11 ms·

The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, setting up their family with generational wealth, is de

by bgun 2y ago

The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, setting up their family with generational wealth, is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful. This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying. Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.

sc68cal 2y ago
> the pioneer days when land was plentiful. I think you mean to say "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"
- echelon 2y ago
  > "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land" That's every single society ever. This has been the civilizational algorithm. It predates our species. That same tactic is alive and well today.
  - milicat 2y ago
    A gross oversimplification of anthropology.
  - James_K 2y ago
    I don't think so. How many genocides can you think of on the scale of the Native American genocide? Such events seem rare to me.
    - echelon 2y ago
      Apart from the Sentinelese, I can't think of one civilization that hasn't warred and taken over land and resources from others. And we really don't have proof the Sentinelese didn't do this at some point themselves. History was full of violence.
      - James_K 2y ago
        You can think of many examples of war and conquest, but what happened in America is more than just war. Genocide is more than just war. Framing the atrocities upon which the US was founded as merely "historically normal" is a deeply revisionist view of history. Technological development at that time allowed for many great evils which were simply not possible before.
        ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        How do you know that what happened to the natives was so much worse than the hundreds if not thousands of similar fates that must have befallen other cultures over the last several tens of thousands of years?
        James_K 2y ago
        Because the things you're referring to didn't happen. That's why you say they "must have happened" instead of "actually did happen". I can think of some examples of similar treatment, for example the British in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland around that time, but even then we see that there are many living natives in those lands today. America is unique in that the overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        Aloisius 2y ago
        > overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry Em. First, numbers of "native ancestry" are almost all self-reported which has more to do with self-identified culture than genetic ancestry. Second, trying to argue through the use current numbers of native ancestry is nonsensical given the US has been an outlier in terms of immigration for a very long time making it impossible to compare against. For goodness sake, around a tenth of the population has been foreign born for the better part of two centuries which has had a dramatic effect on ancestry (both genetic and self-reported).
  - yulker 2y ago
    European colonization of the world is a unique enough phenomenon to not hand wave it away as business as usual. Further, the industrial intensification and financialization of this colonization through the 18th-20th centuries alone is singular on its impact on human civilization with no precedent.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    > It predates our species People will really say this and then still be mad when I want to marry just a couple of my cousins
- dpc050505 2y ago
  Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Except it was not shared, it was almost a genocide.
    - scarby2 2y ago
      genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population. After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.
      - fc417fc802 2y ago
        > at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.
        IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Sure, some tried, but smallpox and other diseases were doing a great job on their own. It didn't need a few blankets to make it a real pandemic.
        Aloisius 2y ago
        The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.
- lurk2 2y ago
  If the land had been the basis of North American prosperity there would have been civilizations there capable of resisting European colonialism.
  - James_K 2y ago
    The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - dddddaviddddd 2y ago
        > The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them. > Long since debunked I mean, the linked article says horses were introduced in the 1600s (brought by Europeans), and then spread throughout the Americas without requiring further European distribution.
        TylerE 2y ago
        The article says the horses were in the Americas millions of years ago.
        rezonant 2y ago
        And then died out, before Cortes brought them back to the continent in 1519. Native Americans then discovered the horses before they ran into the Europeans and began spreading them across the country. > Horses evolved in the Americas around four million years ago, but by about 10,000 years ago, they had mostly disappeared from the fossil record, per the Conversation. Spanish settlers likely first brought horses back to the Americas in 1519, when Hernán Cortés arrived on the continent in Mexico. Per the new paper, Indigenous peoples then transported horses north along trade networks. Don't forget to read the whole article!
- casey2 2y ago
