Of all the things that a person can own, land seems the least justified to me. There is a finite amount of it, you did not create it, you cannot destroy it, and essentially all ownership derives from conquest, in recent or ancient history.
Basically, all land on Earth has an owner. Be it individuals, corporations or governments. It's finite, so highly valuable.
I'm currently unable to return safely to my homeland because the current land owners marked me as an adversary. I wish it wasn't the case but societal rules have been this way since ever.
It's thousand times easier to me to build something, by using software, in the metaverse/on internet. In the real world, I now have no place to call home, except refugee camps and squats in abandonned buildings.
So once you agree that permission to build needs to be organized, you need to figure out how to allocate that permission, which in situations of scarcity is going to be to the highest bidder.
But people aren't going to invest in building structures that will last for decades unless they know they'll continue to hold permission to occupy those structures for decades.
So either you hand out things like 100-year leases or you hand out ownership outright. In the end, most of the world has settled on ownership because 100-year leases tend to cause massive headaches once you hit the 100-year mark, for a whole host of reasons.
So land ownership is just what works from a practical perspective.
(That being said, I am personally intrigued by a system where the government would lease all land yearly according to market rates, but where higher rates for longer [e.g. 15- or 30-year] terms could be locked in with private banks, much like fixed rate mortgages. The classic problem, of course, is how a government is going to reliably determine "market rates" for land that changes hands only very infrequently. Property taxes already attempt that, but they also often result in value that are obviously not "market". It's much the same problem with assessing non-liquid wealth for wealth taxes.)
All ownership works like that.
I buy a plot of land, on the other hand? The lazy sellers won't even deliver it to my home :)
is this really true? you can definitely do things to it that would make it uninhabitable, no longer "fertile", or any other terms that essentially come to the same conclusion of the land being essentially destroyed.
at least as far as the context of desirability to be owned
> is this really true?
Practically speaking, yes. The value of a parcel is largely from its location/proximity to metro areas. I've never heard of someone destroying residential property directly through chemicals or radioactivity, though value can be greatly diminished by local antagonistic developments or rezoning it unfavorably.
Are you kidding me? Look up Superfund sites, and tell me they didn’t affect property values around them.
We just haven't yet gotten to the point where we can access any of the land not on this planet.
Even using the ocean as a fresh water source — which is right here on earth — is a challenge with significant hurdles to overcome.
Even with near infinite land it will presumably be a long, long time before common people can set out into this new frontier and carve out anything like a familiar, safe, let alone comfortable life.