Ownership Of Land - A Deeply Flawed Concept?

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Aihwa

CEO's of most companies worked hard to get to where they are today. They build these massive conglomerates with their own blood sweat and tears from small businesses. They can also be people who invested currency [...]they take an extreme risk with that

Sorry, but I dont think this is true. Surely a CEO worked hard, but you cant tell me he worked harder than an engineer spending sleepless nights developing a new product or a guy who pushes pipes at an oil rig or a mother who takes two jobs to feed her kid.
It simply does not add up - the amount of work is not 1000 times different, though the rewards are. And taking the risk to loose money is way different from taking the risk to loose health or life (thinking of that oil rig worker again).

I cannot imagine anyone working hard enough to own a mansion and a yacht - no single person could by regular work produce such a thing. The only way it works is by "working hard" to let others (employees) work harder and then reap from them.

Originally Posted by ZenitYerkes

Ownership -in general, that is- is an intangible invent for the societies to stabilize and establish themselves, so they can grow. Otherwise we would be fighting forever for whose the fruits I worked hard on harvesting are.

Well thats two point there. Growth (which I dont think healthy at all as it is on the basis of whats destroying this planet now) and working hard for fruits of the land. I know this is utopian, but ideally - ant this was proposed in several ways - people have to work not a lot to get "fruitsof the land". Primitivists argue, that hunter gatherers did not have to work hard for their harvest, as they simply took what nature provided, so the taking was the work, not the maintaining or sowing. Communist utopians argue, that technologcal advances make it a low work intensive task to produce food from the land. In both cases the result would basically be, that people would not have to defend the crops they sweated for because there was no sweat to begin with.

Fact is, that ownership exists. Should we remove it? It would be as perfect as impossible to realize, as long as human spirit remains as it is now. Communism didn't work, because it required a change in human attitude that was difficult to reach.

Well - what I say here is not a single step solution. I cannot say, I want to remove ownership from today to tomorrow and all will be blimey. So indeed it is a vision of some future and I very much know that a fast change is unrealistic and that also depresses me. I think it is right, that the human spirit or the way of thinking or the culture has to change fundamentally for this to work. As I mentioned, there are and have been cultures or societies that do manage to think more along these lines. So it is not beyond human nature to do it, but everyone is trained to see the way we live now either as the best way to live, or as flawed but inevitable. Communism failed mostly because it was never tried. What people now call communism was a dictatorship - In the Soviet Union, the original communist movement was hijacked and a Leninist regime was erected that founded itself as much of power, force and ownership of everything as the capitalist system, just that the power and ownership was in the hands of a political party instead of corporations - which is preferrable I leave to everyone, for me both is undesireable as the original communist idea was more along the lines of ownership by the people themselves.

So what coms closest to that communist ideal are in fact present days coop companies that are literally owned by the workers, in which everyone gets a share of the revenues and the people who work there do so under almost the same conditions. And I think this is a way in which some things may actually start in the present and real world. Other ways are small scale communities.

Generally I think the achievable way to get somewhere is to form tribal structures. And I mean this in the sense of Daniel Quinns writings - not literally as ethnic tribes with tattoos going hunting together, but as small groups of people who share things and work together for whatever they do work for. That can be producing stuff in a small coop company, doing organic farming, printing a newspaper or manageing a Internet coop company. It can also mean to form an ecovillage - whatever, just finding a group of people who "got it" and do things in an egalitarian way and try to be as independent from the larger structures as possible. I dont know if that will cut it or if that will be enough or if that will really lead to utopia, but it is a good start, I think.

Originally Posted by Sonoran Na'vi

The only system I can see that would work in the place of land ownership is a system of land-use rights. Though, one problem I see with land-use rights is what happens if one builds a building, but then no longer holds rights to use the land. Why should this person build the building if they may lose the right to use the land in which it stands?

Ah but that is already the system in place in a way! I rent a piece of land or a house - why should I want to improve that if I know I will eventually leave? Still - land use is better than land ownership, though yes - there would have to be a system in place that allows you to stay there. If I do not have to worry about loosing the place I live in because it is owned by others or because it is rented or leased just for a certain time - then this would be closest to haveing the freedom of land. It pretty much cuts into what I said before - of course you own the home you built and you have the right to tell others not to come in if they are not invited. But you cant own the land it sits on. You cant own a forest or a plains or a river and by that you also have not the right to destroy these things.

I know some native americans said something along the lines of how incredibly ludicrous it is that white people think they can own the land and that it would be as ridiculous as trying to own the air. That was back then and it was a good comparison back then. Nowadays, air pollution rights are sold and I dare not even joke about "what will be next - they will charge for the rays of the sun" as I fear that such things tend to fulfil themselves all too quickly.