4 ms·

American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned t

by myshpa 3y ago

American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned to the people. Given that most of that list is meat farms, that would be a lot of forests, a lot of carbon storage, and a lot of biodiversity.

hinkley 3y ago
There's a BBC series where they look at living conditions at different times, but the Tudor England one was most memorable. They didn't come right out and say it but the implication was clear, that by the time of Henry VIII's reign, the Church and the Royal Family each owned about 1/3 of England and the Church controlled more and more land every time someone had a deathbed conversion. The American version of British History is that Henry broke with the church so he could marry more people and have an heir. I think he knew damn well that the Church was consuming England whole and he may be one of the last monarchs that still had the power to stop it.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Both stories can be true at once—it's a matter of record that Henry used his position as head of the church to go through a lot of wives, and that the initial tensions were centered on his rather hasty annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could be legally married to his then-4-months-pregnant mistress. It's also well established that he took back a lot of land from the Church. History is complicated and events rarely have a singular explanation.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Few decisions are good for only one reason.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. How is this even possible? Even in communism the state owns all the land. Native American tribes also went to war with each other to control different areas. Legally recognized by many or not, some person who group is going to control the land.
- dwallin 3y ago
  You are mixing ownership with control. Ownership is a legal construct and therefore only exists within a given political-economic system. Control is a result of natural laws related to the application of force. Governments control their sovereign land and bestow ownership through the rules they have set. They can bestow ownership upon themselves, people, legal entities, or even no one at all.
lolinder 3y ago
Most of the land described in this chart as belonging to the royal family is actually just Canadian public land, not the actual private estate of the monarch. Which means de facto it already has been returned to the people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land
xkcd-sucks 3y ago
"Land ownership" or "territory" is a fundamental concept of life - Plants, bacteria, fungi, insects, and animals all establish territories which they defend against competitors which often include conspecifics. Obviously not every single type of critter does this, but many do.
- gizajob 3y ago
  “Land ownership” is a contractual and statutory invention of the human race, and only a recent invention amongst certain parts of our species. No other animal “owns” land or tries to enforce their ownership via the courts or with statutes if that fails. Animals are just ‘on’ the land, and either they’re thriving, being predated, or not. Same as dolphins don’t own the sea they swim around in.
  - xkcd-sucks 3y ago
    Of course "legal ownership" is by definition statutory, but non-humans territorial behavior is essentially the same as human ownership behavior in the absence of courts: As a few examples of many, a mountain lion resident in an area will fight and attempt to remove other mountain lions that aren't established residents and will also kill coyotes etc.; black walnut trees poison the soil around them to prevent other plants from moving in, etc.
    - myshpa 3y ago
      > non-humans territorial behavior is essentially the same as human ownership behavior Every individual in nature has to find it's own space and protect it, agreed. But their young don't inherit their claims, as humans do. https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-35714 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-35714 The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago Researchers compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011 and found about 900 surnames still present in Florence
    - gizajob 3y ago
      Those organisms don't draw lines on maps and issue passports.
danbruc 3y ago
With birth everyone should receive a piece of land the size of global land area divided by global population and upon death you return it. And this is of course extremely simplified, we probably still want some public land, and the population changes, and not all land is created equal, ... but you get the idea.
- f154hfds 3y ago
  In ancient Israel it was a law that land had to be re-pooled back into its original tribal allocation every 49 years, it was called 'the year of jubilee'. Not sure there's evidence this law was really kept, though it's an interesting idea. Sometimes I wonder how property value (and housing markets) would behave if everyone in the US eventually went back to some 'tribal' allotment every 50 years.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Seems impractical. As an alternative, I'd suggest that land can not ever be "owned". Instead one gets a lease of 99 years - enough for multiple generations of a family, but with a distinct endpoint.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    In which way would this be different? Seems to me more like a technicality, whether it should be called ownership even if it does not come with all the rights we usually associate with ownership. When I said returned upon death, you could of course also just pass it to one of your children. What I wrote was purely conceptual, an actual implementation could look very different. The idea is just that everyone gets to own or lease or whatever you want to call it some land and does not have to buy it from others who have accumulated it over the generations and keept it for themselves. If you want more land than your share, you can get it from someone who doesn't want their entire share, but only until their death when they lose control over that land and therefore can also no longer lease it to you. At which point you have to return it or find someone else who will lease the same amount of land to you. I guess you could say that my idea is that you get control over a certain area of land during your lifetime but it does not have to be a specific piece of land and you can freely exchange and transfer this control as you like, but not past your lifetime.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Land value tax now. The land belongs to the people and it is utterly immoral to speculate on it.
