Although the most notable philosophers from whom I derived many of the liberalist views for this book all imagine their own version of creating new property regimes (informed mainly by the European Doctrine of Discovery), few minds of the past have ever bothered to explain or justify the creation of property regimes in land that wasn't uninhabited. Being that the greatest economic and military power of my world currently resides on land on which its ancestors did not dwell or purchase, this question becomes of obvious significance. So far, my story of chronimism has exclusively considered that the true value of anything is the amount of labour put into it, but it has not considered to whom that value rightfully belongs.

To preface, I must state what I see as the universe's sole purpose for existing, that being the enjoyment of all of mankind. Past philosophers have argued this point with theological rhetoric, but a much simpler reason exists. In all of the known universe, it is only humans who are sentient, who can see the world around them and understand that it exists. For all others creatures of which we know, this gift has been withheld. Without humans, the universe could be destroyed and rebuilt from a different Armageddon and Genesis each day, but there would be no one to witness or understand it and therefore the exercise would be meaningless. Were there only fish in the world, it would make no difference if the oceans teemed in their multitudes or played host to but a single sturgeon. The fish would be unable to know it was alone, to ponder its existence or understand the world surrounding it. Whether there be ten fish or ten trillion fish in this lonely earth there would still be same number of paintings, poems, treatises and mathematical equations created per annum: zero. However, given such a distinct change in the population of our species, the differences in the products of civilization would be quite profound.

Mankind is the only animal which can appreciate nature for more than its ability to sustain us, and as such only we can truly comprehend its majesty. Killing every last human being might certainly save the rainforests and the endless lists of endangered species, but what purpose would it serve if no one was left to see the forests recover their natural beauty or the rarefied animals remake their appearance? The trees would show us no gratitude for our sacrifice, nor would they make any effort to contemplate the universe which it was no allowed to occupy undisturbed. They would continue to produce oxygen until they all died of asphyxia if left to their own devices. A consciousness is required to improve at a faster pace than the crawl of evolution. A consciousness is appreciate the bounty nature has provided and to mold into something useful only to the one who molds it. A consciousness is needed to compete against nature, to prove one's superiority and make one's existence matter in the cosmic scale of time.

Every fish that ever washed up on shore is the same, but every fishermen who threw in his net is different. There is the one who learned to survive on a diet of cod. There is another who learned to build a boat and catch enough to last him the winter. There is even the man who fished so plentifully that now the sea bears no cod at all. These are all greater than every fish that ever lived or will live because they all made their mark on the universe, a mark which no one could duplicate exactly and which nature herself could never have intended herself. They added something new to nature, they created a new element and for the better or worse, that alien component has changed the universe forever.

It is that characteristic which separates man from nature and which provides us the entirety of the natural world as our dominion. Only we can alter it by design, therefore only we shall alter it by design. Man can only prove himself to be sentient so long as he uses nature to his advantage, so long as he continues to bend her to his will, allowing her to thrive or starve on his command and his alone. As soon as he takes into account the needs of the birds and the birds above his own, as soon as he treats nature as its own entity which should be protected for its own sake, he has lost the battle for individuality. As soon as a zebra is fed by a child starves, a sentient will is being enslaved by an inanimate being. I am not saying that man should not be a thoughtful master, but it would the suicide of our species to think of him of anything but a master.

Within the confines of an existing property regime, it is easy to measure exactly what one man's labour has produced and thus it is easy for them to be compensated. My economic system's only way of computing profit relies on this. By forcing goods to be sold at the actual cost of the average labour used to produce them, it is easy to determine where an industrialist's own intuition has created a sharp decrease in the cost of the production, which then becomes his profit. The only way to generate a profit is to somehow change the method of production wherein it requires less labour to produce a good than before, and therefore a profit is an exact expression of the efficiencies and inventions of which the industrialist is the sole benefactor and beneficiary. However, outside the context of an existing property regime, where an industrialist is gaining resources for free, for example, it is impossible to tell if his profit is determined by the value of the resource he has stolen or by his own ingenuity in production. It is at that point that the chronimistic system encounters a serious challenge to its integrity.

