On Public Property: Response to Dominiak, Israel, and Fegley

In this rejoinder, we return to the question of the ownership status of public property by criticizing Dominiak, Israel, and Fegley (2025). According to these authors, the public domain is legitimately owned collectively by domestic taxpayers in virtue of the so-called accession principle. The present paper demonstrates that the use Dominiak, Israel, and Fegley make of the accession principle is untenable since it (a) runs counter to the very purpose of introducing accession to libertarian theory as another mode of title acquisition, and (b) predicts conflict-generating property claims. We also argue that even if the approach under criticism were correct, it would fail to offer what DIF believe it does: a non-ideal theory comprising policy recommendations for politicians in power. In addition, the paper challenges the second pillar of the approach of these three scholars: their ideas for public property management. As we show, those nostrums are at odds with some elementary insights of Austrian economics.