Edit: In my own opinion, this iniquitous state of land ownership in Scotland is somewhat compensated for by the fact we have the Right To Roam - which means even though a lot of land is kept as hunting estates anyone can wander about pretty much as we please (with some fairly minor restrictions).
The article seems to suggest Right to Roam was only introduced in 2004 in Scotland. Is this really so?
In Scandinavia Right to Roam (alle-mans-rätt / All Men's Right) predates even the earliest modern laws, so is generally not even codified but based on an immemorial legal tradition.
It was codified in 2003[0] but dates back centuries. Here's the wikipedia entry for the code that governs access.[1] The tl;dr is "you can go where you want, just be responsible" - don't camp in somebody's garden, don't annoy the sheep, don't interrupt the hunts/stalking, and leave no trace.
It really is a fantastic tradition. As a Scottish expat, but frequent visitor, it's nice to be able to hike, bike, canoe, and camp pretty much anywhere. Trying to do the same in much of the US is likely to result in being chased off with a gun.
"Trying to do the same in much of the US is likely to result in being chased off with a gun."
this is a real problem in the West of the US. There is so much land fenced in that it's really difficult to do cross country hiking. When I visited Scotland it was a breath of fresh air to see how easy it is to get around there.
Wait, what? I live in Colorado, and a third of the state is public land. There's two long distance trails (The CT and the CDT) that go over much of the state, or completely through. I've lived for months on a bike, and never camped in the same spot twice - and never once had to pay for it.
I think there's more public lands in the county I live in currently (Boulder, CO) than there is in all of the State I grew up in (CT). I know many places in this state that I could walk 100 miles through, without hitting a paved road. I live 30 miles from a National Park, and 18 miles from the nearest Wilderness Area.
A, "right to roam" law would certainly be nice to have, but we're not being suffocated by private land ownership. Things are just different here, than in Scotland. Less people per area of land.
In CA when you go out to the desert areas you often hit fenced in areas you can't/shouldn't cross. This makes it very difficult to approach interesting areas. Sure there plenty of trails but I only realized how confined you are in CA when I got to Scotland where it's so much easier to roam around.
A lot of desert ecosystems are incredibly fragile, and if just one asshole with an offroad vehicle starts doing donuts for fun on the weekend will get damaged in ways that can take decades to recover.
There are plenty of public lands in CA where you can walk around off trail.
Yes, but the existence of jerks with offroad vehicles explains some of the fences.
There are plenty of places where just having visitors regularly hike across the ground off-trail does significant damage to the ecosystem, which is why fragile or popular parks restrict public access to marked trails and designated campsites.
I've stood on mountaintops in California where I couldn't see the end of the National Park I was in, past the horizon. Sequoia-Kings Canyon NP itself is half the size of Scotland.
California has 199,490 km2 of protected public lands, more area than 2.5 Scotlands.
unfortunately there are still many "land locked" public lands among those protected lands in california: public lands which are encircled by private lands, with no easement. in the sierra the access situation is generally very good, however there are definitely examples elsewhere which beg the question of what it means to be "public" when it can't be accessed.
for example, although the summit of berryessa peak is on BLM land, the only access is through private land. fortunately one land owner was convinced to allow an easement on a short section of trail to allow the opening of the berryessa peak trail, and access to this peak, but for years it was public and yet off-limits.[1]
on the west side of lake berryessa, cedar roughs wilderness, currently has no access. there are old roads/trails in there which are accessible from private land, but no public easement.
there was an article posted here last year about similar issues surrounding the crazy mountains in montana[2].
Yes, there are national parks but if you are not close to one you are out of luck. Go out to the Mojave for example. There are huge areas that are fenced off.
There are pretty huge swaths of public lands in America that are easy to look up on a computer. Texas is one if the few states that's deficient in them, by comparison. As unpopular as this statement may be, it really does behoove you to look up where you're going before you start just cutting down fences. But I never bought into that whole anarchy argument, as it quickly devolves into might makes right, by default.
Also, these are typically situations where someone owns land on both sides of a river, and illegally strings wire across the river. Ignoring the fact that the river is a public waterway. Even though their land is posted against trespassing.
The right to roam is said to have it's origin in the middle ages when merchants and other travelers where allowed to grab a hand full of hazelnuts from anywhere to sustain themselves. Similar traditions where common throughout the land. The name "allemansrätten" (right to roam) was invented in the 40's and in the early 90's written into law.
Funny thing is that it's not defined in the legal text, it just says: everyone has access to nature as described in the "allemansrätt". We're expected to know what that means.. :)
Scottish expat here. It seems like a mixed bag for sure. The current land ownership state of affairs combined with the right to roam does tend to keep the large estates free from development and open for tourism. That's good.
But, as the sibling comment mentions, there's a long history of oppression of tenant farmers, who until recently were prevented from buying the land they tend. And the economic impact - while some estates have changed hands over the years, as far as I know, they tend to be sold relatively intact, so there's little chance for people of more modest means to own any of this land.
