Who Owns The Land?

One question to consider going forward: "Who owns the land?"

You no doubt have heard reports of Globohomo figures buying up arable land, whole island, and other land acquisitions. Yes, "acquisitions"; I doubt that cutting checks is the sole consideration made for these transactions, as we'll see soon enough.

For all the talk, for and against us, Mankind as a whole remains a species tied to the land. Therefore control of fertile land, land-based natural resources--wood, minerals, etc.--as well as otherwise marginal land that acts as a chokepoint for land or water transit matters. One of the necessary concerns of any state is to manage the land it holds as sovereign territory; how this is done, at the level I'm talking, is detail. It must be done, so it shall be done, by whatever means and justification necessary.

Do not think that this is above your pay grade. Even if all you seek is to establish a homestead far away from all the madness, you cannot escape this question. If you are unable to defend what you claim to own, then you don't own it; you manage it for someone else, and that someone else can defend it because they can take it from you at any time.

No, I'm not talking about ink jizzed on paper, or electrons spewed on a screen. I'm talking the cold iron and hot lead that backs those claims and records up.

You can bet that those buying all that land are also buying the gear and hiring the henchmen to hold that land against all comers, and they certainly seek to put workers on that land to do the actual labor of making it productive in return for living on it.

That, friends, is feudalism. All you're lacking is the pagentry of nobility.

Consider, therefore, that feudalism never ended. Rather, it became obscured as the actual owners changed their costumes and their mechanisms for exerting ownership and control; we called it something else, and we made a show of it not being feudalism, but it really was when you strip away the exterior and looked at how--in practice--we actually lived. We substituted formal social bonds for financier-based monetary economics, but the mechanisms were the same.

Instead of your master being Lord Shitcock XIII, it's his descendent Dr. Shitcock XXXI who runs the Shitcock Family Trust when he's not part-timing for the Shitcock Institute of Social Policy and guest-lecturing at the Shitcock School for Social Justice while evaluating candidates for the Shitcock Scholarship Fund's annual grant awards and raising money for his grandson Colonel Shitcock, Republic Marine Corps (Ret) in his race for a seat the Republic Parliament.

We still have an aristocracy. It is no longer confined to military affairs, but instead to socio-economic domination of a society.

So I ask you again: Who owns the land?

Start stripping away the trappings, find how the machine actually works, and you'll find out how to break it. Empire falls.