A block of land should be a birthright

For thousands of years, especially in medieval Europe, abusive people have been forcing other people into slavery or quasi-slavery (or wage slavery) by taking their land away or by making it very difficult for them to own any land.

In medieval Europe, the difference between the working class and the upper class (the non-working class) was determined by land ownership. The non-working class used every possible underhanded trick to deprive the working class of the land that would enable their freedom from slavery.

It never stopped. It continues today. Many people are desperately trying to obtain their freedom by purchasing a block of land and paying off the mortgage, but they are struggling to do it (or unable to start at all), because the cost of living has skyrocketed, and inflation has increased, and the wages have stagnated.

For example, it was reported in 2019 that half of England is owned by 0.04% of its population! To be precise, out of the population of 57 million people, 25 thousand land-barons (0.043%) own half of the land in England. If the land were distributed evenly across England’s population, each person would have just over half an acre (over two thousand square meters per person).

In an ethical and civilized society, it would be illegal for any one person to own an excessive amount of land. Land-barons should be illegal.

As many people have already said, it is class warfare. Here is a famous quote from Warren Buffett:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Property tax is one of the things in the list of weapons that are used to rob the working class of land ownership. For example, sometimes retirees/pensioners are forced to sell their land, because they cannot afford to pay the property tax along with the other costs of living.

Property tax is unethical when levied on homeowners. It might be justifiable on investment properties, but it certainly should not be charged for a person’s place of residence. It is cruel and immoral to force retirees/pensioners to sell their homes.

A block of land should be a birthright for every citizen. Land should be allocated to a person at birth or no later than age 18.

The block of land should be large enough for at least one house with four bedrooms. Everybody should have the right to build a house on their land.

The location of the block of land should be determined by random selection in order to ensure fairness as much as possible. Obviously, this will not create 100% perfect fairness, but this is acceptable anyway, because perfect solutions rarely exist in real life, therefore we seek the best solution and not an imaginary perfect solution.

The sale or transference of a person’s allocated land should be impossible (not recognized as a valid sale or transference), because if it was allowed, then many people would be tricked into losing their land or pressured into selling it.

It should be permissible to swap with another person by mutual agreement. This would enable people to move if desired. People also have the option of renting if they do not want to reside on their own land (this includes renting out their own land).

To provide more flexibility, housing co-operatives should be supported in addition to land as a birthright. They already exist in some countries of the world, and they operate successfully and make most customers happy. The only problem is that not enough of them exist to satisfy the customer demand, therefore land should be allocated for new housing co-operatives.

So long as land-barons and corporations are allowed to own huge amounts of land and drive up the prices of land and force working-class people into wage slavery, a civilized society will never come into existence. A block of land should be a birthright.