Тег: Earth

Evaluate the idea for the privatization of land

Alexey Data Engineer

Hello. I am interested in your opinion.

The Problem

During land privatization, the right to choose is curtailed due to a lack of knowledge. And the consequences of this ignorance are often irreparable.

The Idea

All state land should be returned to the citizens, and its disposal should reflect the democratic nature of the state.

The Motive

If 3,155,372,300 hectares are divided among every citizen in the RF, it results in 21.84 hectares per person. At a market value of 1 million rubles per hectare, each of us is a potential millionaire. Unfortunately, the voucher privatization model proved itself unsuccessful, therefore I consider the above-described reform the optimal way to bring the market into solving the problem.

The Solution

Technological progress allows us, unlike in ancient times, to automate processes. Many things that were unavailable to the ancients are now possible.

All RF land can be divided into minimal squares (1 sq.m). Every citizen of the RF receives a proportional share of every square for life, without the right of resale, but with the right of temporary transfer under contractual terms.

Legislative Part

  • Everyone has their own share in every square meter of Russia, giving them the right to dispose of it.
  • Until all owners of the meter (Russians) have granted the right of specific land use to a User, the User has no right to carry out its specific use.
    • For example, if you want to build a factory, you must obtain the right to build a factory from all current owners of the leased land.
  • Upon the death of a landowner, their land is distributed according to a will, or in its absence, to blood relatives. If there are no heirs, the shares are evenly distributed among all citizens.
  • The land of incapacitated citizens is under the trust management of every citizen; rental income goes toward benefits for incapacitated citizens, and a percentage is paid to the manager as a reward for quality management.
  • If a person obtains citizenship, they must pay the market price and buy out a proportional share from ALL citizens. This allows them to become a full citizen with the right to dispose of and grant rights to use the land.
  • Budget funds are spent only on maintaining the blockchain that stores the data.
  • Costs and lease agreements are also stored in the blockchain to solve the problem of citizens’ incomplete awareness of the real price.
  • No tax is levied for owning such land, as all people possess equal rights.
  • Land that was in private ownership prior to privatization remains private.

Consequences

Since land that is closer to a person is more valuable to them, companies will emerge that implement trust management of irrelevant land.

The process will create a huge number of jobs and contract templates, allowing interested people to negotiate and lease land from others.

Environmentalists can hinder the construction of factories without an expertise agreement; factories can hinder environmentalists in the exercise of their domestic disposal of lands.

And other market fantasies.

Answer from Ancap-chan

I’ll start with the simplest. Of course, there is not the slightest sense in keeping a land registry in a blockchain. The whole point of a distributed public ledger is to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries. But if the land use mechanism includes the possibility of forced alienation of land or deprivation of management rights due to incapacity, then the corresponding entries in the blockchain would have to be made by certain persons with admin privileges. That’s it, the blockchain can be thrown away; the optimal solution here would be a regular centralized database. Errors in the database are inevitable, but they can be corrected through various appeal mechanisms.

Now let’s move to something more complex. The proposed mechanism assumes that there will be two land registries in the country simultaneously, and land will circulate within two fundamentally different mechanisms. The part of the land that will be in private ownership at the time of the aforementioned “privatization” (it would be more appropriate to call this procedure socialization, instead) will remain private. A contract between the seller and the buyer would be sufficient for its sale; in other words, the land will be quite liquid. Suppose that by hour X, such land in the RF will be 10%, and the remaining 90% of land belonging to the state will be in the shared ownership of all 140-something million citizens of Russia. The circulation of this socialized land will be extremely difficult, because it will be impossible to buy; only leasing for a specific project will remain, and this project must be approved by the consensus of all owners.

Thus, the legal turnover of socialized land will be completely frozen, and private land, due to the simplicity of its legal use, will immediately skyrocket in price. Judge for yourself. I want to build a factory. The construction cost is 100 million dollars plus the price of one hectare of land. If I build on socialized land, I will have to conclude an agreement with each of the 100 million disposers (counting only the capable ones who will manage the property of their wards). Suppose, with the help of arch-effective means of communication and persuasion, I manage to conclude this agreement in just one year at a price of just one dollar per vote. In total, we have an estimate: 200 million dollars and a year of time to buy construction permission. Alternative: one month of negotiations with a single owner, and I buy one hectare of land from him for just 50 million dollars. Voila: I save time and money, so I won’t even attempt the legal use of socialized land.

