunnel over to land underneath my plot — then the mine and the copper vein are properly theirs, not mine. I have no more right to demand a title to the copper vein than I have a right to demand that airplanes pay me for passage in the airspace miles above my house.