now that I think of it, if farmers had already owned their farms, Mao & co wouldn't have gone through the trouble of redistributing it via Land Reform. I might

now that I think of it, if farmers had already owned their farms, Mao & co wouldn't have gone through the trouble of redistributing it via Land Reform. I might suggest that drawing boundaries around a plot of land and calling it "owned" was the beginning of politics, as it represents collective agreements and mechanisms to arrive at them. Have you dug into Elinor Ostrom's work around the tragedy of the commons being an unrealistic model given that people don't just let other people's cows overgraze? We create rules and sanctions before the resource collapses (or rather, we try to; and that attempt to prevent collapse could be called government).