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Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

It is clear that almost no one commenting here has actually read past the first few paragraphs of the article (if that). It is very well written and explain that this is an extremely complex issue.

Property rights are the foundation of civil society. Due to variety of factors, Hawaii has destroyed property rights on some parcels due to degenerate laws and legal customs.

Just consider one point raised by the article: one small parcel has over 300 informal owners who are descended from a Portuguese immigrant who bought the land over 110 years ago and that "individual ownership fractions range from about 1/7 (about 14 percent) to 17/333,396 (less than a one-hundredth of 1 percent)."; when everyone owns something, no one owns it. This is an enormously complicated legal problem and there are no simple answers for how to resolve it.

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I am surprised by the number of people who claim this is rich bashing.

Indigenous people around the world have lived for centuries with widely different concepts of property ownership. In many cultures, once you reach a working age you build your house where land is available and do your bit (say farming, or crafts) towards a functioning society. There is no land ownership record, but rather it's based on trust. Once these lands become part of countries without adequete protection for indegenous cultures, they become susceptible to exploitation. Interpreting their culture through our legal system is one way to do this.

The indigenous people of Hawaii (and elsewhere in the world) are the true owners of that land. Even if you get legal rights from each one of the current owners, it still deprives the unborn children of their rights.

It's unfair at best. At best.

I agree with you that the social structures we've set up have largely forced the hands of the indigenous people who want to keep their lands in their families in perpetuity to sell. How can we actually make sure these lands stay within families forever possible though? To do something like disallowing the sale of these lands outside of their communities doesn't seem particularly ethical either. In this case, that could mean that some of the landowners who might be hard pressed for money might have a pressing need to sell, so how could we forbid that? Just like preserving our diverse cultures, I totally understand the value proposition, but how can you ethically force cultural preservation? Not a perfect analog, but I'm curious how you think a more equitable system might work here.

Isn't that the exact problems that Indian reservations were set up to solve? A kind of community-administered perpetual land grant, basically.

It seems that – some problems within the tribal administrations non-withstanding – the external legal relationships are solved pretty well within that framework.

What you're describing is forced (w/ threat of violence) migration and I don't think it's easily justified. Care to take a shot?

I was talking about today's reservations as a legal vehicle to allow perpetual group ownership & administration of land, so as to preserve it for a culture. I may have forgotten the part where, once the structure is set up, owners would voluntarily add their property if their shared this objective.

Just accept that the property which you buy is provided with agreements granted to neighbours, and that by buying the property, you inherit the duty to said neighbours.

And then, don't fill a lawsuit to put people out of their homes in order to void these duties.

>Even if you get legal rights from each one of the current owners, it still deprives the unborn children of their rights.

Would you mind expanding on this a bit, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean? Does this only hold true for land or other types of private property as well?

With regards to land ownership, was it really solely based on trust, or servitude and force? I'm no expert on traditional Hawaiian land ownership but didn't all the land essentially belong to the King/Chiefs who then allowed others to use the land in exchange for payment or loyalty?

Also, how would you propose land ownership disputes be settled among indigenous communities who went to war with other indigenous communities? Didn't the unification of Hawaii by Kamehameha I involve forced annexation of other islands? Who does the conquered land rightfully belong to, the ancestors of the winning Hawaiian tribes or the non existent ancestors of those Hawaiians who were killed fighting unification?

> Would you mind expanding on this a bit, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean? Does this only hold true for land or other types of private property as well?

Not op, but I believe the idea here is that use of the land has a cultural dimension, and not just the usual economic dimension. The concept seems quite foreign to me (and probably most) but that may be because nature has a much lower significance in christian mythology compared to others. Maybe as an analog: if Trump were to suggest selling the declaration of independence to the highest bidder (or everything in the Smithsonian, or Yellowstone etc.), could you imagine people invoking their not-yet-born grandchildren, and their right to see these things?

Regarding your other points, I know there were many communities with a structure much closer to egalitarianism than we can imagine among the pacific islands, and even where "chiefs" existed, their position was probably something completely different than what we're bound to imagine upon hearing the term. But I have no specific knowledge of Hawaii.

Thanks, your point about the Declaration of Independence is a great analogy that makes a lot of sense to me.

I want to know why there are considered to be "indigenous peoples" of Hawaii at all, it was a normal, internationally-recognized country ruled by a Hawaiian with subjects as its inhabitants for almost a hundred years before the US annexed it. It had formal land ownership laws before it became part of the USA.

>it still deprives the unborn children of their rights

Hmmmmm

the part I don't get here: What's the legal framework for allowing Zuckerberg to force a sale?

Let's say 20 people own parts of the house in front of yours. It's confusing, so you whine a lot, and suddenly a public auction is triggered?

At the very least, he must understand that he is _not_ the owner, so everything else is kinda moot right?

EDIT: seems like he bought out certain percentages of ownership on these parcels, and there's a law that can help to force a sale when the ownership gets too confusing.

Seems like the sort of law for billionaires wanting to have their own private beach.

