Had this thought I found interesting while reading the thread on Bill Gates buying up farmland. And it’s an exercise that brings up conflicting beliefs in my mind which makes it interesting to play out.
Say a person or group is rich enough to buy a large percentage of an areas food production. But doesn’t like the inhabitants of that region. What are the legal, governmental, and moral grounds in play if said person or group wants to legally purchase said land and then destroy it? What if they didn’t destroy it, but just shut down the production from that land?
Say for example I was rich enough to buy rights to most of the water sources in the Sahara, and then either contaminated them, or even just physically closed them to use.
I find the internal debate interesting because it pits private rights/ownership vs public good.
I would like to point out that Gates’ holdings amount to .00025% of American farmland just to put things in perspective. I don’t think it’s something that can happen in a country as big as ours, or at least not for a very long time.
We do live in an oligarchy however, and one could perhaps argue that it has already happened by way of corporate interests. We only have four major meat suppliers or some such thing. All other meat suppliers combined are not big enough to even compete with them, their saving grace being that more people than ever are willing to pay a premium for their superior products produced on a smaller scale.
Contamination would run afoul of existing environmental laws, both civil and criminal. Ending economic production would not devalue the land for taxation, but only create a dry hole consuming resources of the one keeping it non productive.
“Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: What Is Property?”
Literally every major industry in the USA, is monopolistic , with the illusion of competition.
Many brands, owned by the same mega corp.
We have laws to prevent and/or correct the current situation, but Reagan started the policy of not enforcing those laws…and no administration since then has either.
To me, such scenarios, where necessities are withheld from those who need them and traditionally used them so that those people die, are akin to war crimes: civilians and infrastucture targeted to kill people.
I’d tend to agree. But I fully admit that thinking that also runs afoul of my views on private property rights, which to me is why it makes it an interesting internal debate.