If you are a tenant farmer, you aren't being "oppressed" by not someone not selling you land. If you offer me £20 for my house, are you being "oppressed" if I don't sell it to you?
The Church of England, Anders Povlsen, and others have all acquired huge amounts of land recently (that is why there is so much complaining about landowners from England who only come up to shoot). There is tons of forestry to bid on, and if you offer the right price then you will find willing sellers...if you offer the right price.
If some aristocrat’s great-great-...-grandpa was a thug soldier in a conquering army or the screwup third son of some foreign noble who the king owed a favor to or possibly a merchant who made a fortune in the slave trade and then married into a noble family (or whatever, pick your favorite backstory), and the aristocrat’s tenant farmers’ ancestors were the local people pressed into involuntary labor who then literally built everything nearby with their own hands over the subsequent few centuries, why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force sometime in the distant past continue to own everything, while the ones doing all the work own nothing?
This is exactly why the US [used to] have a meaningful inheritance tax.
Without such a tax, compound earnings on investments implies that over time, a very small fraction of the population will control the vast majority of all economic resources.
At the Federal level there is a progressive estate tax up to 40%.
I don’t believe the rates have changed much, but the base amount which is excluded has increase to ~$5.5million per person, $11m per married couple.
Why do you say “used to”? This is not nearly so much of an exclusion amount as to approach an effect where “a very small fraction of the population will control the vast majority of all economic resources.”
Why should they continue to own it? So that some other account can't write a four-line paragraph and tell us to take what you own. We protect other peoples' property rights in order to secure our own.
Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Citizens should not be accumulating dynastic aristocratic fortunes. Small groups of people should not – based on accidents of history – end up inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society.
This is not about opposition to private property. I’m fine if people own a house, or a family farm, or a small business, or even a controlling stake in a large business they built from nothing. (Though it would be great if at that point the public had transparency into their self-serving political activities.)
But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society. It creates perverse incentives away from long-term thinking towards large-scale fraud and abuse, and entrenches the political influence of an aristocratic class whose primary goal is to maintain their fortunes rather than contribute to the society.
Why are they unjust? I don't see how wealth transferring from one person to another is the same as "inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society". Did the heirs also steal everyone else's things when the wealth was passed on? How does that happen?
If inequality is very high (say 1% own 40% of the resources), and a child inherits almost a percentage of the _entire society’s wealth_ just by birth then that select group of inheritances is receiving incredible portions of the accumulated wealth of society by birth becomes an aristocracy.
Yes that's true, but the actual percentage of ownership hasn't changed, it stays the same. But the bigger issue is that the economy is not really a finite thing. Owning a certain amount of land, maybe by inheritance is not the same as owning a never changing percentage of all the resources. A good counter example might be something like inheriting shares of Google, or Amazon. Those people might never have owned any significant percentage of land but that did not stop them from owning something else that is more valuable than the land. So the resources change over time and I don't really see why land ownership is being used as a proxy for everything. Now, also, you may have not been making that point yourself but just clarifying. I just want to talk people down from the land confiscation movement because it seems destructive and pointless.
1% of 1 million people is 10,000 people, who will be roughly half kids and young adults — the heirs.
So you’re talking 0.00008% of the wealth being passed down, roughly. That’s still pretty unequal in a society with a lot of people, but I’m also not sure smashing any granule of accumulated wealth leads to a vibrant society — the inter generational transfer of structures is essential for culture.
Capitalism is fundamentally just highly mobile aristocracy, though — and that may be the best we can do.
So there are a couple issues here. Taxes(on the rich), economic opportunity(from monopolies and corruption), land ownership, and implicitly a notion of fairness and these all become merged in to one issue but I don't think they really are all the same at all.
Land ownership seems like a much more mundane part of the economy actually but it is being equated with the entire economy. So what does land ownership have to do with monopolies, corruption, and the rich paying proper taxes? What are proper taxes for the rich to pay?
To me the land ownership issue is being used as a wedge to reinforce a different idea that a tiny percentage of people have economically disenfranchised everyone else. I really don't think land ownership should be equated with that however. At this point, the argument is very different. It's gone from why we should confiscate people's land to what tax rates should be, or who the "rich" are, or why real estate prices are what they are. To me the land confiscation case seems like scapegoating of landowners for things like real estate prices or economic inequality.
Really? I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.
> But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society.
I actually don't disagree with this. But we're talking about England here, and even if you stop the money, you still have the class structure and the connections, which still lead to political power.
But even more, while I agree that the problem is real, I disagree with your solution. "Lets just take it from them, and give it to those who have less" is such a seductive dream, but it destroys societies and economies where it is tried.
> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.
You have people like Buffett, Gates even Andrew Carnegie and many other billionaires saying that their wealth should go back to society instead of their kids, are they all wrong?
> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.
Saying it's your stuff, is the misnomer. It was found by your because it was someone else's stuff, but there's supposed to be some moral virtue of you receiving it, because you benefited from it during your upbringing.
Being offended by a perceived slight in Procedural justice is a matter of circumstance - ie altering the principles you were born under for Distributive justice, even if you don't think it's as equitable based on your experience. From a pragmatic point of view, inheritance causes Capitalism to fall into anarchy in the long term...making it inherently immoral, as a practice. Unless you want to dispense with capitalism, in which case it's still immoral to a lesser degree (lesser evil against a greater evil).
It doesn't sound like the inheritance is the problem but the concentrstion of power. A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Therefore every generation splits the wealth among two or more people which leads to a reduction in wealth concentration.
In romanian history I know 2 positive examples where land was confiscated and redistributed with positive effects: one by Alexandru Ioan Cuza who confiscated most land owned by church(roughly 25% of the country) and another instance during ww1 when the King decreted every peasant fighting in the war will be alloted land by the state.
Nothing bad came from that, the people were already working the land, they just got to take home the fruits of their labor more.
Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2.
The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system.
Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.
But the collectivisation was the exact opposite: it took land from everybody and gave it to the state.
My point was, land/wealth redistribution, can and often is a good thing, it's not a sacrilege that aytomatically ends in dissaster as some die-hards make it to be.
Everybody?! The communist propaganda was very careful to underline that they only took from those "who had too much" to give to those "who needed" for the "betterment of everybody".
Too bad if you (dirt poor and uneducated) went to fight in WW1 to get some land and then spent the years after WW1 working that land like crazy to buy more land because you believed that gave your children a better chance in life than you had.
Because that's what happens when you don't have principles (like "private property is sacred") and you replace them instead with nebulous beliefs that sometimes it's OK to steal from others, as long as they have more than you do and you get some of that booty.
That was just propaganda. They took priate property away from everyone that had something. Even if you had two cows, they took that away and made it state property. The process is quite nicely illustrated in the Morometii sequel that came out last year:
That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.
The people digging in my grand parent's garden to find&take their hidden winter children clothes and provisions were 100% Romanians, locals from that tiny village, previous lazy losers freshly empowered into dedicated tools of the communist regime.
It was roughly the same during the French Revolution and giving public land to veterans is a practice since the Roman Empire. But in the USSR during Stalin, colectivised agricultural land amounted to 91%. The blosheviks took land from everyone who owned land, big or small. Add to that other private property such as livestock, means of production.
I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.
Land reforms and redistribution never work. It just disrupts the current social order, pisses off people from which the land has been taken, pisses off people who didn't get as much as their neighbor and eventually, roughly within 50 years, leads to similar social structure as before the reform. Only with different social class becoming the owners. The old aristocracy gets displaced by new oligarchic aristocracy. This has happened all over Eastern Europe.
The actual solution is capturing of the rent as the land value increases. The increase on land value is due to society contributing, but the beneficiary is the landlord sitting on it. Tax the consumer, not the producer of the value. Tax land, not labor and business.
The aristocratic power law society has to be broken in order to fix the system. Bolsheviks didn't understand this. Or they did and they organized the coup just to become the new bosses.
Without this understanding our society will still be very primitive and suffer from revolutions and aristocracy cycles. At least in ancient times they understood basic ethics in terms of ethics of ownership and how destructive debt was on a society. It seems like today we are blessed with all these new technologies but live more and more in some medieval dark age dystopia.
The oligarchs are generally former Communist managers who cashed out as the Soviet Union crashed. So really not that different from William the Conqueror etc.
> We protect other peoples' property rights in order to secure our own.
And from there follows a simple equation - when the distribution of benefit from recognizing existing property rights is too skewed in favor of the few, the gains to be had by the rest from refusing to recognize those rights anymore exceed the risks of not being able to secure your own.
When elites forget about this equation for too long, revolutions happen.
Property rights beyond "what you can defend is yours" are a purely human invention; there's nothing innate to the world that says that the property rights regime that exists now is the right one.
There are other ways you could approach it that would distribute ownership and political power in a more egalitarian way, and as ownership (and political power) become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, more and more people will realize that "we protect others' property rights to secure our own" is not meaningful. There's nothing of our own to secure, and never will be in a significant way.
This sort of refiguring of property rights can happen incrementally and peacefully (through tweaking taxes, etc), or suddenly (revolution). We've seen both lots of times in history.
Where we go next is the question; but ending the discussion the way you wanted to isn't all that practical or interesting.
Look, if you want an inheritance tax, I don't object, even if it's 50%. (I might at 90%, though. And if you're going to rely on an inheritance tax, you also probably have to tax trusts...)
I just object to the "they have to much, so we should take it from them" rhetoric, on the principle that, once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich, and they should take what I have. In the process, they'll destroy the economy of the country. I really would prefer that that particular genie stays in the bottle...
