I’m trying to get my head around mortgages… It appears that the current western model of home “ownership” is based upon paying a continuous stream of our money to banks. How did we end up in this situation? Was it always like that? Does it make sense? If we lived in a minarchist state, how would people pay for their accommodation?
With savings and loans. I think homes would be much less expensive and wages would be much higher, so people would get a lot more bang for the buck.
Thinking about it more, perhaps I should have asked this more basic question:
When person A buys object X from person B at price P, it makes sense that
A is the new owner and B gets the money, because B made X and A has
sacrificed his money. Nobody would begrudge B his reward. Nobody
could object to the transaction.
But what if object X was land? Hang on a minute, how did
B get to “own” the land? What gave them the right to sell it to A?
Couldn’t you or me equally claim ownership of that land?
Shouldn’t we be in on a cut of P?
its like you are pretending that there is no history,
and that although there are legitimate clothes owners, car owners, and computer owners, somehow legitimate landowners are an impossibility.
bizarre.
If you trace land ownership back far enough then presumably the original owners staked claim to their land by force. I thought people on this forum were against the use of force.
yes, we are also against presuming someone doesnt own something because we can tell hypothetical stories about history and we are against redistributing property on such hyop-historical grounds without providing evidence of a superior ownership claim, (let alone that the current ownership claim is illegitimate)
why would you presume the original owners staked their claim by force? If you are the original owner, that means that nobody owned the land before you, there was nobody to forcefully take the land from.
What constitutes a legitimate claim of land ownership?
I would argue that it is based around the principle of mixing labor into nature. This excludes natural forests and the like from ownership. What happens if someone lays claim to a natural forest (or other untouched land) and someone else wants to mix their labor with it?
A thought experiment about land…
Imagine that a large group of people are placed on a small desert island, there is limited space. They know that they are going to be there for many years, and so will want to divide up the land so that each person or family can build houses. Clearly not everyone has the same preference for land. One person may love playing tennis, so they are very keen to have a large flat piece of land. Someone else may like sitting at home reading books and doesn’t really care much about how much space they get. The have a big meeting to decide what to do and avoid fighting. Presumably the method that will result in the least fighting is to use a free market. What will happen then is that the people who have the greatest desire for land will pay for the privilege and those who have the least desire for land can use that as a bargaining chip - i.e. those who are willing to put up with having less land will be paid compensation by those who want more land. Using this mechanism and letting people bid for land, the market can fully resolve itself so that everyone can get exactly the deal they want.
Note that the flow of money/rent/compensation will be from those wanting more than the average amount/quality of land to those willing to put up with less than the average amount/quality of land.
Note also how different that is from our current status quo. I can not say to “society”/government/whatever “Ok, I’ll agree to live in a tiny house on a small plot of land so long as the reset of you compensate me for my sacrifice”.
I conclude that our current system is far removed from what should emerge in a free market without violence, so I am puzzled why anyone here should be content to put up with a system which could only have emerged through violence. One where the poor pay a continuous stream of money to the rich.
We can be against the expropriation of property in the present while forgiving such instances in the past.
So you’re quite happy to live under a system where poor people have to give a continuous stream of money to rich people by virtue of the fact that the rich people’s ancestors were violent thieves.
This kind of social order is not stable without the perpetuation of the power of the elite. Once the power is done away with, the poor begin to accumulate assets very rapidly.
I’ve also toyed with the idea of forgiving all debt owed to fractional reserve banks.
I’m now saying your wrong, but can you just explain the mechanism by which the poor will gradually get to own more land - or point me to an article.
I don’t think he said they’d get more land, but more assets, and why it is so important they own this land? The poor cannot get more land than there is.
Well at the moment the poor have almost none. And they would struggle to buy any because they are so tied up paying rent to rich landowners (that includes banks).
I notice that so far nobody has disputed the logic of my thought experiment. So presumably you all agree that my “free market” solution is the fairest system of all.
Maybe? But there is no way to prove that all land was acquired through theft, and we’d be unable replicate your method without causing massive harm to all parties who happen to own land. You may “redistributing” property people came to own through neither force nor violence, in which case you are doing harm. Even if someone’s ancestors forcefully took land, why is it that their descendants should pay for this transgression?
You could just as well ask why should I (a non-landowner) lose out because of the transgressions of somebody else’s ancestors. It cuts both ways.
I’m sure a mechanism could be devised to make a not-too-painful transition from the status quo to something along the lines I proposed, perhaps over several generations.
How about saying that you are not allowed to give 100% of your land to your offspring when you die. Perhaps only 90%? 80%?.. this way a continuous flow of new land will gradually come up in the market. All new land shall be deemed as belonging to the nation. Then anyone who wants to rent this land has to pay the rest of society for the privilege. Over the coming generations all the land will eventually be rented in this manner. Ie people who want a lot of land pay a continuous stream of money to those willing to put up with owning only a small amount of land.
Why should you not allowed to be?
The 10% or so that you are not allowed to pass on is a small compensation for the fact that the land was originally stolen from the rest of the nation. Its not all your fault, hence the small figure of 10%.