  The truth has always been and will always be that the people who are most technologically advanced will end up with the land, weather by force or purchase. Simply due to the fact that it's more valuable in their hands. Driving out some campers to build a town is the rule, not an exception.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    More valuable? More valuable… to whom? In human affairs there is no such thing as absolute value. The reason is simply that it is inevitable as much as gravity is inevitable. Making a moral law against gravity isn’t going to get you very far.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Define "orginally". You might be interested to research how the Native Americans interacted, especially the Lakota. Rights by conquest was not a new idea.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Well the obvious response is then "can I conquer your land by force too?". No. Because there is a construction of "lawful property rights" that starts with the appropriation of land by force but protects the new owner from the same.
    - pcthrowaway 2y ago
      Well technically the land can still be appropriated by force, only you have to apply it against the entire system which enforces "lawful property rights"
      - whamlastxmas 2y ago
        The most human thing ASI could do would be to have its own Manifest Destiny
      - flutas 2y ago
        or just use the system which enforces "lawful property rights" see: Adverse Possession
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    I mean murder's not a new idea either but it's broadly condemned in most moral vibes "Right by conquest" is sort of a cope, like "You might have a green light and the right of way, but Isaac Newton always favors the semi truck"
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- asdf6969 2y ago
  There were a few hundred thousand of them across the entire continent. In the best case scenario, most of them still would have died to disease. Unless you believe a few hundred thousand people own should own an entire continent as their blood and soil birthright the land was always going to end up like this There’s still a lot of land out there. The only problem today is nobody wants to start over with no plumbing, electricity, or other modern conveniences.
  - codingdave 2y ago
    The numbers you mention don't match what I see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...
    - asdf6969 2y ago
      You’re right, I mistook the Canadian numbers for all of North America. I know south and Central America had a much higher population but that’s not what this thread is about. It looks like a more accurate number is in the low millions so my point still stands.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    I'm gonna go conquer Georgia, then. Genocide some country folks, burn every Confederate flag I see, end some bloodlines forever. There's not many people living there, right by conquest, etc., plus Reconstruction wasn't finished properly anyway.
    - asdf6969 2y ago
      Hell yea brother. Blood and soil. Georgia is for the Georgians and nobody else should be allowed to settle there
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  If you steal something from someone who stole something, I'm not going to cry for the original thief.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Most of us were born into land that was colonized in written memory. I would definitely cry for the death of the innocent grandchildren of thieves.
- araes 2y ago
  We can still steal land from people who were originally on that land, happens all the time in America. - Land Appropriation for "Public Need" with Direct Transfer to Wealthy: https://fastercapital.com/content/Land-appropriation--The-Intricacies-of-Expropriation.html https://fastercapital.com/content/Land-appropriation--The-In... - Heirs property, property tax sales, and Torrens Acts (article focuses on black people, yet works equally well on all skin colors): https://inequality.org/article/black-land-theft-racial-wealth-divide/ https://inequality.org/article/black-land-theft-racial-wealt... - Wealth City / Suburb secession to leave poor areas to pay bills, and then buy them in destitution: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-11/atlanta-s-wealthy-white-suburbs-want-their-own-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-11/atlanta-s... - Rezone areas to make new cities, take all the businesses and good land, and leave the remaining "city" with the bills (another Atlanta idea): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Union+City,+GA/@33.6158433,-84.5757345,15.34z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x88f4e37dff6defcd:0xae053f860c90cf7d!8m2!3d33.5870558!4d-84.5424299!16zL20vMHJ3bjQ?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDIyNi4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/Union+City,+GA/@33.6158433... - Sell vacant land out from under land owners with false listings: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newark/news/fraudsters-are-stealing-land-out-from-under-owners https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newark/news/fra... - Purposely Induced Foreclosure, Bankruptcy or surprise tax assessments to cause a forced sale: https://www.businessethicsnetwork.org/forced-sale-implications-and-processes/ https://www.businessethicsnetwork.org/forced-sale-implicatio...
- michaelcampbell 2y ago
  That's what YOU mean to say.
TZubiri 2y ago
" This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas." And why you guys are looking at Mars now. Here in latam we haven't filled the land at all, you guys have been hard working and filled with riches. But our laziness might give us more longevity, we are playing the long game with the amazon
- hnthrow90348765 2y ago
