Yesterday, one of the Antiplanner’s loyal opponents left a comment comparing land-use regulation with the abolition of slavery, implying that it would just as absurd to compensate landowners for such regulation as it would be to compensate slaveowners for ending slavery. The comparison is apt. Those who make it in favor of land-use regulation apparently think the solution to land-use debates is to have a civil war and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
I’ve heard this comparison before with regard to endangered species. Slavery was immoral, so we didn’t compensate slaveowners. Making a species go extinct is equally immoral, so we shouldn’t compensate owners of habitat when we regulate away their right to use it.
This attitude betrays a profound misunderstanding of both history and economics.
Before around 1840, there was a strong movement in America to emancipate slaves with compensation. This wasn’t just a Northern movement: many people in Virginia, North & South Carolina, and other slave states supported the movement, including, for one, Robert E. Lee. Certainly it was the solution favored by most Northerners. Resistance to emancipation came mainly from the cotton-growing states of the deep South, where slaveowners believed that their economy depended on slavery.
There was precedent for compensated emancipation. When Britain emancipated slaves in the West Indies, it provided 20 million pounds in compensation. That may not have been fair market value, but in effect the government took the slaves by eminent domain, not by simple abolition.
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As late as 1862, Lincoln proposed to emancipate all the slaves in the nation and to pay slaveowners $400 per slave. That would have been about $1.5 billion. According to some estimates, the true fair market value of American slaves at that time was $4 to $6 billion, so $400 per slave was not enough. Of course, by 1862 it was too late anyway.
So what stopped compensated emancipation? Basically: the abolition movement. Abolitionists convinced many Northerners that slavery was immoral and slaveowners didn’t deserve compensation. The cottongrowing slaveowners persuaded Virginia and Carolina slaveowners that none of their property would be safe if they went along with emancipation. In short, the abolitionists polarized the situation and made compensated emancipation impossible.
As it turned out, $4 to $6 billion for compensation would have been cheap compared with the price we ultimately paid. The Civil War cost more than $8 billion, not to mention 600,000 lives (which, in proportion to today’s population, would be 5 million lives). Pensions to Civil War veterans cost at least $3 billion more.
And how did the slaves fare? Resentments resulting from the war led to at least a century of oppression and prejudice against the people who were supposedly freed in 1865. It isn’t clear that blacks enjoy the benefits of equality even today: according to the Census Bureau, black per-capita incomes are still only 59 percent of white’s (tables B19301A and B19301B in the 2006 American Community Survey).
If people had really cared about the welfare of the slaves rather than the principle of what was moral or not, they would have realized that compensation offered a peaceful resolution to the problem. Ownership rights work because they are a building block for social organization. It doesn’t matter if polluting the air or preserving wildlife habitat are moral or not. If you want to stop pollution, create property rights for clean air and water. If you want to preserve habitat, buy the rights and preserve it. If you try to do these things through uncompensated regulation, you are merely creating political and social problems for the future.
If you want to stop pollution, create property rights for clean air and water. If you want to preserve habitat, buy the rights and preserve it. If you try to do these things through uncompensated regulation, you are merely creating political and social problems for the future.
Markets don’t solve commons problems – air, water, soil, ecosystems services that exist without man, yet provide multitudinous services that we require. Air is non-excludable and non-dividable.
And this commons-propertying leads to analysis starting from the fallacy of simple cause: for example, air doesn’t stay in the same place – in fact, RMNP is having problems with ammonium from fertilizer application to the east. Who pays this externality charge? The hay farmer? The meat eater? The industrial ag economy that requires overapplication of fertilizer? The bank holding the loan on the land? The society that has evolved to display wealth by eating meat? The human metabolism that requires protein? Where is the causal chain to charge? We don’t know, as we can’t measure the probabilities of the influence of each factor above, thus we can’t operate efficiently.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m all for charging full price for effects as I think price is a clear signal for agents to understand much of the time (not all the time). But at what spatial and temporal scales? We can only charge what we can measure, today. What about my grandkid who needs that soil for legumes to fix N and evapotranspirate – how does such a system ensure he pays the developer to not pave it over? Property doesn’t move and can be measured. Ecosystem services? Fuhgeddaboudit – what’s the value of the N fixing and air filtration of that legume over there? And what did we learn about free riders – they’ll do whatever they can to not pay costs (Glaeser’s homeowners lobbying electeds to rezone to maintain property values)?
