Who Owns The World
In his 2006 book, Who Owns the World: The Hidden Facts Behind Landownership, Kevin Cahill notes that Queen Elizabeth II is the legal owner of one sixth of the land on the Earth's surface, more than any other individual or nation. This amounts to a total of 6,600 million acres (2.7×1013 m2) in 32 countries. For those unfamiliar with royalty, the Crown is never separate from the individual who holds it but is as one with them. Her Majesty the Queen is the Crown while she is Queen, and she loses neither her personality nor her individuality while she is monarch. In all territories owned by the Crown, including Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the governments of those countries do not own the land of the country, but may and frequently do administer it on behalf of its owner, HM Elizabeth II. More significantly all forms of land possession in those territories are based, formally and in law, on the Crown's superior ownership. This is why the Land Registry in places like the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia cannot register land ownership, only tenure. This is also why freehold and leasehold are defined in law as forms of tenure, not ownership.
Cahill also noted that of all the countries in the world that he looked at over a several year period, the only major country in which ownership of land was clearly defined as belonging to the citizens who had paid for it was the United States This is sometimes called 'allodial' ownership but is a changed meaning of that word. Originally 'allodial' meant land that could not be bought or sold or have a debt attached to it. Countries which have a form of direct ownership, even if it is not clear in their respective constitutions, include Germany, Switzerland, France, possibly Spain and in the future, Russia. In the United States the Federal Government owns about one third of the land of the country. But it does so as a landowner on a legal par with any other landowner and without a superior right to any land other than that endorsed on deeds as the property of the Federal Government. As a government the Federal Authorities and other public bodies do possess the right, sometimes called 'eminent domain', to acquire privately owned land for public purposes.
Read more about this topic: Kevin Cahill (author)
Famous quotes containing the word owns:
“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)