To begin, I must challenge first the notion of collective ownership and royalties. There is nothing in this book to suggest that a state has any right to own land within its territory not already owned by its citizens. It certainly has the right to police and protect those lands for its national interests, but owning the land is ludicrous. Land is only useful when it is developed by individuals. A state is not a corporate being and therefore cannot do this. The state may act like a legal entity, but ultimately the people as individuals are liable to all of its actions, not the state itself. The people must pay taxes to service the debts it incurs. They must fight its war. They must obey its laws. They must suffer from its diplomatic isolation or benefit from its negotiations in trade. The state cannot be considered corporate because its will is derived from the people who direct and compose it, and those same components each have a direct stake in the affairs of the state which they cannot abandon. It is similar to how to man could not be considered an entity if all of his cells had competing agendas, dividing his will and controlling his actions. Being that a state cannot act outside the confines of its various parts, it can be said to be nothing but a collection of those parts.

Various tentacles of the state may be capable of cultivating or mining the land, but given the innate inefficiency of bureaucracy, it is more practical to turn those endeavours over to private interests. Therefore, a government does not go to war so that it can own more territory, but so that it can give more territory over to the exclusive interests of its citizens. This makes the most sense as those private interests is what directs the actions of the state and as such no action of the state would ever be undertaken that did not in some way directly advance the welfares of those in power. Territory that has not be claimed by its citizens, however, does not become state property, but simply lies dormant waiting to be developed. Being that chronimistic governments do not need to gather revenue, not collecting royalties on crown land probably won't be met with much resistance anyways.

But, if the state does not own unoccupied land, how does one acquire it? One only needs to look to Locke for an answer to that, as it is through their own labour. Anyone who is able to turn a natural resource into something useful has given it value and because the labour they put into it was theirs, the value and the property shall be theirs also. If said land is within the territory of a nation, members of that nation will have exclusive right to lay first claim onto it. If said land is outside of any existing territory, the first person to cultivate or mine it will have sole ownership of that land which he has developed. The nature of this doctrine is to ensure that the resources given to mankind are put to use and in the spirit of that ideal, it only makes sense that he who is best able to utilize the land would lay claim to it.

This is how one comes across the ability to purchase. Since one can only accrue money through industry in my system, the one with the most money is the most industrious. Thus, the purchasing of land with money represents the ceding of land from the unambitious to the aspiring, from the lethargic to the industrious. Given that land will be given to the highest bidder, in a chronimistic setting, it means that land will naturally enter the hands of those most able to make use of it. It is also at this point where foreigners are allowed to invest, so that competition will drive up the prices and give the best possible deal to the original settlers who had the tenacity and ingenuity to create a new property regime.

All this being said, there is no moral imperative to educate a person as to the possible value of their land before they sell it. As has been said many times before, no person can consume more than they produce, and thus cannot receive compensation for something they did not have any part in creating. A person must be paid for the value they put into the land, not for what value the land might have in the future. Therefore, if a person hasn't bothered to understand that superior agricultural practices would yield more crop or that geological advances have discovered resources beneath their land, they shouldn't be paid for these equivalencies. The cost of an item should reflect what a person would have to do to produce it (hence why it is costed labour). In that sense, the ideal cost of land would be the value of labour already sunk into the soil plus what the owner would have put in if they had kept it. That way, the new owner will accrue profit only by doing something different with the land other than what the owner would have done, thus making the transaction a useful endeavour for society. A man who is uneducated to the value of his property will not be able to put in more labour, even if others can, because he doesn't understand that he can do so. A man who is educated in it, however, as in someone who has spent the money to learn new agricultural techniques or has spent the labour necessary to discover resources on his property, will be able to put more labour into it in the future, thus necessitating that he receive a higher price for his land (as he has put in more labour into it). This difference will be handled naturally by supply and demand, regardless, as the uneducated man will ask for a much lower price than the educated man will. In other words, there is no reason to consider exploiting people who do not understand the potential value of their property to be wrong, and that certainly can be applied to the first peoples occupying any space of territory.

However, there will be times when the unambitious original inhabitants will not sell their land at any price, either for cultural beliefs or sentimental attachment. Being that the sole purpose for universe existing is so that it may be enjoyed by mankind, it would be counter-intuitive to allow any part of that universe to remain in the hands of people who are willing to waste such a glorious gift for whatever reason they happen to profess. Not having the best person and most efficient system possible to develop the land means that that land is wasted, and there is no economic system which would intentionally allow for waste. Therefore, there must be another method by which land passes from peoples of inferior to superior industry and that is through war.

