The Ownership Society
I'm just going to start this one by saying that people roping off a section of the natural world and calling it "theirs", aka land ownership, on a society wide basis has proven to be, well, bad. And now that half of you have angrily closed your browser, I'll be happy to explain what I mean to a sympathetic, or at the very least, an intellectually curious audience. A Brief History of Land Use in America If we go back into the mists of time, the idea that you have to pay money, or work for a lord and give him some portion of your produce to live isn't exactly new. Any sufficiently advanced society has some form of money, some form of landlord-tenant relationship. It certainly existed in Roman times, and even in some Native Americans tribes, like the Aztec. The institution of land ownership is pretty similar everywhere, but it has shaped the United States in a pretty unique way. In the early days of colonial America, when native tribes were obliterated by disease and...