Not so simple. Kind of hard to run a farm and grow your food when "land belongs to all". And who'd be stupid enough to put up a building on land they don't own?
The land isn't owned collectively. It's owned by individuals. It seems strange to pass laws that say those individuals aren't allowed to sell to people that are willing to pay more money.
Most land is owned by someone or something, getting access to legally farm it is not cheap and the startup costs are high relative to what the groups we're talking about would have access to.
There wouldn't be any shelters on unowned land because it would be foolish to improve it if anyone could take your improvements from you at a moment's notice. Now you need a government to enforce exclusive use of the land by a given person, and guess what, that's ownership.
That's not how land ownership works in many places. You don't literally own the land and anything placed upon it, you own the right to do specific things with the land.
Once there are separate owners (for whatever reason it happened), it's not that easy to arrange that - since the land owner usually does not want to sell.
I always argue that even if they'd want to cultivate their own food, all land is already taken so they are not only unable but forbidden to earn their income.
I just want to note first that it is not clear that all land is currently owned. Natural owners (homesteaders) have been displaced many times by state violence and the threat of state violence keeps people from homesteading available space. I had sidestepped this earlier because, even if all land has legitimate private owners, that does not preclude voluntary cooperation.
1. Your body is your property, and you have the right to contract (i.e. agree with another person to use your property in a particular way, for instance as a condition of transfer of property). So the filthy rich person who owns a country--which by the way I don't think is possible, since he probably just planted a flag and yelled that he owns it, which does not make a homestead... but for the sake of argument let's say he does own the country--this guy excludes thousands of people who only have the standing room on which they were born. Do tell me how this guy will eat. I will bet that, through the magic of self interest, the landowner will be happy to contract with the impoverished majority, say, for farming. Now if you're thinking ahead, you already see that the poor folk, if their private property rights are respected, can save their income and trade and sell among themselves, maybe even buy some of that land from the country owner. The historic problem is not that ownership of land existed, but that it was never treated as a private property, or that the individual right to self-ownership and contract were not universally respected.
You seem to be confusing the fee simple notion of land ownership that we have in the United States with allodial title which doesn't happen anywhere because it's a terrible way to run a society
This seems to be directly in conflict with the idea that once you own land, it's yours. I don't see this flying at all, at least not with the current expectations of most people.
Any sizable company could easily bully any number of people out of their homes to acquire the land. It's hard to overstate how much people would hate this.
Well, being a farmer, I have to compete against them and have a good handle on who else wants the land I have been able to rent, and who has taken the land I wished to rent but lost out on. So, no, I don't think so. That doesn't even get into the people who wish they could farm but can't because there are already so many lined up in front of them.
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