[bemusedthrow75]

No such point was made (regarding a royal family).

Incidentally, the Royal Family themselves privately own 1/250th of the UK's land, and it is mostly not particularly valuable. Only about £15bn.

As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?

The Duke of Westminster (not a member of the royal family) has a physically much smaller (private) estate that is worth more than half of the royal estate.

What the royal family own privately should not be confused with what the "Crown" owns. The Crown estate is basically owned and operated by the state.

[cjrp]

> As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?

If anything, I feel like the speed (or how recently the land was acquired) is actually in the Emmersons favour here. A generation or two ago somebody got wildly successful, vs. land being inherited because your 30x great-grandfather was Henry VIII.

[bemusedthrow75]

Yeah. Swings and roundabouts though; most of the truly long-held property of the royal family has become the Crown estate, and over time the family has had to make much more of its income from that wealth due to the contraction of the Civil List.

Charles himself will only have income from his estate (whereas his mother had income from the Civil List)

What I meant to say is that in the blink of an eye, realistically -- in a couple of generations -- you could and probably will have a situation where a single land-owning family in the USA could end up with a very similar proportion of a _vastly_ larger country.

It's probably in the nature of land-owning for this to happen: someone ends up with all of it, then can't maintain it, and it ends up being sold off or dispensed to the state, then sold off, reaccumulated, and the circle continues.

And I think it's a mistake to see the royal family's land ownership as a source of power and influence. Unfortunately we give them the power and influence for no really good reason; the land is a side thing.

[usrusr]

"It's probably in the nature of land-owning for this to happen: someone ends up with all of it, then can't maintain it, and it ends up being sold off or dispensed to the state, then sold off, reaccumulated, and the circle continues."

Realistically, once someone owns everything, they'd never ever have to sell. Because they could just rent it out temporarily for the same price. Demand isn't that flexible and in absence of other sellers, where else would a would-be buyer take their money?