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If your whole post is applicable anywhere, it is applicable to pre-industrial world, where the rich were rich because they inherited land from their ancestors who arrived with William the Bastard centuries ago.
It has no meaning in industrial civilization, and even less in post-industrial one. How many of today's rich are rich because of unbroken inheritance of land stolen from Indians or Saxons?
Even in country where some of old feudal customs, traditions and wealth still survive you can, at best, justify expropriation of property of Duke of Westminster while not touching the rest of billionaires.
There is a reason why equal distribution of land, most extremely extreme extremist rebel demand for millenia, was quietly dropped back in the 19th century.
Yes, ideas of statute of limitations and adverse possession are universally considered fair and just, given that the alternative is state of eternal vendetta, eternal revenge for ancient slights that were revenge for even more ancient slights.
Land will never be without value as long as humans are entirely living on earth simply because we cannot make more of it. We only have one Earth and once all the land on earth belongs to someone else, you can’t simply get your own. How much wealth is generated by the mere fact that you own land would vary by era, but no scarce resource will ever be without value.
Yes it varies, and in our era pure ownership of land brings less wealth than ever before.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardjchang/2023/04/09/the-path-to-billions-the-industries-with-the-most-billionaires-2023/
Only 7% of world's billionaires have real estate as source of their income (and most of it is from real estate development, not raw ownership of unimproved land).
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All a statute of limitations does, conceptually, is move step 1 up to some more recent date, though. If we say that any claims older than, say, 100 years will not be recognized, then the new "foundation" of the current system of property ownership is just 100 years in the past. I think a statute of limitations can certainly be a procedurally just rule for a society to adopt, but that doesn't mean the outcomes that it produces will be substantially just.
Also, it's awfully convenient for a group in power to say, "Hey, we've gotta let bygones be bygones, alright? You wouldn't want endless vendettas and re-litigation of this whole thing every generation, would you? Good, good, I'm glad you're seeing reason, now go back to your hovel and eat your gruel."
Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?
The US economy is simply not stagnating. We have the highest nominal GDP/capita worldwide among large countries, lead novel research and industries (most recently AI), and our #1 competitor is notorious for stealing our IP. The US's property economy is stagnating for all the usual YIMBY reasons and a lot more construction should be legal, but that's not at all analogous to your OP. Georgism, taken literally, means replacing all taxes with a tax on land, which I don't think is workable because a lot of important capital is entirely intangible in the form of human capital, IP, and organizations and a land tax totally misses that.
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Exactly. These were extremely poor pre-industrial countries completely unlike modern developed world.
Assuming you are in US. You waved your magic wand, expropriated all 1,3 billion acres of privately owned agricultural land and distributed it equally. Every US citizen now owns whole 3.9 acre of land.
Now what? How is poverty alleviated? How are people who "live in hovel and eat gruel" helped, what are they supposed to do with this land?
All pre-industrial, pre-modern ancient civilizations.
Demonstrate that the stagnation we see now (assuming we have stagnation) is due to poor people lacking land of average value about 4000 dollars per acre.
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