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In ancient times, when the planet was sparsely populated and hence the amount of available land per person was far more than one could ever use, inheritance of land along family blood lines was fair and workable. Today though, there is, on average, only just in excess of 2 hectares of land for every human being on the planet. Of this, less than 1.5 hectares is capable of economic production. This makes inheritance along family lines now unworkable. It would rapidly result in unacceptable disparity. The only viable option therefore is some form of collective inheritance.
The human life-form has a finite life-span. Its traditional average is 70 years. The first 20 years are taken up in developing from a baby into an adult. That leaves 50 years of responsible working adulthood. After that age, one should be able to retire from the toil of generating wealth and enjoy the more relaxed lifestyle of passing on one's lifetime of knowledge and experience to the next generation. Ownership of land means control of its economic use. Ownership should therefore be given to an individual only for the 50 year duration of his responsible productive adulthood.
Ideally, one's hythe of land should never be sold. However, if one finds oneself in the unfortuitous position of having to sell it, then one can sell only what one actually owns. Since one can only ever own 50 years use of one's hythe of land, then one can only ever sell to another the use of one's land for the remainder of one's 50-year tenure. At the end of the 50 years, ownership of the land must revert to the descendants of the original owner automatically and unconditionally. This ensures that every new generation starts out with the resources they need to turn their work into their needs of life and realise the potential of their special talents.
On the short wave band, radio signals wax and wane in strength. They do this in repeated cycles. The length of each cycle from one maximum to the next can be anything from half a second or so (known as flutter) to many minutes (known as fading). This is caused by movement of the Earth's ionosphere like waves on the ocean. The difference between the maximum and minimum strength of the signal can be enormous.
To compensate for this, the listener would have to keep turning the gain control up and down as the signal waned and waxed. But engineers can alleviate this chore. They bleed part of the output signal from one of the receiver's amplifier stages, reduce it and reverse it, and feed it back into the input of the amplifier. Because it has been reversed, it cancels out some of the strength of the new signal coming in 'off the air'. When the incoming signal increases, so does the amplifier's output signal. So in turn does the reversed signal which is fed back. So the more it cancels the incoming signal. When the incoming signal decreases the opposite takes place. The overall effect is to keep the amplifier's output constant even though the incoming signal is varying in strength enormously.
This principle of automatic negative feed-back is an essential component of practically all systems - both artificial and natural. It can stabilise the speed of an engine, limit the gain of an amplifier, minimise the error of a servo and sustain the pull which holds the behaviour of the world's weather system within its decreed bounds.
The automatic and unconditional reversion of ownership of land to its original owner or his descendants at the end of 50 years is an important manifestation of this negative feedback principle. It prevents any one family from indefinitely amassing a greater and greater proportion of the world's available wealth over multiple generations. It automatically redistributes capital assets every generation. And it guarantees that the spectre of capitalism can never rise up to enslave the people of this planet and hold them under its yoke of bondage as it does today.
This form of ownership would ensure that, no child could ever be born onto this planet already dispossessed of his future fair share of its land. He could never become homeless of fall a victim to poverty. He would always belong. He would have guaranteed a future of prosperity and choice. His wealth and means could never be dissipated by the cancer of economic boom and recession. He would always be guaranteed his basic needs. No corporate master could ever enslave him for a pittance. In the hythe-based economy, the only things traded are the goods and services of the artisan. Land - the permanent 'capital' resource which generates them - is not. This is because if the individual were to sell his land, he would be selling not only his own use of it, but also that of his children and his children's children which he has no right to do.
The wealth-generating resources of the planet must be passed on from one generation of its human inhabitants to the next as a collective inheritance. But that collective inheritance must then be divided to give each individual inheritor direct and allodial possession of his rightful share. It is neither socialism nor capitalism, yet it is both. Every human being has a personal identifiable share in the planet on which he lives. But it is his fairly divided portion of the collective inheritance of all.
Following its 20 formative years, the human being has an economically productive life-span of 50 years before retiring. It would seem sensible therefore to re-divide the planet for inheritance by each new generation once every 50 years at exactly the same time in every part of the world. In each 50th year, a global census would be taken, and the mean size of the new-generation's share would be determined by dividing the area of all the productive land on the planet by the new population figure. Then fast procedures (such as one based on GPS-type technology) would instantly fix the locations and boundaries of each newly inherited share such that all the shares belonging to each particular family would join together to form a contiguous hythe which would be farmed as an integral economic unit.
For practical reasons, the 50th year would have to be a year of rest during which no productive operations would take place. As such it would be an opportunity for recreation and social interaction on a global scale. It would provide an opportunity for families to move. They could opt for their new-generation hythe to be in a different part of the world, thus giving to each family line a history enriched by geographic variety. The fact that families may move to entirely different parts of the world every 50 years places an obligation on each to be a good steward of the land on which his current hythe is located. It also makes it desirable for the homes of Hythe World to be transportable or even vehicular equipped for independent global navigation.
History has proved that good stewardship, being beyond an individual's self-interest, cannot be effectively enforced by an external agency. It can be enforced only by conscience - the policeman within. Conscience is a product of education or - dare I say it - indoctrination. It requires formative instruction and life-long reinforcement. Dispersed in their hythes among the distractions of day-to-day work, such instruction and reinforcement would be impossible to administer. Therefore times throughout the year should be set aside when everybody travels from their hythes to centres at which the instruction of children and reinforcement of knowledge for adults is administered. Away from the distractions of daily toil, such events should also be opportunities for socialising and recreation.
This system of passing on the planet to the next generation collectively, then re-dividing it for individual possession is the only way which guarantees true equal opportunity. Under this system, your inheritance of the means of turning your labour into your needs of life is completely independent of your gender, your family, your race, your abilities, your personality, or any attribute by which human beings are differentiated.