The Right to Quiet

Last night some people gave their dogs pain killers to keep them from freaking out over the fireworks. Other people didn't give their dogs pain killers, and their dogs ran barking from corner to corner with their eyes popping out. Last night was a reminder to me that noise can be an infringement on property rights.

I should qualify this by pointing out that noise that's already there before you move in is very likely noise you consented to either through your concious acceptance or your stupidity. You can't get a house next to an outdoor shooting range and then have any reason to complain about guns going off. I live very near an airport, as anyone who watches my videos can tell. If I were the one who knowingly bought the house near the airport, and if I had a problem with the noise, my only legitimate claim would be that I was an idiot for moving in to a place that I should have known has so much noise.

Fireworks can be a similar case, in that we all pretty much know there's going to be fireworks on the night of July 4th. So I'm going to talk about another kind of noise. At the church where I grew up, it wasn't the custom to ring the bell until I reached 4th grade or so. People had already been living in the area, and were already accustomed to their quiet Sunday mornings, before the church started ringing its bell.

If there were people who already were living in that neighborhood and who enjoyed the quiet of it, and felt the quiet of their Sunday mornings disturbed by the bell ringing, then the ringing of the bell is something that impedes their subjective enjoyment of their property.

The main concern behind Switzerland's ban on the building of new minarets could have had something to it if it were about noise. For instance, a ban on amplifying calls to prayer would have made more sense than a ban on a particular kind of structure pointing into the air. Minarets themselves can't walk through your locked door or peak through a drawn curtain. Amplified noise can. However, none of the existing minarets in Switzerland had calls to prayer at the time voters approved the ban. If the ban on building minarets should make any sense, its supporters should show how the existence of a minaret can prevent someone from enjoying their property in the way they want to enjoy it, and I think that would be a hard argument to make.

Smell can be treated in a similar way that sound should be treated. If you move next to a feedlot, and then complain that the air smells like shit, then the only problem that's apparent is your own lack of foresight. If, however, someone buys property next to your own property and then puts a feedlot there, and you happen to strongly dislike the smell of shit in the air, then the feedlot is an infringement on your right to the subjective enjoyment of your property.

A Brief Thought on Use and Occupancy

Though I believe in a use and occupancy condition for property, I also believe that this condition should be interpretted liberally - and by liberally here I mean conservatively. Thanks in part to agrarian nostalgia and also to philosophical convenience, original appropriation and continuing "use" and "occupancy" are often explained in terms of a particular mode of subsistence, which is family farming. Under a very strict interpretation of the use and occupancy condition, you don't own your land unless you plant and/or live on it, and the only bits of it that you do own are those parts that you either live directly on or plant on; and if your land goes fallow, then you don't own it any more.

I think there are very good "liberal" and "leftist" reasons for homesteading and continuing use and occupancy to not be interpretted so strictly. One is American Indians getting run off their land because they hadn't sufficiently appropriated it and/or weren't making "good enough" use of it. Another is protected natural areas.

My general and hopefully noncontroversial sense is that if there is no room under the property rules for an area set aside for the mere observational enjoyment of nature, then the property rules are too strict. So what if my land went fallow? I like the look of tall dry grass and wildflowers. Merely walking through and enjoying it should be good enough to count as use (and if I'm the first in a while to walk on it with a fence around it, then that should count as first use).

I shouldn't have to spend 7 nights a week 52 weeks a year on my land for my claim to it to be respected. And I shouldn't have to plant on every bit of it for my claim to be respected, either. If I can't enjoy my land in the way I want to enjoy it (assuming of course that my method of enjoyment doesn't get in the way of other people enjoying their own land), then I don't have property rights. And the way I'd like to enjoy it, once I get rich enough to buy a few acres, is to leave some of it as brushland, grassland, or woods.

None of this is to say that I think the use condition should be thrown out altogether. A house that has boards over its windows and obviously isn't being used at all is, I think, "re-homestead-able". And I believe a field that has nothing grown on it and no one living on it, and whose last owner according to all the records there are died with no heir or anyone who claims to be one, then that field too is re-homestead-able. I just think that sitting there and enjoying the land as it is should be good enough to count as use.