3 ms·

It's utterly immoral to allow people to own land. Land is a unique asset that belongs to society and letting anyone think otherwise was a massive mistake. The g

It's utterly immoral to allow people to own land. Land is a unique asset that belongs to society and letting anyone think otherwise was a massive mistake. The government allows people to enter into perpetual leases, but that's it. Private ownership is useful as an incentive to create things. Land isn't created so it can't be owned.

imtringued 4y ago
Ownership of land is an illogical concept anyway. The government doesn't own the land either, it is merely protecting it from intruders and enforcing the law it wrote. There are lots of stories about aboriginees being surprised that they could sell something they believed they didn't own. From a simple arithmetic perspective, a land "owner" that doesn't pay at least the guard labor necessary to protect the land, will eventually lose that land. If we assume that military expenditures are paid by working income tax payers, then the guard labor would no longer be paid by its beneficiary and over the long run this disequilibrium will be eliminated through a revolution or war. In the latter case, the attacker values the land more than the "owner" and therefore it is "profitable" to acquire it by expensing the full amount of guard labor to "defend" it from the weaker army of the original owner.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Ownership of land is an illogical concept anyway. The government doesn't own the land either, it is merely protecting it from intruders and enforcing the law it wrote. I don't see how this doesn't extend to all property. If it does, perhaps ownership is "logically" impossible, so we're going to need a new word to mean what everyone's using "ownership" to mean now, because it's a useful word.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    The damage Rousseau has done... Give me Locke and hands off my bought and paid for hat rest.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      If we're going with Locke, you better be using all your land productively if you want to retain ownership. [EDIT] For those who've not read him (the Second Treatise is, if not great philosophy, at least a clear, engaging, relatively-quick read, and is the work of his that comes up the most) Locke notices, as many have, that land ownership is kind of screwy under many otherwise-liberal frameworks of political and economic thinking, and justifies it by proposing that adding labor to land is what renders it fit for private ownership, by improving it (in terms of productivity or utility-to-people) beyond its "natural" state. Like most of the rest of the work, this comes off rather as Locke deciding which things he likes first, then going back and constructing the reasoning to justify them under his "natural law" framework, while studiously ignoring any branches of that reasoning that may head any direction he doesn't like—but, regardless, that's his take: input increasing productivity/utility is what justifies private land ownership.

imtringued 4y ago

Ownership of land is an illogical concept anyway. The government doesn't own the land either, it is merely protecting it from intruders and enforcing the law it wrote. There are lots of stories about aboriginees being surprised that they could sell something they believed they didn't own. From a simple arithmetic perspective, a land "owner" that doesn't pay at least the guard labor necessary to protect the land, will eventually lose that land. If we assume that military expenditures are paid by working income tax payers, then the guard labor would no longer be paid by its beneficiary and over the long run this disequilibrium will be eliminated through a revolution or war. In the latter case, the attacker values the land more than the "owner" and therefore it is "profitable" to acquire it by expensing the full amount of guard labor to "defend" it from the weaker army of the original owner.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> Ownership of land is an illogical concept anyway. The government doesn't own the land either, it is merely protecting it from intruders and enforcing the law it wrote. I don't see how this doesn't extend to all property. If it does, perhaps ownership is "logically" impossible, so we're going to need a new word to mean what everyone's using "ownership" to mean now, because it's a useful word.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  The damage Rousseau has done... Give me Locke and hands off my bought and paid for hat rest.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    If we're going with Locke, you better be using all your land productively if you want to retain ownership. [EDIT] For those who've not read him (the Second Treatise is, if not great philosophy, at least a clear, engaging, relatively-quick read, and is the work of his that comes up the most) Locke notices, as many have, that land ownership is kind of screwy under many otherwise-liberal frameworks of political and economic thinking, and justifies it by proposing that adding labor to land is what renders it fit for private ownership, by improving it (in terms of productivity or utility-to-people) beyond its "natural" state. Like most of the rest of the work, this comes off rather as Locke deciding which things he likes first, then going back and constructing the reasoning to justify them under his "natural law" framework, while studiously ignoring any branches of that reasoning that may head any direction he doesn't like—but, regardless, that's his take: input increasing productivity/utility is what justifies private land ownership.