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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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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. Exactly. These were pre-industrial feudal countries completely unlike modern developed world.

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?

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?

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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