Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

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>We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person to have perpetual exclusive rights

I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all the land, while young people must buy it from them. That is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do not step down from their positions of power voluntarily, then people will force them to step down.

I obviously do not want this to happen so I will argue against anyone who wants earth to be littered with wars over land.

Wars do not break out because people are evil, wars break out because our laws and rules during peace time aren't good enough for everyone. If land is properly allocated to everyone, then borders become irrelevant goals for war. The difference between whether you trade to get indirect access to land or whether you own it should be so slim, that no one ever considers obtaining land forcibly be ever worth it because the peaceful methods work just fine.

>>I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all the land, while young people must buy it from them. That is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do not step down from their positions of power voluntarily, then people will force them to step down.

Land ownership does not fit the definition I provided, which in greater context, is:

"a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe."

Land is not scarce, and appropriating it is not a case of appropriating only that portion of the matter of the universe which one reconfigures into a value-added form.

So I agree, there can be no natural right to private ownership of land. A land tax, therefore, can be justified, as can other forms of state-intervention over how one may manage it.

That should say "Land is not abundant"

> Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited.

Ownership of anything by a person is already time limited - limited to a human lifetime.

> If land is properly allocated to everyone

Let’s imagine every person in the world should have an equal holding of arable land (ignores lots of other factors, but whatever!). Assuming 8 billion people and 1.6 billion hectares of arable land, works out to 5 people per hectare.

To be fair, USA needs to a double its population (≈ 2.3 times to 760 million). New Zealand needs to approximately halve it’s population.

For other countries, find your arable land figure (it is in Hectares, left most column of main table is 2016 figure) from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/arable-la... and multiple by 5 to get the fair population and compare that with the actual population.

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