On the other hand, I can always carry out a land grab of this very land and use it quite peacefully. Who can stop me? Only the nearest neighbors, who would themselves not mind using this plot. I will share some money with them so they close their eyes to this. I will also share with the land inspector so that on paper the land continues to remain unoccupied. Voila, I build a factory, spending a measly million dollars on bribes and the same month of time.

Such land grabbing will take on a massive and uncontrolled character, because due to the tragedy of the commons, no one will be interested in doing things the long and expensive way if it can be done quickly and cheaply. The doctrine of deterrence will be applied to the most obtuse opponents.

So, the draconian regulation mechanism that was proposed will lead to the emergence of a very expensive white land market and a very massive black one. As we know from history, the prevalence of a black market sooner or later leads to its legalization. This happened in Great Britain, this happened in the USA, this happened in the USSR—yes, it happened in many places—and there is no reason to believe that this case will be an exception.

And what if you have to negotiate with every Russian not about building a factory, but about building a private house?

Let’s say my property (whether it be a cow, or perhaps just an ordinary ball) ends up on my neighbor’s plot, but we have concluded no agreements for such cases. Can the neighbor in such a case take my ball, kill my cow?

anonymous question

To begin with, the neighbor must be prepared to prove that it was not he who stole the ball or the cow, but that it landed on his land on its own. Then, he must be prepared to prove that the landing of a foreign object on his property caused him damage. And finally, he must be prepared to prove that he did not know and had no simple ways of finding out who owned the object, and therefore considered the appropriation of the object as the most logical way to compensate for the damage, rather than approaching the owner of the object with a demand for compensation.

The title of ownership to an object does not transfer from one subject to another simply because the object changed location. But, of course, in a situation where it is unknown whose cow grazed on someone else’s plot for two years, managed to calve, and then the owner of the cow appears, the owner of the plot would probably be able to justify his rights to the calf. Similarly, if the owner of a ball comes to claim it after a week, the owner of the ball is unlikely to be entitled to demand rental payment for the fact that the ball was used to play football.

Trespassers will be shot

On what principle will no-man’s land be privatized? Will there be democratic voting among the former population of this state to allocate land by majority vote, or will the principle of “whoever cultivated it first, the land is theirs” actually be applied?

anonymous question

I have already been asked on what principle nuclear bombs will be privatized, but with this low-liquidity commodity, things are indeed different, because off the top of my head, I can think of only two useful applications for a nuclear bomb specifically as a bomb, and both boil down to burying it deep in the ground in the right place—and blowing it up. First, this would make it possible to register seismic vibrations at different points on the planet and use them to refine information about its structure. Second, this allows for the release of seismic tension in seismically hazardous areas, so that instead of rare large earthquakes, there will be a series of frequent small ones.

But anyway, the question is about land. Land, unlike a nuclear bomb, has a vast number of useful applications, and therefore competition for it can be quite substantial.

Privatization scenarios will, of course, differ greatly depending on how great the mentioned competition is in a specific case, and how developed the mechanisms of self-governance are in that location.

Where competition is lower, homesteading is more likely. Whoever hustle first takes the best plot. Whoever is a bit later takes the adjacent one. The latecomers take a couple more, and the rest figure that they won’t get the cream of the crop here and go look elsewhere.

Where competition is high and local self-governance is weak, the plot will be seized by the first person to hustle, and then a stronger subject will arrive and declare: dude, you’ve gotten too arrogant, get the hell off my field right now! The arrogant dude will haggle a bit to save face, perhaps receive symbolic compensation—and get the hell out.

And where lawlessness has long been eradicated by the local community, the most likely scenario is the hiring of an auctioneer, who will prepare the land lots for sale, conduct an auction, and then distribute the proceeds, minus their own commission, among all the local residents who also claimed the land but were not ready to pay too much for it.

The scenario you mentioned—”let’s democratically vote on who gets a tasty piece of the pie for free, which any of us is smart enough to want as private property”—seems less likely to me: if I receive no compensation, why on earth would I agree to vote for someone else? In such a vote, it is most logical for everyone to vote for themselves, and this would lead to the need to form a joint-stock company with equal shares for the voting participants. Then, the person who needs it more will gradually buy out the shares of those who need it less, and we will arrive at the same model as simply selling the plot as a single lot with subsequent compensation to the losing participants.

