Fun Online Polls: The Next General Election & Land Ownership

Having caught snippets of the details of the 'negotiations' between the Lib Dems and the Tories on the telly over the weekend, it strikes me that all the big three parties must have known for weeks that a hung Parliament was a very real prospect, so I would have expected each party to have sent off a small delegation to haggle with the others over what the terms of a possible coalition would be, just in case. From where I am sitting, their overall policies are so similar, that it can't be too difficult to go through their manifestos line-by-line and find a compromise on each one.

So either:

a) They are reasonably competent, have thrashed this out in advance and are now just playing to the gallery (which makes them unfit to run a country, this is not a game), or

b) They are in fact totally incompetent and vain, and lived in a fantasy world where 'their' Party was going to win an outright majority (again making them unfit to run a country).

Whichever answer is closest to the truth, what the public (i.e. me) really wants to know is, how long will they stumble along, playing to the gallery and/or living in a fantasy world, until they throw in the towel and call another General Election.

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As to last week's Fun Online Poll, "Is landownership possible in the absence of a 'state'?" I was heartily relieved to see that 62% chose "No, of course not. The two are synonymous.", but perturbed in equal measure by the 38% who chose "Yes, and I have left a comment explaining how it would work."

Out of the 36 who said they'd leave a comment explaining how it would work, only five bothered to actually try and explain how it would work. These answers fell into two categories:

a) The usual faux-libertarian "land ownership can be protected by force", which is self-defeating - whoever has the biggest army, or can call on the compliance of the most people IS the state, so that is just replacing one state with another, and

b) The other faux-libertarian favourite "land can be bought and sold by private contract", which completely misses the point. Of course it is quite possible for land to be bought and sold by private contract, but that does not address the subject matter of the contract.

I tried to illustrate the point here, by referring to broadcasting licences, it may be just as useful to look at the opposite extreme and consider things which are totally illegal in most countries, like drugs.

If I had asked "Is the ownership of drugs possible in the absence of a 'state'?" then the answer must quite clearly be yes. We know that people grow and manufacture drugs, smuggle them into the country, wholesale and retail them, and the user buys them from his local dealer and consumes them. The state goes to all manner of lengths to try and prevent this at every step of the way.

Ownership of drugs, in a legal sense, is more or less impossible - if they catch you at customs with half a kilo of coke, then they will take it off you, whether you can show proof or purchase or not. But when you go to your dealer for an ounce of dope, he expects hard cash there and then - there is little point you pointing out to him that in legal/criminal terms, he does not own what he is selling - in a very real and practical sense he does.

When you are buying drugs, you are paying for the drugs themselves - the physical stuff, which in turn the dealer and everybody else in the supply chain has created from scratch, and so on.

Compare and contrast this with 'land ownership'. What are you paying for when you buy land (apart from the buildings perched on it)? You are paying for exclusive occupation of a certain plot of land (or part thereof, in the case of a block of flats), which, within your budget constraint, you have chosen because it is near to your place of work or a train station, has a nice view, is near the shops, in a low crime area, in the catchment area of a good state school etc etc.

Some of these things happen of their own accord, some of these things are paid for out of taxation (separate topic). You are not paying for the physical land - you are paying for a bundle of things which the vendor has not had any hand in creating.

Further, unlike illegal drugs, land ownership is only possible with the state's blessing - it has to be recorded at HM Land Registry (or in olden times, backed up by title deeds which would be recognised in court) - and is only worth something because the state is prepared to guarantee exclusive possession, by evicting squatters if need be. Again, you can contrast this with drugs - they still have value, even though the state will not protect your title or guarantee exclusive possession - if somebody nicks them off you, you can hardly go to the police, and if they are of inferior quality, you cannot go to the local Trading Standards Officer.

Sure, in theory, the state/the police protect ownership of all physical goods, but even with higher value items like cars, the chances are, if your car is stolen, the police will give you a crime number and go back to watching television in the canteen. The reason why so few cars are stolen is because of locks and immobilisers and so on, and if your car is stolen or vandalised, most people will just claim it back on the insurance rather then expecting the car to be returned to them. But car ownership still 'works', even though it is far more privatised than the system of landownership.

If the state had the same lackadaisical attitude to land as it did to cars, i.e. if you get squatters, just claim on the insurance, then things would look a lot different - insurance premiums would be colossal, and land values would be correspondingly low.

Just sayin', is all.