The problem with massive corruption is that ownership becomes unreliable. I had an Indian friend once tell me that it happens sometimes that when you buy some l

The problem with massive corruption is that ownership becomes unreliable. I had an Indian friend once tell me that it happens sometimes that when you buy some land in India, and don't develop it, someone else may, and they will even have a second title. And that the courts are likely to grant it to the person that does the development vs the person that sits on their title. I was obviously surprised, but he said - what makes you think that the title you bought and sit on was ever valid in the first place? This can also backfire on a more coordinated scale, for example see what the communists did in post WW2 Warsaw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decree Those cases are still dragging on in (now fair) courts of Poland. And you can't honestly blame Bierut for doing this - the capital was so devastated that there were less than few thousand people living in it (down from like 1mil before WW2). In fact one of the problems with those pre-WW2 titles is that they often intersect multiple properties across streets, because due to the extent of city damage the street layout was re-architected (if you're starting from almost zero, why not rewire the fundamentals?).