Facebook’s Zuckerberg sues to force land sales

Post by matt4077 » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 10:04 AM UTC

cooper12 wrote: post #106

refurb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather have 0% ever thinking they'll be rich? That sounds like a terrible place to live.

There's nothing wrong with having aspirations per se. The issue is when these aspirations lead people to identify more with the upper class rather than their own class and voting against their own interests. For a very recent example, see the case of people who depended on the Affordable Care Act regretting voting for Trump. ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-voters-didnt-t... ) Also, you don't see somet…

Post by Inconel » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 10:13 AM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #158

Inconel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if you get legal rights from each one of the current owners, it still deprives the unborn children of their rights. Would you mind expanding on this a bit, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean? Does this only hold true for land or other types of private property as well? With regards to land ownership, was it really solely based on trust, or servitude and force? I'm no expert on traditional Hawaiian l…

> Would you mind expanding on this a bit, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean? Does this only hold true for land or other types of private property as well? Not op, but I believe the idea here is that use of the land has a cultural dimension, and not just the usual economic dimension. The concept seems quite foreign to me (and probably most) but that may be because nature has a much lower significance in c…

Post by RA_Fisher » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 10:18 AM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #157

0bfus wrote: post #134

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I agree with you that the social structures we've set up have largely forced the hands of the indigenous people who want to keep their lands in their families in perpetuity to sell. How can we actually make sure these lands stay within families forever possible though? To do something like disallowing the sale of these lands outside of their communities doesn't seem particularly ethical either. In this case, that cou…

Isn't that the exact problems that Indian reservations were set up to solve? A kind of community-administered perpetual land grant, basically. It seems that – some problems within the tribal administrations non-withstanding – the external legal relationships are solved pretty well within that framework.

Post by ci5er » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 1:35 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #79

ci5er wrote: post #30

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> Why isn't that enough? Who is to judge how much is and is not enough? Do you want an international tribunal allocating a "fair and equitable" amount of square meterage of various quality levels of real estate to individuals?

While there may be no legal entity making a decision on the question "how much is enough," people are allowed to make value judgements on the actions of others based on how much they personally think is "enough" for said others.

Post by refurb » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #126

refurb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxfam's report [1] on 62 people accumulating more wealth than half the world's population combined Measuring wealth is a pretty poor way to measure inequality. If you're a recently graduated brain surgeon with $400K in student debt, you have less wealth than a homeless person with a $100 bill in their pocket.

Identifying one edge case doesn't really prove an argument. Net wealth is not a perfect metric, but is probably the best one we have. You can be sure 95%+ of brain surgeons have paid off all their student debts and have a lot more wealth than a homeless guy, considering their median salary is $395k per year.