" policing can be excluded from many of its benefits,"
I agree. I think you agree that some component of policing is excludable and others are not.

On a tangential note, I think the non-excludable part is bigger. If someone is bothering you and you call the police, there's a good chance they won't get there in time. The main benefit is after the crime or attempted crime they collect evidence that could be used to help other citizens, including full-service subscribers in an excludable subscription model.
I overheard the police confront someone in front of my house. They said, "you say you're out here selling magazines, but you don't have any sales materials and you don't live here. You just got out of jail for burglary. I am not going to arrest you. I'm not your father but I'm telling you in a fatherly way if you break into my house at night I'm gonna blow you away. You're going to break into the wrong place eventually, and I don't want to see that happen." He was benefiting everyone in the neighborhood.

Wow, I own the International Space Station! . . .
Wait, where did it go??

Reading your quote above, morality does exist for an individual on a deserted island, but rights do not. If rights are "the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society," then the "legal code of a society" must exist in order for the "link" to exist. This requirement would not be met in the case of a single individual on an otherwise deserted island.

That is an interesting quote, however I do not think it is saying what you think it is saying, as this quote points out:

"“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."

The Virtue of Selfishness “Man’s Rights,”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 92


For Rand morality exists for an individual on a deserted island. So if rights are part of morality then they exist separate from a social context, however in a social context they "are the means of subordinating society to moral law."

Re: “property rights are not limited to a social context”. Ayn Rand would disagree. Her definition of rights states explicitly, “A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” (Man’s Rights, in The Virtue of Selfishness.) This applies to all rights, including property rights.

In a world of complete laissez faire and Objectivist law, how could a sunset be owned, used and disposed of? What would be the mechanism of enforcement to exclude others from the benefits of ownership?

How about if everyone is too scared of actually building something because they worry about lawsuits in case someone else already built it (or claims they did, or claims they purchased a patent that allegedly is being infringed)?

Did European settlers have the "right" to enter a peaceful Native American village and force the inhabitants to leave, on the grounds that the land was "unowned"? I think the issue is more complex and context-dependent than it appears.

I agree that the "ancient sacred ground" argument has no legal or moral justification.

Someone who doesn't want policing can be excluded from many of its benefits, such as not having police respond when his person or property are attacked and not being able to initiate court proceedings.

We may be talking about two different things. In the case of an invention you can (it's physically possible) to exclude it from people who don't want to pay. If there is an invention that crams more data into a single cable, someone who does not want to license that technology can instead use multiple cables or accept lower data throughput. In the case of something like the benefits of policing, someone who doesn't want the policing cannot be excluded the benefits.

I think that from the time of the caveman to today private property is what you can take and defend. We have engaged government to defend our property for us according to rules that we have agreed upon. In earlier times it was believed that everything belonged to the superior being that created the earth. Craftily there were those that added that there was a Divine Right given to some mortals to be the caretakers. Most of history is composed of squabbles among those Kings as to how the pie was to be sliced. The United States is based on individual rights and there are no rights unless you have property rights so our courts are the councils by which the government determines how to apply force to the protection of the property rights we claim. Since we are fools, we tend to abandon our claims in the name of altruism and screw up the rules but that will ultimately lead to the fall of our system and we will be back to Kings, Warlords and Mad Max like tribes that will take what they can defend.

Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of her QA* edited by Robert Mayhew, New American Library, first edition; first printing, 2005, pgs 94-95. Ayn Rand said that the only "innocent" people in the USSR are in concentration camps. And she called them "non-communist blobs." Moreover, the USA should not be deterred by the problem innocents in war. But we can take this up in a different topic.

"Excludable" hits on the problems with intellectual property. As Ayn Rand pointed out, you cannot prevent someone from knowing what they know. You cannot copyright (or patent) the ideas in a book, only the form of the presentation.

I am not sure that that is entirely correct. I do not know how patents on mathematical theorems would work. dbhalling and I have gone around on that, unproductively. (He is an IP attorney.) He has denied several times with me and others that two people can independently invent something. His real world argument is that in our society today, a professional inventor does literature searches before embarking or getting too far down the road with an idea.

He does not have to regard it as either all or in part his property to live. He only needs to do what is required for himself in a situation in which he is all alone and his life is threatened.

But 'Robinson Crusoe' portrayals are at best relevant as extreme examples to illustrate the necessity of personal productivity, and otherwise emergency ethics of no particular significance to how principles for normal life are established.

The settlers did not "take what they wanted". The land was unowned. It didn't belong to anyone. European settlers had as much right as any native to use and claim the land in a sparsely settled wilderness.

Natives were not all killed regardless of whether they accepted individualist property rights of civilization. There was some racism and injustice against innocent Indians, while many Indians successfully became part of civilization. All of it was in the context of a war against near stone-age primitives, most of whom would not give up their primitive, tribalist collectivist mentality leading to barbaric attacks on innocent families of settlers who had every right to be there.

That ongoing war across the continent was a serious problem during the early settlement to well beyond the establishment of the country. It took a very long time to contend with it using the technology of the time, and is not to be dismissed in terms of modern multiculturalist propaganda. Of course there were injustices. There are always are in war. We prefer civilization and do not look for war with excitement as if it were a sports tournament, but do the best we can when it comes.

Ayn Rand did not advocate "raining death on other people".