jareklupinski 3y ago
> Given that most of that list is meat farms I hope lab-grown meat will lead to our next Renaissance
CPLX 3y ago
Name a piece of land where “the people” who it should be returned to is a single clearly defined entity capable of acting in unison.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Most people live in a society with a functioning government. All land in a country should be owned by that country's government and rented back to people at close to its full unimproved rental value.
TyroneBlack 3y ago
>The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned to the people. It would be impossible to determine the original owners. Every nation and tribe took land from others who took land from others who took land from others, etc. We shouldn't just give land back to the previous owners when they stole it from others.
- defrost 3y ago
  > Every nation and tribe took land from others who took land from others who took land from others, etc. False. There are, in fact, actual OG land owners who are first people: Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416 Note that this is sound genetic evidence that post dates Quadrant literary opinions that waffle on about circulating patterns and waves of takeover. When the Sahul paleocontinent was first settled by humans they arrived, spread out, and more or less stayed where they stopped moving.
  - TyroneBlack 3y ago
    I don't have access to the paper so I can't read it. There are a few problems though. One, we don't know for sure that the aboriginals were the first in Australia. It is possible a tribe made it to Australia and were attacked by the present day aboriginals who came later. Your paper presumably doesn't disprove that? Second, it seems like you are suggesting that no aboriginal tribe ever attacked another tribe and took their land. That seems like a ridiculous assertion and I need definitive proof, because that has never happened anywhere else in the world. Even if you posted is accurate, which there is no proof of, it would be an exception that proves the rule.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > I don't have access to the paper so I can't read it. Weird - anyone that routinely reads actual science papers knows how to access them: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/nature21416 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/nature21416 > Your paper presumably doesn't disprove that? There's an entire body of work on human diaspora from first origins, it's been making great strides in recent decades with DNA comparisons dating movements by degree of change over time - that'd be a good place to start your study. > because that has never happened anywhere else in the world. That seems like a ridiculous assertion and I need definitive proof, can you back that up? Good luck in furthering your education and best wishes to you MrShoelaces.
adolph 3y ago
> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. > The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned to the people. If something is owned by nobody, how can it be "stolen?" If lands were "returned," how can someone who disclaims ownership receive it?
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  I’m think your first statement should be clarified otherwise it’s an argument for genocide, i.e. nazi gold stolen during holocaust and put into Swiss banks - they killed the owners so is it stolen?
  - adolph 3y ago
    No, it just follows the parent comment's seemingly conflicting assertions "American Indians were right... nobody should own the land" and "lands were stolen and should be returned to the people." In your hypothetical "nazi gold," the stolen goods were owned by specific people who did not voluntarily repudiate ownership. Imagine that someone disclaimed ownership of a dollar bill. Another person picked it up and bought a tasty dollar menu item. Would the first person have any claim to the resulting soft-serve ice cream cone? (Postulating a working soft serve machine.) https://www.eater.com/2020/10/23/21530265/mcdonalds-soft-serve-ice-cream-machine-broken-map-mcbroken-rashiq-zahid https://www.eater.com/2020/10/23/21530265/mcdonalds-soft-ser...
mkl 3y ago
> Given that most of that list is meat farms, that would be a lot of forests, a lot of carbon storage, and a lot of biodiversity. No, most of those farms are in Australia, and they're so big because it's so arid. They're not taking the place of forests.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land "There’s a myth that Europeans arrived in the Americas and divided the land up, mystifying Native Americans who had no concept of property rights. In reality, historian Allen Greer writes, various American societies had highly-developed systems of property ownership and use. Meanwhile, European colonists sometimes viewed land as a common resource, not just as individual property." -- https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-columbus/ https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-colu...
- myshpa 3y ago
  I should have used "no one", not "nobody". "Many Indigenous societies practiced communal ownership of land and natural resources. Land was often viewed as a shared and sacred entity that belonged to the entire community or tribe. It was not seen as something that could be privately owned or bought and sold as in Western concepts of land ownership. While the concept of private ownership was rare, Indigenous groups often had rights to use certain areas for specific purposes, such as hunting, fishing, farming, or gathering. These rights were often based on traditional customs and were respected within the community. Indigenous peoples generally held deep reverence for the land and nature. They saw themselves as stewards of the environment, with a responsibility to care for the earth and its resources for future generations."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

by myshpa 3y ago

hinkley 3y ago

There's a BBC series where they look at living conditions at different times, but the Tudor England one was most memorable. They didn't come right out and say it but the implication was clear, that by the time of Henry VIII's reign, the Church and the Royal Family each owned about 1/3 of England and the Church controlled more and more land every time someone had a deathbed conversion. The American version of British History is that Henry broke with the church so he could marry more people and have an heir. I think he knew damn well that the Church was consuming England whole and he may be one of the last monarchs that still had the power to stop it.