The UK's landowners have already destroyed the economy of the country. The country has food banks, literal starvation, and barely functional health, education, and transport systems. Industry has been almost completely sold off, and services are following in due course.
Overt this period the landowners have accumulated more personal wealth than at any time since the Enclosures.
Your point is naive first-order thinking about a third-order problem. "If we let people take billionaire stuff they may take my stuff" is nonsense.
What actually happens in redistributive economies is high taxation leads to high stability combined with high opportunity - not the false rhetoric of opportunity hiding a reality of very poor social mobility, which is what the US has, but genuine social mobility and business opportunity.
Huge inequalities are actually more like to result in revolution and war than stable economies where wealth is more evenly distributed.
Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation.
This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.
Labour rhetoric. The UK isn't "barely functional", that's a ludicrous communist fantasy that can be traced back right to Marx, who tried to convince his readers of the dire near apocalyptic state of England by committing various kinds of fraud - like making up quotes and attributing them to the PM, or relying on obsolete government reports into factory conditions. Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents.
Nor have "landowners already destroyed the economy of the country". The UK economy is the fastest growing in Europe right now (of the rich nations), unemployment is at record lows despite a long term massive influx of immigrants: its economy is literally the opposite of destroyed. You're lying about the reality of the UK, whilst criticising others for being naive.
Shooting down your trad-Marx rhetoric with economic facts is easy so I'd like to focus primarily on this oft-cited belief:
Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation. This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.
But it is a moral point. The people who perform "seismic social dislocation" in response to (perceived or actual) economic inequality have a long history of performing that dislocation by shooting peaceful people, stealing all their stuff, building forced labour camps, liquidating all their political opposition and then turning their countries into hellholes. The communists who did all these things absolutely deserve moral condemnation and their acts cannot simply be whitewashed away as some sort of mechanical inevitability, no more than someone could excuse the Nazis as some sort of mechanical inevitability given the inequalities imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versaille.
Compare the fate of every country where your views have gained critical mass vs America. The latter is one of the world's most successful countries, if not the most. The others are all slowly recovery from absolute poverty, and recovering only because they finally turned their back on your Corbynite views.
> Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents
I've heard most of the anti-Marx stories - some invented, some just rumor, a few true. Never heard this one before. Not sure what one of these jibes you are referring to.
Marx traced the history of capitalism in England. Actually in his studies he showed how working conditions had gotten better in some respects. He was writing a history, so of course he referred to "obsolete...long since reports".
You are correct that he predicted capitalism was in a death spiral. Just as he had observed feudalism in a death spiral, and knew about the Roman slave latifundia economy's death spiral before that.
Corporate America going to the taxpayer to bail out "too big to fail" deregulated banks is precisely the kind of thing Marx predicted. Marx said eventually that would lead to the end of capitalism.
Who knows, the amount of carbon poured into the atmosphere increases every year, perhaps capitalism and humanity will both end at the same time before Marx's visions could be realized.
> ...once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich...
Doesn’t mean it’s right either. Taken from the link you cited:
> One reason why I am skeptical has to do with the difficulty of the causal reasoning needed to establish that a slope really is slippery; most slippery slope arguments make little or no attempt to do this hard work. Moreover, it is difficult even in retrospect to tell whether a slippery slope mechanism has actually been at work.
I see no attempt on the part of the commenter I replied to, to make this kind of effort. And to save them the effort of doing so- even if they had established the presence of a slippery slope, they’d still need to prove it was the causal agent of the consequences they described.
Short of evidence to prove in advance that action A will lead to consequence B, this comes across as scaremongering.
The flaw here is talking about the 'rich'. You can divide rich into absentee landlords collecting hight rents and stifling the economy down and the actual rich who became so through entrepreneurship or other positive impact activities.
I think the sequence of events you're proposing is implausible, on the order of likelihood of a zombie apocalypse or the apes rising up to overthrow mankind.
"If we decide that billionaires represent a policy failure that has allowed a few to concentrate wealth and power and society collectively wrests some of that back from those with such a disproportionate power and wealth, then that means eventually 'they' will come after my inconsequentially meager possessions."
I saw an interesting documentary recently about the British Royal art collection, and it included the interesting quote: "At the root of every great fortune is a crime".
The original British Royal art collection was confiscated in 1649 by Cromwell and it's putative owner was put to death! Almost all of it was sold off, with some parts later returned after the restoration and then glorious revolution (which was more or less a coup). The subsequent collection was built up significantly by the Hanoverian's.
I expect that the crime being referred to was the execution of Charles 1st?
In the documentary they were examining a famous piece from the collection depicting Ceasar's conquest of Gaul (France), which, according to the documentary, was effectively a genocide.
