Spectrum should be private property (2004)
mises.org
mises.org
If they are private, then I, as a landholder, want to control the airwave rights on and though my land. Why should some broadcaster get to control it, without paying financial compensation?
If the current public radio waves are declare private, why wouldn't there be the same lawsuits again? Should a landowners have the right to run a mobile phone jammer which doesn't not adversely affect radio use outside of the land? If so, who else has that right? Would it be legal to advertise radio jammers - something which is currently prohibited? Should it be legal?
I assume that's the part about 'homesteading', right? In the historical context, that's when a European power uses military force to take over land which was controlled by a native population, and re-purpose it to fit the European, and predominately British, way of life. (We don't, for example, talk about the Spanish homesteads in the American southwest.)
But here it's used with a specific libertarian definition, which I can't help but think echos the historic meaning. Based on this essay, it's the process of taking unowned land and assigning initial ownership. (I point to Iceland as an example of what truly unowned land was like. Not the American historical context.)
In this case, no, the essay didn't establish what it means by 'unowned'. It asserts that we should view things as "spectrum". That's a specific philosophy that was created by regulation. It's not a natural definition. Before we had spectrum-based continuous-wave radio, we had spark-gap radio which generated broad-band signals.
Over time, legislation banned these radios because, in modern terms, they are noisy and interfere with the spectrum. The government could do that because these are the public airwaves, under public control.
Take that away, and where do you reset? Why shouldn't the original uses be allowed again, and what other historic uses did the government take away? I don't know, but the fact that I can point to one suggests that there were others.
Of course, viewing the topic through a post-regulation framework makes it easier to justify a specific apportionment, just like how the historic homesteaders used the simplicity imposed by government authority to justify occupation of land that was in use by others.
Even that philosophy aside, no, it doesn't answer the question. I'll phrase it a different way:
Can I buy radio silence for my land? (That is, I have my own radio telescope, and want no artificial radio signals in a given frequency range with power levels above a certain threshold.) If so, how? If not, why not?
"Thus the Rothbardian concept is radically different from how we're used to thinking about property. It is not a physical object, nor a rigidly defined spatial boundary; it is "not in things as such," but an exclusive claim to the use of a scarce resource, a claim to the means of human action."
"My land property isn't violated by radio transmissions crossing its borders, nor by airplanes passing overhead, so long as neither one affects my use of my land."
"If my neighbor drills for oil in his back yard and finds an untapped pool that extends under my land, I have no claim to the oil, so long as his drilling doesn't disrupt my use of my property. If I tap into that same oil deposit, I am violating his property. But I can drill down into non-contiguous deposits next to his and they become my property even if they extend beneath his land."
So, it seems that according to this article, if you are the first one to use the corresponding TAS (Time,Area,Spectrum) package, you get the property right by Rothbardin's homestead principle - irrespective of who owns the land rights for that area. If not, you can buy it from the person who own that by paying his price. So, yes, you would be able to buy radio silence for your home.
As I recall, we had lawsuits based on the idea the radio waves were interfering with "my land." I wish I could find that article I read.
> It is not a physical object
That was another objection of mine. An EM wave is as physical as you and I. It's much more physical than, say, a copyright.
> my land
Yes, that's part of the libertarian world view. I live in Sweden, where "my land" has a different meaning. I have the right of public access to most land, and the joint responsibility to maintain it.
The libertarian world view, deriving as it does from the British context of serfdom, has a different interpretation of exactly the same term.
> you can buy it from the person who own that by paying his price
Yes, the libertarian view is that all things can be resolved by a market. However, you haven't told me what that process might be, only expressed a belief that it can be solve.
We have real-world equivalents based on observatories for visible radiation instead of radio. Consider the McDonald Observatory. There are laws in the 7 county area to prevent light from interfering with the observatory.
Do you propose that the better solution would have been to start a outside lighting market, and have the observatory purchase the sky illumination rights, instead of passing a law? That doesn't make sense, since it only takes a few stubborn people to ruin the telescope, but it's the logical conclusion from the argument presented in this essay.
The market for EM silence is far different than the market for
This applies to land as well. It only takes a few people to ruin a golf course, or a highway we want to build if they commit trespass or refuse to sell their land. Yet, we make it work by considering eminent domain ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain#United_States ) which requires "public use" and "just compensation", and NOT by appropriating ALL of the land EVERYWHERE for ALL TIMES.
As long as property rights enforcement is there, the number of lawsuits shouldn't be a problem. If trespassing on land isn't a huge problem, why would trespassing of spectrum be?
Your observatory example sounds like tragedy of the commons. The article has this quote:
"The tragedy of the commons isn't a symptom of too much market; it is the result rather of not enough private property. All allocation of scarce goods will be most efficiently handled by the price system—so long as enforceable property rights are well defined."