Although previous chapters have described the ideal military as a group of society's least adapted members, it can still be assumed that when nations truly go to war for means of strategic gain, they will not simply toss their invalids at each other, but turn the attention of every worker, resource and economy to the act of war. Therefore, in modern conventional warfare, the contest is primarily one of industry, not of battle strategy or ruthlessness. Historians of all stripes have explained the American victory in both World War II and the Cold War as being the product of economic superiority, even in facing enemies of either greater numbers, territories or subservience to ideology. It only makes sense that the country with the greatest economic engines would win any conflict as they are able to produce more ammunition, armaments and well-fed soldiers than their opponents. Thus, the winner of war, as long as that war is not guerilla in nature, is the most industrious side, giving them the authentic claim to the lands they capture. This then establishes the right of the conqueror in the system of chronimism.

This logic does, of course, not settle many indigenous sovereignty claims such as those currently facing my own nation of Canada. To give the reader context, although much of my country was ceded to the crown via treaties with the first inhabitants, a remarkable portion of the Canadian population currently resides on territory never conquered by or surrendered to the state which claims to govern it. Given my previous statements, one can assume that this being native territory, only the indigenous people should have exclusive right to develop this land and then Europeans could purchase it afterwards (although they were explicitly told not to do so by the Royal Proclamation of 1763). This obviously didn't happen, with European settlers simply claiming squatters' rights, a clear violation of the Proclamation and my own statements. Being that my own family profited greatly from these illegal land seizures, however, it would be remarkably idiotic of me not to write a logical loophole, which I have naturally included.

In order for industry to persist, one needs relative stability and peace. In order to sustain this, a state must be able to do two things, repel foreign invasions and maintain property rights. The repulsion of foreign invasion clause links to the already established right of the conqueror. The winner in a war is clearly the one that is least susceptible to foreign invasion; therefore, in the interest of preserving stability to promote industry, the territory should belong to the victor. Property rights also maintain that stability, as industrialists won't invest their labour and ingenuity into projects without a guarantee that they can reap the profits they sew. Therefore, it is also the state that can best defend the property rights of its citizens that should also have right to the territory.

Given that the First Nations lacked the capacity to repel those who stole their property, it is impossible to consider them actual sovereigns over this territory. Their states were unable to guarantee that their land wouldn't be delivered onto foreign hands, and thus they lost the right consider that land as territory. The Canadian state, once it had stolen the land, was better able at both repelling foreign invasions and protecting the property rights of those who lived there, and thus, in the interest of creating an environment conducive to business and industry, had a better claim to the territory. That being said, chronimism's highest law assumes that a person is only compensated for the labour they actually gave to society, and in this case, a whole nation profited from something in which it invested in no labour to the obvious detriment to those who had put millennia worth of toil into their land. Therefore, although this territory can no longer be considered part of an aboriginal state, there is no logical reason that the invading sovereign should not compensate the original inhabitants for its use, to ensure that the highest doctrine of chronimism continues to apply. Therefore, in areas where squatters are well established, although their lands cannot be returned to the indigenous peoples, some settlement must be made for the past and continued use of that land in order to compensate for past injustices and discourage such reprehensible behaviour in the future.

Finally, should mankind ever discover another piece of land never claimed by another nation, perhaps on another planet, the explorer would be able to start a new property regime in the same manner as already described, but would not be able to plant his flag and declare it national territory until his nation asserted itself, patrolling borders, policing its territory and foiling invaders. Obviously such an expedition would be an enormous expense, but many companies can have enormous expenditures without feeling entitled to profits. In order to justify the expense, the explorer would have to develop the land, therefore creating property in the terms I have already described. If another explorer from another nation arrived at a different location, neither the first explorer nor his nation would have right to force him back except with arms, which would be expanding territory in the sense I have already described. Being first to arrive does not grant one exclusive privilege (as the Spanish and Portuguese would have thought in "discovering" the New World); being first to produce does, and only over the land which is producing. The accomplishments of one man, however bold or awe-striking, are not ever to be shared by his people at his expense. He will make his own reward, as will they make theirs and we will all make ours. There is no such thing as a free lunch, even on the planet Mars.