RE: The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt
Taiwan's situation mentioned by @ekklesiagora was interesting:
Taiwan’s land reform was a bloodless revolution ending the unfair distribution of land and significantly reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.
After Taiwan’s retrocession to the Republic of China from Japan in 1945, over 50 percent of the island’s population was farmers, of whom 70 percent were tenants. After a half century of colonial rule, the Japanese land-rental system still applied. The average share of the harvest that tenants had to turn over to the landowner exceeded 50 percent, sometimes going as high as 70 percent.
Furthermore, some were “iron leases” requiring a fixed crop quantity, regardless of land conditions or natural disasters. Tenants toiled all year round just to give most of their harvest to the landlord. To make things worse, leases were usually oral. When conflicts arose, there were no written documents to refer to, and landlords, given their higher social status, usually won out. The system represented blatant socioeconomic inequality.
The final goal of Taiwan’s land reform was to make all farmers the owners of their own fields. The reform proceeded in four stages: (1) leasing government-owned land to tenants; (2) 37.5 percent shares on privately-owned farmland; (3) the sale of public land to farmers; and (4) the land-to-the-tiller program.
Beginning in 1946, to begin balancing land supply and demand, state-owned farmland was leased to farmers for 25 percent of the crop. Furthermore, in 1949, shares were reduced to 37.5 percent on privately-owned farmland, based on average harvest quantities for the previous two years.
The figure of 37.5 percent was arrived at by assuming that the working capital provided by a farmer was equivalent to 25 percent of total production. The remaining 75 percent of the crop was divided into two equal parts, one for the landlord and the other for the farmer.
In 1949, Chen Cheng, then chairman of the Taiwan Provincial Government, pointed out to a reporter that farmers, who made up a large percentage of the total population, work harder than anyone else, but they sometimes could not even fill their stomachs. “The motivation behind the 37.5-percent rent is to eliminate such unfair conditions,” he emphasized.
Under the new arrangements, crop yields increased as tenants were willing to invest more money in agricultural equipment and improved farming methods. According to Ministry of the Interior statistics, in 1948, before the rent reduction, total rice production was 1.037 million metric tons. Following the change in 1949, the rice output rose to 1.172 million metric tons, and jumped to 1.517 million metric tons in 1952, a 46 percent rise in four years.
Clearly we have to solve the issue of land and resource distribution. I think that our concepts of ownership have to be questioned in this regard.
Any distribution of resources that is not uniform will be questioned by those that dont get their share. As a consequence every human born should receive a part and that is not compatible with private ownership. In the past the solution of this problem would have required authority and a state. But I think that we can finally solve the problem without a middle man using distributed organisations and the blockchain.
The blockchain is quite a transformative technology. It's the dawn of a new world with new possibilities. :)