lolinder 3y ago
Both stories can be true at once—it's a matter of record that Henry used his position as head of the church to go through a lot of wives, and that the initial tensions were centered on his rather hasty annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could be legally married to his then-4-months-pregnant mistress. It's also well established that he took back a lot of land from the Church. History is complicated and events rarely have a singular explanation.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Few decisions are good for only one reason.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. How is this even possible? Even in communism the state owns all the land. Native American tribes also went to war with each other to control different areas. Legally recognized by many or not, some person who group is going to control the land.

dwallin 3y ago
You are mixing ownership with control. Ownership is a legal construct and therefore only exists within a given political-economic system. Control is a result of natural laws related to the application of force. Governments control their sovereign land and bestow ownership through the rules they have set. They can bestow ownership upon themselves, people, legal entities, or even no one at all.

lolinder 3y ago

Most of the land described in this chart as belonging to the royal family is actually just Canadian public land, not the actual private estate of the monarch. Which means de facto it already has been returned to the people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land

xkcd-sucks 3y ago

"Land ownership" or "territory" is a fundamental concept of life - Plants, bacteria, fungi, insects, and animals all establish territories which they defend against competitors which often include conspecifics. Obviously not every single type of critter does this, but many do.

gizajob 3y ago
“Land ownership” is a contractual and statutory invention of the human race, and only a recent invention amongst certain parts of our species. No other animal “owns” land or tries to enforce their ownership via the courts or with statutes if that fails. Animals are just ‘on’ the land, and either they’re thriving, being predated, or not. Same as dolphins don’t own the sea they swim around in.
- xkcd-sucks 3y ago
  Of course "legal ownership" is by definition statutory, but non-humans territorial behavior is essentially the same as human ownership behavior in the absence of courts: As a few examples of many, a mountain lion resident in an area will fight and attempt to remove other mountain lions that aren't established residents and will also kill coyotes etc.; black walnut trees poison the soil around them to prevent other plants from moving in, etc.
  - myshpa 3y ago
    > non-humans territorial behavior is essentially the same as human ownership behavior Every individual in nature has to find it's own space and protect it, agreed. But their young don't inherit their claims, as humans do. https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-35714 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-35714 The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago Researchers compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011 and found about 900 surnames still present in Florence
  - gizajob 3y ago
    Those organisms don't draw lines on maps and issue passports.

danbruc 3y ago

With birth everyone should receive a piece of land the size of global land area divided by global population and upon death you return it. And this is of course extremely simplified, we probably still want some public land, and the population changes, and not all land is created equal, ... but you get the idea.

f154hfds 3y ago
In ancient Israel it was a law that land had to be re-pooled back into its original tribal allocation every 49 years, it was called 'the year of jubilee'. Not sure there's evidence this law was really kept, though it's an interesting idea. Sometimes I wonder how property value (and housing markets) would behave if everyone in the US eventually went back to some 'tribal' allotment every 50 years.
euroderf 3y ago
Seems impractical. As an alternative, I'd suggest that land can not ever be "owned". Instead one gets a lease of 99 years - enough for multiple generations of a family, but with a distinct endpoint.
- danbruc 3y ago
  In which way would this be different? Seems to me more like a technicality, whether it should be called ownership even if it does not come with all the rights we usually associate with ownership. When I said returned upon death, you could of course also just pass it to one of your children. What I wrote was purely conceptual, an actual implementation could look very different. The idea is just that everyone gets to own or lease or whatever you want to call it some land and does not have to buy it from others who have accumulated it over the generations and keept it for themselves. If you want more land than your share, you can get it from someone who doesn't want their entire share, but only until their death when they lose control over that land and therefore can also no longer lease it to you. At which point you have to return it or find someone else who will lease the same amount of land to you. I guess you could say that my idea is that you get control over a certain area of land during your lifetime but it does not have to be a specific piece of land and you can freely exchange and transfer this control as you like, but not past your lifetime.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Land value tax now. The land belongs to the people and it is utterly immoral to speculate on it.

jareklupinski 3y ago

> Given that most of that list is meat farms I hope lab-grown meat will lead to our next Renaissance

CPLX 3y ago

Name a piece of land where “the people” who it should be returned to is a single clearly defined entity capable of acting in unison.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Most people live in a society with a functioning government. All land in a country should be owned by that country's government and rented back to people at close to its full unimproved rental value.

