Ownership Of Land - A Deeply Flawed Concept?

[auroraglacialis]

This is a continuation brom a debate started in this thread here: http://www.tree-of-souls.com/communi...82-broken.html

I continued it here to not bust that thread. Moderators maybe you can move the rest of the debate here, too?

Originally Posted by Fkeu 'Awpo

I find it hard to believe you could build your own house

It depends on what kind of house. I could build a wooden hut, given enough time. In fact we built a little one already on the property of my mothers.

I think you're underestimating how much work goes into building an entire house.

Again - it depends of what house you want. A place to live in, to have it warm, sleep, cook food and maybe read - that is not a big deal. A 10 story building made of concrete and bricks and with steel reinforcements and marble floor and central heating and all that - thats an entirely different thing, but in the end it provides the same - a warm place to sleep, cook meals, and spend some time (reading or TVing or PCing).

And about the free land, what's stopping others from just coming onto your land? I wouldn't want a bunch of crazy people just sitting outside my house.

Originally Posted by Aihwa

When you purchase land, you have legal protection of it, and your family that lives on it from trespassers or thieves. I do quite enjoy being able to sleep soundly knowing that in most instances, a random stranger isn't going to walk into my home.

I think you both do not understand what I try to convey here. Sigh. I'd have to dig deep in Anarchism and maybe Socialist theory to explain this properly. But the thing is, that only the concept of land ownership makes such things as trespassing or "people coming on your land" possible. If you dont have a land, you dont own a land, you just live on that land - there would be no trespassing. People may come by on the land around you and walk there, so what? This does NOT mean that you cant own a house you built and lock the door or set up protection for that house. The house is something entirely different from the land. We are trained to believe that humans need a government, a ruler, a boss to behave properly. That it requires prisons and punishment and complex laws to fight the evil behaviour that is human nature. That is such a sad view of things! And it is not true. People can live together in [url=http://www.peacefulsocieties.org/]peaceful societies[/quote]. Its not at all human nature to walk into other peoples homes or steal from them, unless someone else did steal from them first. And if you steal from the people the natural right to have a place to live and the means to feed yourself and replace it with a system of money and ownership, naturally these people will struggle and turn against the memebrs of that system. Why do people commit crimes - it is not because they are inherently evil, it is because they perceive a need. They break and steal a TV to sell it for food or drugs - both needs that arise from an artificially created scarcity. Abundant crime is a mere expression of the failure of this socioeconomic system to fulfil the needs of all its people. In aboriginal cultures and some present day peaceful societies as well as in regular small villages, crime is virtually unknown. In rural areas it is not uncommon to leave the front door open all the time and to not lock the bikes. People have cars that are not started by a key but by a button. The point is, in small communities, people are not strangers, there is often no need to have a police or state there. And while these small villages still have a concept of property, most aboriginal cultures dont have that. Maybe you can own a house or animals or maybe even the crops you planted, but not the land itself.

Aurora, people own land. Thats the way it is now. Every square inch is owned by somebody at this point. "Back in the day" ownership was decided by how much land you could take from others and defend.

Just because it is like this now does not mean it will always be and it also does not mean that I cannot criticize this! If one cannot think of alternatives to whatever is now, there will never be any progress or change. You could by the same right say, that we will never be able to get rid of crime, poverty, hunger, ... - and that would be a rather fatalistic worldview leading to a future of misery and collapse.

I dont know what "back in the days" means to you, but whatever time that is, you still talk about ownership. Of course, if you want to have ownership over land, excluding others from beeing there, they you need to fight for it and be vicious and lead wars or have a police force and guns and violence because if someone owns land and others own less land, there will always be struggle. But what if ownership of land does not exist - people would not have the need to defend their property, they would not need all that violence. What a concept:

Originally Posted by John Alexander Williams

The Indians had no concept of "private property," as applied to the land. Only among the Delawares was it customary for families, during certain times of the year, to be assigned specific hunting territories. Apparently this was an unusual practice, not found among other Indians. Certainly, the idea of an individual having exclusive use of a particular piece of land was completely strange to Native Americans.

I dont know how you concluded this:

And you say that you get nothing from land?

- if that is what you read in my lines, I may have stumbled over a language barrier, but that is not what I was saying. It is contrary to everything actually. Land is the most important thing, it is where we all come from and all go to, it is what feeds us and provides for us, it is our home. And for exactly that reason, I find it ludicrous that every square inch of it is owned by some person that does not require that land but can extort other people who have been born into this world for the right to benefit from what this world, the land provides.

Reward and aid those that are willing to do work, and leave those who want to leech off the hard work of others in the dust.

Yes - work has to be rewarded, living off other people not. But who is leeching and who is working. Is the CEO of a company really working a thousand times more than a shop clerk? Is the person who inherited millions not leeching on the poor people if he lends them money for interest or if he invests the money in projects that extort people in foreign countries with wages of $5 a day while he is sitting at a pool doing NOTHING? Isnt a person who is working two jobs to feed the family entitled to a higher reward as such a lazy golf playing upper class guy?
I believe people shall be rewarded for their work, equally, on level ground but I do not consider ownership as work, yet in this socioeconomic system it is treated that way.

Greetings, Aurora