And how do we pay the rancher on the South Platte to not pollute RMNP? He’ll continue to overfertilize so he can pay his loans on the John Deere & land (this is where many market failures come from – asymmetric information) – and how do we get Randal’s descendants to pay the rancher so that alpine flowers continue to bloom in RMNP? How do we charge aynrandgirl’s granddaughter so that landowner doesn’t clearcut the hillside and increase runoff into the valley, inundating WalMart?
Sure.
DS
First, they were “slaveholders” and not “slaveowners” –to state otherwise would be to recognize a concept of ownership in derogation of the common law.
If there was any compensation to be paid, it would be to the slaves or their heirs for the theft of their personhood. To the extent that one would justify the payment of ransom (not “compensation”, which implies a right of ownership)for the freedom of slaves on the basis of expediency, those to whom the payments were made should then be treated no differently than any other felon. If you hold otherwise, you then must agree that the right to one’s own person, and the fruits of one’s labor,vests completely in, and is subject to, the power of the State.
Since you invoke the name of Henry David Thoreau on your site, I hope you realize that he was a strict abolitionist.
Thoreau
Along these same lines, I have to think that the “war on terrorism” would have been significantly more successful if, instead of spending trillions of dollars bombing and shooting people, we had spent the money instead on humanitarian aid (e.g. food, water projects, construction, etc.). Why didn’t we? Because, in the minds of our leaders and those who voted for them, terrorists are immoral “evildoers” who should be killed instead of treated like human beings. This same kind of mindset serves as a barrier to effective drug policies, unwanted pregnancy prevention, etc.
If, for example, people really cared about reducing abortion rather than the principle of what is moral or not, they would realize that sex education and contraceptive distribution offer a better solution to the problem than “Just say no to sex” campaigns.
If you want to stop pollution, create property rights for clean air and water
I’m a little confused here. Does this mean that the polluters had an intrinsic right to pollute, and that rights to clean air and water have to be created, or does it mean that all rights (including the right to pollute) have to be created?
The notion of creating rights would seem to be in line with what I was saying yesterday, i.e. that rights don’t exist but instead are the product of agreement among peoples.
Markets don’t solve commons problems – air, water, soil, ecosystems services that exist without man, yet provide multitudinous services that we require. Air is non-excludable and non-dividable.
That is not really the case. Just because there is not currently a market for certain kinds of pollution does not mean there can’t be or that if one was created it would be effective. Markets exist for and effectively reduce sulfur dioxide. California has more than a decade of experience with assigning property rights for pollution through the REgional CLean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM).
Achieveing abolition by means of an eminent domain type of scheme would have been a wonderful result. The carnage, mayhem and aftermath of the Civil War could have been avoided. The problem with that plan though is one of enforcement. How exactly would you plan to carry out the compensation/manumission plan? Presumably, it would require the very civil war we’re trying to avoid. Also (and I’m no Civil War buff/expert) but I don’t think most people fighting in the war at the time necessarily saw the war as a war of slavery vs. abolition. I think that would be looking at the old conflict through a contemporary lense. Very few southerners held slaves, and very few northerners cared enough about abolition to fight and die for their respective sides. There was a lot more going on than slavery, and Lincoln only brought forward the Emanicimation Proclamation in 1863. It wasn’t as if a compensation scheme could on its own have smoothed over the conflict in its entirety (and it might have undercut support in the North). Still, it would have been a great way to solve the problem if it could have done the trick.
To some extent, I think we are saying that certain solutions that might work in a “technical” sense are not feasible in a “political” sense. This kind of realization can tempt some folks into thinking that society should be governed by scientists and other intellectual “elites”, who can “do the right thing” without being thwarted by the political process. But such a system is not without its own set of problems.
D4P –
You are so blind to reality and history that it scares me. Why didn’t we spend the money on ‘humanitarian aid’? How about because we knew (and we know) that the money and aid would never have made it to where it was intended. We knew (and know) that rulers like Sadam don’t (didn’t) care about his people, he just wanted money and power and any ‘aid’ sent would have profited HIM and his people would have seen none of it. You should read some history.
