Property and theft

Most of what we call property has no basis in logic, and so is indistinguishable from theft. The most obvious example is land: we all live on land that someone, somewhere, took by force. There are many more examples, but the others are closer to home so talking about them offends people. and I have no desire to offend people. The AnswersAnswers site discusses the concept of property as derived from logic, and how that would change the world. Later I will add examples of land rent in practise, but my first priority is to get the logic simple enough for a ten year old to follow, otherwise the examples just lead to misunderstanding.

Anyway, I was reminded of property (a topic never far from my little mind) by some quotes on today's Reddit. It began as a discussion of some Indian islands where people have very little contact with the outside world. "jurble" wrote:

"One of the problems Indians who live in the Andaman islands have is that the natives will walk in and just start taking stuff. They can understand the concept of how a watch works and what it does - but the concept of private property is actually harder to grasp.
That blows my mind."

Yet in the west we just do it on a bigger scale. We give it names like "national interest" (where our only concern with foreign nations is what we can get) or "mining" (when we just walk in and take stuff from the land) or "sovereignty" (where the ruling body can take what it likes by just writing on bits of paper and calling it laws). Bas on Reddit, "aardvarkious" replied,

"I remember reading about an early explorer in the pacific islands who came across an uncontacted group of natives. They boarded his boats and started taking everything in sight, he ended up slaughtering them, they ended up torching his fleet. His surviving crew latter found out that these people were taking things form the ship not as an act of war, but because that is how their culture worked. And, if the crew had simply said "we need this stuff more than you do," it would've all been recovered without any fighting."

"Orange_Drink" then quoted Raj Patel:

"In many North American indigenous cultures, generosity is a central behaviour in a broader social and economic system. One anecdotal account examined what happens when boys from white and Lakota communities received a pair of lollipops each. Both sets of boys put the first one straight into their mouths. The white boys put the second one in their pockets, while the Lakota boys presented it to the nearest boy who didn't have one."
Raj Patel - The Value of Nothing

I am not the only person moaning about western hypocrisy. But I think I am the only one offering a solution that is both simple and derived from pure logic: vote for land rent. Then see what happens when a society is not based on theft.