A quote attributed to Honoré de Balzac, but when I went to use it a few years ago I wanted a citation and found that his actual words were neither so pithy nor so broadly implicative:
"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly/cleanly done," is my fairly literal translation, but I am not really fluent enough to capture subtleties.
Ignoring the fact that a lot of the land has changed hands since then (the issue is concentration not identity of owners...a dangerous conflation): are you saying that a morality test should be applied to the family tree of all property purchasers?
I am sure this is attractive to you because you are a member of the "virtuous class" no doubt, but have you checked your family tree? How far back? What genetic crimes prohibit property ownership? Class traitor? Rightist? Capitalist Roader? Perhaps religion?
And why do these people still own land? Presumably you aren't personally being pressed into involuntary labour, so why do you as someone who is doing "all the work" still have nothing? These inbred landowners are presumably so feckless they would take anything (certainly, lots of these estates go for sale every year).
If you go far enough back in my family tree of European peasants, I’m sure there are plenty of bastard children of feudal lords in there. Not to mention thieves, killers, psychopaths, abusers, and so on. Likewise, I’m sure there are plenty of aristocrats (both historically and today) who are lovely people who treat their servants pleasantly and pay them above market wages, and so on.
That’s not the point. The point is that a small group today shouldn’t be the inheritors of the entire society’s wealth. We shouldn’t be judging people today based on the actions of distant ancestors. And the way to avoid that judgement is for the majority of absurdly wealthy people’s property to devolve to the state when they die.
> And the way to avoid that judgement is for the majority of absurdly wealthy people’s property to devolve to the state when they die.
That just makes the state the owner of most of the society's wealth--which in practice means the small group of people who control the state own it. How is this better?
Because it’s far easier for someone with a great vision about how to use the state’s wealth for everybody’s benefit to get themselves elected to the governing body than it is for them to get themselves reincarnated as an aristocrat.
Is it though? In the US, I think, it’s far easier for someone to make a billion dollars, and thus be able to buy a bunch of land or whatnot, than it is for a president or major politician to be elected with a clear enough vision to do something.
I base this on the number of new billionaires vs the number of major new political initiatives.
I think it’s quite easy to have a vision, but very difficult to filter those through the will of the people. In the sense that a great vision is very subjective and may not be believed by the large number of people necessary to change things in a constitutional republic.
> someone with a great vision about how to use the state’s wealth for everybody’s benefit
History shows that such people are much, much rarer than people who have a great vision about how to use wealth they have either inherited or built up themselves for everybody's benefit. Or, to put it another way, people with a great vision that will actually work are far more likely to become entrepreneurs than politicians. Bill Gates is eradicating malaria using his own wealth while governments have failed to do so for centuries.
I agree. But it can be made simpler than that. If the owner actually wants his land property to be inherited, why shouldn't he pay for the property protection over his life himself? If he convinced the society that he really is the owner this way, I don't think the society would have found this private
land property or inheritancee unethical.
What they find disturbing though is that they as a society have to pay for all these property related services like internal protection (police, courts, law system) like external protection (army) and give these to the sitting and do-nothing landlords for free. While paying for them from their pocket through income taxes and receiving nothing back.. Actually the landlords are then so kind as to increase their home rents as a Thank you.
Okay, that isn't the point...but that is what you said: "why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force"...how else is this supposed to be interpreted? Because of someone's ancestors, this group shouldn't own property. If you want to make a different point, then make it.
And it isn't random. You can acquire this property if you want. But be aware, you seem to be expecting to acquire the "entire society's wealth"...most of this land isn't that valuable and that land that is requires work (which is why it is valuable).
Again, I don't understand what your point is here beyond anger that someone else has something you want?
EDIT: Are you actually familiar with the population distribution and density in Scotland? A good chunk of this land is just agriculture and rough grass that has few economic uses. This isn't land that anyone wants to live on. The main concern of the govt, as I understand it, is to encourage forestry (which will mean more large owners, not less).
I happen to think there are good social, and perhaps most importantly, ecological reasons why the current land ownership situation in Scotland isn't ideal.
And that's without looking at the rather nasty and complicated history of land ownership here - but I can recommend Andy Wightman excellent book The Poor Had No Lawyers to explain that.
1% of England's population is about 550,000, that is extreme inequality. You seem to think its OK for a small percentage of people to have everything as long as you have the right to roam around. I respectfully disagree. Wealth equals political and social power and it should be divided more evenly in order to ensure democracy. Make not mistake Capitalism mean fair and free - but in our warped form of Capitalism we have those with money rigging the rules for their own benefit and as such we don't have Capitalism we have Aristocracy.
> You seem to think its OK for a small percentage of people to have everything as long as you have the right to roam around.
Agriculture in the United Kingdom uses 69% of the country's land area. 476,000 people work on those farms. That farms take up a disproportionate amount of land compared to urban areas doesn't tell us anything about income inequality. Most people in England want to live in cities, so even the wealthiest citizens might own little to no land (how much land does a wealthy penthouse owner own if all they own is that penthouse).
