I’m tired of trying to search this site for how to quote people, so I’m going to do it the old fashioned way. Putting quote user=“Autolykos” in brackets and ending with /quote in brackets just leaves the preview of my message blank.
Autolykos said:
When you write of building a farm, surely you mean more than just building the house and barn. I don’t see the tilling and planting of the fields as a construction activity, but that’s just me.
It seems to me that, in order to build a farm, the land that will make it up has to already exist. And since it already exists, it must be already owned before anything can be (legitimately) done with it. Likewise for building a city (so to speak) – the land that it’s built on has to exist and be owned first. Therefore it seems that land is indeed ownable.
End quote
The tilling and planting of fields in not a construction activity, but it is a homesteading activity. I held the view that owning land was intrinsically connected with capitalism until I recently came across this debate:
My understanding now is that one doesn’t buy title to land, they buy title to the labor product of the land (the farm or house). If the labor product of the land ceases to be used then a claim on the land is no longer valid. The land can be re-homesteaded by anyone. To do otherwise is to create unnatural scarcity (and this scarcity can be seen by skeptics of capitalism and cause them to view it as “for the rich,” thus hurting the cause of capitalism).
And of course the government is not a legitimate owner of any land, for the people that constitute the government never homesteaded it. I always knew that property could be abandoned, but I thought of that as freely giving it away. But now I see that if you don’t use it, you lose it, whether you like it or not. You either make use of the land or transform it to make it yours, and to keep it yours, otherwise it reverts back to nature.
The debate started off about how that would work with nature preserves. I held the views of “kingmonkey” before but by the end my mind was changed.