A solution to the endless centralization of land and other property ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer rent-seekers is to eliminate legal protections for absentee owners and restore respect for the homesteading principle as a means of acquiring property. The system of property rights we have today is artificially constructed by the state, and could be changed to prevent the accumulation of property by absentee owners.
You don’t seem to have thought any of this through. Those property rights that were artificially constructed by the State were largely based on that homesteading principle that you think you want to restore.
The basic premise of homesteading was that the government would recognize one’s claim to a parcel of land and if that person improved the land over a period of years, that got a permanent deed giving them full and clear title to that land to do whatever they wished with it. (this of course, is along side the entire issue of the government seizing land from it’s existing inhabitants and handing it over to others that fit into favored classes.)
And despite what you may think, there is very little land that has “absentee owners”. The vast majority of land that would fit in that sort of description is land that is owned and controlled by government entities. I doubt you’ll find much support for allowing the dismantling of our State and National Parks/Forests so people can clear cut them and setup strip mining operations.
The result would be more people who have a chance to homestead property as our ancestors did hundreds or thousands of years ago rather than paying rents on property they’ll never own, and property ownership would instead be more equitably distributed in the hands of people who are actually using the property.
Well, no actually. That probably isn’t what would happen. If there is no government backed guarantee that they would be able to retain all legal rights to that property, why would anyone go build a homestead and invest their time and money into land that can be taken back away from them at any time? Would YOU invest YOUR money to build a house on land that can be taken from you on a whim?
Your concept is more likely to result in a wholesale raping of the environment. What would prevent commercial interests from finding whatever land that does exist as “absentee”, claiming that land, stripping it of all it’s natural resources, leaving their waste behind and then abandoning it? Your idea removes all of the incentives for anyone to bother being a good steward of the land.
