Comment by zackmorris

Hey roninorder, after sleeping on it, I realized I got triggered. A friend said something similar to what you said years ago, and I had a lot of time to stew about it.

Take a show like Yellowstone: highly politically charged, and the plot is around the realities of making it in the world today. I would argue that the ranch should be public land and the ranchers should pay grazing fees instead of taxes. But they are homesteaded, so the land is theirs. Which creates tension in who profits from the land. One advantage of private ownership is that it's arguably less susceptible to development, in that a selfish person can't build a cabin at the top of the mountain for all to have to see. But it can also go the other way - the Wilks brothers (billionaires) bought large tracts of land in Idaho and immediately built fences to keep hunters out of what used to be shared. People previously all for private ownership are now suffering under cognitive dissonance at the loss of what they felt was their heritage.

I take the academic road and imagine ways to satisfy these constraints outside of the current context. But most people are trapped in a Nash equilibrium where not everyone is happy, in fact a lot of people are unhappy. I think that's what you're getting at in your comment, that these things are hard. My idealistic dreams have little effect on the situation on the ground.

Sorry if I was too confrontational in my response.