Why are terrorists evil-doers? Because anyone who would use themselves as a bomb to kill innocent men, women and children in a market place is scum. Anyone who would allow themselves to walk into a crowd of innocent people and with forethought set off an explosion, intended NOT upon a military target but ONLY with the idea to kill and spread fear – isn’t human. If you’ve ever seen us capture an enemy, we capture them – we keep them alive. In most cases the conditions that we keep them in is superior to how they normally live. Ever seen the terrorists overrun one of our positions? I have – they don’t capture us (even though our soldiers have put their weapons down and put their hands up in surrender), they grab our soldiers from behind and slit their throats like they were an animal up for slaughter. The few people who are captured, what happens to them? They are terrorized and eventually beheaded, often on film. How we treat the terrorists versus how they treat us is night and day. One side IS human, the other side is NOT.
We try to play by a ‘moral’ set of rules, the other side does not. It’s like playing baseball, we are limited to nine men on the field and three outs when we are up to bat. The other side is ignoring those rules and has 27 men on the field and stays up to bat till they get tired – guess which side has the advantage?
As for creating ‘rights’ – I thought your posting yesterday was off base and I think your notion of ‘creating rights’ is also whack. Read the Constitution, we are granted RIGHTS by our creator – period. Your idea about creating ‘rights’ is what has us in the mindset of gay marriage, national healthcare, and unfettered abortions; that the government will take care of everything. Sorry, you have the right to pursue happiness, it doesn’t mean that society or the government has to guarantee it. You have the right of freedom of speech, along with that ‘right’ is the ‘right’ that you will be offended by what someone else says. I have the right to bear arms, it doesn’t mean that I also have the ‘right’ to blow you away with that arm because we disagree (and man do we disagree).
You appear to one of those folks who believe that we can just sit and talk with everyone and we will all get along. Wrong, and most people of the middle eastern culture will tell you that. It’s not one big, happy world, it never will – be to believe any different is to deny reality. We need to put a rifle, a flack jacket and a helmet on every person who thinks that the terrorists are “just people too” and send them to the front line for about a week. Half will die within the first 10 minutes because they will try to ‘reason’ with the enemy and will be killed. The other half will come back looking for more ammo to finish the job on the terrorists.
Sorry D4P – you don’t know the world as it is … you simply imagine it as you would like it to be.
Read the Constitution, we are granted RIGHTS by our creator – period
Wait: so the Constitution tells us which rights God grants us? Does that mean the rights are not listed in the Bible? If they are in the Bible, where are they? For example: where can I find property rights in the scriptures? Doesn’t the Bible tell us that everything belongs to God? Are exclusion and hoarding Christian values? And what of the apostles who (in the book of Acts) essentially lived in a commune, sharing everything in common? Doesn’t the Bible tell us to serve others and put their interests ahead of our own? If so, doesn’t that mean we should have to consider them when deciding what to do with “our” land? What is Christian about concepts such as “my land” and “my money” and “I should be able to make as much money as possible with my land”? I can’t fathom Jesus or Paul thinking that way.
Your idea about creating ‘rights’ is what has us in the mindset of gay marriage, national healthcare, and unfettered abortions; that the government will take care of everything. Sorry, you have the right to pursue happiness, it doesn’t mean that society or the government has to guarantee it.
Exactly. If society or the government (or someone else) doesn’t guarantee it, it’s not really a right. It’s just your belief, or your preference. You can call it a right if you want, but the word doesn’t have much meaning if other people don’t agree with you and if there’s no mechanism to protect it. And doesn’t “the right to happiness” justify gay marriage? If being married to a same-sex person makes someone happy, aren’t you essentially saying that they have a right to such a marriage?
Actually, they’re quite good at solving commons problems. Consider the problem of overhunting animals in Africa, animals that are in danger of extinction. In countries that decided to listen to Uncle Milton and give their citizens the right, over the objection of Western NGOs, to own, breed, and sell, said animals are no longer in danger of extinction.
Unowho seems to be following the most useful line by referring to the common law. Under common law principles if title is found to be invalid, the holder is due zero compensation. That’s what happened in the USA; all titles in other persons were extinguished. Similarly, when possession of various chemicals was made illegal, owners of those compounds were not owed compensation.
Such a mechanism is different and distinct from a taking of immovable property, whether by direct transfer of title, or placing a restriction or encumbrance without transfer. Planners (through government) do not contest title to land, they merely seek to limit a rightful owner’s enjoyment and disposal of land. The common law says if an owner suffers harm (loss of use or value) to his rightful property, he is due compensation.
