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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (117163)	10/19/2003 4:22:54 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<protection for property rights has to also include land reform, or it just solidifies control by the landed gentry (who stole it by force, generations ago).> Jacob, there are some problems around that idea. One is that land was controlled and lost by tribal power around the world. All social animals settled land claims like that until humans developed more civilized political arrangements, unfortunately with lots of tribal violence used right up until now in some situations. In NZ, we set ownership as being based on who held the property at the time of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, when the British and most Maoris came to an arrangement. Maoris fought territorial wars until then [and after then too in some instances]. They killed the opposition, enslaved them and ate them. Not all tribal leaders signed up for the treaty, but they were stuck with it anyway and the subsequent development of colonial British rule, then independent rule, under a parliamentary political system. Plenty of claims are still being sorted out. In Fiji, Indians whose ancestors arrived in the 19th century held 100 year leases on land owned by Fijian tribes, who in recent years decided they didn't want to renew the leases. So there have been problems there. Land reform means somebody gets the land and somebody else misses out. It gets really messy in the middle east, where Ottoman, British, Roman and other empires, Jewish and other claims intertwine in an impossible Gordian Knot with political law-making problems overlying the land claims. Possession originally by force is the case for most land around the world. Unless a living person had the land taken from them by force, or maybe their parents, then any claim on the land is reduced. If it was 1000 years ago or 2000 years ago [for example in the Jewish claims to the promised land for the chosen people] those making the claims are off their rockers. None of us can trace our ancestry back that far. Most people lose their chain of genealogy within 100 years and certainly by 200 years the records are very sparse. Then there's the fractional ownership business. Going back 2000 years would see most people in a 3000 km radius being related and there would be a few inroads from far further afield than that. 2000 years has seen a LOT of licit and illicit mating in the human mish mash. I'd bet that everyone in Britain in 1900 was related to nearly everyone from the Red Sea to the Urals and across to Britain. Everyone from the Bering Straits across to the Urals and down to Singapore, including Taiwan and Japan would have swapped some DNA in the past 2000 years. There's no untangling that lot. I'd say it's absurd to go back even 100 years, but certainly 200 years must be long enough to set term limits. The other big thing is that the value of land has dropped enormously over the past 100 years and continues to drop. Most people now live in cities and land provides smaller and smaller proportions of GDP. So there's less reason to fight. Give it another 50 years and populations will be dropping and land will go into surplus and prices will plunge. That process might start sooner in some countries, such as Japan, where population decline is under way. Small business people and capitalists don't need special protection. But less government nonsense would be good. Sure, the thieves need to be caught and punished and control systems used to minimize the risk of fraud and theft. The USA is already pretty good in that regard, which is one reason I like to invest there. Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing etc notwithstanding. Mqurice