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"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the

• ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right" - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. How can we say with a straight face that granting people, institutions or corporate entities rights to own a piece of the Planet Earth in perpetuity, forever, is fair or a good thing that is sustainable? It might have sounded good 300-500 years ago when new land was constantly discovered (cough conquered/taken cough) but what happens when the land pie runs out? Do we just say "tough shit mate, you should have been born 50 years ago when land was still available and affordable for everyone, or you should have been born in a family with inherited land ownership"? It's a hot take but I think land should be only leased for a limited time, like the max lifespan of a person, ~100 years or so, and then expire, never owned in perpetuity by any individual or corporation.
  • ayende 4y ago
    In Israel, for example, a lot of land is not "sold", but leased by the state to people. In practical terms, there is no real difference. Technically speaking, the lease terms are 49 / 98 years. The problem is that when you reach the end of the lease, there is no real possibility of _not_ extending the lease. And the lease is for the _land_, not anything on top of that. So it "sounds" nice, but in practical terms, it just adds another body that you have to go through. From economic perspective, there is very little difference between the two. A bank will give you a mortgage to buy a house whose "land lease" expire next year, for example. Because there is no possibility of that not being extended. There is _slight_ advantage to buying houses not leased, but mostly because that means somewhat less paperwork to go through.
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      That lease system just sounds like land ownership with extra steps.
      • Retric 4y ago
        It requires active renewal which has implications. For example abandoned property is acquired by the state.
        • ejb999 4y ago
          that also happens in the USA already. There are tax auctions all the time.
          • Tangurena2 4y ago
            Some states allow the person/org who failed to pay the taxes on time to "redeem" the debt (pay it off). So this means that for several years after you acquire the property, there is a risk that it will revert to the previous owner. Some tax auctions are only for the right to collect the tax. In those states, you never can acquire ownership. You just get a lien. And some tax auctions are for worthless strips of land. I've seen some that were essentially the strip of grass between a parking lot and the street. The shopping mall had a permanent easement to put a driveway through that grass (if they wanted) and there was no possible way to make ownership of that 10 foot wide (and several hundred feet long) strip of lawn to be useful. Plus, you get to pay property taxes for something you can't live on. Tax auctions are a wild west of buyer beware.
        • code_duck 4y ago
          That’s essentially how things work in the US with property tax. If a landowner fails to pay property tax for some extended period, eventually the government will seize the property and auction it off to fulfill the tax debt.
  • NavinF 4y ago
    That sounds great until you spend 5 minutes thinking about it... What do you do with the $500k home sitting on the $80k land that just got repossessed? Why would anyone take care of their 98 year old land if they know it's gonna disappear in a few years? Are you gonna fine every person that goes right up against the line (regarding environmental laws for example) without crossing the line? By the time you get to the expired land, it will be a defacto landfill. Can people choose to lease a specific plot of land and if so does the term reset to 100? Why not pass property around the family back and forth forever? Who sets the price of a lease? Use gov't prices and the deadweight loss kills your economy. Use market prices and every lease will cost about the same as buying land in our existing system.
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      > That sounds great until you spend 5 minutes thinking about it... You and I don't have to think about this for five minutes as that's too little time and we're not qualified, but I'm sure if we round up all the top economists and university graduates of the G20 countries and put them together in a luxury resort in the alps to brain storm for a few months, I'm sure they'll be able to come up with a better economic land lease model than the system we have now which only encourages multi generational, winner-takes-all, land hoarding scheme for rent seeking purposes, where the earliest who got in the market got a great deal which they can use as leverage to acquire more land over time, and the ones getting into the market now are completely priced out and screwed as the pie is fixed in size and has already been called dibs on. Basically, we need a system that resets the monopoly board from time to time as currently you're entering the game from square one while others inherited a better starting position with more assets to boot. I'm sure such a system could be designed if desired but that's not what's desired as the elites and people in power with entrenched wealth don't want to lose their position on the board.
      • scatters 4y ago
        This has already been solved. The solution is a land value tax.