  LATAM will get a lot of remote work if the wages stay lower than the US since they're in better-for-US-company-timezones than India or others overseas. That's what my company is outsourcing to.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Yeah, looks like the go to strategy, but I may have to pass on the gold mine and go for the higher payoff of a decent living but a more spiritually fulfilling trade diplomacy In international trade there's complementary/productive trade, you have gold, we have silver, let's trade. And you also have redundant/substitutive trade, you have soy, we have cheaper soy, buy our soy. I don't believe from the bottom of my heart in substitutive trade for similar reasons I don't believe in (most) inmigration. We've conquered the americas, now we have to populate it, god won't reward desertors who revert their ancestor's decision by running back to the old continent, and the excuse of "I was born in the wrong hemisphere" is also quite petty, we rolled the dice and this is what we got. Substitutive trade isn't far from immigration, the poor want to go to the rich countries, and the rich buy the cheap labour. Where is the pride in that? In both sides. Leave your country for another with a different religion, leave your mother your brethren, and serve. Leave a war instead of fighting? Take a 1 hour bus to a fancy neighbourhood to serve coffee and wash dishes. Conversely, you can wash your own dishes, you can use a bottle of water and fill that up before you leave, we don't need a migrant washing our dishes, and we don't need to migrate to wash dishes. So I'm trying to focus on trade that is not replaceable with local labour, hopefully countries start nailing down remote work and we start locking those behind visas. And unfortunately india and philipinnes get that productive trade, they can cover night shifts. We'll find stuff to export. There's not much, as Trump said "they need us more than we need them". Local entertainment, sports and games will always be there, it's like cybertourism. there might be an argument for redundant trade as a counterweight to an unbalanced productive export. But I don't think that works long term. There's also localization services, in language and legal, but those are just costs of exporting really. Lithium is probably the lesser evil, super extractive, but we gotta pay somehow. Sorry about the super rant. Lately I've been more using forums as a way to write things that I already had drafted in my mind.
foolfoolz 2y ago
land is still plentiful in the u. s. just maybe not where you want to be, similar to what a pioneer town might look like
Gothmog69 2y ago
I wonder about the economics of places with declining population like Japan and South Korea. I always read that declining population is bad for the economy but feels like those countries will have more opportunities for the young in the future.
adverbly 2y ago
Land value tax would solve this.
yapyap 2y ago
of course this was never going to last forever, we have more than 8 billion people in the world, if even 0.00001% of people wanted to do what you proposed, eventually own a part of a nation’s land, thats 80 thousand people. that’s just not happening
lurk2 2y ago
America isn't overpopulated. The pyramid scheme you're describing is not a Malthusian constraint but the product of bad monetary policy privileging non-productive investments in real estate. There's still no better place on earth for normal people to build wealth, unless you're playing the digital nomad game.
- thelamest 2y ago
  It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    It was never implied that this mechanism was magical. If you reread the original post, the claim being made is: > The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, [...] was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is manifestly not the case. My response was that, insofar as a pyramid scheme exists, it has nothing to do with some fundamental Malthusian limit on how many people can fit in a given space; this limit exists, but is not the reason that the rich are getting richer, which instead has to do with monetary policy. You make cheap money available to those with good credit. These people take out loans and use the money to buy real property with the expectation that they will be able to rent it out for more than the carrying cost of the loan. This causes the price of real estate to rise artificially beyond what it would if the cheap credit had not been made available. The key issue here is that this credit isn't being made available to everyone at once - you have to qualify for the loan first.
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  > bad monetary policy Bad zoning policy, more like.
- yulker 2y ago
  America has enough room to build many new cities in useful locations, yet it doesn't. Why is that?
Aurornis 2y ago
A big part of the problem is that too many people want and/or have to live in very tiny portions of the country: major cities. There is a lot of cheap land and even a lot of cheap houses for those willing to live in a different place. Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically. This has opened the door to many of them moving even farther away, unlocking an entire new world of affordability. There was a brief moment where all of this looked like it was a very real possibility for many of us, but the rubber band is snapping back with remote work and now many are being required to move back to those few cities again to find the best jobs. > but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. I don't think most people believe that you can just work hard and then have generational wealth for your heirs. That feels like a strawman argument. Generational wealth has always been a difficult feat for the few, not something we promised everyone could achieve. However, people also underestimate the power of compounding for retirement savings. Obviously not helpful to someone working at McDonalds and trying to pay rent in a big city, but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. Not "generational wealth" or "setting up your heirs", but enough to make big contributions to education, helping kids with emergencies, possibly leaving some non-trivial inheritance. This happens all the time and continues to happen with millenials, as it will happen with Gen Z. Again, not literally everyone but to suggest that it's out of reach is really out of alignment with the reality of what we see people earning and saving.