To be clear, I'm not saying that income inequality doesn't exist. We just don't see examples of it by looking at farmland.
The wealthy penthouse owner is actually an interesting case in point.
Traditionally England only had Leasehold ownership of 3D space, you couldn't own it in perpetuity. Since the penthouse is presumably above many other properties belonging to other people its owner could only own a "long lease" (e.g. 100 or 250 years) on the penthouse, with the permanent freehold rights separate, often owned by brass plate companies with the ground rent and other fees paid to them disappearing into opaque foreign corporations.
Some years ago, recognising that this is crap, the British government introduced Commonhold, a way to own 3D space that acknowledges that the property owners who share the same physical building need to work together but rejects the approach that the Freehold should be a profit centre for rent-seeking third party investors.
So in principle today a penthouse could be owned Commonhold, which means it comes with membership of a "Commonhold Association" an entity that exists only so that the Commonhold owners can all be members, and to own the Freehold that they're all dependent on instead of it being possible for somebody else to own that.
In practice people didn't say "I demand Commonhold" and accept a price premium for this improved ownership. So if you developed a piece of land after the reform you had the choice, sell a property Commonhold for £X or sell the same property as Leasehold with say a £1000pa escalator ground rent going to Property Holding Corp 3472 based in the British Virgin Islands, for £X. It was a no brainer, and there are very few Commonhold properties today and plenty of these mysterious property holding corporations earning fat stacks.
Sure, its farms. Tell me another one. If yo see who owns all the wealth, it would be about an equal percentage of the population. Stop deflecting from the gross income inequality that exists in UK and across the world. Its a fight that you can't win because the numbers don't support you. (pfss. "It's farms").
69% of all the land in the UK is farm land. Most farms are owned by individual farmers. Those farmers make up roughly 1% of the total population. The numbers absolutely support this (feel free to research it yourself if you don't want to take my comment as gospel).
There are legitimate signs of income inequality. This just happens to not be one of them. No one defines income equality as everyone in the country owning roughly the same acres of land. The vast majority of people live in urban areas, so we wouldn't expect that those city-dwellers all owned roughly the same percent of farmland.
how can we cure these poor people from this delusion that they have a right to possess what they have not earned?
life is inequitable you have to fight to get a higher station. substituting taking responsibility to create wealth for convincing yourself you're entitled to it just disempowers you.
I'm not saying it's not hard. but that it is hard is not special and that it is hard is the motivation to overcome it. and when you get there that your hard earned achievement can be taken away by people who don't want to overcome is wrong.
The fundamental point is this wealth is not some free right it's not some magical thing that just exists. wealth is precisely the value created by overcoming difficulties.
wealth is made by work and the people who make it ought to be free to choose what they do with it rather than coerced into surrendering it in the name of equity, a false equity which is inequitable to the moral nature of wealth, responsibility and hard work. that kind of idea is a disease that will erode away the social foundation.
I'm not saying wealth disparity is easy nor that it creates no problems. it creates a lot of problems but I don't believe the solution is by redistribution. at least not at this stage of human and economic evolution. while our species is still bounded by the amount of energy we can extract from our surroundings.
taxes yes, State yes, a social welfare net yes, but not to an excessive degree, and not to cure inequality.
if energy was free of course it should be distributed to all without cost. like air.
but it's not. to do so would bankrupt our species in the name of compassion. the greater compassion is the realization of the poor state we're in, and the preservation of all. not the temporary satisfaction of some who convinced themselves that things should be easy.
one day as a species we will get there. no crushing disparity. but we're not there yet. trying to live like we are already there is a toxic delusion that doesn't help us get to that more compassionate future.
Wealth is made by labor, yes. But it is not accumulated by it. It's accumulated by being in a position of power whereby you can extract rents from the laborers who make it. In older times, this was done by threat of physical force. These days, it's more often done by exploiting some economic advantage - for example, if you own any valuable resource, such as land or means of production, you can extract rent from people who use it.
Whenever you see concentrated wealth with such extreme disparity that you have one person owning more than a million others, there are only two possible conclusions: either they really are a million times more productive, or it was actually produced by that million, and extracted from them via rents.
You could argue that those rents are fair, since they stem from legitimate ownership. But what makes it legitimate? Most land was originally taken by force, for example, and the result enshrined in law (that was written by the people who did this) post factum. If that doesn't make economic advantages that stem from such ownership unfair, then surely the same standard holds today, and those people have no right to complain if society decides to take it away from them by force, and enshrine it into law, just because it can.
Exactly, and there’s in particular the very special kind of rent extracted by the hiring of people to work for you without profit-sharing, and using your negotiation power as a capital owner to get people to agree to the terms of your employment contract stipulating your appropriation of the whole work product.