        • 4y ago
  • manicdee 4y ago
    What is the practical outcome of this? Do I camp outside Microsoft headquarters then walk in on day 1 of year 101 and say, “this is mine now”? Where I live we have leasehold land so titles theoretically extinguish after 99 years. What has happened in practise is that the lease just auto-renews, making the situation no different to freehold apart from the paperwork.
    • mcv 4y ago
      > Do I camp outside Microsoft headquarters then walk in on day 1 of year 101 and say, “this is mine now”? You'd probably have to outbid Microsoft for it. I don't think land should ever be free for the taking for whoever claims it first; It should belong to society and you purchase use rights from society.
      • robertlagrant 4y ago
        There is no "society", though. Who actually owns it and decides? The state? A local body? Who do you give all the power over the land to, if you're removing its ownership from individuals?
        • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
          The state owns the land and will lease it to any individual, with the price being determined by the free market, same how property prices are determined today. Whoever can afford the most, gets it. Best of both worlds. You discourage real estate speculative and hoarding for rent seeking purposes and still have the free market competition determining the prices. Once your lease is up you can renew it at current market prices if you want it and can afford it. If not, then you make way for someone else to take up the lease.
          • robertlagrant 4y ago
            I don't know why you'd want a system where a rich person can take the land your house is on if they can pay £1 more than you for it every so often, unless you're a fan of the feudal system. I also don't see how it discourages speculative investment. If nothing you own is really yours for very long then you're much more likely to have your property bought from under you if it's in a desirable area. As an investor I would want to do that if I believe I could rent it out at a profit.
  • lelanthran 4y ago
    > IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. Why limit ownership restrictions to land ownership only? Private ownership of property (not limited to land) is foundational for functioning democracies; some would even go as far as saying it's foundational for society. Those societies that went your route of "from each according to his abilities to each according to his need" turned out very badly.
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      You misunderstood, I wasn't advocating for communism but our current system is definitely flawed and unsustainable long term. So you're telling me that we should allow people to own pieces of the planet earth forever? Sorry, but how is that sustainable? How is it fair the someone gets to own large swaths of the planet and use it as leverage to buy even more of it, just because his great granddad came to an empty country and got land basically for free which now make his grandchildren millionaire landlords even though they didn't contribute to society in any way to earn what they have and if they were to buy their property at current market rate they wouldn't be able to afford even 10% of it. This may have been the foundation of societies, thousands or hundreds of years ago, but what was the population of the earth back then and what is it now? This system is not sustainable, and just like laws, it should be updated to account for current conditions. Our current system is flawed as it just comes around full circle to creating a society of a few landlords owning most of the property and assets and the peasantry which can't afford to own anything. And looking back on history we know how that usually ends. We need a new system that resets the monopoly board fairly instead of waiting for social uprisings to boil due to increased wealth inequality.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        You can apply all the logic you want, people who got there first (eg own land through inheritance) find a way to dismiss it.
        • robertlagrant 4y ago
          The issue isn't logic. It's in worldview. If you're more left wing, you probably view the state as a parent who can be trusted to confiscate and dole things out fairly. If you're right wing you probably view the state as a necessary evil for providing specific services that can't be provided fairly purely through people making agreements with each other. If you're the former, you may well think that the state seizing property in the name of redistribution will solve more problems than it causes. If you're the latter, it's the other way round.
  • simonh 4y ago
    As has been pointed out leases are a thing and work just fine, but many of the objectives you're after could better be achieved through a land value tax. Most of the value of a piece of land is usually derived from it's location relative to other facilities and infrastructure that were not created by the land owner, so it seems reasonable to return a share of that 'excess' value to the public purse.
  • xienze 4y ago
    > IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. How can we say with a straight face that granting people, institutions or corporate entities rights to own a piece of the Planet Earth in perpetuity, forever, is fair or a good thing that is sustainable? Who's granting people perpetual ownership of a piece of land? Once you stop paying taxes on it, the state will take it back. > but I think land should be only leased for a limited time, like the max lifespan of a person, ~100 years or so, and then expire, never owned in perpetuity by any individual or corporation. I mean in a practical sense this is exactly what happens. You die -> taxes are no longer paid on the land -> someone else gets it. That "someone else" is either an heir who is now paying tax on it, or its sold to someone else entirely.
