[diggers350] Reasons to abolish private land ownership

[Stephen Bint]

Thank you to those who have replied. I can't always get to a
computer, so I have not replied to all. I am going to.

Duncan.Exley at uwe.ac.uk writes:

> I'd say that the only hope for such a dream is if a case
> can be built that your average person in the street would
> strongly agree with, feel to be to their own advantage,
> and feel to be within their power to act upon: Large scale
> effective public support would be the only way to achieve
> it.

Sadly, I can only think of three reasons to abolish private
land ownership.

1. Land cannot be property because nobody made it.

You can own something by making it yourself or by aquiring
it by consent of the rightful owner. If the first people to
sell the land or bequeath it to their children had actually
created the land and brought that wealth into the world,
they would have owned it and had every right to sell it.
However, their erecting a fence around the land created no
wealth, so they are not entitled to any reward from the
community. You can only buy something from someone who owns
it, so our own legal system neither has a right nor a
motive, to force us to pay rent to people who have not
acquired it by legal means.

2. All human beings will begin to get a regular income we
have always had a right to

When all the rent from land and money from selling oil and
other resources is shared, everyone in the world will get a
regular income. How to share it out is a prickly problem,
but not intractable. Let us say it amounted to ten quid a
week. Think what that is worth in poor countries and what a
difference it would make. There is no reason why we or they
would choose to have a system that deprives us of our share.
We get nothing out of it; we just don't get this money every
week.

3. All wars over resources will cease

As long as it is possible to own an oil well, two tin-pot
warlords might battle eachother over the right to own one
and get free money forever for themselves and their
descendants. If the whole human race owned the oil well, the
warlord would be stealing it from the whole human race and
all of our incomes would go down till we got it back, so
no-one would buy the oil.

But apart from those three things I don't have a problem
with it!

If any of you can think of more reasons to abolish private
land ownership or just want an argument, I would like to
hear from you. I am especially interested in the responses
you get when you introduce these ideas to your friends. What
do they say to maintain their denial? I want to know all the
common reactions, so please tell me what they say.
Interviewing people on tape and putting these arguments is
better still. I think this is the edge of the end of
feudalism and video interviews of people's initial reactions
to these ideas will be precious to future historians. I do
not like central organisations, so I do not want to collect
these, though I am interested to know what they commonly
say. If you think they should be broadcast I would rather
you arranged that yourselves.

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Stephen Bint