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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good.

Been there, done that, it is worse than the alternative. People will stop cultivating anything, because why bother if a random officer can just take things from you at will.

Western regulations about land appropriation are strict for a reason, and they always require just compensation for a reason. That is the only way to prevent powerful people from just grabbing what they want, cloaking the thieving act in word bubbles about common prosperity.

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> Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good.

Maybe there could be some balance instead of "Either everything can be owned, or nothing is!".

It isn't impossible to move cities if it's really needed and someone is footing the bill, even in a democratic Western country that is famously highly regulated, like Sweden. Since a mine in the north is expanding, they have to move the entire city (paid by the mine's operator in this case), building by building, which of course isn't without complaints, but it's a thing that actively being done as we speak. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o

I don't really mind takings for very good compensation. If you want to uproot people in the name of X (say, a railway that cannot really change its path, or a very valuable mine), pay them some low multiple of the current market price of their property and off they go. The part with the market price helps them buy property elsewhere and the extra part is sugar to compensate for injured feelings. (It is not easy to abandon a home if your family lived there for generations, and we should account for that.)

But such situations are relatively rare. Perhaps the mine in Kiruna is worth it and the corporation/government can pay for the compensations. Same for vital ground communications (highways, railways).

If it isn't, though, then let the ore in the ground and let the people live where they built their homes.

Most of the time I hear ideas about "flexible ownership" etc., upon further discussion, the person starts talking about outright expropriation from people they don't like.

Yeah i agree. Theres a very thin layer between these ideas and outright crazy.

To defend myself a little, I never said rigid land ownership was not still what I would prefer. But tying significant value to land and allowing individuals to hold it has some downsides.

yeah i see what you mean. There are only trade offs.

That’s a limited population being moved for high value resources. This option does not scale for large populations. It’s easier and cheaper to rebuild.

Maybe the current system is the historical balance.

It's a small town of 17k and they expect to be done "moving" (really just building a whole new town 3km away) by 2100. That's not a scalable process.

For a more likely scenario, see Japan. Demographic crash (which is already happening all over the developed world) followed by mass migration to urban centers with economic forces dooming or favoring a city depending on it's circumstances (looking at you, Miami).

I don't think it's fair to pretend the only options humans have are the extremes of private and state ownership. Greed and the weight of capitalism under rail expansion in the US completely obliterated at least 15-20k years worth of Indigenous "non-rigid land ownership", being the apex system of human power consolidation and all that.

Native American nations and tribes didn't "own" land in the way that European colonizers did, under a doctrine of private property, written deeds and legal systems. Even under tribal territories, access was fluid.

America and its land was held communally by tribes and was generally understood in terms of use rights. If your nation, family or tribe cultivated a field, you had rights to that field as long as you actively used it. And stewardship of the land was seen as something to care for, not a commodity.

And this was the way things were in America up until a few hundred years ago.

You're painting a false picture of pre-Colombian history. Indigenous groups fought wars over control of territory, sometimes escalating to genocide.

The concept of borders is relatively new. Up until a few hundred years ago, countries simply didn't have them. Battles would start simply because "we saw those other guys again! Stop em!"

Control of borders was nowhere near as tight as today, given how underdeveloped technology was compared to today, and in some places (deserts, forests) the border was more of a very wide strip of no-mans land than just a line.

But places like the Roman Empire absolutely had "hard" demarcations in some places, not just standard country borders, but also internal borders.

For example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he legally crossed into Italy by doing so and thus triggered a war. Rome itself had pomerium, a city demarcation whose crossing had legal consequences as well.

If you entered the Roman Empire peacefully, and you had something to tax or apply duties to, you would be confronted with officials in the closest suitable place.

That sounds like border to me.

City walls and later regional walls are some of the oldest structures that still exist (some still in use today after 1000s of years)

Borders are very much not a new concept. Nations are new-ish but not the idea of owned and protected land.

Border walls and dykes are quite an ancient concept. Yours. Ours. Keep out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_defense_lines -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_(Roman_Empire)

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