- koolba 2y ago
  > but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. You’re off by at least a factor of ten. 40 years of $100/month savings at a generous 5% compounding is $148,242. And that’s in future dollars. Drop it to 4% and you’re down $116,606. The real formula to consider is what percentage of your monthly spending you are savings. If it’s 100%, then every month worked is one month of retirement. If it’s 50% then two months of working is one month of retirement. If you live frugally and save 400% of your spend, each month counts as four retired months. It’s a simple fraction with the numerator as your net savings and the denominator your total spending. And lowering the denominator scales things much faster.
zusammen 2y ago
[dead]
6stringmerc 2y ago
The Puritans became settlers in the New World because they were hated and thrown out of Europe / England so they set up shop and managed to derange society to this day in the US.
giantg2 2y ago
"is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful." Land is still generally plentiful. The need to all live in one spot is more social/artificial and really accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to rapid urbanization.
methou 2y ago
It does not have to be the "pioneer days", just saying this from Japan...
nullc 2y ago
In the US you can buy land at quantity for, say, ~$1k/acre in places where there aren't people/infrastructure/etc... There is no shortage of land in the US. There is a shortage of land in a few high density areas. But increasing their density makes them more attractive. I don't think it's reasonable to make the pioneer comparison-- if you want to do what pioneers did and build something from almost nothing in the middle of nowhere with great effort then there is still an analogous route open to you.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  There is a lot of land for $100/acre. The main problem with that land is there is no water.
  - nullc 2y ago
    Indeed, though at $1000/ you can be proximal to subsurface water at least... Perhaps not enough for intensive agriculture, but absolutely enough to live.
wcfrobert 2y ago
Land is not scarce in the US. My road trip through Nevada to Salt Lake City convinced me of that much. What is scarce is land people actually want to live in - with safe neighborhoods, good schools, restaurants, shops, etc. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism is definitely making this worse. I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore. Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  Doesn’t BLM control chunks of land that are desirable but not allowed for settlement?
  - scoofy 2y ago
    The point is San Francisco has tons of land (with houses already built on it) that is desirable but not allow for redevelopment.
  - Analemma_ 2y ago
    Not really, no. The land the BLM owns is mostly scrubland suitable for cattle grazing and basically nothing else. I suspect whoever told you that has an ideological bone to pick with the BLM and is bullshitting you to try and make you equally mad at them.
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      No one told me that I’ve just seen a map and it looks quite extensive in a lot of the western US.
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      By the way, this is such a textbook example of how planted counter narratives brainwash people into deflecting actual criticism on a topic. People interpret the speaker as if he is “one of those people”, who believes the counter narrative the listener has heard about. Rarely does the listener move past this point, and check in on whether the speaker is actually one of those people, or if he is someone who has never heard of those people, or if he has ignored those people because he thinks their views are just as stupid as you think they are, and he is actually independently criticizing the topic.
wwarner 2y ago
I want to agree with you but I don't see the difference between land and any other kind of asset ownership.
nitwit005 2y ago
The homestead act only ended in the 1970s. We were happily handing out land for free if people were willing to live there and work it quite recently. If there had still been a big demand for it, the program would probably still be running. They granted an extension to Alaska for that reason.
andrepd 2y ago
Look at Georgism, and LVT. A 100% "tax" on the value of unimproved land would ensure the forces of market itself would push away from the situation you describe.
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
It always strikes me as bizarre that people can "own" land. It existed before you and will exist after you, so how can a short-lived being really "own" it? It would make so much more sense if land "ownership" was related to whether you live on or work that particular piece of land rather than relying on arbitrary pieces of paper that were mainly decided before any of us were even born.
- newsclues 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_(property) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_(property) It’s paying tax for owning something that is weird to me.
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    Isn't the tax paying towards a society that will respect your "ownership" so that you can have access to legal redress if someone prevents you using it?
rsynnott 2y ago
This is a fairly simplistic/wrong view. If this were the case, say, you’d expect housing costs to be fairly reliably lower in low density European countries than high density ones. Spoiler: nope. In practice housing costs are driven by shortages of _housing_, not land. And these are quite different.

