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Comment by awqrre | Hacker News Reader

Nobody really owns the land their house is built on in the USA... stop paying your property taxes (rent) and you'll see who owns it.

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I suppose you can think of that way. But consider that the reason you are able to "own" any property is because there is a legal system in place(1). In someplace without an operating rule of law, a warlord could easily take "your" property.

Even if you're a King, if you stop paying your knights/army you probably won't hold on to your lands for much longer. Would you say (A) the army "owns" the king's land or (B) the army just makes it possible for him to continue owning it?

(1) Unless you are a Law unto yourself i.e. have your own army.

It's not just a way of thinking about it - it's the actual legal arrangement. In pretty much every state today, you don't own any land (unless you're a monarch, or a noble with an ancient allodial title) - you own an estate in land, but the government (or the monarch in person) owns the actual land.

you used to be able to get a thing called an allodial title, but it's basically extinct now.

This is such a tired claim. Every civilization ever has been built under the aegis of, if no one else, each other.

Of course you own it. The question is what "ownership" means. Ownership of a property is best defined by delineating the specific rights that you can exercise with respect to it. You may bar people from entering it. You might not be able to bar the government from entering it or making certain uses of it. There's a good chance you can't keep people from being underneath your house and extracting valuable minerals, if they're far enough down. Your rights don't extend very far above the earth.

But you knew all that when you made the purchase.

> There's a good chance you can't keep people from being underneath your house and extracting valuable minerals

6ft in my (Commonwealth) country.

Have always found it cool that ordinary Americans operate their own oil wells on their (sometimes small) properties.

> But you knew all that when you made the purchase.

and you didn't have any other options.

There's this underlying assumption that people seem to have that they have an absolute right to have absolute control over some piece of land. I'm really confused where that comes from. Was it that way in the past? I suppose, in various places and eras. But far more common was that you had enough power to deter the powerful around you, and you were for all intents and purposes a state. I can understand wanting to be a state, but you don't have a right to be one.

It's you, and you're in arrears on a tax obligation.

Did I get it right?

I don't owe any taxes, but finding the ones that do is a good way to find cheap properties...

  The land, the land,
  'twas God who made the land,
  The land, the land,
  The ground on which we stand,
  Why should we be beggars
  With the ballot in our hand?
  God gave the land to the people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_(song)

Primary versus secondary property, sovereign and allodial versus infeudinated ownership. Different in autonomous kind due to a difference in degree of autarky.

You are right - I ran across this a few years ago which surprised me:

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

We all must pay service to our feudal lords.

It's not necessarily a bad thing - it's how you take a legacy system and adapt it to the new conditions without too much breakage. By making the government, in effect, the one and only feudal lord in its jurisdiction, and every land owner its vassal, the existing laws and precedent retain meaning, so you don't have to start from scratch - just change the things that need fixing.

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