Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

I mean, food literally grows on trees. The comic is obviously set in prehistory when we didn't cultivate our food.

Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?

View on HN

>Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?

That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism is supposed to fix

Sometimes I think about what it were like if land rights were structured as limited-term exclusive-use licenses. The licences are offered in recognition of the fact that it takes time and money to develop the land, so the licensee, by taking on this risk, should be allowed to try to earn back that value and then some. But after a certain point exclusive use seems to be an excessive reward, so the term should be limited somehow -- I haven't been able to think up a good way this part should work. In many cases, there's a natural limit to land ownership (we only live so long), but corporate land ownership is able to extend normally limited licenses into perpetuity...

I read that many ancient farming societies used lottery to rotate which farmers used which plots each year.

You know, there's an unfair advantage if you get access to the best land and then that grows you the best crops and then profit and so on. So, everyone gets chances to farm different plots.

I agree with you about the problems with corporate land ownership.

philosophers have been thinking about more fair ways to manage resource ownership for quite some time. Mutualists, for example, have a construct similar to what you're describing called a usufruct where land rights are granted directly to the person or group working the land (ie, you cannot own land you do not work), and you only have the right to use and profit from the land, without any right to destroy it.

why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?

They don't. Farming profits are razer thin. That value goes to the person who owns the land, the people who work the land, the people that ship the product, the manufacturers of equipment, shop owners, the list goes on.

Even in prehistory, feeding people required a lot of work, that work just took the form of hunting, gathering, and migration, and later cooking and making tools to make hunting and gathering easier.

> why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?

They aren't? Many people divide the value in the final product.

The person who owns the land pays other people for farm equipment, fertilizer, weed killers, pest control, harvesting, etc, then they sell the product to other people who add value in various ways and each sells for a higher price.

The point is that the person who owns the land gets to set the pay of the workers. So somebody who doesn't really have to do any labour themselves gets to choose the fraction of the reward (in reality, a set fee ie a salary) that goes to the people who are actually doing the work. If they're the ones producing all the value by mixing their labour with the land (which the land owner didn't create), then they should be the ones who divide the profits.

Ownership incentivises longtermism.

When noone owns the land, this happens:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_...

No, when you make something a free-for-all, that happens. Conservation areas exist.

> The point is that the person who owns the land gets to set the pay of the workers.

If that were true, the less compassionite owners would set the pay to zero, so it's obviously more complicated than that.

Just because they get to set the pay, doesn't mean their choice is a totally independent one.

I guess we have different definitions of "set". The word I would use is "negotiate".

Sure, that's fair.

Regardless, my issue is that the people who do the actual work do not get to determine how profits get distributed - power is held over them by the owner (who is only the owner by virtue of state enforcement of property rights), and this leads to accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. IE, capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com