LOL. Wut?
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
I’m being completely serious. It may seem like an arcane concept at first, but it isn’t and IMO it bears a few minutes of ponderment.
Suppose you have a piece of raw land. You want to build a building on it....to increase its value, its utility. I happen to live in CA. All of CA was originally a Spanish land grant (not sure if that is the correct term) but CA entered the union; eg, became a state in 1850. What does that mean...to “become a state”?
Among 50+ other things, it means that activities within the state suddenly start to be governed by the laws of the union. When CA (and I suspect every other state with the possible exception of New Mexico and Arizona whose laws derived from territory law, and maybe Hawaii) So that includes laws about property, prop rights, and transfers of property. When CA joined the union, the US decided it would superimpose the standard method of mapping out real estate; metes and bounds. Sections, meridians, townships. So this piece of land, you think it’s yours, but how do you know? How did you get (become the owner of) it? You have a deed or some form of title. If you have title, then that title is backed up by title insurance and presumably, a survey that will reference those metes and bounds and meridian lines. Whatever you paid for the land, that value is protected by the issuance of a title ins policy. It is entirely possible that somewhere, there is a prior claim to ownership of that property, and whomever sold it to you never really owned it; whether that was deliberate or not. It is also possible that wherever you believe your prop boundaries are is incorrect. There could have been an erroneous survey or a deliberate fraudulent conveyance of the land. Maybe you can not be the actual owner because fraud was committed when it was sold to you, but at least you can get most of your money back under most conditions by having a TI policy. That is what I mean: There is “the thing”, in this case, the land, and the value it represents or you thought it represented when you exchanged money for it. You cannot insure against a flood coming through and ripping off all your topsoil or depositing 240 tons of dead trees upon your land, rendering it useless (without a massive cleanup effort) unless you insure against such an event, without buying some form of insurance.
Now you want to build a building. Whatever the value of the raw land was, you propose to increase it. That makes the certainty of you knowing that you really own the land that much more important.
The guy who you want to hire to build your building and you come to a deal about what you’ll pay him for his work. But in modern times, if his const equipment hits a spring under pressure or a huge rock he can’t move and somehow he gets injured, you may find yourself the defendant in a lawsuit that claims you knew about the spring or the rock and should have warned him. The compan(ies) that manufactured the tools he will be using have insurance to protect them against claims based upon the various hazards associated with using said tools.
Ad infinitum. Virtually everything you can point at and claim has value has, underlying that value, a piece of insurance. And that is why I say that there is a “mirror universe” comprised of a thousand different forms of insurance protecting the values of those things we see and use and think “that thing has value”.