by bgun 2y ago

sc68cal 2y ago

> the pioneer days when land was plentiful. I think you mean to say "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"

echelon 2y ago
> "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land" That's every single society ever. This has been the civilizational algorithm. It predates our species. That same tactic is alive and well today.
- milicat 2y ago
  A gross oversimplification of anthropology.
- James_K 2y ago
  I don't think so. How many genocides can you think of on the scale of the Native American genocide? Such events seem rare to me.
  - echelon 2y ago
    Apart from the Sentinelese, I can't think of one civilization that hasn't warred and taken over land and resources from others. And we really don't have proof the Sentinelese didn't do this at some point themselves. History was full of violence.
    - James_K 2y ago
      You can think of many examples of war and conquest, but what happened in America is more than just war. Genocide is more than just war. Framing the atrocities upon which the US was founded as merely "historically normal" is a deeply revisionist view of history. Technological development at that time allowed for many great evils which were simply not possible before.
      - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        How do you know that what happened to the natives was so much worse than the hundreds if not thousands of similar fates that must have befallen other cultures over the last several tens of thousands of years?
        James_K 2y ago
        Because the things you're referring to didn't happen. That's why you say they "must have happened" instead of "actually did happen". I can think of some examples of similar treatment, for example the British in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland around that time, but even then we see that there are many living natives in those lands today. America is unique in that the overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        Aloisius 2y ago
        > overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry Em. First, numbers of "native ancestry" are almost all self-reported which has more to do with self-identified culture than genetic ancestry. Second, trying to argue through the use current numbers of native ancestry is nonsensical given the US has been an outlier in terms of immigration for a very long time making it impossible to compare against. For goodness sake, around a tenth of the population has been foreign born for the better part of two centuries which has had a dramatic effect on ancestry (both genetic and self-reported).
- yulker 2y ago
  European colonization of the world is a unique enough phenomenon to not hand wave it away as business as usual. Further, the industrial intensification and financialization of this colonization through the 18th-20th centuries alone is singular on its impact on human civilization with no precedent.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  > It predates our species People will really say this and then still be mad when I want to marry just a couple of my cousins
dpc050505 2y ago
Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.
- watwut 2y ago
  Except it was not shared, it was almost a genocide.
  - scarby2 2y ago
    genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population. After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      > at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Sure, some tried, but smallpox and other diseases were doing a great job on their own. It didn't need a few blankets to make it a real pandemic.
      - Aloisius 2y ago
        The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.
lurk2 2y ago
If the land had been the basis of North American prosperity there would have been civilizations there capable of resisting European colonialism.
- James_K 2y ago
  The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dddddaviddddd 2y ago
      > The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them. > Long since debunked I mean, the linked article says horses were introduced in the 1600s (brought by Europeans), and then spread throughout the Americas without requiring further European distribution.
      - TylerE 2y ago
        The article says the horses were in the Americas millions of years ago.
        rezonant 2y ago
        And then died out, before Cortes brought them back to the continent in 1519. Native Americans then discovered the horses before they ran into the Europeans and began spreading them across the country. > Horses evolved in the Americas around four million years ago, but by about 10,000 years ago, they had mostly disappeared from the fossil record, per the Conversation. Spanish settlers likely first brought horses back to the Americas in 1519, when Hernán Cortés arrived on the continent in Mexico. Per the new paper, Indigenous peoples then transported horses north along trade networks. Don't forget to read the whole article!
casey2 2y ago
