[ExI] Social right to have a living

[spike]

Subject: Re: [ExI] Social right to have a living

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 5:41 PM, Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>...
> So a fair society would give an equal bloc of land to everyone...


This comment caught my attention.  In more agricultural times, that might have made some sense, but in the industrial age, litigation has replaced agriculture as a leading accumulator of wealth, even if not actually a creator of wealth.  Today land ownership is mostly a liability.  Liabilities must be insured.  Most people couldn't buy that insurance, so most people couldn't afford to be given an equal bloc of land.

In the age of cheap food imports, it generally costs more to grow one's own food on one's own land than to import the same amount of food from countries in which wages are low and people are hungry.  So most people in the states could not afford to grow their own food if given the land to do it.  Those equal blocs of land would go mostly unplanted and unharvested, which would soon convert this rich land into a country in which wages are low and people are hungry.

spike