Rights is a concept that can only arise in the context of interaction with others. It doesn't mean personally creating value, which is more fundamental. They are different concepts. Rights is more abstract and logically dependent on basic ethics. Rights protect your keeping from others the value you create.

In other words, the "equality is fair" movement is collectivist egalitarian nihilism dragging everyone down by brute force to a lowest common denominator in the name of idealism.

Personal value to you need not be reflected in economic market value as a price resulting from supply and demand.

"Generally, the air we breathe is not limited and not owned" because we generally do not go around breathing out of bottles that someone else produced.

Beauty may or may not be produced. No one produced the view of stars in the sky at night or sunshine or the air in the atmosphere. That is not an oversight of economics. If something becomes in limited supply it can then be a commodity.

It is not a question of rasserting ights, it is a question of reality If Crusoe does not create value he will die. If he creates values, he has created property rights - whether he has to assert them against other is a different question.

"It is an oversight of Austrian economics that air, sunshine, and beauty are not subject to the market."
The key thing is it's not excludable. If you do something that pollutes or improves the air, you can't exclude people who don't want to pay to improve it. You can with drinking water, though.

To me excludability is a basic issue in economics.

Suppose you have a like surrounded by plots of land with different owners. Some of the owners are using fertilizers that promote algae growth, polluting the lake. I don't have a perfect solution, but it seems like the courts or gov't should compare a group of properties by a polluted lake with a similar group of properties by an unpolluted lake, use those numbers to calculate a cost for each unit of fertilizer used, and make the people who use the fertilizer pay damages equal to how much value they're destroying.

If there were only two property owners, it could be handled by mutual agreement. The owners who doesn't want the fertilizer used could negotiate a price with the other owner for polluting the lake. This becomes problematic, though, when there's a group of owners sharing a lake, and there's one holdout who says that for whatever reason this lake is priceless to him. Maybe his family owned property next to it and swam there for generations.. I'm sympathetic to his position, but I don't think his property rights override all the other owners'. If he wants non-polluted water, he needs take the money paid in damages plus the money from selling his "damaged" property, and purchase land by a lake he owners or on which he owns a binding non-pollute agreement of some sort.

I have not read Montesquieu, but the quotes in your comment just reflect the same misunderstanding of money found in both Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises. Money did not evolve from barter. Barter is what monetized societies devolve to when money fails.

You are right that there was trade in copper in America, about 900-1200, give or take. How it started and why it stopped are not clear to us. We know of extensive patterns of trade in the Americas. None of those was analogous to the trading houses of the Middle Ages, or even to Sumeria vis-a-vis the Hittites. The natives were more "primitive" than that, or so the evidence seems to indicate. They exchanged gifts to seal friendships.

Ritual gift exchange is the origin of trade and commerce. But I look to the tradition of exchange beginning perhaps 20,000 YA between the two great ice ages, but in any case certainly no later than the most recent, about 12,000 YA.

It is not true that all societies have money indigenously. Many learned it; some still have not. Like writing, money began in one place, from one invention, and spread by cultural assimilation. They both spread rapidly.

In The Economy of Cities Jane Jacobs says that where we find pastoralists today, we should look for a lost city near the center of their range. (Farming was invented in cities. Cities did not evolve from agricultural communities.) Similarly, where we find ancient writing and ancient commerce, seemingly independent from Sumeria, when we are missing is the trade route and the moment of transfer.

But all of that is perhaps better addressed in a different topic.

Regardless of the internal organizations of the tribes, from the outside the tribal lands did not belong to the Europeans. At first, being weaker, the European settlers bargained and "paid" with gift exchanges. Once they had the military advantage, the Europeans just took what they wanted.

By the time John Locke penned his essays, Native Americans had converted to Christianity and moved into proximity with the Europeans. (I refer to Massachusetts Bay.) King Philip's War put an end to that. The natives who had acculturated were killed along with the rest. It was an injustice.

Calling them primitive tribalists does not excuse the wrong. Historical injustices exist, whether the Norman Conquest or the Holocaust. I know no way to undo it all. But the fact of injustice remains.

And, again, I insist on my opening point: how the natives organized their own lives had no bearing on the problem. If it did, there would be many excuses to rain death on other people. Ayn Rand was in favor of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, being herself undeterred by the presence there of "some non-communist blobs." I point out that the modern United Kingdom still maintains the fiction that the Crown is the primary owner of all land. Their error in philosophy does not grant you the right to hire mercenaries to seize a shire for yourself.

That is not a matter of rights: With no one else around, the question of rights could not arise. Taking action to live when alone is basic ethics, which contrary to altruism does not begin with and is not restricted to relations among people. The facts that give rise to the need for a concept of rights are the social context related to behavior between different people. That is why rights are defined as a moral principle sanctioning and defining freedom of action in a social context. The concept of rights depends on ethics, not the reverse. The ethics of egoism implies rights. And basic ethics does not depend on 'Robinson Crusoe' situations, which are only extreme examples. In fact we do grow up and live in society, but must choose to think and act independently to live regardless of what others are doing and interactions with them establishing a social context.

I did not mean that animals pluck fruit. Animals do not have rights. I meant that people pluck fruit, freely growing in an open, and unowned range. The fruit belongs to the person who picked it. But the idea of owning an orchard - and leasing it use - is far abstracted from that.