I, Magneto, wrote:
Of course, you *could* implement a Geoist scheme which would deal with these troubles, by issuing every citizen 1 of N inalienable shares in the land, where N is the number of citizens. A share would entitle the citizen to occupy 1/N of the land - if they wish to occupy more, they have to rent the rights off someone else. So if Alice wants to occupy 50% more land than she is allocated, and Bob is willing to rent half of his allocation to her, she would be able to. If Bob decides that protecting part of Yosemite is more important to him than the money from Alice, however, he would be able to use his unused portion to stake a claim to that part instead. You could apply the same idea to non-renewable resources - you can extract as much as people are willing to sell to you. So is Geoia has a population of 5 million, and there are 5 million barrels of oil available for extraction, each Geoian has the right to a barrel of oil. If a company wished to extract all 5 million barrels, they would have to purchase all of the shares from the population.
One advantage geoism has is that it provides a basic income to everyone. This scheme wouldn't have that guarantee, of course, because you'd have to make sure that someone wanted to rent from you in order to get some money. However, what it would have is certain environmental protections - indeed, it would mandate a strict environmental regime, because all the land would be owned, and you're not allowed to pollute land that is not yours. But I'm sure it would lead to forests being preserved, because people would be willing to give some of their share to ensure that.
Yes, there are plenty of questions that need to be worked out for this to be viable. No, I'm not going to try defending this model all that much, because I don't actually believe that it should be implemented. Maybe I will change my mind, if someone else can convince me.
Let the battle, begin!
