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Property Rights In Space?
ATKeiper writes "A number of companies have announced plans in the last couple of years to undertake private development of space. There are asteroid-mining proposals backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, various moon-mining proposals, and, announced just this month, a proposed moon-tourism venture. But all of these — especially the efforts to mine resources in space — are hampered by the fact that existing treaties, like the Outer Space Treaty, seem to prohibit private ownership of space resources. A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the debates about property rights in space and examines a proposal that could resolve the stickiest treaty problems and make it possible to stake claims in space."
There's plenty of space out in space!
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Short version (it's a very long article)
There is precedent in the U.S. federal government's history of land grants to railroad corporations -- once the corporation owned the land, it had a strong incentive to increase the land's value by laying track. The situations are not quite parallel: in that case, the land rights only covered surface uses, not mineral rights; and of course, in the case of the Moon, the federal government has no land to grant. But while the general recognition of secured property rights would here take the place of grants from a previous governmental owner, the central premise still applies.
In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.
Free Martian Whores!
Your 'homesteading' right is ultimately defeated by an even more natural right: The right of he who has the sniper rifle to shoot you and your family from a safe distance, then come loot your home and take over your land.
Rights are an artificial construct, and exist only so long as they can be enforced either directly (Employ enough guards to secure your home against any threat) or indirectly (Have a government that will, reasonably reliably, either defend you or remove the economic incentive for attack by finding and imprisoning the attacker afterwards). A right that is not in some way backed up by physical force simply doesn't exist: You can whine all you want about your 'right' to property, but it won't do you one bit of good if there isn't ultimately the threat of violence to back it up.
In space violence isn't very practical, so property rights would be backed up by the threat of governmental seizure of the earthbound assets of offending companies or individuals... and again, you still need the men with guns sitting around somewhere just in case a CEO converts all company product to gold and tries to hide it in an abandoned mine. Not that any of them would be that stupid, because they know that if they defy a court ruling long enough sooner or later violence will happen.
Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein. They had prisoners who mined on the moon, and when they rebelled against the government, they hurled down moon rocks. Good little story.
We planted a flag. That's how these things are done.
Later on, the shooting starts.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
In other words, the same rules as we have on Earth. A government claims a land because they want it and they have the means to defend it...
Sort of...but with a nasty twist. Whoever has control of large amounts of material in space and the ability to transport it back to earth will actually have the biggest guns. So if we let corporations loose in space without some viable means to prevent large chunks of rock hitting the Earth they will end up not just with more spending power than governments but with more military might than them too. I'm not sure this is a good environment for democracy to flourish.