TyroneBlack 3y ago

>The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned to the people. It would be impossible to determine the original owners. Every nation and tribe took land from others who took land from others who took land from others, etc. We shouldn't just give land back to the previous owners when they stole it from others.

defrost 3y ago
> Every nation and tribe took land from others who took land from others who took land from others, etc. False. There are, in fact, actual OG land owners who are first people: Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416 Note that this is sound genetic evidence that post dates Quadrant literary opinions that waffle on about circulating patterns and waves of takeover. When the Sahul paleocontinent was first settled by humans they arrived, spread out, and more or less stayed where they stopped moving.
- TyroneBlack 3y ago
  I don't have access to the paper so I can't read it. There are a few problems though. One, we don't know for sure that the aboriginals were the first in Australia. It is possible a tribe made it to Australia and were attacked by the present day aboriginals who came later. Your paper presumably doesn't disprove that? Second, it seems like you are suggesting that no aboriginal tribe ever attacked another tribe and took their land. That seems like a ridiculous assertion and I need definitive proof, because that has never happened anywhere else in the world. Even if you posted is accurate, which there is no proof of, it would be an exception that proves the rule.
  - defrost 3y ago
    > I don't have access to the paper so I can't read it. Weird - anyone that routinely reads actual science papers knows how to access them: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/nature21416 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/nature21416 > Your paper presumably doesn't disprove that? There's an entire body of work on human diaspora from first origins, it's been making great strides in recent decades with DNA comparisons dating movements by degree of change over time - that'd be a good place to start your study. > because that has never happened anywhere else in the world. That seems like a ridiculous assertion and I need definitive proof, can you back that up? Good luck in furthering your education and best wishes to you MrShoelaces.

adolph 3y ago

> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land. > The British Royal family and the Catholic Church... those lands were stolen and should be returned to the people. If something is owned by nobody, how can it be "stolen?" If lands were "returned," how can someone who disclaims ownership receive it?

stevenwoo 3y ago
I’m think your first statement should be clarified otherwise it’s an argument for genocide, i.e. nazi gold stolen during holocaust and put into Swiss banks - they killed the owners so is it stolen?
- adolph 3y ago
  No, it just follows the parent comment's seemingly conflicting assertions "American Indians were right... nobody should own the land" and "lands were stolen and should be returned to the people." In your hypothetical "nazi gold," the stolen goods were owned by specific people who did not voluntarily repudiate ownership. Imagine that someone disclaimed ownership of a dollar bill. Another person picked it up and bought a tasty dollar menu item. Would the first person have any claim to the resulting soft-serve ice cream cone? (Postulating a working soft serve machine.) https://www.eater.com/2020/10/23/21530265/mcdonalds-soft-serve-ice-cream-machine-broken-map-mcbroken-rashiq-zahid https://www.eater.com/2020/10/23/21530265/mcdonalds-soft-ser...

mkl 3y ago

> Given that most of that list is meat farms, that would be a lot of forests, a lot of carbon storage, and a lot of biodiversity. No, most of those farms are in Australia, and they're so big because it's so arid. They're not taking the place of forests.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

>> American Indians were right... nobody should own the land "There’s a myth that Europeans arrived in the Americas and divided the land up, mystifying Native Americans who had no concept of property rights. In reality, historian Allen Greer writes, various American societies had highly-developed systems of property ownership and use. Meanwhile, European colonists sometimes viewed land as a common resource, not just as individual property." -- https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-columbus/ https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-colu...

myshpa 3y ago
I should have used "no one", not "nobody". "Many Indigenous societies practiced communal ownership of land and natural resources. Land was often viewed as a shared and sacred entity that belonged to the entire community or tribe. It was not seen as something that could be privately owned or bought and sold as in Western concepts of land ownership. While the concept of private ownership was rare, Indigenous groups often had rights to use certain areas for specific purposes, such as hunting, fishing, farming, or gathering. These rights were often based on traditional customs and were respected within the community. Indigenous peoples generally held deep reverence for the land and nature. They saw themselves as stewards of the environment, with a responsibility to care for the earth and its resources for future generations."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]