What's wrong with Zubrin's land patent idea?

Zubrin makes some good points about the value of land ownership.

Enormous tracts of land were bought and sold in Kentucky for large sums of money a hundred years before settlers arrived [, land that] might as well have been Mars in the 1600s. 

[A] registry of a sufficiently powerful nation, such as the United States, would be entirely adequate [to] enforce private-property rights in space. [Those properties] probably could be bought and sold now.

[A registry allows] the undeveloped resources of space [to] become a tremendous source of capital to finance their exploration [and settlement].

All of the above is true with one very minor problem. Nations can not give grants to something they don't own. No sovereign nation owns any of of that property and are actually prohibited from ownership if they are part of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. So they can't grant it. However, they can recognize that other's own the property and have legal title. Which is to say, if a title office were established on mars which held a registry of property claims made in accord with reasonable terms; other nations could recognize those private ownership rights held in title so they had international enforcement. Zubrin is saying one strong nation would be enough for all the others to accept those property rights. Which makes it easier for land to be used to provide capital. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out; Land ownership by free individuals is by far (leaving the second thing too far back to see) the most important thing for a strong healthy economy. Valuable land provides the resources and collateral for financial growth.

Historically, the way a land patent worked is a person would pay for the necessary paperwork fees associated with the steps of entry, warrant, and plat. Entry would be adding their name into the registry, warrant would be the actual title and plat would be physical description of the property made by surveyors. By this process the first claim for about 50 acres (depending on time and place) on undeveloped property could be claimed by anybody in the territory. Being bureaucrats this process could take as much as ten years, but the owner still took possession of the property immediately. They had to, to prevent others from making claims on the same property. On mars, title could be issued immediately using a computerized system of pre-surveyed properties.

The problem is people perception that only the state can make decisions. This hasn't always been the case in America, especially when we still had frontiers. The people that claimed their 50 acres didn't ask permission from the state first. They just followed the procedures the state established after they'd claimed their property. There is no reason the same could not be done today. We can wait for the state to recognize the claims in a registry established by it's members.

The question is about the terms. If the terms require possession we have to wait for possession. This is a sort of chicken vs. egg problem because of the need for a few billion dollars of funding to put just a handful of people on mars. The problem of not doing it by possession is that it would involve unending legal squabbles. Smart politicians without greed could get around this by understanding the problem. That leaves that solution out.

Could land claims be recognized before they are possessed? Of course, but what would be the terms? The Space Settlement Initiative has it's ideas, but I see major problems with that as well. It results in a company town where individuals do not own the assets in a fair distribution. People risking their own lives should have some compensation. We have enough slaves right here on earth.

Perhaps awareness of the property rights issue will result in a solution. If not, in a few years a few billion invested will result in possession. Then it doesn't really matter what the politicians and lawyers (but I repeat myself) think.

A tremendous source of capital is something space colonization could use right now.

Via Rand.