These opinions warrantied for the lifetime of your brain.

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Sunday, February 7, 2010

Is Occupying Vacant Land Inherently Immoral?

Bruce Cohen wrote:

> Building a house on vacant land is not inherently immoral.

John Locke says it's moral only if you leave "as much and as good" land
for others. Are you disagreeing with Locke?

You own the house, because you created it. But you can't create
acreage, you can only occupy it and exclude people from it.

And I would say you can occupy a site as long as you like, but you can't
appropriate the ground rent that gets capitalized into its allodial
value by the nearby development efforts of others.

P.S. If you're going to make comments about whether/how a tax gets
"passed on", first spend ten minutes reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence and understand how it depends
on elasticity.