Slaves were not *taken*. No entity received title. The legal arrangement of person-owning-person was abolished. It’s apples and oranges to compare with taking land.
Now, whether title to land is valid in principle, is a separate question. Same for the collective roots of the common law, or the philosophy of the US Constitution. Whatever one feels about the validity of these ideals, them’s the rules we work under. Planners don’t kill people in philosophy class, they grind them to death in the meat world.
This quote betrays gross ignorance of the religious dimension of the war on terror. The terrorists do not do what they do because of poverty. In fact, they are on balance smarter and more educated than the average member of their home country. They do what they do for Islam.
First of all, humanitarian aid is, in their mind, jizya: tribute paid by a conquered people as protection money. Aid does not cause gratitude: it is simply what Muslims, the best of peoples, the rightful rulers of Earth, are due for suffering unbelievers to live.
Second, their goals (conquer the world) and methods (terror) are sanctioned, indeed are ordered, by both the Koran and Hadith (records of the words and deeds of Muhammad).
Koran 2:193: “Fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief) and religion is only for Allah”
Koran 9:29: “Fight those who do not believe until they all surrender, paying the protective tax (jizya) in willing submission”
Apologies in advance for going OT, but AynRandGirl, did you see this?
Will Brad Pitt play John Galt?
I guess I can’t argue with sacred texts. However, I believe that people can change, and that treating people kindly and with compassion can have a profound (positive) effect. Maybe some of the extremists are so hard-hearted (and pious?) that they would return evil for good, but I’d like to think we could change their hearts by treating them with kindness rather than with violence. But, maybe I’m wrong.
I’d like to alert the AP to an error in one of his posts. The February 21st “Junk Science Week: #3 – Obesity & Health” post reads in part “…residents of dense Boston weigh just 1.7 pounds more than Boston suburbanites, while those of denser Chicago weigh just 1.4 pounds more than that city’s least dense suburbs.”
This is incorrect. It should read “residents of dense Boston weigh just 1.7 pounds less than Boston suburbanites, while those of denser Chicago weigh just 1.4 pounds less than that city’s least dense suburbs.”
Don’t say I never did anything for ya’.
Actually, they’re quite good at solving commons problems.
No.
They can solve certain commons problems. Not all.
This is well known, except apparently among a small subset of our population.
The multifarious issues surrounding the fallacy of simple cause (thus simple solution) is captured well in this passage:
BTW, the situation you describe is not one of those situations, as oftentimes these programs are property rights held in common, which sometines can manage these resources with institutional guidance; these are not private property rights. Intitutions are required to make these goods excludable.
DS
** http://tinyurl.com/29wzt3
Extremists? In Islam there is nothing extreme or impious about hurting disbelievers because kindness is reserved only for Muslims. Allah commands Muslims never to take disbelievers as friends, and that any Muslim who does is “of them” i.e. is an apostate. Muhammad commands death for all apostates who don’t renounce disbelief. What you want presumes Muslims have moral beliefs that are compatible with ours. They patently are not.
I’ve heard about this project, though considering the participants I wonder if it will be faithful to Rand’s vision or a repudiation of it.
Dan, I’m not sure that your block-quote proves anything. Property rights regimes exist wherever people and property meet. The spectrum runs from 100% collective (we all own everything together) to 100% individual (each and every non-human molecule is owned by some individual). Some are not satisfied with allocations under any regime. It depends on what the judge wants to maximize. I don’t see how Goodland, Ruddle, me or you are qualified to say what *failure* is for all of us.
More fundamentally, you’ve set a trap of false premise. *Markets* cannot fail (or succeed) to best allocate *the commons*. 1) We have to agree on what *best* means; and 2) there is no *market* existing as an entity capable of action. Only individuals can act, cooperatively or by coercion. If people are not cooperating, perhaps they have different goals.
The commons, those *services* provided by nature, are not a source of value. It is man who assigns value to them. If one has allergies, alpine flowers are a negative value. The *market failure* may be in not removing floral poison from the commons.
You seem to have a comprehensive vision of how the future should unfold. Why is yours better than mine?
fm:
I don’t see how Goodland, Ruddle, me or you are qualified to say what *failure* is for all of us.
So you reject the findings of the classical* and neoclassical** economists. Good for you.
More fundamentally, you’ve set a trap of false premise…
You’re confused. Here are some basic definitions.
