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by eevilspock 3885 days ago
Land and other finite natural resources as private property is antithetical to the principles of a free market because the former allows an infinite amount of something to be purchased for a finite sum. Just like money, land has a time value. Geologists and geolibertarians call it "ground rent".

If we're going to have capitalism, we should at least fix this. Natural resources belong to the commons, and capitalist should pay market rate rent on those resources, the proceeds of which should be distributed to all or be used to fund commons costs (government).

2 comments

It's not antithetical, because in reality you could never accumulate enough of those natural resources in your very finite life to dent the context. The scenario is nothing more than a nearly impossible potential - like pretending that some rich person could bottle all the oxygen on earth.

The richest people in world history never came even remotely close to accumulating even a tiny fraction of global wealth. The same goes for the world's biggest commodity corporations.

There will never be a corporation more dominant in oil than Standard Oil was in its time, and even they couldn't corner the global oil market. Oil is far easier to corner than real estate. The richest / biggest private land-owners in the world, hold a comically tiny slice of land compared to what's out there.

I don't disagree at all, and I think Benjamin Tucker's (op)position on the Four Monopolies makes much sense, I just wrote based on the context of the previous post - that even with land as property, you can't just burn it willy-nilly.