Who Does Land Belong To?
No one or anyone.
I’m going to defend an idea you might find controversial.
Stated simply:
There are only two logically consistent and moral frameworks for understanding land ownership. Either all land belongs to everyone, or no land belongs to anyone. Every other framework is indefensible, either logically or morally.
But what about private property? What about national borders?
We’ll get to those, but the gist of my argument is that all modern forms of land ownership are pragmatically useful - they create a better world than would exist without them - but are still morally or logically indefensible.
Let’s dive in.
Ownership versus Possession
I’ll start by distinguishing between owning something and having something in your possession.
Owning something, in this essay, means having a morally defensible right to exclusive access to it. If you own it, that ownership is moral and universalizable, meaning that everyone can accept that this is a legitimate means of ownership.
Possessing something, in this essay, refers to simply having control of it, regardless of how that control came to be. If you stole a car, you possess that car, but you don’t own it. If you kill your neighbor and take their house, you might be in possession of their house, but you sure don’t own it.
The key difference between the two is that our society and civilization recognize that a person has a legitimate right to the things that they own, because that’s what it means to own it. A person possesses everything they own, but society only recognizes their exclusive right to the subset of their possessions that they own legitimately.
I contend that there are four valid - that is, defensibly moral - means of ownership.
First is to create something - everyone owns the fruits of their own labor.
Second is to purchase something - a voluntary exchange of money or barter is foundational to our civilization and a morally defensible means of ownership.
Third is to receive something as a genuine gift or inheritance (inheritance is a kind of gift, when you think about it). A child, for instance, receives basically everything they own as a gift from their parents.
Fourth is via government fiat, i.e. social security or Medicaid.
As for possession, well, all you need to possess a thing is to take it. Force, deceit, and uncontested claim are all means of possession, but they aren’t valid means of ownership.
Might Does Not Make Right
They say possession is nine-tenths of the law. In this essay, ownership is nine-tenths of the law, and for good reason.
One of the whole points - and arguably biggest benefits - of civilization is that it protects the weak from the strong. Without laws and rules and a state monopoly on violence, those with strength can take from those without. Stuff, whether ordinary possessions or land or whatever, belongs to whoever can enforce their claim, for exactly as long as they can enforce it.
This is a horrible state of affairs: fundamentally, it is the Law of Might Makes Right.
While a full analysis of why this is bad is beyond the scope of this essay, I’ll note two points:
Morality should not depend upon who is better at killing
Enforceable property laws undergird trade, which allows for specialization, and specialization and trade are the foundation of our entire economy and way of life, which is empirically better for humanity on almost every conceivable metric than what came before.
The Chain of Ownership
In a criminal justice case, there’s a concept of a “chain of evidence”. The goal is to ensure that a piece of evidence brought against someone is legitimately sourced (it came from the place the police say it did) and hasn’t been tampered with since.
I’d like to introduce a similar conceit: the chain of ownership.
The chain of ownership is a way of determining if a possession is legitimately owned, i.e. a person has it via means that we as a society would support morally and logically.
I define the chain of ownership inductively: something is legitimately owned if either
The owner created it via their own labor, or
The owner acquired it through a valid means of transferring ownership
Valid means of transferring ownership are:
Voluntary exchange (buy or barter)
Genuine gift
Government fiat (e.g. taxation and redistribution) (Theoretically, this is valid because everyone in a country is part of a social contract under which this ‘voluntary’. I realize that this can be controversial, and it’s not really necessary here, just included for completion.)
Examples
Here are some examples of the chain of ownership, resulting in a legitimate/illegitimate ownership of a chair:
Legitimate:
You create a chair
Someone else creates a chair, then you buy it from them
A company paid for the raw materials and labor necessary to create the chair, and then sold the chair to you
Someone made a chair, someone else bought it, then sold it to a used chair store, where you bought it
Illegitimate:
You steal someone else’s chair
A company paid for the raw materials and labor necessary to create the chair, and you stole the chair from their store
You kill someone else for their chair
The Argument
Much like many a math proof, we’ll use an argument by contradiction: we’ll start by assuming the opposite of what we want to prove and show that what results is contradictory - it forces us to accept the unacceptable.
