Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
My practice is real estate title law \u2013 what individual natural person owns this particular patch of land?<\/p>\n
My job didn\u2019t exist in olden times because The King owned all land (or \u201cnobody owns the land\u201d in aboriginal cultures).<\/p>\n
My job still doesn\u2019t exist in Cuba or North Korea, where the answer remains \u201cthe king, however he\u2019s titled\u201d or in places like Somalia where lack of a functional government to enforce a rule of law leaves the answer as \u201cwhoever can defend his occupation of the land at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
And in almost all the science fiction stories I can recall, the answer in the future is \u201cthe government\u201d or sometimes \u201chuge corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mass individual home-ownership exists in Canada, Australia and the USA. It\u2019s a uniquely Colonial thing and when these countries eventually fall (as all nations do), the concept may vanish with it.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Explaining to Americans “it doesn’t have to be like this” is like explaining to a spoiled teenager (or\u00a0a liberal) where money comes from.\u00a0 It’s a revelation to them that it could ever be different.\u00a0<\/p>\n
(Bonus:\u00a0 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)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: My practice is real estate title law \u2013 what individual natural person owns this particular patch of land? My job didn\u2019t exist in olden times because The King owned all land (or \u201cnobody owns the land\u201d in aboriginal cultures). My job still doesn\u2019t exist in Cuba or North Korea, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45728"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45730,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45728\/revisions\/45730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}