Comments by "N Velsen" (@nvelsen1975) on "The Eternal Landlords of the Philippines" video.

  1. Plus that system leads to exploitation. Philipino sailors are popular throughout global shipping seeing as you can pay them a fart and three marbles instead of a proper wage. In Gulf States like Dubai and Qatar, Philipino slaves are very popular because they will put up with a lot more than other slaves will. I mean, you enslave a Chinese woman as your nanny to work 7 days a week no breaks no passport, there's going to be trouble. Enslaving a German engineer? Instant trouble even with your own government. A Philipino slave-nanny or slave-truck driver by contrast? Their government isn't going to care at all and they will accept (well, be forced to accept) what you do to them because 'still better than back home'.
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  2. That sounds a bit weird to me. Who ended up taking that inheritance then? Because any legal system I'm aware of, it's really hard or impossible to cut out the children, and if the children die before collecting their share is automatically transfered to any grandchildren. Grandmother being the spouse can sometimes stop an inheritance as long as she lives, but after her death the normal rules should still apply. The state or random other people typically don't enter the picture if a family goes extinct with no surviving 1st or 2nd line relatives at all.
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  3. Oh wow, they bought out the exploitive catholic church for a high price? That was a mistake. The Vatican gets rich from extorting society to become ever-richer and adding even less value to society that a class of ultra-wealthy landowners do (those at least financed larger business undertakings like land reclamation, railroads, factories etc or inadvertently create heritage and tourist attractions). We Dutch were in the same situation once after centuries of catholic stranglehold. A village near where I grew up was razed by the bishop's armies in 1321 because the farmers were becoming too independant, and the Vatican wanted serfdom to be the norm (never became popular here in western Europe). In the end this lead to the Vatican's massive holdings being mostly seized during the 16th century and being given away to people important for our independance. True that was mostly protestant rich city-dwellers with a minority going to building houses for common people and even less to creating free-farmers with their own land, but this created a powerful non-feudal upper middle class. And where a feudal class acquired the lands this at least lead to a more diverse and larger noble class that would be more moderate in its collective decision-making than a handful of medieval-era families would be. Paying money for the catholic church's lands was a huge mistake, basically ensured society paid for that land three times. First when the church stole it, second when the church extorted money to develop it, thirdly when it was bought from them at a high price and thus skyrocketed land prices in the Philipines without need. Now you can argue that was a long time ago, but such prices do keep weighing on society to some extent and an even richer catholic stranglehold on society has never been a good thing.
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  4.  @erkinalp  Basically. I rewrote the sentence from a positive to a negative and forgot to change all.
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