Thought For The Day

Dedicated to Tom Lehman:

Anyone can seize a good, thereby coming to "own" it, provided he compensates its owner. If several people want a good, the first to seize it gets is, until another takes it, paying him full compensation. (Why should this sort of middleman receive anything?) What amount would compensate the original owner if serveral persons wanted a particular good? An owner who knew of this demand might well come to value his good by its market price, and so be places on a lower indifference curve by receiving less...Complicated combinations of subjunctive conditionals and counterfactuals might perhaps succeed in disentangling an owner's preferences from his knowledge of the desires of others and the prices they are willing to pay. But no one yet has actually provided the requisite combinations. A system cannot avoid the charge of unfairness by letting the compensation paid for a border crossing [i.e., violation of rights on the Lockean picture of natural rights as physical boundaries] equal that price that would have been arrived at had a prior negotiation for permission taken place. (Call this compensation "market compensation." It will usually be more than merely full compensation.) The best method to discover this price of course, is to let the negotiations actually take place and see what their upshot is. Any other procedure would be highly inaccurate, as well as incredibly cumbersome.

---Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Or just seize homeowners' property and use their efforts to contest the legitimacy of the seizure as an occasion to declare them squatters in debt to the new 'owners.' Unfairness is justice, or injustice is fairness, or justice is injustice. I can't remember how it goes, but you get the idea.