Homesteading in Action

As previously mentioned in my article on land, I outlined why homesteading and trading is the only moral and correct way to obtain property. Homesteading is when an unused natural good is first used by a person, which was not previously used or was abandoned. This person can be called the first-comer as he was the first person to use the resource, mixing his labor with the now property.

Now I would like to illustrate how homesteading is the only way to establish clear property boundaries and why a government decrees make no sense. (If you want to see more on why governments drawing up property lines is completely useless, read this article: Intro To Anarcho Capitalism).

My family and I were doing some landscaping a while back, we had this wall near our property that was overtaken with weeds and tall grass. So wanting to tidy up the surrounding area, we decided to clear the area of the unwanted material and throw down some brown mulch, and add some ground cover plants to further prevent weeds from growing. 

Now this wall is bordering our neighbors property. See if you can draw a property line on where the property begins and ends.  The red arrow is pointing to the newly worked on and landscaped wall with brown mulch/soil and plants.

So where is the property line? Is it along the end of the brown and the beginning of the yard grass? Does it look something like this:

Now we can look at how the government views who owns what land. This is taken from my local county parcel viewers website:

Or from the view on Google Earth:

See, we can objectively view where the property begins and ends just by seeing the landscaped area versus the yard grass. This land was unused, both my family or our neighbor could have cleared the land to homestead, but my family and I were the first-comers. Previously the entire wall was infested with weeds and tall grass, but my family and I mixed our labor, by clearing, adding mulch/soil, and planting new species to the previously unused, barren land. We effectively homesteaded property!

Without government, we can still decide what property is whose through objective means, not by some drunk scribbling lines.