The truth has always been and will always be that the people who are most technologically advanced will end up with the land, weather by force or purchase. Simply due to the fact that it's more valuable in their hands. Driving out some campers to build a town is the rule, not an exception.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  More valuable? More valuable… to whom? In human affairs there is no such thing as absolute value. The reason is simply that it is inevitable as much as gravity is inevitable. Making a moral law against gravity isn’t going to get you very far.
giantg2 2y ago
Define "orginally". You might be interested to research how the Native Americans interacted, especially the Lakota. Rights by conquest was not a new idea.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Well the obvious response is then "can I conquer your land by force too?". No. Because there is a construction of "lawful property rights" that starts with the appropriation of land by force but protects the new owner from the same.
  - pcthrowaway 2y ago
    Well technically the land can still be appropriated by force, only you have to apply it against the entire system which enforces "lawful property rights"
    - whamlastxmas 2y ago
      The most human thing ASI could do would be to have its own Manifest Destiny
    - flutas 2y ago
      or just use the system which enforces "lawful property rights" see: Adverse Possession
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I mean murder's not a new idea either but it's broadly condemned in most moral vibes "Right by conquest" is sort of a cope, like "You might have a green light and the right of way, but Isaac Newton always favors the semi truck"
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
asdf6969 2y ago
There were a few hundred thousand of them across the entire continent. In the best case scenario, most of them still would have died to disease. Unless you believe a few hundred thousand people own should own an entire continent as their blood and soil birthright the land was always going to end up like this There’s still a lot of land out there. The only problem today is nobody wants to start over with no plumbing, electricity, or other modern conveniences.
- codingdave 2y ago
  The numbers you mention don't match what I see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...
  - asdf6969 2y ago
    You’re right, I mistook the Canadian numbers for all of North America. I know south and Central America had a much higher population but that’s not what this thread is about. It looks like a more accurate number is in the low millions so my point still stands.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I'm gonna go conquer Georgia, then. Genocide some country folks, burn every Confederate flag I see, end some bloodlines forever. There's not many people living there, right by conquest, etc., plus Reconstruction wasn't finished properly anyway.
  - asdf6969 2y ago
    Hell yea brother. Blood and soil. Georgia is for the Georgians and nobody else should be allowed to settle there
IncreasePosts 2y ago
If you steal something from someone who stole something, I'm not going to cry for the original thief.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Most of us were born into land that was colonized in written memory. I would definitely cry for the death of the innocent grandchildren of thieves.
araes 2y ago
We can still steal land from people who were originally on that land, happens all the time in America. - Land Appropriation for "Public Need" with Direct Transfer to Wealthy: https://fastercapital.com/content/Land-appropriation--The-Intricacies-of-Expropriation.html https://fastercapital.com/content/Land-appropriation--The-In... - Heirs property, property tax sales, and Torrens Acts (article focuses on black people, yet works equally well on all skin colors): https://inequality.org/article/black-land-theft-racial-wealth-divide/ https://inequality.org/article/black-land-theft-racial-wealt... - Wealth City / Suburb secession to leave poor areas to pay bills, and then buy them in destitution: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-11/atlanta-s-wealthy-white-suburbs-want-their-own-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-11/atlanta-s... - Rezone areas to make new cities, take all the businesses and good land, and leave the remaining "city" with the bills (another Atlanta idea): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Union+City,+GA/@33.6158433,-84.5757345,15.34z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x88f4e37dff6defcd:0xae053f860c90cf7d!8m2!3d33.5870558!4d-84.5424299!16zL20vMHJ3bjQ?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDIyNi4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/Union+City,+GA/@33.6158433... - Sell vacant land out from under land owners with false listings: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newark/news/fraudsters-are-stealing-land-out-from-under-owners https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newark/news/fra... - Purposely Induced Foreclosure, Bankruptcy or surprise tax assessments to cause a forced sale: https://www.businessethicsnetwork.org/forced-sale-implications-and-processes/ https://www.businessethicsnetwork.org/forced-sale-implicatio...
michaelcampbell 2y ago
That's what YOU mean to say.

