These opinions warrantied for the lifetime of your brain.

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Sunday, October 25, 2009

Who has the rights to a managed forest?

Why Not "Save Lives" With Single-Payer Healthcare?

My book doesn't go into any details about geo-/eco-libertarianism. I recommend my portal http://earthfreedom.net.  In my manifesto there I write:
  • Production of property via extraction of natural resources from a community commons should require a fee to the community proportional to the decrease in the ability of that commons to sustainably support such extraction.
  • Verifiable endangerment of a species or ecosystem that is part of the commons of a community is aggression against any non-consenting member of that community.
  • Persons may exert peaceful honest first control of unowned land and thus acquire the transferable right to possess it indefinitely, as long as they leave "as much and as good" for others, or as long as the land's geo-rent is shared with those persons whose access to it is impaired.
  • Geo-rent is the excess production obtained by using a site in its most productive use, compared to the production obtained by applying equivalent inputs of labor and capital at the most productive site where the application doesn't require (additional) payments for use of the site.
The world's foremost authority on geolibertarianism is Prof. Fred Foldvary.  In these papers he describes how geo-rent can be returned to the community via a land-value tax:
I would agree that some site improvements are harder to price separately from the site itself. Foldvary describes how to assessors use data about nearby sites to make these valuations.

So my answer to your question is: if the landholder is returning geo-rent through a land value tax, and pays a resource depletion tax as described in the first bullet above, and is not endangering an ecosystem per the second bullet, then they otherwise have the full rights to the agricultural and biological output of the site.