“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, September 10, 2011

Ontology and Property

Talking with my mum in London about her house sale today made me think of the way different economic structures organize and bundle property. In England there are all kinds of leaseholds and freeholds as well as the plain vanilla private property thing that Americans are used to. Like the land that my mum's house sits on had to be paid for, with payments to the guy who build the house in the first place.

Can any of my American friends imagine a situation where you pay the architect as part of your regular mortgage?

Then there's the situation where you don't own the entire thing, you own the house but you don't own the land on which the house has been built. This is also the case with condos over here but over there the rules have byzantine tunnels in them that are probably some relic of the feudal economy.

Buying a house in the UK is notoriously one of the worst experiences you can possibly have. Hence this:

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