You seem to have a comprehensive vision of how the future should unfold. Why is yours better than mine?
I’ve presented no such vision for you to claim fitness or robustness.
HTH.
DS
* http://tinyurl.com/36ptr3
** http://tinyurl.com/33kvzz
“You’re confused”
I guess I’m confused too, as (1) neither Goodland nor Ruddle are economists, (2) Bator is a pure Keynesian, and (3) both Jeffrey Tucker and Tyler Cowen are both critics of the market-failure doctrine.
Gee, it sure is fun being snotty, Dan. An appeal to authority and a list of irrelevancies are no help at all. It would be so much more precious if you made a sound argument (or brought some clarity to the one you think you made previously).
Perhaps I, too, am not being clear. *Market* is an abstract and/or collective concept. It cannot have moral agency, and cannot cause or solve anything. If there is failure, it is of individuals. When judging success or failure, we must consider the preferences of all stakeholding individuals. Any assessment of the collective outcome is essentially subjective. Use one of your links to learn the distinction between positive and normative.
And, finally, I might have misread, but it seemed like you have some preferences regarding RMNP and your grandkid’s ability to grow beans. If these are not the tip of a vision, I apologize for overestimating you.
RE: #20:
I could have been clearer in my reply (haste makes waste), but I presumed the argument attempted a reductio ad quibblum to try to claim that there are no market failures. Addressing the two given names was irrelevant to my reply. I stand corrected on the Bator label but not on content, and I purposely chose Cowen because although he often may criticize descriptions or reasons of what might be considered market failures, I doubt anyone reading Marginal Revolution for any length of time would argue that Cowen thinks that market failures do not exist. They do exist, and economists for many generations have shown such.
RE: 21:
Apologies as well. I think your argument is actually a good one in a certain sense for stating against market solutions for problems, as many solutions require moral considerations. This was my argument in my first comment and subsequent comments above, which showed how markets alone cannot solve problems, esp. as we cannot hear the voices from the future and wrt the information asymmetry problem. My ‘appeal to authority’ was instead a demonstration that market failures have been described for some time, as I was replying to what I thought you stated was an argment that market failures do not exist.
The dangers of haste!
Regards,
DS
“The dangers of haste!”
I’ll say. In seriatum
1. unattributed excerpt either quoting or summarizing the work of a biologist and a fisheries expert;
2. blind link;
3. cite to a jstor abstract; and
4. cite to a book review of a tertiary source, while mischaraterizing both.
C’mon, we’re busy people here.
Why yes, haste indeed – perhaps created by busyness:
1. unattributed excerpt either quoting or summarizing the work of a biologist and a fisheries expert; no, the link to the abstract was footnoted, the bquote was germane and directly to the discussion and the point
2. blind link; I see no blind links in here anywhere. They are all explained or referential in nature.
3. cite to a jstor abstract; So what. Aren’t old papers acceptable, esp when pointing out how old an idea is? Or should I only link to something that isn’t behind a paywall, even tho I have the paper & can quote from it (as in the Hanna paper)?
4. cite to a book review of a tertiary source, while mischaraterizing both.
Yes, to point out an economist who disagrees with an assertion, and explains why (e.g. providing context). Or should I only link to an abstract where you can’t see the context? And, as I pointed out above, it wasn’t mischaracterized.
But let’s return to being OT, as we’re all busy. The prescriptions given in the post don’t work on the ground.
DS
First step on the way to knowledge is to admit error, grasshopper.
Sure. Have you found something additional not listed above?
DS
Nope, I think I covered it all. Errare humanum est, which you may wish to consider before you call another poster “confused.”
Nope, I think I covered it all
Thank you for the advice. I addressed the…um…’rigor’ of your attempt in #24 – Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Now, as you claim folks are busy, let’s stop the off-topicing attempts and get back OT about the fitness of the property rights argumentation that has appeared here lately, and the subsequent arguments pointing out the ill-fitness of said argumentation.
DS
We do agree — nothing came out of your posts.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
Unowho…
Well done.
Civil War Emancipation. I seem to remember (!) pointing out that it wouldn’t have worked because, as offensive as it may be to modern eyes, in their opinion black slavery meant that every white man was civilised, and didn’t have to engage in demeaning work. Also that Robert E. Lee was Unionist, but went to fight for his state (Virginia) when it left the Union. Antiplanner, why are you still pushing these myths?
