All already owned and claimed by someone, backed by the force of violence.
I agree with you about space not being solution, but I don't think its as simple as you put it.
Most of the deserts are technically owned by somebody, but you can easily get far away enough that nobody is going to come looking if you don't call attention to yourself.
"Easily" here is defined as "walking for many weeks through deeply unpleasant territory". Which is, of course, very hard, but orders of magnitude easier than space.
None of it's simple, of course, as you note. But space is always far, far, far harder. You could go McCandless yourself right now. Which, of course, means dead, but even McCandless made it there, and a few (miserable) months. Which is months longer than you'd survive in space without vast armies of people helping.