Dividing the pie

Look at that, Bitcoin is on the rise again! That’s what life-giving competition for rare resources does! Now, of course, donations from you have become slightly less likely, but just in case: 1A7Wu2enQNRETLXDNpQEufcbJybtM1VHZ8

There is an owner of land and a warehouse with ammonium nitrate on it. And then it explodes, causing a lot of damage to the adjacent territories (see the Tianjin explosion). The owner was blown to smithereens, there are no heirs. Will the victims have a preemptive right to a share of the land under the warehouse, or is it first come, first served?

Anonymous question

If the land was owned by the warehouse owner, then it, of course, like other remaining property, must go toward the partial compensation for damages to the neighbors. If any of the neighbors wish to receive their share in kind, it will be necessary to deal with and conduct a land survey; however, if everyone agrees to money, there will be fewer problems, and the plot can be divided into lots of arbitrary configuration for ease of sale.

Tianjin

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What to do if an ancap society that has successfully formed in some territory begins to be squeezed by neighbors? For example, if they are a religious state, and its citizens, possessing some kind of superiority (or the support of their state), buy land, move in, but do not want to observe the NAP?

anonymous question

The topic of direct military conflict was best explored by Vladimir Zolotorev, whom I have mentioned repeatedly, in the series of articles “Insurance Company ‘Sonechko’ versus the Tsardom of Muscovy”.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Most likely, this volume of material will be sufficient for you to address both the question you asked and several related ones.

But I will still make a small clarification regarding one of the models of creeping expansion you mentioned. Buying up all the land is very unrealistic, because the less unsold land remains, the more expensive it becomes, and the happy sellers of land receive more and more resources, which they can invest in assets that seem more profitable to them than the land they have just sold.

At the same time, the fact that a certain NAP violator is a landowner does not protect them in any way. They violated it — a conflict arose, now they either pay a penalty or they are fought against. In a state, the law may protect a NAP violator, but for ancaps, dealing with such problems is much simpler.

Sonechko

How to acquire land in Antarctica under libertarianism?

anonymous question

I am sure that under libertarianism, farming in the area of, say, the current Vostok Station would be very profitable. See for yourself:

First, constant katabatic winds, meaning energy surplus.

Second, a constant freezing blast, no problems with heat dissipation.
It’s the perfect place for mining, right!

All that’s left is to solve the problem of material strength in such frost, and probably some tinkering with lubrication in the wind turbines, but those are just trivial “boy problems” 😏

Meanwhile, there is an abundance of land in Antarctica—we simply don’t have enough crazy miners to overrun an entire continent; there are other types of business in the world, after all.

Therefore (I am finally starting to answer the asked question), in the foreseeable future, no more complex mechanism for acquiring land ownership than a simple homestead—that is, seizing unclaimed territory—will be required there.

By the way, speaking of miners: send some sats for the development of the channel! Here is the wallet:1A7Wu2enQNRETLXDNpQEufcbJybtM1VHZ8

See how much room there is for farms! Ururu!

Why is the opinion that there will be some problems with roads under ancap so popular? Doesn’t the existence of toll roads show that their construction can be profitable?

Anonymous question

Roads are an easily accessible, common-sense example of a public good provided by the state through:

  • taxes
  • laws on land expropriation for road construction
  • uniform traffic rules within the jurisdiction
  • traffic police and other structures performing related functions.

In general, roads are a large, complex, and expensive “something,” yet any car owner can get on the road and drive for free. But if toll roads owned by different parties are introduced, the average car owner immediately envisions countless barriers, queues at them, and similar clumsy interfaces for taking their money. “No way,” thinks the car owner, “taxes are better.”

The fact that building toll roads can be profitable does not prove the advantages of ancap. The advantage of ancap is proven by the fact that the construction of free roads can be profitable.
A road does not lead from void to void. It connects plots of land, thereby increasing their transport accessibility and, consequently, their commercial value. It is precisely to increase the value of their land that owners have a vested interest in building roads to it. Any owner of a summer house in a cottage community can confirm this for you.