James Hammond, South Carolina, put it like this:
“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life… It constitutes the very mudsills of society… Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilisation and refinement… Your whole hireling class of manual labourers and ‘operatives’, as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated… yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated”. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson, ISBN: 0-345-35942-9, pp196.
Put bluntly, no slaves, no civilisation. And no room for compromise.
Unowho is wrong about slave-ownership. It was precisely the idea of ownership that was held up as the basis of freely moving slaves in and out of the slave-free states. Slaves were bought, moved, and sold. The slaves were property of their owners, notwistanding the use of Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution – Any person held to service or labour in one state who escaped to another shall be delivered up on the claim of the party to whom such service or labout shall be due. This was intended for bonded labour, where a free person from Britain had their transport to the colonies paid for in exchange for a given number of years labour, after which they could make their own way in the world. (Same book, pp78).
The question of compensation. Everything was stolen in the first place. If you go back far enough, my land was owned by Normans, who stole it from the Saxons, who stole it from the Romano-British. The question of compensation then revolves on how far back you look. If the land was handed down by lawful exchange of contracts throughout that period, then compensation is payable, if not then nothing.
Miscellaneous religious points, since they’ve been raised.
Property ownership is a right given in the Bible. The Ten Commandments, one of the few times that God spoke directly to the people, instead of via his representatives, can be interpreted as human rights. Thou Shalt Not Kill becomes a right to life. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness becomes a right to a fair trial. Thou Shalt Not Steal becomes a right to property ownership.
aynrandgirl seems to have a problem with Islam. Long before Al Qaeda was formed, long before Qutb and his teachings, Britain, France and the US were treating arabs with a murderous contempt. During the Great War, Britain and France back-stabbed our arab allies with the Sykes Picot agreement. The arab countries were for many years part of the European empires. Italy used poison gas in (mostly Christian) Abyssinia – Britain would have used it in Iraq (like President Hussein), but didn’t have the right kind of bombs – shucks! During the Second World War, in Tunisia, rape and murder was carried out by allied soldiers on a scale which far surpasses what we have seen in Iraq and Guatanamo Bay. When Nasser led the first independent Egypt for 2500 years, Anthony Eden accused him of being the next Hitler, and attacked Egypt without provocation (Suez Invasion, 1956). The USA has supported Israel in its murderous campaign of terror against the palestinians, including (most notoriously) the genocide in Lebanon such as Sabra, Chatilla and Qana, although there were many more examples. We have also seen Israel engaging in community punishments. As the icing on the cake, we get (US-backed) spiel from the Israelis, who portray themselves as the innocent victims of arab aggression. Al Qaeda is a mixture of this resentment and Qutb’s teachings.
Al Qaeda may very well be a crusader organisation, since their brutal behaviour is a blow-for-blow re-run of the mediaeval crusades – murder of non-orthodox men women and children (#4), the murder of prisoners (#3), the tidal waves of blood in the market places in Iraq (#1), and – for 9/11 – the murder of people of all confessions and of none, “for God will know his own” (Albigensian). But please never forget who started it, and who could stop it right now. I think an apology or two is in order.
A book review by Harold Henderson in the latest Planning (74:1, pg 66) of a new book by Freyfogle states more directly what D4P was roundaboutly arguing here lately about property rights. Among other things that he says that most of us know but some have ideologies that get in the way of clear understanding:
I have argued as much here many times. Property rights are granted by society and are subject to change – I commonly use slaves, women, and lunch counter owners when arguing how property changes as societies change, and sometimes I throw in air rights being taken away so the airlines could fly passengers.
DS
hmmm…looked fine on preview:
A book review by Harold Henderson in the latest Planning (74:1, pg 66) of a new book by Freyfogle states more directly what D4P was roundaboutly arguing here lately about property rights. Among other things that he says that most of us know but some have ideologies that get in the way of clear understanding:
I have argued as much here many times. Property rights are granted by society and are subject to change – I commonly use slaves, women, and lunch counter owners when arguing this, and sometimes I throw in air rights being taken away so the airlines could fly passengers.
DS
Integrate the West bank into Israel proper and have the Gaza strip become it’s own Philistinian state. Case closed there.
As for property rights, a big problem this that a lot of entities don’t want to take any responsibility for their property for either the short or long term.