In ethics, there must be a distinction between private, morally reprehensible issues, and moral issues that require action from courts and legislators. Neither Rearden nor idle property owners fall in the latter category.

No doubt, some property owners whose land & buildings are idle, voted in support of policies that caused their own businesses to fail. We could agree those owners deserve that failure. But which owners did not deserve it? Which idle property owners spoke out against that legislation?

By what principle should either lose their Property Rights to other men?

I thought that Hank Rearden’s reception of Francisco D’Anconia’s statement that, upon the former’s refusal to join the latter’s strike he must understand that he is now his biggest enemy, is one of the most powerful points made in all of Atlas Shrugged.

It’s interesting how complicated, and in such seemingly unrelated detail, such a subtle point plays out in real life.

Great point Jim. Sometimes illness, or a corporate oversight may allow idle property for a time. However, on the scale Mike N is concerned with the legal distortion argument comes to the fore. When widespread, idle property (even large market crashes) is not simply an usual grouping of lazy (or greedy) owners/executives, it is a consequence of larger (economic, usually due to legislative) factors.

The distortions brought about by the tax laws (eve3r heard of “tax loss harvesting”?) is a big one here… when you see something that makes no economic sense, such as an intentionally money-losing venture, some legal distortion like that is usually the source.

Idle-property owners should not be collectivized as guilty of anything, when legislation establishes a Statute of Limitations and/or ‘Homesteading’ rules. The new rules would have to be completely neutral.

It occurs to me that a Statute of Limitations on idle property might make sense if created via reasoning similar to that used for patent ownership rights. But I still stand by a prior procedure of contacting the owner to affirm his intentions as per my previous comment.

But surely, the property owner is on the court records of a city or township. I would agree with a Statute of Limitations that required that the owner be asked, via a legally binding document, if he wishes to abandon his deed, transfer it, or simply keep it.

I can’t imagine idle property that has no known owner, except in the unusual case of a death & an incomplete will. Likely, the value of the property would be so low that there would not be much of a rush for it by ‘homesteaders’.

I think we can all agree a property owner has the right to do whatever he wants to do with his property so long as he poses no threat to the rights of his neighbors. Aside from the possible violation of neighbor’s rights, the government has no business concerning itself with private property.

The question is not how should the law makers interfere with private property, but how should the law be written to for us to best exercise our property rights? In this light I think my original idea of a time limit may be erroneous as some have suggested. Be that as it may, when I look at abandoned property with large buildings on them just rotting away for decades on end, there is something wrong with this picture.

I’m not too concerned about vacant residential lots. Most of these are abandoned by the owners themselves. The city just assumes ownership, demolishes the old house and lets it sit. I think something like a homestead act mentioned above would work fine on these.

But large plots with giant buildings on them are a different story I believe. Here again I return to the idea of value to whom and for what purpose? Obviously when buildings like the Packard plant and the train depot are ignored by the owners it means the owners no longer see a value in the land and/or the building. So why do they continue to own it? Why don’t they keep lowering the price until a developer finds it attractive enough to buy it? I think the answer lies in the way our laws are structured.

This comment is getting too long but I will have more to say on this. Perhaps another post.

Why aren’t these pieces of property in Detroit homesteaded properties aswell? Certainly, the current owners aren’t the original owners – but at some point that land was homesteaded (even if, because Michigan was an area that was settled long before the term “homestead” became part of the cultural lore, it wasn’t called that at the time). So why isn’t the current owner still responsible for meeting the promised level of productivity just as if he were the original claimant? Why shouldn’t that piece of land, in order to have legal recognition as private property (ie: off limits for new homesteading by anyone who cares to claim it), have to continuously meet a certain threshold of productivity? Not just once, long ago in the past, but continuously.

Why continuously? (and here, let me clarify that by “continuously” I don’t mean that each and every day some tangible, noticable productive acitivity must be taking place. I agree with Embedded I’s contention that real estate speculation is it’s own form of productive activity – and that some times to do nothing with a piece of property is the most productive thing to do with it. I only mean that once that speculation ceases to be speculation – ie: once the activity of the owner is no longer productive and it just becomes senseless hoarding – he is no longer being “continuously” productive).

So, again, why am I asserting that a piece of property must continuously meet the stipulations that homesteaded property (when it was originally homesteaded) was required to meet? Because government, too, must be continuously supported. It’s not enough to simply lay claim to the land, make it productive, have it legally recognized, and then stop – letting it go fallow – and yet still expect the government to protect your rights to it. Police men, mayors, and deed clerks have bills to pay too! A fee paid to the territoritorial government of the “Ohio Territory” in 1789 or whatever isn’t going to suffice!

It is a question of the philosophy of law to answer just what time frame is relevant I’m talking about when sometime goes from being “continuously productive” to “fallow”, so I’m not prepared to answer that. I’ll only add this one observation about it, since it is relevant to something Embedded I said regarding who’s responsible for Detroit’s woes: Perhaps the time frame would be different from community to community given the city/state/region’s macroeconomic situation (sadly, too often a result of the political situation), but I’m suspicious of that as an excuse for any given individual land owner. Since some ex-factory, now vacant lot, owner in Detroit, being also a citizen, is to some extent responsible for what his government does, why shouldn’t he suffer the consequences of his actions (and/or cowardice)?

To quote John Galt: “Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality-and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent-that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real-and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan-so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collective countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values-the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win-and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’

If these people wanted to keep their land – and indeed their city and their state – they should have pronounced their “No.” Either with their voices – by taking control of their government long before it got out of control – or with their feet – by pronouncing the city of Detroit hopeless and divesting themselves of it all long ago (instead of hanging onto property under the delusion that, without their active participation, somehow “things would go back to how they were” – and then having the gaul to call that delusion “real estate speculation”). That they should be relieved of their land is, in my opinion, the price they should have to pay for giving his consent to the destruction of the city of Detroit; for failing to pronounce his “No.”

The bottom line point I’m making: why should a guy, who owns a vacant lot in Detroit, and who has no intention of going anything whatsoever politically to prevent Detroit’s inevitable complete collapse, really care if it’s taken now by a “homesteader”, or five years from now by a socialistic city government who just hasn’t gotten around to picking the bones of the city? He’s going to lose whatever smalls shreds of value he still has in that land anyways.