@Imari, I'm going to reorder your post so that the answers to some of these questions flow better. If you think I'm jumping around by talking about the damage incurred by infringing someone's property rights, I apologize. I'm only using it to help explain the concept of claiming unowned property.
All of the above confers ownership assuming that you had to actually lift or move both the red and green block when you placed one on the other. If you left the red block right where you found it and just put a green block on it, you own the green block and not the red block - because you transformed the green block and not the red block. The difference between that and number 1 is that by bonding them with a weak adhesive you made a new object (however tenuous that object is) and the new object belongs to you.
If you're walking through the woods and find a red block (as they occur naturally in nature, not as composed by man), and you pick it up, you have now inseparably mixed labor with the block. Yes, someone could point a gun at you and tell you to put it back, but all they would be doing is destroying what you had made, which was a block which had been transported to a new point in space via your labor. The analogy to this with the clay pot is that someone could smash your clay pot into little bits and perform various processes on it to separate the molecules in it and recombine them back into the mixture that they were originally found. The
ability to destroy what someone has created has nothing to do with it. What matters is that they have created something, and we have no way of going back in time and preventing that - removing their labor from the resources they combined it with.
Not the point I was trying to make. If you go build something on land that I spent a lot of time developing plans for, you've destroyed (devalued completely) my product. It doesn't even matter whether it was worth anything to anyone else, it was worth something to me, and now it's not. Same thing with the clay pot, if you destroy it (render it worthless, render it valueless, render it purposeless, whatever) it doesn't matter whether the pot was worth anything to anyone else, it was worth something to me. You've destroyed my labor.
If you go bake a bunch of apple pies, my labor might be worth less in the marketplace, but you haven't
forcibly destroyed what I made.
The design is for something to be built in this case, and let's pretend for a moment that it is specific to the particular plot of land. There's a hill, let's say, and I've put 20 homes along the hill so that they don't interfere with one another and placed a road such that drainage will function properly etc. etc.... a design that would be essentially garbage for any other plot of land. That design is labor, and it is inseparably mixed with that parcel of land. It is no different than any other type of labor with that resource.
Let's back up... why can you own anything? Why can I own the clay pot? You don't go far enough to see it here:
There's no reason to take self-ownership as an axiom. Why can't other people own you? Why should you get to say what you do with your body? After all, perhaps it is for the interests of others that you should be made to work, or killed, or something in between. You can't just assume that you own your body.
The reason that you own your body is... human rights. The lion doesn't care whether the gazelle owns it own body, it's going to eat that body (steal it) anyway. Might makes right. Except that might makes right is a value judgement that is subjective - valuing might above all else. We could just as easily have come up with any other arbitrary value judgment, such as smart makes right. The smartest person is deemed correct. Or art makes right, the person who sings the best, or draws the best gets their way. Or perhaps fast makes right. We'll just have a footrace to see who gets their way. There are literally an infinite number of versions of might makes right (not all of them rhyme).
I know of no objective reason why one person's will should supersede another's. The only objective behavior then is to NOT impose your will (initiate force) against others, for any reason, any subjective value system. If someone does it to you, it is only logical that you can play by their own rules. They agreed, after all, that some subjective reason was a good enough one to use force against you - and that is how the lion and gazelle interact. Valuing might. If the gazelle develops a gun (let's say the gazelle is a homo sapien) then the tables have turned.
The reason you can own something is because you have worked to produce it and taking it from you is the forcible deprivation of the results of that labor. So whatever constitutes an initiation of force is what I'm constantly looking for in these examples.
Getting back to the intellectual property example, if the land is not owned by anyone, and you labor to produce plans for it, if someone else takes that land, they're destroying your plans, the results of your labor. It is force against you. If you've done nothing with the land of course there is no way they would know (in the absence of sophisticated technology like an internet and computers). But of course if you let them know, then you've staked your claim.
If you say that's calling dibs, I'm fine with that. We're talking about resources that just exist... nobody owns them.
Everything can be forcibly separated. The point is whether you have destroyed someone's creation by separating it. That is what I mean by inseparable... inseparable without the initiation of force.
You created it at a particular location, presumably upright in a piece of land. Moving it does destroy that particular combination of matter.
That's kinda my point. Laboring with natural resources produces something and the fact that it did is immutable. If you destroy it now, you're forcefully destroying that labor. If you could keep your destruction limited to the original unowned natural resources without affecting what I created with my labor (such as the crane example) then you're not initiating force against me.
I don't find it any different.
Well nobody believes they can own it because all of the world governments have declared it so. But to simplify things, let's imagine for a moment that they all changed their mind tomorrow. If I simply say "Mars is mine", I have not created something that must be destroyed for someone else to have Mars. But if I say mars is mine and draw a sketch that involves developing every portion of mars, then I have a claim to it.
But let's say someone else showed up on mars and built a house. I take them to court based on my sketch (which I spent 2 hours on). The court looks at my sketch (which was dated) and realizes that I actually had a legitimate claim to the spot where the house was built. The court then instead of ordering the people who built the house to tear it down and give me my land back (which would be far more valuable than my sketch) orders the house-builders to pay me off for my lost value. They estimate the value of the sketch at $40.
Here's another way it could go. The court looks at my sketch (which was dated) and realizes that I actually had a legitimate claim to the spot where the house was built. However, since i made no effort to inform others of that right, the court decides, based on a purely pragmatic convention to facilitate the market, that I should be paid $0. There is no way the other people could have known that I had any claim to the property. This is fairly analogous to trademark in the US.
