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Old 09-25-2007, 02:54 PM
mosdef mosdef is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Toronto
Posts: 3,414
Default Re: Owning land and conditional residence (for ACs)

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Thought experiment:

Say I buy up a bunch of farmland. I let people live on it as long as they agree to follow a set of rules or "laws" that I've come up with and pay me a certain percentage of their profits or "taxes". With the money I make off of this I hire a security force or "police force" to enforce my set of rules and to make sure people pay me what they owe me. Other rich individuals see this as a good idea and start doing similar things. A group of land owners and myself decide to pool together and join forces to create a single company and eventually we own a very large portion of land. If people don't like our rules they are free to not live on our land, but the utility of the land provides strong incentive. We provide further incentive by using our profits to try to make life pleasant for our residents. If we feel very generous we may even make all of our residents joint owners in our company and let them vote to decide who gets to fill our executive and rule making or "legislative" positions. It's quite unlikely that we'd be this generous, but it could happen.

My idea is of course that AC could result in something resembling a state or a group of states. I am being bogus? Basically I'm asking this, because I want to gain a sense of how ACists interpret land ownership.

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The basic difference between this and a state is that you actually own the land, and can sell the land to someone else, and that someone else, and your set of rules applies only on land that you own for as long as you own it. The government "as is" does not own all the land, not does it even pretend to. If the government was recognized as legitimately owning the land in the first place, ACists would think of the government as being an ineffective owner, not a entity violating everyone's rights.
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