[michaelochurch]

"Property" is quirky word, and I now wish I could think of a better word to represent what I'm talking about, because the points you've raised are valid. Property rights are a great thing in moderation. There's a social need for people to have the right to own the products of their own labor. Where property becomes a systemic disease when property relations persist for longer (and allowing larger concentrations than are reasonable) than serve any purpose. If a person who works hard gets rich, great. If his moronic, undeserving, spoiled great-grandchildren are rich and powerful and still call the shots in society, not great.

There needs to be a way of storing Energy, as you said, but it needs to be limited and kept reasonable. Infinite transferability of property rights is a demonstrated disaster.

For example, private land ownership (at scale, in non-agrarian settings) is pretty much illegitimate. I'm not saying that it's illegitimate for a person to own a small house in the woods on an acre of land. That's fine. I'm talking about what happens at scale. Private land ownership was necessary at one time because it gave people an incentive to use the land properly, but the senseless wealth transfer we see in, e.g., Manhattan is just perverse. People like me (hard-working, ambitious, energetic, talented) are the fucking reason people want to live (or work, or employ people) here... we fucking make cities... and yet, instead of thanks for making this place great, we get the obligation to pay immense sums of money in rent.

I would actually support a government solution to the urban land problem. Since the total price is going to be high anyway (because of the high demand for housing) I'd rather see it go into taxes that make the place better-- better schools, more and nicer parks-- than into the already bloated coffers of multimillionaire real estate owners.

The religion aspect: private land ownership pretty much emerged out of ancestor veneration. Land "ownership" started at the ability to defend land, which was usually the job of the chieftain or king or alpha male. However, being people, they died. If their descendants weren't strong or persuasive or wily enough to defend the land claim through ordinary means, they started using supernatural claims, based on the idea that the ancestor still existed and could enforce those claims supernaturally. (Over generations, these ancestors became gods.) This was almost certainly not the only religious impulse, and it's far from true that all religion was borne of this desire, but it's a strong and consistent strain of the impulse to corrupt religion toward political aims.

[eli_gottlieb]

You seem to be getting at the distinction between possessions and property. Proudhon would be proud.

Possessions are things you own (in the sense of being the exclusive user) because you made them and you're the one who uses them. You make a flint and then a wood carving, these are your possessions.

Property, however, is what we get when you start having exclusive usage rights to things you don't actually use. So a feudal landlord has the property rights to a manor. However, he only actually uses the bit of land occupied by his own castle. So what's the problem? He still "owns" the rest of the land, particularly the productive farmland, and he "rents" it to the peasants who actually work it.

He is engaging in the fundamental economic crime: rentiering, demanding that other people pay him forever to use something without their ever acquiring actual ownership over it. This can only be done because he has a property right over something he never productively uses (in fact, cannot physically make full use of: no one person can farm an entire manor or village worth of land). The creation/acquisition of property titles that can be rentiered upon is the usual historical mode of what Marx termed "primitive accumulation" or "the original accumulation", the first initial step that creates a capitalist class capable of living without working.

Note that we can use this definition to arrive at formulations of other great economic "crimes". Usury, we can now say, is the rentiering of money: the debtor never actually acquires ownership over the investment he borrowed, he just rents it for a while in the hope of generating enough return to make a profit for himself even after paying the "money-rent" of interest.

This, it is worth noting, is why modern capitalism really took off when we started forming joint-stock corporations. (Start-up guys, start reading here!) Equity investment routes around rentiering by actually trading the start-up capital for a share of ownership in the business. Ownership of one thing is exchanged for ownership of the other thing. This is why it's harder for venture capitalists to earn money than for, say, Goldman Sachs to earn money: venture capitalists are trading, Goldman can rentier (in fact, investment bankers in general are rent-seekers on their exclusive professional access to the broader capital markets) and commit usury.

[_delirium]

Interestingly, the distinction was actually common among the founding generation of Americans, before even Proudhon, though Proudhon turned it into more of a fully worked out theory of property.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote this:

"All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such a disposition."

(Elsewhere he clarifies that what he means by "necessary to a man" is essentially personal possessions, work tools, and shelter.)

Thomas Jefferson made a similar distinction in some of his letters. There's some speculation that Jefferson+Franklin's view that property isn't a natural right, but a social convention, is why the Declaration of Independence discusses "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", rather than the formulation, "life, liberty, and property" that was otherwise more common at the time.

[einhverfr]

One useful thing would be an excise tax for land rentals. This would drive up the cost of renting (but probably not the price, since rentals are competing with purchases) in comparison to owning in terms of both one's own home and productive property (farmland, office space, etc). This means less incentive to be a landlord. Ideally the home should be productive property but all too often it isn't.

[eli_gottlieb]

This is exactly the conclusion Henry George came to when he investigated these phenomena: a land-value tax. I, personally, would couple it with a rebate/"prebate" for a certain value, as society's way of saying, "If you use less than $X in land/commons value per year, that's fine." The X would be set so that the fat middle of the bell curve of single-family residences would fall within X.

[malandrew]

The terms you're probably looking for are "land rent" and "money rent". Both of which are well discussed in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. The text may be old, but it is remarkably thorough.