0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 29 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: The Evil of the Residential Property Tax libertarian
If you haven't made a post about this already, I think you should. It's interesting to think about what a transition to property title blockchains would look like and, more importantly, what it actually means for title claims.
I'm going to restate how you put my position, because I like the way you framed it and I think we're close to seeing where each other are coming from.
L0 is something like the conceptually ideal just property assignment. I'm not sure I'd say it "exists" either, but rather that we have criteria for evaluating which competing claims are closer to L0. L1 is the ledger of property titles that we want to reflect L0. I think changes to L1 should only occur through homesteading new property, voluntarily trading titles, and court (or some other dispute resolution process) decisions that decide an L1 entry was incorrectly assigned.
I'm not going to make that post because simply migrating the database to a blockchain is only a small part of a solution, the true question is how to peacefully resolve disagreements between competing jurisdictions, and I don't have a post-worthy answer to that. The actual Prospera simply relied on the state of Honduras, and the state now decided to destroy the experiment.
L0 is something like the conceptually ideal just property assignment.
To see where I'm coming from, check out this response by Lysander Spooner to Earl of Dunraven (cited from here):
"The whole force of your letter, as a defence of Irish landlords, rests upon the
assumption that they are the real and true owners of the lands they now hold. But this
assumption is a false one. These lands, largely or mostly, were originally taken by the
sword, and have ever since been held by the sword. Neither the original robbers, nor
any subsequent holders, have ever had any other than a robber’s title to them. And
robbery gives no better title to lands than it does to any other property.
No lapse of time can cure this defect in the original title. Every successive holder not
only indorses all the robberies of all his predecessors, but he commits a new one
himself by withholding the lands, either from the original and true owners, or from
those who, but for those robberies, would have been their legitimate heirs and assigns.
And what is true of the lands in Ireland is equally true of the lands in England. The
lands in England, largely or mostly, were originally taken by the sword, and have ever
since been held by the sword; and the present holders have no better titles to them
than simple, naked robbery has given them.
If the present holders, or any of their predecessors, in either Ireland or England, have
ever purchased any of these lands, they have either purchased only a robber’s title to
them, or they have purchased them only with the profits or proceeds of previous
robberies. They have, therefore, never had, and have not now, any real titles to them.
For these reasons, the present holders of lands generally, in either England or
Ireland—whether they hold them by inheritance or purchase—have no whit better
title to them, than the highwayman has to the purse he has taken from the traveller, or
than the pirate has to the ships and cargoes he has captured on the ocean."
Spooner continues this to advocate no less than undoing Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests through a revolution. He does so in a time of acute crisis in Ireland, so it looks less insane than it does now. I'm not saying that going that far today is anywhere near a good idea. But he has a point, which is: a spherical "conceptually ideal just property assignment" in a vacuum doesn't really exist, given the history.
To that, you've already replied: "these things get complicated if you trace them sufficiently far back". Indeed. But they also get complicated if you ask how far back is sufficiently far. For example, Erdogan said that Israel is an unbidden newcomer on originally Turkish territory. Of course, Greeks have a lot to say about whose territory Istanbul originally was, and Israel itself lays a claim much older than all of Turkey's existence even when it was at its original location somewhere around China. Speaking of which, Mao's China wasn't originally allowed in UN because Mao's conquest was seen as totally illegitimate; but now Taiwan isn't allowed in UN because China doesn't like it. Is anything simply going to be legitimate if you wait long enough, and if so, how long?
Looks like the US Supreme Court would clear a land fraud after almost 300 years, but do we really want that?
So my position is that violence-free real estate, like guilt-free spaghetti from the excellent Rick&Morty spaghetti episode (S7E4), only exists if you refuse to think of how it's cooked.
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I actually don't think it's as hopeless to get property rights correct (in many cases) as you do, because most of those historical issues will end up being irrelevant. The current owner is the person with the longest unbroken chain of title transfers and those generally don't go back very far.
I don't believe in a statute of limitations in these matters, If you can demonstrate that something was rightfully owned by someone who passed it down to you, then you ought to be recognized as the rightful owner.
I also don't think the right approach is to try to figure out exactly who owns what. Rather, we should just be trying to resolve disputes about who owns what. I'm sure I live on stolen land, but no one else is claiming to own it (apart from the government sort of), so for now it's mine.
I'd still encourage you to make a post about the future of property titles, even if you don't have all the answers. If you lay out how you're thinking about it and what you aren't sure about, I bet it would generate an interesting conversation.
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