Land Ownership Makes No Sense

I grew up in Oregon, where all the beaches are public. Later I discovered that some people in different places owned beaches, which blew my mind. How can you own a beach?

I then wondered why I felt that way about beaches, but not about other lands.

In the broad context of history, I acknowledge that land ownership is kind of a myth. I kind of think of the little bit of land that I own as almost sort of a "lease" from the government. I really only get to "own" it so long as we have a functional government and market.

While I broadly agree with the ideas of Georgism as well as LVT, I hate the framing of this article. It largely devolves into false moralisms and crazy talk.

Land ownership still makes sense! The goal of private land ownership, especially in America, was to broadly distribute the stakeholders of political power. And in a way it's kind of what makes our society stable.

Even Henry George was against collectivisation! If anything, his whole body of work was "since we still need private people to own land, here's how better adapt a policy perspective".

It makes no sense in a world where collectives of people can make sane decisions in a timely manner.

We don't live in that world - for anything to get done, there must be a very small group of people with authority to decide what color to paint the bike shed. Land ownership is important exactly because it gives responsibility over what happens in a geographic area to a single entity, and excludes most people from providing paralyzing "input".

> Yet by 1797, US founding father Thomas Paine was arguing that “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state” would always be “the common property of the human race," and so landowners owed non-landowners compensation “for the loss of his or her natural inheritance.”

Paine also wrote a pamphlet about how the U.S. government actually owned all the territorial land the British thought they still owned after the revolutionary war. So, he did believe in owning property as it turns out.

And do we really want to adjudicate this issue by tallying the number of U.S. founding fathers who believed in property rights? It's a meaningless metric, and I don't think the results would fall in the author's favor anyway.

Also, owning land is not a modern concept. Stone age humans fought over territory: night raids, throat slashing. It's a human constant. The modern idea of property ownership is a less violent method of staking a claim, backed by the threat of force by the government. Generally an improvement.

I think this article is making a bad suggestion in a dumb way.

The Georgian model of land taxation is interesting.

Not sure i agree with the moralist approach that land isn’t something we should fight and war over. It’s a resource like anything else, and if when it comes down to it, people will fight. It would be a luxury to implement a Georgian taxation system because that’s only viable because the nation doing so has fought and defended that very land. It doesn’t scale endlessly, but even so, it’s something that should be looked at as something a nation could do to improve its internal quality of life!

The alternative is assignment of space by government appointment. We all know the government is corrupt and the best spaces will go to the best connected people.

Purchasing the rights to the land in a free market is imperfect, but it's certainly an efficient and tamper resistant mechanism.

The ideal is having the right checks and balances in place. Power tends to corrupt. Having government owning all the land is problematic, but so is allowing individuals to own all the land. As the article implies, in the US, individuals have gained a bit too much power, IMHO. Locations with water access or places with unique geographical characteristics should not be controlled by individuals who we can't trust will do the right thing. Americans' freedom to traverse the land has been eroded. It is no wonder why we live more in our virtual spaces where we are more free to roam.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out on the moon. The Outer Space Treaty along with the Artemis Accords makes moon ownership illegal, but it also makes interference illegal.

So in other words you can't own the land, but if you're doing something with or on the land nobody can interfere with that. And if you're doing science than you can plausibly claim an exclusion zone around your experiment.

We used to think there was lots of unused land on the moon so that conflicts would be easy to avoid, but the areas of interest are the polar regions and those are relatively small.

"You'll own nothing and be happy." - Ida Auken

> In New York City, 46 percent of a typical home’s value is just the cost of the land it’s built on. In San Francisco its 52 percent; in Los Angeles, 61 percent.

In my neighborhood, it's <10%...

> Similarly, on planet Earth at least, occupying space necessarily implies occupying land.

> The problem with the right to land is that it’s all been taken.

> Economists call this “rent seeking,” and most of us call it “immoral.”

This feels like it was written by a passionate 11th grader.

Land ownership makes total sense, the article is like an apology of utopian socialism. The main issue with those approaches (socialist variants, communism) vs something like capitalism is that they are not robust.

Capitalism assumes ill-intentions (i.e. everyone for themselves trying to maximize wellbeing) and creates a distribution mechanism that is robust in the presence of bad actors while still allowing altruism.

Utopian socialism and it's variants assume everyone is perfectly altruistic, which makes it extremely fragile. So a single bad actor can abuse the system in detriment of everyone else.

Ownership is such a basic instinct (i.e. protecting your resources) that it's biological in nature and I doubt you can successfully thwart it.

Another quality wired article that makes no sense. Someone is going to own land. Either you or the government. So it is immoral for the private citizen to own land, but moral for the historically corrupt, ruthless, and often-times tyrannical government to own it?

This circle doesn't square.

I often ask myself where wired writers get their weed. If I had to guess, it is from a private grower who owns his own land.

What is the viable alternative to land ownership?

The Tragedy of The Commons is a well known and frequently repeated experiment in many areas of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

You know call me whimsical. I also dont care about land ownership if I can live rent free without risk of eviction or uncertainties and in the kind of house that I am comfortable with. Ok rent free is wishful - atleast no more rent than all mortgage+property tax / life of mortgage.

Yeah, sure, tax land at whatever rate. Our rent would just go up to compensate. Thank you very much.

Posting articles behind paywalls makes no sense.

Wired coming out swinging with an actual socialist/leftist/communist article? Color me impressed.

In the states, the Democrats are often mislabeled as a lefty party, or mislabeled as socialists. People will call CNN Marxist. They really, really aren't.

It's fascinating to see a major publisher going out on a limb to publish something like this.