My real takeaway from that article is this: Three men own a volcano. They inherited it. Let that sink in for a moment and think about how absurd it is.
I let the sink in and he won’t leave. This is very absurd indeed.
Capital mistake: the sink is an asshole. Never let it in!
How is that absurd? It’s a landmass, people own land including entire islands. Inheriting a mass with a volcano on it doesn’t seem any different from inheriting a farm.
Do you really see no qualitative difference between owning some land to live on or to produce food or something other useful, and owning a volcano just because? We can also have the discussion of private land ownership vs grant of use for a specific purpose. Or about the justification for inheritance. It’ll be a slippery slope into capitalism vs socialism. My gut feeling tells me that it wouldn’t be a productive discourse, that we should avoid.
Setting aside the private ownership of land (I don’t think we would differ as much as you think).
No there is no difference. The issue here is you focusing on the volcano part. It’s a land mass like any other. The article didn’t go into history of ownership but it’s possible that it was passed down and likely from before the USA was a thing and well before Hawaii was part of the USA.
I can guess without looking that if I did a search for privately owned mountains I would find more than a few. Same goes for the aforementioned private islands that can be bought by anyone with enough cash/credit.
What about people owning lakes? If I took an acre of my land (yes, we are buying 3+acres) and turned it into a lake, would that seem odd to you? Would you want me to open my land up to anyone who wanted to visit, fish, etc? Or would that not be as absurd?
Do yourself a favor and ignore the volcano part, it will make much more sense.
My gut feeling tells me that it wouldn’t be a productive discourse, that we should avoid.
QED
