Amen!

I tend to agree that private ownership doesn't really exist, at least in the USA, at present. Private ownership is always subject to the whims of the government here, however whimsical they are. Try building a house on "your lot", and see that its ok for you to pay for the building so long as its built according to the whims of the local government and inspectors. Try buying a house without pleasing the government regulations and payoffs that are often required. You used to have to deal with Ma Bell to make a telephone call, until after YEARS of work on the part of competitive companies to break up that government supported monopoly

As there has never existed purely private ownership in real life, it is an interesting hypothesis, though I point out that the term "collective monopoly" is an inherent contradiction.

but people who make decisions and spend money that arent popular AND/OR economically sound tend to lose their money and their ability to continue to make unpopular or economically unsound decisions.
I am saying that over the long haul, the competition offered by private ownership gives better results than afforded by a collective monopoly.

I agree with competition and I agree that government control can often be co-opted for personal reasons, but if you look at it carefully, those offensive governmental controls don't tend toward benefiting everyone. Just a few. Total private ownership is monopoly - not competition - because you can't have multiple individual owners of land. Something to consider.

There are countless examples of government passing regulations that just benefit certain people and they don’t get revised for many years. Look at how long it took for the ma bell government supported monopoly to have to face mci and other competitors. A private person can indeed keep his beach for his use only, only to sell it later to a beach club in a private sale. Governments set whatever regulations.they want and those regulations often are never changed. All I am saying is that competition is the savior of the common man much more that government tegulstiond

"has a better chance to correct stupidities"

Be particular. Who is going to "force" someone to allow access? The government? Please expand your rationale here because I think that as you do you'll begin to see the flaws in such an unwaveringly idealistic stance.

A couple of examples:
1) The Chinese government through shell corporations has been trying to buy land near military bases. What are the ramifications under your proposal?
2) A private owner purchases a parcel of oceanside property which includes a walkway used by the public to access the beach. (This is a real event.)

I would agree that stupid things can result from both private and governmental ownership. The real difference is that with private ownership there is the element of competition that has a better chance to correct stupidities than government with the power of gund

"I think also that most religions have SOME reasonable tenets that reflect reality, but most religions also have really stupid and nonsensical tenets."

Plenty of stupidity to go around, no doubt. It's a basic characteristic of humanity. ;)

"This is why adherence to religion of any type should NOT be enforced on people, an it should NOT be enforced by government at any level."

We couldn't agree more.

"AS to public lands, look at the stupidity of government ownership of roads..."

I've already done the work of exposing the dangers of an all-private road system and I didn't see any counterargument, just a restate of your original position. I'll just take that to mean that we'll agree to disagree.

I think also that most religions have SOME reasonable tenets that reflect reality, but most religions also have really stupid and nonsensical tenets. This is why adherence to religion of any type should NOT be enforced on people, an it should NOT be enforced by government at any level.

AS to public lands, look at the stupidity of government ownership of roads and how decisions as to where they go and how they are maintained are made by political committees , often under very suspicious circumstances (corruption)

"Whats so bad about a private game reserve?"

So let's take your hypothetical to its extreme and hypotheticalize that every single square feet of land is now privately owned. Sure, let's go there. You now end up paying fees to anyone and everyone in order to go anywhere. Those landowners have to police that territory to enforce those policies. You're creating an enormous hassle for everyone - and a massive revenue stream for those who own the primary corridors of travel.

Let's also discuss the effects of free movement of labor - which your idea would effectively nullify. Adam Smith noted in his seminal "The Wealth of Nations" that those populaces which had mobility and could travel secured better wages and better jobs than those who could not. Along the same vein, merchants who could travel could take their wares to more profitable venues for sale. All of that comes to a grinding halt without public ownership of roads on which to travel.

Let's go one step further and examine the elitists in the one-world government who are actively trying to take over the world. They're doing it by privatizing bank notes (that exactly what the Federal Reserve is) and they're trying to buy up all the land they can. Huh.

As you can see, the "all private lands" argument is just as big a minefield - and perhaps greater - than the one involving general use public lands.


"Why don't they just call it "X" and anyone who wants to live there buys into it, regardless of religion?"

"'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title."

-- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

To you, the name has no meaning. To the Jews, however, the name Israel means "House of God" or "Family of God." It is much more than just a name. It is a symbol of a covenant relationship with God. The Islamists have similar meaning in their names. It's something that a secularist American can't hope to understand the depth of.

"Islam is an ideology just as "woke" is or any of the religions like leftism today..."

All religions and ideologies should be individually examined as to their tenets, with the results of their teachings being the primary evidence of the morality of those tenets. But it is an utterly false equivalency to equate one philosophy with another. Either it espouses correct principles or it does not. In my opinion, woke-ism is nothing more than the embrace of the derelict mind and enslavement to the passions of spontaneity without conscious thought. Islam has some positive things like fasting, taking care of one's parents, etc. but it attempts to enforce its edicts with marshall punishment. And it brooks no debate - no dissent. To me, these two ideologies are an entrapment and enslavement of the human intellect and will and I can think of few philosophies more sinister in nature.

