Slashdot Mirror
No More Lunar Land for Sale
dptalia writes "According to China Daily, Beijing authorities have shut down sales of lunar property. Apparently there's a "Lunar embassy" in China and they've sold 34 people deeds to land on the moon. Not too surprisingly, the government has declared this illegal. The Bejing office claims to be a satellite of the U.S. Lunar Embassy, run by Dennis Hope. Hope claims that while it is illegal for countries to stake a claim on the moon, it is legal for individuals and corporations to."
Secondly, with government so charged to "protect" consumers from scams, you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
As the government doesn't actually refund the losses of any victim of scam victims (except in the vanishingly small number of cases where their money is recovered, months or years later), there is no less incentive right now to smarten up than there would be in a system under which the government didn't attempt to punish the scammer for his actions. People fall victim to scams because that's human nature, not because we have a nation of perfectly rational people who are shutting off their rationality because there's no punishment for doing so. The real world isn't a Libertarian's flight of fancy; humans are not perfectly rational actors.
On the other hand under the current system there is less incentive for new scammers to take up the trade, while in a system absent the disincentives of government punishment, given that gullible people will still be every bit as gullible, scammers would flourish.
What's wrong with the existing homesteading laws? If you want to claim a plot of land on the Moon all you should have to do is go fence it and live on it. After a specific period the land becomes yours and you can apply for a title, which you can then trade with anyone you want, or you can apply for geological survey and mining rights. Sure, it currently costs billions of dollars to get to the Moon, but that hardly makes it unfair to apply the same homesteading rules there as anywhere else.
How we know is more important than what we know.