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Intentional communities are halfway there, yeah. I guess a condominium complex is part of the way there, too. They’re points along the continuum.
So it would be interesting to see how much this concept could scale up. Could it be scaled up to a town level? A regional level? Even a national level?
Imagine if our bodies of water could be owned like land can. Imagine if the Mississippi River or Lake Michigan were subdivided and sold off into parcels, marked by buoys. People would be outraged if they could sail or row only in limited, narrow passageways on the water, while well-to-do folks reserved the rest for their private recreation and views.
But that’s exactly what we have right now with land. There are shorelines in this country where 95% is owned by private individuals. You cannot reach the beaches. You cannot even see the beaches. You don’t even know what you’re missing.
I used to visit one of these public beaches. It was a skinny strip of beach, closed in by tall fences with “PRIVATE PROPERTY” signs that led all the way up to the water. The beach had a big drainage pipe letting out onto it, providing a putrid smell and a magnet for wasps. In the summer, the tiny beach was packed to overflowing. You’d have to park nearly a mile away and walk because there was no parking lot. Forget about ever camping on it. And as you sat on that overcrowded, wasp-infested, foul-smelling beach, you could look through the fences and see miles and miles of beautiful empty beaches, looked upon by occasional stately beach houses.
We do love our riverfront home. Our private boat dock affords easy access to the river and the Gulf of Mexico.
OP can enjoy the same with a little savings and investment.
Would the public trash the public lands? We don’t see that now. Is every national park a giant garbage dump today? Is every RV park a giant mess today? And there would still be park rangers and cleanup crews. We’re not talking about anarchy. But most of all, there would be powerful social expectations.
Would this mean totalitarian control or communism? As mentioned before, no. Public land ownership is completely compatible with capitalism and democracy. A strong case could be made that by lifting land rights, citizens would become freer and more equal, economically and otherwise.
How would the government raise revenues if there were no land taxes? Any way it wanted. There are income taxes. There are non-land property taxes (vehicle taxes). There are sales taxes. There are usage fees. For the public campgrounds, there would probably be nightly fees, just as there are now.
How would people survive in cold climates? They might be migratory, as early peoples were. For those that didn’t, they might use campground-style lodging that had modern heating and insulation. In the days before the Europeans arrived, native tribes kept warm in longhouses - and that was without today’s amazing technologies.
And remember that such an arrangement might be available only for certain cities and regions. In other words, it would be an option for those who were suited to it, and not for all.
And that’s what we have today - a small slice of our land that is developed for public use (national parks and campgrounds), used regularly by a small segment of our society of van-lifers and digital nomads and snowbirds and gypsies and so on. And the rest of us use it on an occasional basis.
Maybe that’s the direction a future society could evolve in. Perhaps in some country in Europe or Asia where the population is much more educated and civically involved. For example, there are places in Europe today where local government officials are appointed through a process more like jury duty and less like retail elections. And these are some of the most equitable, healthy, educated, progressive societies on the planet. It’s conceivable that a small country, say in Northern Europe, might convert 50% of its lands to shared use under good public management, freeing much of their population from private land ownership and rewarding them with all the benefits.
Those with few skills and low self-esteem would fit in well where nothing is expected of them. Laziness and lack of motivation is apparent in the regions you mention. Muddy Birkenstocks will be your symbol!
Such societies are the result of poorly thought-out laws and the lack of a founding document like our Constitution.
You guys and gals are urban planners or urban planning enthusiasts. So you can handle this sort of mind-blowing proposition.
Let’s say we erased all the property lines on all the maps. Delete, delete, delete. Everyone would sell most of their junk and move into their vans/cars. The government repo’s all the houses, tears most of them down, reforests the land, and repurposes the remaining ones into public restrooms, community centers, and places like that. Imagine a campground or RV park. Lots of them.
Instead of a neighborhood with thousands of people living in oversized wooden boxes filled with junk on quarter-acre plots, there would be thousands of tents scattered across the fields and woods of endless campgrounds and national parks. Most of America would be some form of national park. (Except some of some of them would have hospitals and auto dealerships and so on.) All campgrounds would be open to everyone. If you desperately wanted to pitch your tent close to a particular place, you’d have to cram in there and deal with crowding.
The economy would be primarily digital. Issues like safety would be handled mostly through technology like videocameras and GPS. Material goods and possessions would be minimal. Most folks would need a few pairs of self-cleaning clothes, a good tent, a laptop, an electric bike, and that’s about it. Most of our jobs would be building a better society, rather than building more roads and power plants and skyscrapers.
Instead of 10% of the world being available to for us to experience, 90% of the world would be. Maybe it would save most of the world’s wildlife species from becoming extinct. Maybe it would stop climate change. Maybe it would make our air and water cleaner. Maybe we’d be happier, freer. Maybe this was how humans were intended to live. In a sense, it’s how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
Dude, you need to grab ahold of a railing and hold steady for a minute. Your head is whirling like a vacuum cleaner and you are beginning to sound unglued.
You must realize this utopian vision of yours would only come to fruition if preceded by the bloodiest human carnage ever known to our species.
Last edited by Pope of Greenwich Village; 08-27-2019 at 09:59 AM..
What the heck are you looking for, a 1960s commune?
And the government can't repossess what wasn't theirs to begin with.
The government (both state and federal) patented lands into the private sector for the purpose of putting the same to higher and better use than the government itself could. To the OP's delirious point, it would be extremely unwise to attempt to undo all the good that has emanated from that process.
