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 Switzerland all lake shores are public land. And most of them (most of the usable parts at least) are fenced out by local prominent people owning villas nearby, and nobody moves a finger about it because as I said they are prominent (politicians, TV stars, Tina Turner...). And when I mean nobody I really mean nobody - there aren't even teenagers rebelling, it looks like an societary accepted evil.
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".
Agreed that the premises (land ownership is a moral wrong) and conclusions (we should adopt a land-value tax) of this article are strangely disconnected. If land ownership is the problem, then Georgism is not the solution, it's just a different property tax regime, one that will only have a meaningful effect in urban areas where land values constitute the bulk of total property value.
Georgism is such an interesting rabbit hole to go down. It was a very popular political movement, his proposals had near universal endorsement from economists across the political spectrum... and then it just vanished.
Henry George recognized that there were benefits to private control, security of tenure, productivity, etc. These ideas were well recognized by classical economists/liberals, Locke, etc.
There is ultimately no -perfect- solution to the land problem because 2 objects cannot exist in the same place at the same time so -any- solution will be somewhat arbitrary.
However, the advantage one plot of land has over another manifests in its rental value. Therefore, you pay everyone else according to the natural advantage your location has. If only marginal land is left for me, then that reflects in the fact that I pay nothing and receive a share of the differential advantage in return.
Nothing in society will ever be perfect, but compared to alternatives and also recognizing that other forms of land control are also problematic, the solution in the article makes quite perfect sense.
If the full rental value of land were collected then its selling price would be $0. That is a far cry from the tax system we have today. Urban locations are the most relevant for society, but all the same there would be benefits to farmland use as well. The selling price of land is recognized as the primary barrier to entry for new farmers.
Try not paying property taxes for a while and you'll find out who owns your land.
Actually, pay property taxes to the wrong state and you'll find out (distant relative owned land on an island in a river. The river changed course and the land belonged to a different state, unbeknownst to distant relatives who then lost their land)
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".
Maybe you don't live in that world, but I sure do. Only few people actually care enough to show up for any decision, and they can usually come to agreement fairly quickly.
The only times I have experienced trouble has been when people have had the prejudice that "democracy obviously doesn't work" so they make a big stink about not getting their way (how ironic!) instead of focusing on the decision at hand. Those people can usually be trained out of that mindset with a little skilled facilitation. Those that cannot are free to move somewhere where a third party owns the land they're on.
I agree with your sentiment, but it's not really relevant here. Georgism doesn't say much about restricting the right to use a piece of land. Rather it's about what it costs to maintain that right (and isn't actually a huge departure from the current state of things where that cost is generally nonzero except in the rare cases of allodial title).
For example, homeowners associations are a significant source of tyranny, that often literally regulate what color you can paint your shed. It's probable that under Georgism the lack of desire to keep one's abstract property value high would lead to a lot fewer of them, and homeowners would actually end up more free.
Indeed - but it's much easier to get a collective of people to discuss something once in general terms ("property rights") than every little decision ("we can't build the factory until we agree on the color of the paint in the breakroom")
You'll get more out of the article if you read it as more of a philosophical exploration than a literal policy proposal. You can share similar values without reaching the same conclusion.
These philosophical explorations have a really nasty pattern of being picked up as the policy platform of political strongmen riding a wave of discontentment to power. Then the philosophical exploration becomes poorly-implemented policy.
Maybe future historians will appreciate your explanation of something that everyone today knows. Nobody is stopping you from talking about what you value and how to incorporate those values into policy design. Other people are participating in public discourse the way they want. If you don't participate the way you want, that's on you.
Collectives make a lot of decisions in a timely manner. Why not, specifically, about land use? When did the collectives all "run out of time" to decide who gets to manage land, as a specific resource? 1980? 4000 BC?
> 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 statement about Paine is brief, and the author immediately moves on. In the full context of the article, it functions more to establish context than to bolster an argument. I have no horse in this race, but it's very weird that you've decided to cherry-pick this one statement so strongly.
Yep, I read the article, thanks for your concern. The fact that the author begins and ends the article by talking about Thomas Paine's position on land ownership isn't an accident. The point is to say land ownership is some modern perversion, maybe even an un-American one, so it's fair to call that into question.
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.
> 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.
Rent seeking is a real and cogent issue. The morality isn't in the rent seeking, but in the rules around it. Taxless inheritance and corporate perpetuities may be part of the increasing financialization of the housing market. Free COVID money handed out to stabilize the equities markets might be another part.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Land leasership. You are renting the land from the public at a rate that encourages you to improve it. (Not buying vacant land, hoping for your neighbors to improve theirs, so you can profit.)
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.
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.
Interesting tech articles were always a very small part of Wired magazine. They've always been about techno-utopian visions of the future. IOW, they've always had philosophical articles.
Me too, our difference is that I see relatively few leftist publications in tech. There's plenty of writing out there that supports Democrats, but the Dems are not leftist in any meaningful way.
I then wondered why I felt that way about beaches, but not about other lands.