There is world of difference between displacing a million people and doing little to help them along, and telling a small group of farmers to fuck off or get rolled over. It’s not either / or. It’s that in the western world, we attribute too much to land ownership because it’s deeply tied to peoples personal economy and nebulous concepts like freedom. I think that’s insane. Decomodify housing and ban the trading of land as a speculative market, and I think you’ll see people give less of a shit about it.
Here in Denmark, farmers (and suburbanites pretending to be rural, let’s be real) have an immensely disproportionate amount of power to veto infrastructure projects that benefit us all for the dumbest reasons, but I can’t veto the parking lots they demand be built on my street even though it only benefits them.
Where I live (east of Montreal), people who’s house is in front of a rail line complained about a train mass transit project that was in development before being severely altered because of NIMBYs.
Why not vote against subsidies for farmers then? I’m just as against subsidies as I am in favour of land ownership. The biggest problem I have with subsidies and high taxes and government control of property is that it politicizes these decisions and pits special interests against the common good.
Once you create a subsidy it becomes very difficult to get rid of it, politically. The farmers who benefit from it will fight tooth and nail to keep it regardless of whether or not the subsidy actually benefits society.
What makes you think I don’t? Farmers also hold a disproportional amount of political power. My one vote isn’t going to uproot the fundamental flaws of how we choose to do democracy.
I think it’s more useful to talk about how insane the status quo is, like that land is a speculative market that effectively locks lower-class people out of living on their own terms, as it might awaken more people to the reality that we live in, and the inevitable far-worse future we’re rushing headfirst into.
At least in Europe the land used to be owned by everybody (the so-called “Commons”) and then kings decided to take it all and make it the property of the Crown which would then divy it out to favored servants of the Crown.
Modern laws around Land Ownership are just a natural extension of the laws made in the Monarchical system and which were mainly preserved and extended in the transition to Republic and later Democracy, probably as a way to try and keep the landed gentry from stopping that transition (also, having lived through a Revolution from Authoritanism to Democracy an its aftermath, it’s my impression that the powerful from the previous regime generaly get to keep most of their possessions and hence power, even some amount of political power as they use their wealth to fund parties to represent their interests under Democracy).
There is world of difference between displacing a million people and doing little to help them along, and telling a small group of farmers to fuck off or get rolled over. It’s not either / or. It’s that in the western world, we attribute too much to land ownership because it’s deeply tied to peoples personal economy and nebulous concepts like freedom. I think that’s insane. Decomodify housing and ban the trading of land as a speculative market, and I think you’ll see people give less of a shit about it.
Here in Denmark, farmers (and suburbanites pretending to be rural, let’s be real) have an immensely disproportionate amount of power to veto infrastructure projects that benefit us all for the dumbest reasons, but I can’t veto the parking lots they demand be built on my street even though it only benefits them.
Last month, some-200 farmers got off their subsidized ass to bitch and whine about how some electric poles off in the distance would, and I quote, “ruin my life”. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/niels-bliver-nabo-til-44-meter-hoeje-elmaster-vi-faar-oedelagt-vores-livsvaerdi
Where I live (east of Montreal), people who’s house is in front of a rail line complained about a train mass transit project that was in development before being severely altered because of NIMBYs.
…
Why not vote against subsidies for farmers then? I’m just as against subsidies as I am in favour of land ownership. The biggest problem I have with subsidies and high taxes and government control of property is that it politicizes these decisions and pits special interests against the common good.
Once you create a subsidy it becomes very difficult to get rid of it, politically. The farmers who benefit from it will fight tooth and nail to keep it regardless of whether or not the subsidy actually benefits society.
What makes you think I don’t? Farmers also hold a disproportional amount of political power. My one vote isn’t going to uproot the fundamental flaws of how we choose to do democracy.
I think it’s more useful to talk about how insane the status quo is, like that land is a speculative market that effectively locks lower-class people out of living on their own terms, as it might awaken more people to the reality that we live in, and the inevitable far-worse future we’re rushing headfirst into.
At least in Europe the land used to be owned by everybody (the so-called “Commons”) and then kings decided to take it all and make it the property of the Crown which would then divy it out to favored servants of the Crown.
Modern laws around Land Ownership are just a natural extension of the laws made in the Monarchical system and which were mainly preserved and extended in the transition to Republic and later Democracy, probably as a way to try and keep the landed gentry from stopping that transition (also, having lived through a Revolution from Authoritanism to Democracy an its aftermath, it’s my impression that the powerful from the previous regime generaly get to keep most of their possessions and hence power, even some amount of political power as they use their wealth to fund parties to represent their interests under Democracy).