I’ve found the writings of David Ellerman to be very elucidating on this topic, and admirable for giving a deep critique of capitalism without any reliance on Marxism. He relies on a labor theory of property rather than a labor theory of value, and a Lockean liberal notion of inalienable rights. Two short texts that make a good introduction:
Land is finite natural resource and its ownership is a zero sum situation. Company ownership, however, is not. It is entirely possible to own your sweat and labor, which is demonstrated by millions of small business owners.
The sentiment we hear often, however, is yearning for benefits of co-owning a (ideally mature and profitable) business while retaining the hired hands' rights. Not many are keen to give up their 8 hour workday, benefits, social welfare net for the upside of owning their share of corporate profits.
Exactly, people are making choices, and then complaining about it, which make sense as a coping strategy, but not if you really want to own your own labor.
There's hardly a place in the world (yes, even in Scandinavia) where starting a business entitles you for welfare or the usual labour rights. A typical small entrepreneur has to live with that for years, until the cashflow becomes viable enough to support them employing themselves.
I realize that's not what most people have in mind when they ask for profit sharing. They want to be a part of an already successful operation, and take no risks. And that's precisely what I've been talking about. The process of building a successful business is given little thought, as if they grow on the trees or are being brought to Earth by meteors.
Then there's that thing with businesses statistically being just slightly more often in black than in red. Would your profit sharing scheme involve absorbing the losses as well? How many takers you think it will have? If not them, who will get to absorb the losses, potentially reinvest to weather through rough times etc? The expense would be not negligible, on the order with the profits.
Scandinavian entrepreneurs and coop workers can certainly participate in the social security. Probably some reforms could make the situation better, especially if cooperative business becomes more of a norm.
When the firm spends more than it produces, it needs access to capital. This can be in the form of savings, credit, or new investment. Small new businesses are routinely launched through loans. Credit institutions are quite used to absorbing losses.
A worker-owned coop can also take investment from external capitalists. It would just be in the form of a profit-sharing contract rather than equity with voting rights.
We are in Norway and my wife ran her own small construction engineering business for a few years. You get no welfare, as it is funded from your previous payroll contributions, and only for up to 2 years. If you business is too small for you to have yourself on payroll, tough luck. Getting there takes a while, as tax burden on a business here is quite significant.
> Credit institutions are quite used to absorbing losses.
They are also quite good at taking the profits on their investments. If a bank bails you out, it wants to take its pound of flesh. You essentially arrived at status quo.
It’s also naturally abundant in the form of land, those cadastral game tiles on which life plays out, dominion of which are allocated by the state in a system of hereditary monopolies.
Wealth is not allocated the same way it’s created. That’s why we have the concept of rent-seeking, behavior that increases one’s share of wealth without creating more wealth.
Owning wealth lets you accumulate more wealth without working, because you can charge other people rent in exchange for using your wealth. Not only that; you can also hire people in an arrangement where you automatically own everything they produce using your capital goods.
Rich people know that labor is a very inefficient and tedious way to increase one’s own share of wealth. That’s why they prefer rent, interest, and staying on the top of the employment hierarchy where they have a legal claim on the products of others’ labor.
Yes, work is a true source of wealth, and so is capital and land and the other factors of production. There’s a long history of criticizing how most of the wealth created by working ends up owned by the owners of capital and land—that’s the essential critical point in the discussion of capitalism, whether Marxist or Georgist or Ellermanite.
Or you could say the crucial question is how can we cure the rich people from the delusion that they have a right to appropriate what they have not produced?”
no you couldn't. I think you've been deluded by fancy sounding ideas.
you could just as well say that people are rent seeking with their labor, using the capital of their bodies.
if you deny personal ownership of property and land and the ability to extract wealth for rent from that ownership you may as well also deny personal ownership of one's own body and personal space and the ability earn income for renting out one's time, or professional service or the capital of one's body. that gets you to slavery in one step, well done.
so the simplistic argument that labor capacity of people is fundamentally different to other capital is false. consider that you invested your time and your money in your education to better your skills increasing your ability to rent on your own capital. if you want to deny people extracting money from their investments and property why not also deny them extracting money from their investments in their own education?
so again I think on the premature path to compassion and equality in your mind you have actually found a shortcut which disempowers people and limits their freedoms. I don't think you did this intentionally, you just haven't thought it through.
I understand the temporary appeal but it does not actually provide a workable solution to the problems you are trying to address.
the next step is consider what the second-order effects of policies inspired by your theories would be. the ultimate goal of this is to create a dependent slave class to do the bidding of the elites. these theories have been designed for mass appeal.
Nowhere have I argued for eliminating private property or renting out land or capital; I’m for all of that, so I can’t really respond to your condescending dismissal.
How do you extend this argument to, let's say, three of the richest people on the planet namely Bill G, Mark Z and Jeff B ? What cure do you suggest for them?