The opposite of my thesis above is this:
A specific piece of land can be owned by a specific person.
How could this come to be?
For a specific person to own a specific piece of land legitimately, we have to be able to trace the chain of ownership all the way back to its source, and each link in the chain has to be a legitimate transfer of ownership.
If I own a piece of land today, it’s because I bought it from someone else. That’s valid.
Who did they buy it from? Probably another person, and that’s valid too.
But if you go far enough back, you’re guaranteed to find that someone claimed the land by force.
Either
the land was already occupied, and they claimed it by forcing whoever it belonged to/whoever occupied it to leave (or just killing them), or
the land wasn’t already occupied, and they claimed it by virtue of being the first person to set foot on it - a claim rooted in force, since the land you set foot on could be yours only so long as you could defend it
Now, it’s tempting to consider the second of those two options a legitimate means of gaining ownership of the land - who should have it first but the person who got there first? There’s an analogy one could make with intellectual property, after all, where we all acknowledge that the first person to have an idea should have legitimate ownership of it.
The difference between a piece of land and an idea, though, is that a person isn’t responsible for the existence of the land. It still would have been there, if the person never came, whereas an idea requires actual work to be done by a person’s brain to coalesce.
Also consider that ‘the first person to find a piece of land owns it’ is more or less just an adult version of ‘finders keepers’, and also boils down to ‘might makes right’, because how else does someone discover a new piece of land other than by physical accomplishment?
Furthermore, how are the boundaries set, when one discovers new land? Should the first European to set foot on the North American continent have claimed the whole thing?
Consider, if you think that the first person to set foot on a piece of land should have legitimate ownership of it, that under those rules the entire moon might as well belong to Neil Armstrong. It took an entire country’s GDP and the work of thousands to put Neil on the moon; should the entire thing belong to him simply because his footprint was the first one there?
Or should the moon belong to America, just because Americans got there first?
The core of the problem with land when it comes to the chain of ownership is this:
There is no good way to decide who specifically should own a piece of land first, because no one created the land. It was already there.
No valid chain of ownership can thus exist for land. It can’t be owned by a specific person legitimately.
All that’s left are the two absolutes: either all land is owned equally by everyone, or no land is owned by anyone.
(As a somewhat politically charged aside, this is why I find American land acknowledgements and the general accusation that Europeans stole land from the Native Americans to be misconstrued. It’s undoubtedly true that the colonists took land from the Natives by force - but I don’t believe the Native Americans had a right to the land either. Whatever land the Europeans took from them, they either took from someone else or claimed by right of being the first people there, neither of which I recognize as legitimate means of ownership. This doesn’t abnegate the horrific treatment the Native Americans suffered, just reframes the land ownership issue in particular from a special horror to one more instance of land ownership being transferred illegitimately among many in history.)
The Importance of Private Property
I am neither an anarchist nor a communist, so the previous conclusion is somewhat troubling to me.
I understand the importance of private property and strictly enforced land ownership. After all, if a person can’t be guaranteed the fruits of their efforts to improve the land they own, why would anyone improve any land at all? Without private property, no one would have an incentive to build anything, till any soil, invest in any future.
We need private property.
Yet I find the moral conclusion above inescapable.
Conclusion: Georgism and the LVT
This leaves the elegant solution of the Land Value Tax, which neatly threads the needle of having everyone benefit from common ownership of land while keeping the structure of private property. I’ve written about Georgism elsewhere and will likely write about it more in the future, but this is one of the moral arguments I find most persuasive about it.
Land wasn’t created by any particular human, so why should a particular human get to monopolize the value it produces?