Land can not be owned and should not be owned

LEGAL PERSPECTIVE 

§1. Ownership is a legal concept which is agreed upon right of exclusion over things owned from rest of human beings. Or it is legal right or the right of protection from the sovereign to the owner that You can have things you owned. 

§2. For a thing which was never owned, possession over period of time when recognized by the sovereign gives the right of ownership there. In other cases, mix of capital and labor or the exchange of something owned gives rise to ownership when transferred within legal framework. 

§3. For all things other than pure land, it may be justifiable to put money value on the mixture of capital and labor to price the thing and get ownership over that to preserve its future uses. 

§4. For land, can it be owned? Text as far as I read and understood, they see ownership over land as relaized right, i.e. ownership established after claim is made by possession by force on foreign land and by other manner in homeland. But they failed to make past analysis that how can anything you don’t possess be owned. Can anyone possess a land? Absolutely Not. One may say, making boundaries or posting bodyguards etc. land may be possessed. But possession is by all its physical meaning is to be able to control that thing. Can anybody claim that they can control whole earth from its creation to dissolution? Men came later to earth or universe or any matter in the universe, at least I believe so. If they rise from the earth itself then land is mother and nobody can own mother. If they arrived from somewhere else, still they didn’t made it, they only use it. In anyway, men don’t control land Ex-ante, and hence no possession is possible. If something cant be possessed can not be owned at first. 

§5. We have very interesting idea about it in Isha Upanishad and Vishnu Puran. Isha Upanishad declares “ 2. By performing karma in this world (as enjoined by the scriptures) should one yearn to live a hundred years. Thus action does not bind thee, the doer. There is no other way than this”. Idea is to live by efforts alone and not on rents (land creates rent on which efforts are not made). 

In Vishnu purana, Lord Vishnu having the form of Baman, ask Great king Bali, grandson of sage Prahalad,  to give 3 steps land. Here the Bali has won all land already yet he couldn’t give 3 steps of land. It shows that land cant be possessed and hence  it is a gift of nature and not human efforts. 

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE 

§6. Since the land can’t be owned it can’t be exchanged. All economic problem over it will be vanished, No. since the land has In-elastic supply, i.e. supply of land can’t be increased. And all works are performed over land. Hence land must be in occupied for work to be performed. 

§7. When the land can’t be exchanged, its economic value is zero and no productive resources will be allocated to it. The rent seeking behavior will be impossible over a land. Then alone men can truly say to be free (still in limited sense) to live alone on his/her efforts and not on what their forefathers owned, because all other resources are consumed over a limited life span. 

§8. Allocation problem will then be emerged, how can land be allocated? It is as answered by Aristotle for flute, that it must be given to the one who can use it best. Similarly land should be occupied by those who can make best use of it when. 

Note: No men should be deprived of land in the name of efficiency of land use for the sake of exploitation ,as often done in the name if meritocracy. 

I wrote it from perspective of what should be and not from what is there in the field. Hence, I wish it can start a debate on land ownership from point of view of both Law and Economics.