Something like using legislation and taxation to shift corporate structure towards something more like democratic worker-owned firms. But that’s a long term project; I don’t suggest suddenly and forcefully restructuring existing corporations. As a fundamental long term goal I suggest abolishing the renting of people (a la David Ellerman), along with heavy taxes on land value (a la Henry George).
That's why the Marxist critique of capital is wrong. Was use of capital to extract rent from others ethical or not? Maybe yes, maybe not, who knows. It is impossible to decide.
Georgist perspective doesn't blame the rich capitalist, but the rentier, no matter if rich or poor. Rentiers provably extract others people's and businesses' labor.
Renting out capital is not an ethical problem, but renting labor is. Human actions are not a commodity, and treating persons as tools is wrong for the same reasons “voluntary slavery” is wrong—it violates inalienable rights. The problem with capitalism is that capital owners alienate persons from their own natural property rights through the injustice of employment contracts. (Land ownership is also a problem in our world but it’s sort of orthogonal to capitalism, although it depends on how you define capitalism. Georgists make a big distinction between capital and land; maybe we can talk about both capitalism and “landism” as different strands of the economic system?)
I think you're being uncharitable towards OP's post; he doesn't make the case you're suggesting. Although I'm not sure that your broader point is too far off.
...yep, and the fact that the population of Scotland is tiny and over 50% of that population live in the Central belt.
Afaik, the only solid evidence against is an apparent lack of "participation" from local communities on land use. Unfortunately, this is an issue that applies as much to council as private landowners in Scotland and also tends to elicit opinions on what "should" be the case, rather than what is actually possible (i.e. people who live in the middle of nowhere complaining about the lack of economic development, complaining that the landowner isn't selling them a house at a cheap enough price, complaining that the landowner only comes up from England to shoot, etc.)
There has been an abundance of loose reasoning on that is justified only by the perception that of unfairness (and, unf, a bit of light bigotry about the English). One of the sources for the rather brief Land Commission report was some political theory on power and participation (https://landcommission.gov.scot/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/R... - Section 5 - I studied Politics postgrad btw, theory shouldn't be used this way...it is basic). Madness.
It's not really a "perception" of unfairness... it's a long rooted and fossilised class system, acting to the detriment of the entire country. (Hopefully your politics postgrad included the clearings.) England at least had the Civil War to equalise things a bit, Scotland has never had any kind of revolution or similar to break very old land ownership structures.
Scotland's second biggest problem is England, in the form of unbalanced monetary transfers from borrowing from London, and the brain drain to England, and for that matter the rest of the world. But its greatest problem is itself, and the domination of control in a few families hands.
You've repeatedly crossed into personal incivility in your HN posts. We've had to warn you about this before. We ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
"...someone who is poor in Scotland can become rich..."
Five minutes of casual googling didn't yield Scotland's current measure of social mobility. The Great Gatsby Curve is a rule of thumb suggesting that inequity & mobility are strongly correlated. Further, the members of the commission responsible for the Elite Scotland report (meant to update the measurements) all resigned in protest, which is probably a bad sign.
> It is amazing that you aren't able to distinguish between your opinion and reality.
This is snark, and is not welcome here.
> my politics postgrad most certainly did not "include" the clearings (I am not even sure what this means
neffy is referring to the Highland Clearances which were a brutal and iniquitous time for tenants in the Highlands. I'm quite surprised that given your chastising tone and appeal to authority by bandying around your politics postgrad studies you hadn't heard of this.
> the result of the Civil War for Scotland was imposition of govt from England.
Whilst there may have been some ripples down through history as a result of the Civil War, there are more conclusive reasons why Scotland became governed from England. Perhaps you should read some Scottish history. In particular the bits about the Union of Crowns and the 1707 Act of Union.
I'd also suggest grabbing a copy of Andy Wightman's "The Poor Had No Lawyers"[1], he explains land ownership in Scotland and the reasons why it is difficult for ordinary folks to make inroads into fair land ownership here.
> It not only reeks of bigotry but is a self-destructive pattern of thought. Scotland's decline is a function of the nation and it's people. These "stab in the back" myths only help the weak-minded find (empty) solace in their failure.
Hoo boy....I'm shouldn't even grace this with a response it's so ludicrous and ill-informed; and I'd suggest you not accuse others of bigotry as it's downright rude.
Politically (not culturally) England has always been a problem for Scotland. I highly doubt you're a member of the SNP (I am and your claim from the comments above fail the sniff test), maybe you meant the BNP?
You've broken the site guidelines badly yourself in this comment. Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling, regardless of how another commenter has behaved.
https://www.holyrood.com/articles/comment/land-reform-and-in...
Edit: In my own opinion, this iniquitous state of land ownership in Scotland is somewhat compensated for by the fact we have the Right To Roam - which means even though a lot of land is kept as hunting estates anyone can wander about pretty much as we please (with some fairly minor restrictions).