Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My practice is real estate title law – what individual natural person owns this particular patch of land?

My job didn’t exist in olden times because The King owned all land (or “nobody owns the land” in aboriginal cultures).

My job still doesn’t exist in Cuba or North Korea, where the answer remains “the king, however he’s titled” or in places like Somalia where lack of a functional government to enforce a rule of law leaves the answer as “whoever can defend his occupation of the land at the moment.”

Even in many modern countries, most of the land is held by a few wealthy families (France, Germany, Russia) and everybody else lives in public housing (English council estates) or apartments (Hong Kong).

And in almost all the science fiction stories I can recall, the answer in the future is “the government” or sometimes “huge corporations.”

Mass individual home-ownership exists in Canada, Australia and the USA. It’s a uniquely Colonial thing and when these countries eventually fall (as all nations do), the concept may vanish with it.

We’re living in a bubble of rights not seen before, and not to be seen again. What an amazing privilege. What a shame that our leaders are risking it all.

Explaining to Americans “it doesn’t have to be like this” is like explaining to a spoiled teenager (or a liberal) where money comes from.  It’s a revelation to them that it could ever be different. 

(Bonus:  Explaining to self-styled “anarchists” that lack of government doesn’t mean freedom; it pretty much inevitably means a much worse form of authority will fill the gap)