  • cinntaile 4y ago
    Don't deviate too much from the zeitgeist or they'll downvote you to oblivion. It will also cause tears in the spacetime fabric.
  • PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    What you're saying, however, is that the government owns the land in perpetuity, and only lets you live there. That sounds familiar and oddly like serfdom. The USA has 1.9 billion acres. Developed urban areas account for only 3.5% of this area. If you count other, non-urban areas with more than 30 people per square mile, then the occupation of habitable land constitutes less than 6%. Accounting for mountains and bodies of water, Earth has 24,642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres (43%) of habitable land. Humanity is only 1/100th of the total biomass on this planet. Less than 15% of earth is either an urban area or occupied for agricultural use. And 95% of the world’s population is concentrated in just 10% of the land. Land is generally affordable. Land in areas not yet fully developed is actually quite inexpensive. You can pick up 40 acres of land in Montana for $20,000 USD, and they'll even throw in some livestock and feed. Property in developed population centers increase in price because of scarcity and market conditions. That's the product of living in an area that has recursive development, amenities, limited supply, and practically unlimited demand. This leads to an inevitable conclusion. We have plenty of land and plenty of resources. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell something. With this in mind, you could double the population of the planet and still not use a third of the habitable land. As it turns out, Earth is really, really big.
    • idiotsecant 4y ago
      I'd like to see this 40 acres with free cattle for 20k. Your argument is fine, no need to embellish.
      • tekknik 4y ago
        I’ve seen some properties like this. What they didn’t tell you is there is no road access, you’re surrounded by gov land (and they want your plot to finish the set), and you generally won’t be able to access the land without an easement. That’s why the cattle are still there, they can’t get a truck in there to move them.
      • PM_me_your_math 4y ago
        Thanks. It is not an embellishment, however. There are programs that create incentives for moving to rural or sparsely populated areas.
  • insane_dreamer 4y ago
    China has something like this (when you “buy” property you’re actually getting a 70 year lease from the government) and I can tell you that it’s a huge problem (no one wants to pay again for property they already paid for)
  • xkcd-sucks 4y ago
    A modest proposal: Do land rights the way Nature intends, i.e. one's territory is that which one can physically defend against incursion by conspecifics. Social groups are okay. Acceptable tool use will have to be determined by the courts.
• benj111 4y ago
  So when people talk about the founding fathers and what they had in mind when they wrote the constitution, typically in relation to gun laws, it should also be pointed out that the constitution should have run out after 19 years? I actually quite like this. The US constitution has been elevated to some quasi religious document where everyone interprets it how they want to interpret it. A bi decadal debate on what it should actually say would be useful. Although it would take politicians longer than that to actually agree.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    I feel you are commingling negative rights with regulations . The constitution provided "negative" rights to the people and individual states. Negative rights are rights that exist unless someone acts to negate them. This means the constitution affirms that people and states get to keep all priviledges, unless specifically enumerated as priviledges of the federal government. So, if the Federal government starts with nothing, the right end state for the for the government to end with nothing. This is quite different from the inertia you see today in Federal government regulatory growth. Going back to the current discussion, negative rights dont lapse since they define the starting point. It is only regulations (I.e. anything that comes outside of the constitution) which is subject to reset.
    • benj111 4y ago
      Negative rights, are rights to be free from something. Eg cruel and unusual punishment. Also the quote started "It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution" So I don't see what's wrong talking about the constitution.
  • harshreality 4y ago
    Jefferson is speaking there of a political-philosophical hypothesis. It's not a statement of fact that laws do, or that the Constitution does, expire after 19 years. Clearly they don't by default. By all means, let's hold a constitutional convention periodically. Whether it's every 20 years or every 100, we're overdue. The founders even foresaw the potential need for that, and provided a procedure utilizing constitutional conventions to bypass state legislatures, a procedure which the country has not once utilized. Failure to go through the amendment procedure doesn't grant us the right to ignore the Constitution as written. It's very easy to say you don't like some part of the Constitution. It's very difficult to propose and pass an alternative.