I dont know what the answer is. Allowing local governments to zone land, based on favours for mates, self interest, or disallow zoning for same reasons, is not working. Allowing State government to make the decision is just importing gross incompetence.
The idea that "Development rights are only valuable because our planning systems have choked the supply of new housing in the most desirable parts of our cities, driving up prices for everyone" ignores the fact that land is in fixed supply.
No matter how libertarian your planning system, there's only so much land.
The idea that development rights have value only due to restrictive planning assumes that it's the limited number rights doled out out by the planning system that gives them scarcity value, rather than the limited land area to which the planning system can attach rights.
“the bundle of rights that makes up landownership is always and everywhere a creation of the state, and relies on active enforcement by the state.”
Land ownership preceded the state pretty much everywhere. Modern people forget that the state is a modern invention, that stateless society describes the vast majority of human existence, and that humans had personal and real property with a variety of specific rights throughout that stateless experience.
How were those personal and real property rights enforced in the stateless world?
I think I see what you are saying. Are you distinguishing between "modern state" and "other methods of collective rule enforcement"? Sure. But with every method, the rules are created and enforced communally, not created independently. Hence, all rights are a creation of the "collective method of rule enforcement", which I call a state.
How people enforced their rights varied from culture to culture. The most common form of stateless society is a tribal system where you would call on relatives to back you up. There might be formalities by which you make your dispute known and make your backing known. You might ask for a big man to arbitrate. And ultimately, you and yours might fight for it. But there was no central authority deciding what rights to enforce.
Nor was there a collective rule-maker. People lived according to custom — the way that they understood their people to have lived since the memory began. They really had no notion of technological or social change, which was so slow that it was typically invisible to them except through interaction with other peoples. They would have denied that they were ever creating rules. They were only ever applying the customs of their fathers.
My favorite example of a stateless society is the Gauls that Caesar’s Romans fought. They are a clear mix of tribal and big-man structures that seem very common in bronze- and iron-age Europe. Rome, by comparison, is very much a state.
A key point to understanding stateless societies is that their governing aspects typically had very low governing capacity compared to a state society. A big man has himself, his family, and a few buddies. A tribe has a network of cousins, typically old men that younger men will take direction from. That’s not a lot to draw on. So customs that generate a lot of friction don’t survive.
So, relevant to this point, personal and real property rights are customs that emerged independently out of stateless societies all over the world and survived because they reduce friction. Imagine how unworkable daily living would be if you did not have a rule that the things in your immediate personal possession were presumptively yours, so anyone could just take them. Now extend that to tools that you might pick up and set down, or shelter that you want to improve from week to week, or animals that you want to feed.
So, the state did not invent property rights. They emerged from stateless societies because they met human needs efficiently without the need for complicated coordination. They almost certainly emerged first for personal property and only later applied to real property. But we know of many, many tribal societies with individual farmer-landowners.
Would you be convinced that the current system of property rights is a creature of the state if the state granted property rights to people after land was enclosed into the state system, such as in most of Australia, where state governments auctioned off the land the British state claimed?
Would these property rights be legitimately state-created whereas at other places and points in time they are not?
Yes. In two ways. First, specific rights can be first granted by a state after those rights were previously invented (though you might fairly say that the state first appropriated those rights by conquest from indigenous peoples — I don’t know enough to say anything intelligent in the subject).
Second, the state clearly extended the concept to property rights to intangibles, such as patents in inventions.
I dont know what the answer is. Allowing local governments to zone land, based on favours for mates, self interest, or disallow zoning for same reasons, is not working. Allowing State government to make the decision is just importing gross incompetence.
The idea that "Development rights are only valuable because our planning systems have choked the supply of new housing in the most desirable parts of our cities, driving up prices for everyone" ignores the fact that land is in fixed supply.
No matter how libertarian your planning system, there's only so much land.
The idea that development rights have value only due to restrictive planning assumes that it's the limited number rights doled out out by the planning system that gives them scarcity value, rather than the limited land area to which the planning system can attach rights.
This is fundamentally ahistorical:
“the bundle of rights that makes up landownership is always and everywhere a creation of the state, and relies on active enforcement by the state.”
Land ownership preceded the state pretty much everywhere. Modern people forget that the state is a modern invention, that stateless society describes the vast majority of human existence, and that humans had personal and real property with a variety of specific rights throughout that stateless experience.
How were those personal and real property rights enforced in the stateless world?
I think I see what you are saying. Are you distinguishing between "modern state" and "other methods of collective rule enforcement"? Sure. But with every method, the rules are created and enforced communally, not created independently. Hence, all rights are a creation of the "collective method of rule enforcement", which I call a state.
How people enforced their rights varied from culture to culture. The most common form of stateless society is a tribal system where you would call on relatives to back you up. There might be formalities by which you make your dispute known and make your backing known. You might ask for a big man to arbitrate. And ultimately, you and yours might fight for it. But there was no central authority deciding what rights to enforce.
Nor was there a collective rule-maker. People lived according to custom — the way that they understood their people to have lived since the memory began. They really had no notion of technological or social change, which was so slow that it was typically invisible to them except through interaction with other peoples. They would have denied that they were ever creating rules. They were only ever applying the customs of their fathers.
My favorite example of a stateless society is the Gauls that Caesar’s Romans fought. They are a clear mix of tribal and big-man structures that seem very common in bronze- and iron-age Europe. Rome, by comparison, is very much a state.
A key point to understanding stateless societies is that their governing aspects typically had very low governing capacity compared to a state society. A big man has himself, his family, and a few buddies. A tribe has a network of cousins, typically old men that younger men will take direction from. That’s not a lot to draw on. So customs that generate a lot of friction don’t survive.
So, relevant to this point, personal and real property rights are customs that emerged independently out of stateless societies all over the world and survived because they reduce friction. Imagine how unworkable daily living would be if you did not have a rule that the things in your immediate personal possession were presumptively yours, so anyone could just take them. Now extend that to tools that you might pick up and set down, or shelter that you want to improve from week to week, or animals that you want to feed.
So, the state did not invent property rights. They emerged from stateless societies because they met human needs efficiently without the need for complicated coordination. They almost certainly emerged first for personal property and only later applied to real property. But we know of many, many tribal societies with individual farmer-landowners.
These are all fair comments and descriptions.
Would you be convinced that the current system of property rights is a creature of the state if the state granted property rights to people after land was enclosed into the state system, such as in most of Australia, where state governments auctioned off the land the British state claimed?
Would these property rights be legitimately state-created whereas at other places and points in time they are not?
Yes. In two ways. First, specific rights can be first granted by a state after those rights were previously invented (though you might fairly say that the state first appropriated those rights by conquest from indigenous peoples — I don’t know enough to say anything intelligent in the subject).
Second, the state clearly extended the concept to property rights to intangibles, such as patents in inventions.