There can be land owned by jews, and there can be land owned by Palestinians. But I disagree that there can be "public" land owned by some "nation"- that is where we get into the statist trap. I think all land should be privately owned by individuals , corporations, partnerships, etc. Including parks, roads, forests, etc. Whats so bad about a private game reserve? A private beach, etc. If we are going to have the concept of private property, we have to allow for all property to be private. "Public" lands is a minefield, and you can see how it unfolds in the land called Israel or Palestine.
Why don't they just call it "X" and anyone who wants to live there buys into it, regardless of religion?
Islam is an ideology just as "woke" is or any of the religions like leftism today. Certainly Christianity, as well as many other religions have engaged in murder to eradicate infidels. In the USA we use the legal system to eradicate non believing political leaders and jail them . We no longer just kill them, although that was certainly done in the past.

I have to disagree. There is certainly Israeli land as there is a nation of Israel. Even here in the United States there are public parks, roads, forests, etc. that aren't owned by individuals and I object to private ownership of such. (We're fighting a couple of uber-rich brothers trying to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres of land here in order to establish private game reserves for the rich and famous. Part of that is that they are also gating off public access roads to small lakes for hiking and fishing contrary to public easements and historical access.)

The name of a State is defined by those who live there - not some ephemeral third party. And most of that land WAS privately purchased by individual Jews all through the 1900's - and they have the records to prove it.

And there will never be peace on this planet until Islam is eradicated as an ideology. The Middle East isn't the only place where radicals murder and bomb in the name of Islam. Ask the Russians. Ask the Chinese. Ask the Indians. Ask the Phillipinos. I can go on and on. The problem isn't the Israelis/Jews.

There is no such thing as "israeli" or "Palestinian" land. There is only individual ownership of land. That is the initial fallacy of this "creation" of Israel.
Maybe the only way to finish this off is to have ONE state, give it another name than Israel or Palestine, and permit private ownership of parcels by whoever owns them. No more invasions, no "two state" arguments, and perhaps a bit of peace. Otherwise, let the two sides fight and kill each other until there are no more Israelis and no more Palestinians left. The USA should STAY OUT OF IT. Its not OUR fight

Every one of the Americans demonstrating for the Palestinians and Hamas should be made to watch this video. To the college students who so openly parade in support of the Palestinians, remember these people danced in the streets when the twin towers were destroyed. That's who you are supporting...........shame, shame on this country for allowing the anti Israel demonstrations to take place on our college campuses.
https://www.israelunwired.com/this-vi...

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Another video those demonstrating against Israel should be made to watch. I guess the truth hurts the Palestinians cause so they work to suppress it. This Muslim woman tells how it actually is in Israel, a lot different than the mainstream media projects and ignores.

An Arab Muslim addresses the claims about Israel being an apartheid state - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLzsI...

Agreed - thanks mhubb...

Very true today - if the defenders can get past the nonsense, or just not pay attention to, the UN...

Like building a mosque at or close to ground zero in NY.....

Kind of like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant? OHH no virgins for me!

If I recall correctly a M.O. of Muslim conquest is to build mosques on top of whatever religious buildings were there before.

Thank you, mhubb, for taking the time to post these two narratives. Very succinct and informative.

LoL. Auto Correct strikes again.

...or Jordan.

The Palestinians have a homeland and a country: it's called Jorden.
Prior to WWI the land was impoverished and sparsely occupied by what can only be called Bedouins, wanders of the desert.
Yeah, there was a few Coptic Christians, a few Oriental Jews and a few Muslims, too widely scattered to fight over what amounted to a desert outpost.
It was only when the British stuck a stake in the ground, with the ultimate goal of shipping European Jews off the European Continent proper, that the troubles began.
Much like along the lines of what they did by drawing the borders of Iraq and Iran. By grouping Shiite, Sunni and Kurds together, they will spend all their time fighting each other to have spare time to fight their occupiers. A similar border was drawn in India with the same reasoning.
The neighboring countries took a page from the British playbook, watching all these European Jews come in from all conners of the globe they decided: "What better place to ship all our trouble makers than to send them Gaza" This is exactly what they did. Yasser Arafat and his extended family is a perfect example of this. He and his father were a thorn in the side of Egyptian authorities, so off to Gaza they went: with the warning: Ya'll don't come back now, Ya hear?

As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The territories comprising all other “Arab” states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history. The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence.
There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no “Palestinian” people and no “Palestinian” claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name “Palestinian” referred to the Jews of Palestine.
The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that “aboriginalism”—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?
Back to the Arabs: I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs’ tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?
To answer that question, let’s look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we’ve discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews. Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted.
The Jews’ willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN’s partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel’s urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel’s existence (achieved in ’48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in ’67).
The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been “stolen” from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel’s destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as “oppressors,” and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.