The fact that Elwar deleted our posts is astounding. We were engaging in healthy debate.
I'm including what I said below, for posterity.
Eminent domain, even as it exists in civil law, is a vestige of the monarchic
structuration of society and law; the thought that a governing entity (initially, in
the monarchic sense, derived from divinity) and compel a transaction on the part of
the state. If we're talking about a new protocol for building infrastructure,
statist artifacts such as eminent domain will have to go out the window.
In retrospect, I'm afraid that my argument will be misconstrued with a reapplication
of communism/profit-sharing, but I was thinking that III's DAC model could have some
use in the non-cryptocurrency realm. Why do urban planners, engineers, and
construction workers come together to build roads? What compels them is primarily
the goal of making a salary, which is provided to them by a government in exchange
for work. They operate within a legal safety and specification framework to carry
out their work and thus we get roads and bridges and a transportation
infrastructure.
I think that reducing all major thoroughfares to toll-roads is a rather simplistic
way to go about it (and reminds me of Neal Stephensons Snow Crash; is that the path
we're on?). But borrowing from the DAC model, maybe tolls could be replaced with a
membership system. Consider that the nexus of workers need a pool of money from
which to be paid; I can't see any better way than to provide payment from a central
collection. In the vacuum of a state, if we replace compulsory taxes with a
voluntary levy that goes to a DAC group made up of DACs that provide a fleet of
services from certain sectors (member DACS from the medical services, farms,
schools, etc), that voluntary payment now becomes a membership grant that permits
the buyer access to the use of the services of the member DACs while providing a
pool from which to distribute resources to the DACs for their operation.
Or, we could replace the tax/levy structure entirely by going the protoshare route,
in which consumer membership in a master DAC would be granted upon the purchase of
securities from that DAC, the upfront capital going to the 'pool' for the
service-providers and continuing membership being provided on the basis of dividends
made on the trading or growth of the securities.
There are still a number of questions to hash through. Who determines the
attribution of resources? (do member consumers get a say?) In a DAC (distributed,
autonomous corporation), who decides where to build what road? Who provides a
regulatory framework for safety (and can impel compliance)? The DAC model, if writ
large, would require a vast rewriting of our current legal system and the creative
invention of a new legal framework for non-centralized service.
Just my $.02.
I do want to point out that I'm not a free-market solutionist. Actually, in many cases, I'm more of a statist. But I see eminent domain as having been glossed over by the Enlightenment, which gave us a legal foundation for 'inalienable rights'; in my country, which practices civil law, there are explicit protections against the government compelling a private citizen to do certain things that would be usurious to them. To me, eminent domain falls into this category.
As I said, I
can't acccept the argument that we need eminent domain because it's too hard or unpractical to convince multiple landowners to lease or sell their property for infrastructure purposes. I
do understand that's how it works nowadays as a practical solution for a traditionally difficult problem, but what I was saying in my other responses is that we're living in a new paradigm of communication (if you want to go so far as to say we're living in a new paradigm of compressed space-time as some anthropologists like Harvey say, I'd go along with that becuase I'm an anthropologist), we can build the tools to do it
better.
One model that is initially of interest is the legal framework around the leasing of land for the purpose of hydrofracking in the US; this breaks down when we realize that, for roads, we need contiguity, but it does bring up a case of land being leased for projects on a mass scale without eminent domain and, often, to the benefit of the land-owner.
Another model could be developed that takes a consensus based approach that distributes the decision-making apparatus of landowners into overlapping pools of proximal landowners and only permits transaction once the pool has reached consensus over a course of action, but I haven't thought this through all the way.
Edit:(for once, the 'a new reply has been posted' is useful)
All land is ultimately owned by the state and when you buy land, you buy it knowing that eminent domain exists
I think this is a source of our split in perspective. You are right: in the current climate, all land almost anywhere is owned by the state. That's why they can levy property taxes. But I think that this is something that is
going to change in the next century. Again, state ownership of land is an artifact of aristocratic notions of property rights and, for most of it's legal history, was relatively unenforceable due to the existence of terra nulla. If you didn't want to participate in feudal/state taxing schemes, you moved out to where nobody was. Sure, you lost all of the protections given by the state/Lord, but that's the nature of the Social Contract. It's only in the last century that the boundaries of the nation-state have solidified and terra nulla has ceased to exist, as nations butt up against one-another. As the role of the state begins to be renegotiated in the 21st century, so will property rights. I doubt that this is going to happen any time soon in the Western nations, but it's extremely likely in developing/failed states and, interestingly, we may be able to look at them for examples of new, novel forms of governance.