TZubiri 2y ago

" This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas." And why you guys are looking at Mars now. Here in latam we haven't filled the land at all, you guys have been hard working and filled with riches. But our laziness might give us more longevity, we are playing the long game with the amazon

hnthrow90348765 2y ago
LATAM will get a lot of remote work if the wages stay lower than the US since they're in better-for-US-company-timezones than India or others overseas. That's what my company is outsourcing to.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Yeah, looks like the go to strategy, but I may have to pass on the gold mine and go for the higher payoff of a decent living but a more spiritually fulfilling trade diplomacy In international trade there's complementary/productive trade, you have gold, we have silver, let's trade. And you also have redundant/substitutive trade, you have soy, we have cheaper soy, buy our soy. I don't believe from the bottom of my heart in substitutive trade for similar reasons I don't believe in (most) inmigration. We've conquered the americas, now we have to populate it, god won't reward desertors who revert their ancestor's decision by running back to the old continent, and the excuse of "I was born in the wrong hemisphere" is also quite petty, we rolled the dice and this is what we got. Substitutive trade isn't far from immigration, the poor want to go to the rich countries, and the rich buy the cheap labour. Where is the pride in that? In both sides. Leave your country for another with a different religion, leave your mother your brethren, and serve. Leave a war instead of fighting? Take a 1 hour bus to a fancy neighbourhood to serve coffee and wash dishes. Conversely, you can wash your own dishes, you can use a bottle of water and fill that up before you leave, we don't need a migrant washing our dishes, and we don't need to migrate to wash dishes. So I'm trying to focus on trade that is not replaceable with local labour, hopefully countries start nailing down remote work and we start locking those behind visas. And unfortunately india and philipinnes get that productive trade, they can cover night shifts. We'll find stuff to export. There's not much, as Trump said "they need us more than we need them". Local entertainment, sports and games will always be there, it's like cybertourism. there might be an argument for redundant trade as a counterweight to an unbalanced productive export. But I don't think that works long term. There's also localization services, in language and legal, but those are just costs of exporting really. Lithium is probably the lesser evil, super extractive, but we gotta pay somehow. Sorry about the super rant. Lately I've been more using forums as a way to write things that I already had drafted in my mind.

foolfoolz 2y ago

land is still plentiful in the u. s. just maybe not where you want to be, similar to what a pioneer town might look like

Gothmog69 2y ago

I wonder about the economics of places with declining population like Japan and South Korea. I always read that declining population is bad for the economy but feels like those countries will have more opportunities for the young in the future.

adverbly 2y ago

Land value tax would solve this.

yapyap 2y ago

of course this was never going to last forever, we have more than 8 billion people in the world, if even 0.00001% of people wanted to do what you proposed, eventually own a part of a nation’s land, thats 80 thousand people. that’s just not happening

lurk2 2y ago

America isn't overpopulated. The pyramid scheme you're describing is not a Malthusian constraint but the product of bad monetary policy privileging non-productive investments in real estate. There's still no better place on earth for normal people to build wealth, unless you're playing the digital nomad game.

thelamest 2y ago
It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.
- lurk2 2y ago
  It was never implied that this mechanism was magical. If you reread the original post, the claim being made is: > The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, [...] was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is manifestly not the case. My response was that, insofar as a pyramid scheme exists, it has nothing to do with some fundamental Malthusian limit on how many people can fit in a given space; this limit exists, but is not the reason that the rich are getting richer, which instead has to do with monetary policy. You make cheap money available to those with good credit. These people take out loans and use the money to buy real property with the expectation that they will be able to rent it out for more than the carrying cost of the loan. This causes the price of real estate to rise artificially beyond what it would if the cheap credit had not been made available. The key issue here is that this credit isn't being made available to everyone at once - you have to qualify for the loan first.
fc417fc802 2y ago
> bad monetary policy Bad zoning policy, more like.
yulker 2y ago
America has enough room to build many new cities in useful locations, yet it doesn't. Why is that?

Aurornis 2y ago

A big part of the problem is that too many people want and/or have to live in very tiny portions of the country: major cities. There is a lot of cheap land and even a lot of cheap houses for those willing to live in a different place. Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically. This has opened the door to many of them moving even farther away, unlocking an entire new world of affordability. There was a brief moment where all of this looked like it was a very real possibility for many of us, but the rubber band is snapping back with remote work and now many are being required to move back to those few cities again to find the best jobs. > but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. I don't think most people believe that you can just work hard and then have generational wealth for your heirs. That feels like a strawman argument. Generational wealth has always been a difficult feat for the few, not something we promised everyone could achieve. However, people also underestimate the power of compounding for retirement savings. Obviously not helpful to someone working at McDonalds and trying to pay rent in a big city, but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. Not "generational wealth" or "setting up your heirs", but enough to make big contributions to education, helping kids with emergencies, possibly leaving some non-trivial inheritance. This happens all the time and continues to happen with millenials, as it will happen with Gen Z. Again, not literally everyone but to suggest that it's out of reach is really out of alignment with the reality of what we see people earning and saving.

