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Comment by PM_me_your_math | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> Someone is going to own land. Either you or the government.

It does not have to be black and white. You can own the land but with restrictions and accommodations. Also, tyrants tend to be individuals. I don't like the idea of some tech tycoon buying up all our farmland.

It should be easy to provide a high quality rebuttal then.

Haven't they already? Land ownership makes sense to beasts and man. Someone is going to take advantage of a plot of land and historically use it to reproduce or otherwise propagate their living will. Even electrons can't occupy the same space at the same time.

> Land ownership makes sense to beasts and man.

Yeah that’s why I’ve never seen a dog, cat, mole, mouse, squirrel, etc. on my personally owned property.

You've never seen two cougars fight over territory or a squirrel gnawing another for entering its leafy abode? That is absolutely how humans behaved before civilized law. Now we fight and erect barriers via law.

We are repeating 150 year old debates now. Occupation and possession aredifferent concepts. If you personally use a plot of land to reproduce you're well entitled to that. If you merely stake your claim to potentially use the land how you want at some point in the future, that's a different concept.

It's like the difference between sitting on a seat on the bus and claiming five different seats on the bus "in case you want a different one later", or because "you're expecting your friends to join later" or "to charge other passengers for your seating service." In times of abundance, go ahead. If those seats are the only unoccupied ones left? Scram.

That Manhattan Island was sold for $24 shows how unnatural land ownership is. The natives making the sale had some concept of ownership, but did not comprehend that they were giving up perpetual, fully exclusive rights to the land.

I don't understand this. Presumably the natives thought it was a good deal? Or were they sold a lie? Like "yea buddy come back anytime?" Either way doesn't preclude that we can peaceably transfer ownership. I mean if the natives are pissed because they got hoodwinked then the rule doesn't need to be "noone shalt own land" it could be "don't fraudulently do business". If we are saying nobody owns land then I suspect that means I'm crammed into a tin can and somebody out there owns a whole fuck load of land.

You asserted that "Land ownership makes sense to beasts and man". If so, then saying "I'll buy this land for $24" is a straightforward transaction where being hoodwinked is basically impossible.

I "own" 1/6 of an acre of land. But there are many things I'm not allowed to do to my property. So do I truly own it?

I possess the right to do certain things to my property, and possess the right exclude others from doing certain things. I can resell that right. Those rights would be largely unaffected whether you call what I have ownership or not.

In practicality ownership of land is a semantic game, but it's an important piece of semantics.

For most of human history, no one owned land. There are systems beyond individual ownership and central government ownership.

Pseudo Marxism dressed in techno-elite clothing

Marxism is just a model of society where emphasis is put on the differences between the commoner and the elites.

That’s all it is.

I reckon there's more to it than that, and I'm sure we'd have a productive conversation about it, but I'm sorry I can't spend much time discussing Marxism.

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