Yeah - and even at that, of course, it is a relative trickle.On land ownership WITH WRITTEN TITLES AND DEEDS we were not alone (most of Europe had this) but unlike all others we had available land. Every new restriction Zero places on the country is designed to reduce land and home ownership.
Your emphasis on written titles and deeds puts me in mind of the guy (de Sota?) who wrote a few years back about the squatters in a Peruvian city, I think - who laid heavy emphasis on the value of clear titles in the establishment of a middle class and entrepreneurship.I also think of the American frontier institution which I had never even dreamt of until I read Boorstin’s The Americans - the National Experience. The "claim club,” as I (now vaguely) recall it. The idea of the claim club was that people who would stake claims in a given locale would not find it at all practical to leave them unattended to go register their claims at some central location. Instead, the claim club was a mechanism for localizing the recognition of claims - you showed up and staked your claim, and you basically swore allegiance to the claims of everyone else in the community - and in exchange, the community would help you enforce your claim.
Boorstin said that if you went to the central registry and filed a claim, and then showed up and tried to evict someone who had already physically staked out that land and joined the claim club, you would be out of luck trying to make the paper in the registry stick. Not only would you be physically forced out if you tried, you would also lose in court because the judge in your case would himself be a member of a claim club.
Boorstin also had a kind word for vigilantes, making the point that there were times and places for them, and that they often, as it were, went by Robert’s Rules of Order even though they were organized ad hoc. He told of a murderer who had a one-day trial at their hands, pointing out that the jurors were giving up what to them was important, valuable time in order to see justice done. Far from summary executions, in his telling.
Boorstin’s The Americans trilogy was interesting in another sense - in being a history without wars. He simply talks about people. A real “people’s history,” not the Zinn kind.
Thank you so much for your yeoman’s work addressing the AP test for the sake of future generations. It really is a scandal how the marxists have just taken over the culture by taking over, say rather preventing, the teaching of history.
When the Northwest Territories (IN, MI, OH, IL, WI) were opened to settlement in 1785, they were supposed to be surveyed, then land parcels sold. Except settlers quickly went way past the surveys to establish their own land, farms, even towns. All other nations would have sent gubment troops to evict the squatters, but under common law, the people know what's best. So the Articles of Confederation Congress developed "preemption" better known as squatter's rights. You live there for seven years, develop the land, take a "deed" into a gubment office with your own drawing of your land lines, they certify it. It's legal. NO ONE else has done this. Under European civil law, Sharia law, or any far eastern law I know of, the gument tells the people what to do.
Now, in a book/film series called "The Commanding Heights" by Daniel Yergin, De Soto's idea is followed up in Africa, and things didn't work out as well because (not their words, but mine) absence of COMMON LAW. They couldn't sort out the original land holders (you never can!). So even though they knew his idea worked, they wouldn't cut the Gordian Knot and just say, "It starts now. YOU own this." It's very unjust to some of the original people, but it quickly sorts out.