The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #159380   Message #3776015
Posted By: Steve Shaw
01-Mar-16 - 09:04 AM
Thread Name: BS: ...this land is private property
Subject: RE: BS: ...this land is private property
I never said you couldn't. I don't even believe that you shouldn't. I think that your land ownership should be a bit like your tax allowance. Above a certain amount, the more you own, the more tax you pay. But the tax should be graduated, based on the real value of the land you own, as I mentioned before. The main point about land is that no-one made it. Go back far enough and you find that someone stole it in a war or enclosed it using force to keep other people out. You can make a house, which is then yours, though if you build it on land that you stole you can expect to be challenged. You can improve your parcel of land, which gives you the right to be its steward, unfettered, as long as you did it without exploiting or disadvantaging people. If the law says that you can own tens of thousands of acres or square miles of land, and lets you use that land for improper purposes such as rearing grouse for brainless rich idiots to shoot at, or allows you to rent it out at extortionate rents to the tenants who work it for you, or allows you to stop me from walking over your moors and mountains in case I frighten the deer that you want to shoot at for sport, then I think the law is wrong. And I've never pretended that my ideas can ever be carried out. But I don't mind telling you what they are anyway.