The Labor Theory of Property: Parking Places

 If I recall my John Locke correctly, his theory of property was that the owner established a claim to property by intermixing his labor with natures. (My memory seems to be close according to this.)

The snowstorm expected tomorrow will offer the chance to create property.  While my home owners association provides two parking spaces per townhouse, a lot of people also park along the side of Greenrange Drive. After the snow ends, they'll have to shovel their cars out (assuming there's more snow than the 1-3 inches currently predicted).  In doing so they'll feel they've established a property right to the space, and a few will try to exclude others by putting traffic cones, folding chairs, or whatever in the space when they pull out. 

Land Tenure in Israel

According to this Treehugger post:

Should land be held as a public asset, or traded as a private commodity? In Israel, where 93% of the country’s land is publicly owned, state ownership of land is anchored in legislation, and even in the Bible. However, a new plan to transfer a massive amount of state land to private ownership is afloat, provoking plenty of opposition among environmentalists.

I'm always curious about land tenure because it seems to structure much of our society, at least in history.

Mathematical Illiteracy in the AP

From an article on this document from ERS:

50 percent more US children went hungry in 2007

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN – 3 days ago

Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department's annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Note the headline is accurate, but the writer is not (i.e 691,000 is not double the 430,000). When you look at the ERS study, the 2005 figure for children was close to the 2007, making me suspicious of the accuracy of the 2006 figure. In general, the ERS study doesn't indicate dramatic changes in "food insecurity".

Falling Property Values

My little corner of Reston is rather diverse. We had an African-American family down the court--they bought in 2006. I use the past tense because they moved out this weekend, presumably having been foreclosed on. The prior owner bought in 1999 for $98,500; he sold in 2006 for $365,000.

Whose Property?

Shankar Vedantam in the Post wrote about property yesterday and Tyler Cowen and Ross Hanson links to it. Research seems to show that those people who decorate their cars with bumper stickers, regardless of the sentiment, are more aggressive drivers than those milquetoasts like me who have an unadorned car (almost put a Gore sticker on in 2000, but didn't) and who just fume inside when someone cuts me off or tailgates or whatever.

The researchers' explanation is people have difference senses of "property"--our sense of possession of our bedroom is "private", whereas walking down a city street is "public". So the theory is people who decorate their cars consider them to be private, or privatish, and take more offense when their property is impinged on. (Reminds me of a cartoon I saw yesterday, although I can't get the punch line right: it was someone in a sort of vehicle, explaining to the bystander it wasn't their new SUV, it was their new house.)

I was struck by the sense of property idea. One thing I've noticed, living in a townhouse cluster where one's yard extends about 3-6 feet from the house and the rest is common, my sense of property doesn't match my neighbors, or rather, it took a good while for me to adjust. In the country our farm was a bit isolated, so anyone appearing on one's land was sort of automatically an intruder, suspicious, perhaps a hunter, perhaps a city person, definitely someone whose business you'd want to know. (Didn't want hunters mistaking cows for deer or city folks scaring the cows and cutting their milk production.) This might fit with the imperialistic image of farmers, who don't want anything except the land next to theirs. And, of course, reinforced by the need for fences. Anyhow, it's a different sense of property than I see in Reston. There's no property markers evident.

I thought of that yesterday, but got interrupted from posting it. Then this morning I got reminded of how we are just animals, after all. Petting our older cat, whose mother was feral and who still retains a bit of edge, everything was fine until she decided to jump into her cardboard box and bulge over its sides and I continued to pet her. Wrong! For her, when she's in a box or a paper bag, that's her property and she defends it, even when the hand approaching the box or bag harbors only good intentions.

Bottom line: Cats own property too.