I believe that he found people with a partial ownership in the land and bought that partial ownership. Now, as a partial owner, he can force the sale.

Having this law makes sense, because as ownership gets more diluted you would never be able to get everyone to agree on anything.

Being Hawaii though, I don't think he will get a private beach, though :)

http://seagrant.soest.hawaii.edu/coastal-access-hawaii

http://dlnr.hawaii.gov/occl/beach-access/

For someone who is so virulently anti-privacy, he's certainly strangely a very private person isn't he?

There is something I find very odd and unsettling about Zuckerberg. One day I think we will yet rue making him such a success.

He claims he is pro-privacy, and that if people get into problems by sharing too much on social sites, it's their fault. He himself is not sharing too much.

Explain shadow profiles then.

I think a lot of his stances and statements on privacy are with respect to internet privacy as it pertains to Facebook's users and the success of his company. His stance, in my opinion, focuses more on users having control over what they post and what they choose to share, but in general that sharing information online is a good thing. Unsurprisingly, his views seem to coincide with some encouragement of users to share information via social media.

With that in mind, I feel that the issue of privacy with respect to one's home/private property is very different. With this, Zuckerberg is likely thinking about the physical safety of himself and his family.

I'd be curious to hear more about what you find unsettling about him.

He'll get pretty close. The terrain along the shoreline makes the beach in question pretty much inaccessible. It's not unusual in Hawaii to flaunt the law by making public access as inconvenient as possible by buying the surrounding land and removing roads/paths so people who do want access have to trek miles to the beach.

Billions bro the guy has unlimited money what does no one get about mark zuck? He has literally unlimited wealth and power HELLO

why is everyone in denial about it

> Property rights are the foundation of civil society.

It's one a set of rights generally considered essential, i. e. "human rights". But among those it doesn't seem to be considered very special. The UN charter of human rights (written in no small part by the US) finds 16 other rights to list before it gets around to property: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights.

But anyway, I fail to see how even utmost reverence for the centrality of property would change anything about this:

> one small parcel has over 300 informal owners who are descended from a Portuguese immigrant

People inherit stuff. They leave it to multiple children. Therefore it gets split up. To force any of them to sell against their will is obviously infringing property rights – not that it's not possibly justified, but it seems pretty clearly on the side of a less strict application of "property rights".

And "when everyone owns something, no one owns it" is just wrong-ish, at least in the intended sense of neglect and uselessness. The Statue of Liberty is owned by everyone and no one, as are the airwaves, most of the Rocky Mountains and the works of Shakespeare. All of them seem to be doing fine.

IANAL and IANA business/stocks person, so allow me to vomit nonsense, but how is this not unlike equity in a start-up? Or stocks in a public company? Especially in the latter case, one can have theoretically a 17/333,396 stake in a company.

I'd imagine it might be different though because companies are regulated and there are things like the FTC, and a company is an organization, so certain concepts like "liability" and "rights" to utilize the property are better defined than for a random parcel of land, but still, it's not like "ownership by many" is that foreign.

>Property rights are the foundation of civil society.

are you sure that indigenous people want your version of civil society?

>when everyone owns something, no one owns it.

yes. And isn't it how many tribes own their land?

>Property rights are the foundation of civil society.

For the exact opposite view of property, that it is in fact the sign of barabrism and the law of the jungle, read Proudhon's "What is Property?".

It didn't sound like any of the parcels had occupants nor were the ownership rights concentrated in a single individual. I'm not sure how I feel about this but it isn't a cut and dry issue.

If the land was going for a public use, I might be a bit more sympathetic. However, it's being bought for a private use by a person who can well afford to pay for it and the number of owners of a piece of land isn't the problem.

Zuck's using lawyers to force a sale is a huge problem. What specifically entitles him to have a special case for purchasing without going thru all the motions?

You could err on the side of the living ancestor(s).

In absence of saying "that fraction is approaching zero", you could assume the intent of the original buyer that they wanted anyone from their family living there.

And how could you enforce that -- sue the owners to force them to live on the land?

At least this way, all the owners are finally identified (at considerable cost to the plaintiff, I might add), and they are properly monetarily compensated for the land.

If the current owners really did want to live on the land, they are more than free to band together and bid on the parcel themselves in the auction -- especially the ones who didn't know about the land before.

It's complex. Only a very rich aristocrat gives a shit about it though. Obviously why it's stood for 110 years.

Why would anyone read the article when they can take the opportunity to bash the rich?

The GP is good comment lets not init a flame war here.

because the top 8 billionaires own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population?

the rich have really been sucking it up lately.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/20...

Good grief. Any child with $2 in pocket money has more wealth than 2bn people. If you are a doctor with a massive student loan, you're probably in the bottom 10% of humanity in terms of wealth.

Yet killing these 8 billionaires and taking their wealth would do almost nothing when spread across the bottom 50% you are comparing them to.

You don't raise civilization by chopping off the top.

Which is itself a rigged stat.

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