Having said that...there are vast expanses of the western U.S. which are still owned by the federal government and which are managed by BLM, the Forest Service, or some other agency within the Department of the Interior. Virtually none of these lands have become anything approaching the social/technological utopia envisioned by the OP.
As an example, take the drive on U.S. 285 North out of Roswell, NM, heading toward Albuquerque. Almost all of the acreage is federally owned rangeland where absolutely nothing exists, or ever happens. As long as those lands are in the public domain, nothing will ever happen and no real societal benefit will ever accrue.
If this is the OP's version of "urban planning," then the OP is welcome to keep it for him/herself while congratulating him/herself for his sense of social consciousness and foresight.
The type of logic applied by someone putting any serious thought into such propositions is either
1.) someone who is disadvantaged and doesn't like the fact that they don't have the ability to secure property while other people do, or...
2.) they are part of some ultra liberal movement and of the influence that DESPITE their ability to support themselves and afford shelter, the very concept of charging money for "private" property (I use this term lightly) is beyond them and they have been shamed for their "privilege", and now seek to reduce the separation between them and others.
I can't get passed needing private property for food - crops and livestock. (Talking about large scale farming, dairies, etc.) They don't coexist with anyone being able to plop down amongst them. There is also a lot of management needed in knowing what pastures to use, what crops to plant, when to rotate, when to let one rest, etc. To an outsider, it could just look like wasted land, but it's not. Who is going to control when pesticides can be used? They drift. Have you ever seen some of the biosecurity measures at pig farms? How could you enforce any of the rules on land you don't own? And what about pets? What happens if you don't have a fenced-in yard to keep your dogs in. Are dogs just going to be roaming free? I can just imagine the dangerous packs they would turn into. How are we going to protect ourselves, our pets, and our livestock from predators? Who gets to decide what land the livestock is protected on and what land the predators are free to roam in? If someone makes that decision, is it really like no one owning land? You've also got bears and wolves, etc., that could go after people. I feel like BOUNDARIES are necessary and I don't want the government or anyone else controlling it.
I can't get passed needing private property for food - crops and livestock. (Talking about large scale farming, dairies, etc.) They don't coexist with anyone being able to plop down amongst them. There is also a lot of management needed in knowing what pastures to use, what crops to plant, when to rotate, when to let one rest, etc. To an outsider, it could just look like wasted land, but it's not. Who is going to control when pesticides can be used? They drift. Have you ever seen some of the biosecurity measures at pig farms? How could you enforce any of the rules on land you don't own? And what about pets? What happens if you don't have a fenced-in yard to keep your dogs in. Are dogs just going to be roaming free? I can just imagine the dangerous packs they would turn into. How are we going to protect ourselves, our pets, and our livestock from predators? Who gets to decide what land the livestock is protected on and what land the predators are free to roam in? If someone makes that decision, is it really like no one owning land? You've also got bears and wolves, etc., that could go after people. I feel like BOUNDARIES are necessary and I don't want the government or anyone else controlling it.
This is the problem with these childish schemes. Nobody dares mention reality and the consequences that lie therein because the pipe dream drives the narrative. When the realities become so severe that action is needed, the only answer at that point is liquidation. First your pets -- then you.
Myself, I'm pretty disappointed that the OP got basically nothing intellectual from those that responded. My first reaction is that the OP is a stoner, and I mean that in the most complimentary sense. Sometimes you have to turn everything upside down in order to to rearrange its parts, and sometimes you can more easily do that with the help of marijuana. In your sober state, you can then continue organizing these sorts of thoughts, and sometimes what happens is you stumble upon a realization -- maybe without a solution -- but a realization that the way 7 billion humans are devising one planet is basically wrong. That isn't to say that anyone here has the solution, but literally no one tried to have one. Maybe we're just so used to the way things are that few question our application or maybe we shut ourselves off to a greater conversation for more nefarious reasons...
What the OP is doing, for those who aren't paying attention, doesn't appear to be some sort of back-handed way to convert you all to communism (Seriously guys?), but was a request to play an intellectual exercise that might have a beneficial application, even if in just one area.
I'm sort of really disappointed that we can have AN ENTIRE SECTION OF CITY-DATA for people who want to CREATE IMAGINARY CLIMATES where others GRADE THEM ON A SCALE OF A-Z, for bleep's sake, but we can't jump out of our robotic thought processes and play another intellectual game?
Hell, we can even imagine that South America is connected to Antarctica and imagine what that would mean to both of their climates, and that OP isn't ridiculed, but here, we cannot even begin to question land use on our gorgeous planet? Anyone want to take a gander as to WHY that is? And by the way, I loved the climate thread I'm referencing, but there's a very obvious reason why it's deemed okay for us to imagine something that we can't control versus imagining something that we can control.
That's sort of embarrassing that we didn't do this or the OP more justice. This thread deserved a lot better, and I mean that sincerely.
Last edited by llowllevellowll; 08-27-2019 at 12:51 PM..
Private land is usually cleaner than public unless the private homeowner is a hoarder. Check out the western states’ public lands. USFS, BLM, etc. plus state public lands. Trashed because people don’t practice “Tread Lightly” and “Pack it in, pack it out”. We travel through these places extensively. There are garbage facilities nearby in some day use/camping areas but people still burn plastics and cans even glass bottles. We are slovenly pigs. This idea won’t work.
Please check out the sanitation in the west coast cities like Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Tent cities and broken down RVs dumping refuse and raw sewage in the street. S F even has a poop patrol.
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