> If I own the land, and I mean own and am responsible for - no taxpayer subsidized safety net if I go too badshit crazy with the nutrient depletion or chemical baths - then it is in my best interests not to ruin the property so that it remains valuable if and or when I want to sell it.
Realistically, most people would want to extract as much from the land as they can in their lifetime. This means, while they may not necessarily destroy the land with in their own lifetime, they will bleed it dry by the end of their lifetime, leaving nothing to the future generations. This, of course, also presupposes that most people are rational, smart, and sane individuals. The truth is quite the opposite, and if you have doubts about the latter, just read YouTube comments of any video :)
Nothing is ever mentioned about the process by which a society converts itself into a libertarian utopia. That makes all the difference in terms of the configuration of ownership. According to my purely idle speculation, here are a couple of possibilities:
1. Worldwide adoption of libertarian society at some fixed point in time (e.g., by magic), meaning that the largest land holders would soon absorb their neighbors and form estates of a size equivalent to US states or small countries. These people would presumably be responsible for families or even entire clans, forcing them to take a long term outlook. But "selling" might be problematic if there is no reliable store of wealth other than land.
2. Adoption limited to a geographic region (e.g., through a political process), with the commercial economy dependent a foreign currency. In this case, the rational strategy for a small land holder (less than 100 square miles) might be to extract foreign money from the land by selling crops, ores, etc., and then abandon the land.
I'm guessing that the optimal size of land holder that is big enough to be efficient, but small enough to saddle some larger entity with their externalities such as the cost of protecting them from the territorial ambitions of their neighbors. The bigger the estate, the bigger the cost of absorbing one's own pollution, crime, etc.
Realistically, most people would want to extract as much from the land as they can in their lifetime. This means, while they may not necessarily destroy the land with in their own lifetime, they will bleed it dry by the end of their lifetime, leaving nothing to the future generations. This, of course, also presupposes that most people are rational, smart, and sane individuals. The truth is quite the opposite, and if you have doubts about the latter, just read YouTube comments of any video :)