koolba 2y ago
> but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. You’re off by at least a factor of ten. 40 years of $100/month savings at a generous 5% compounding is $148,242. And that’s in future dollars. Drop it to 4% and you’re down $116,606. The real formula to consider is what percentage of your monthly spending you are savings. If it’s 100%, then every month worked is one month of retirement. If it’s 50% then two months of working is one month of retirement. If you live frugally and save 400% of your spend, each month counts as four retired months. It’s a simple fraction with the numerator as your net savings and the denominator your total spending. And lowering the denominator scales things much faster.

zusammen 2y ago

[dead]

6stringmerc 2y ago

The Puritans became settlers in the New World because they were hated and thrown out of Europe / England so they set up shop and managed to derange society to this day in the US.

giantg2 2y ago

"is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful." Land is still generally plentiful. The need to all live in one spot is more social/artificial and really accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to rapid urbanization.

methou 2y ago

It does not have to be the "pioneer days", just saying this from Japan...

nullc 2y ago

In the US you can buy land at quantity for, say, ~$1k/acre in places where there aren't people/infrastructure/etc... There is no shortage of land in the US. There is a shortage of land in a few high density areas. But increasing their density makes them more attractive. I don't think it's reasonable to make the pioneer comparison-- if you want to do what pioneers did and build something from almost nothing in the middle of nowhere with great effort then there is still an analogous route open to you.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
There is a lot of land for $100/acre. The main problem with that land is there is no water.
- nullc 2y ago
  Indeed, though at $1000/ you can be proximal to subsurface water at least... Perhaps not enough for intensive agriculture, but absolutely enough to live.

wcfrobert 2y ago

Land is not scarce in the US. My road trip through Nevada to Salt Lake City convinced me of that much. What is scarce is land people actually want to live in - with safe neighborhoods, good schools, restaurants, shops, etc. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism is definitely making this worse. I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore. Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

pfannkuchen 2y ago
Doesn’t BLM control chunks of land that are desirable but not allowed for settlement?
- scoofy 2y ago
  The point is San Francisco has tons of land (with houses already built on it) that is desirable but not allow for redevelopment.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  Not really, no. The land the BLM owns is mostly scrubland suitable for cattle grazing and basically nothing else. I suspect whoever told you that has an ideological bone to pick with the BLM and is bullshitting you to try and make you equally mad at them.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    No one told me that I’ve just seen a map and it looks quite extensive in a lot of the western US.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    By the way, this is such a textbook example of how planted counter narratives brainwash people into deflecting actual criticism on a topic. People interpret the speaker as if he is “one of those people”, who believes the counter narrative the listener has heard about. Rarely does the listener move past this point, and check in on whether the speaker is actually one of those people, or if he is someone who has never heard of those people, or if he has ignored those people because he thinks their views are just as stupid as you think they are, and he is actually independently criticizing the topic.

wwarner 2y ago

I want to agree with you but I don't see the difference between land and any other kind of asset ownership.

nitwit005 2y ago

The homestead act only ended in the 1970s. We were happily handing out land for free if people were willing to live there and work it quite recently. If there had still been a big demand for it, the program would probably still be running. They granted an extension to Alaska for that reason.

andrepd 2y ago

Look at Georgism, and LVT. A 100% "tax" on the value of unimproved land would ensure the forces of market itself would push away from the situation you describe.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

It always strikes me as bizarre that people can "own" land. It existed before you and will exist after you, so how can a short-lived being really "own" it? It would make so much more sense if land "ownership" was related to whether you live on or work that particular piece of land rather than relying on arbitrary pieces of paper that were mainly decided before any of us were even born.

newsclues 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_(property) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_(property) It’s paying tax for owning something that is weird to me.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  Isn't the tax paying towards a society that will respect your "ownership" so that you can have access to legal redress if someone prevents you using it?

rsynnott 2y ago

This is a fairly simplistic/wrong view. If this were the case, say, you’d expect housing costs to be fairly reliably lower in low density European countries than high density ones. Spoiler: nope. In practice housing costs are driven by shortages of _housing_, not land. And these are quite different.