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Thread: What do you think of Land Value Tax (LVT)

  1. #631
    Quote Originally Posted by Nathaniel1984 View Post
    So, what would be the cut off point on the amount of land? or would it be rather the quality of land? I mean, would someone who inherited 30 acres of basically unusable or unfarmable moutain forest be exempt? Would someone with 1000 acres of desert (no oil on it, etc) be exempt?
    The exemption would be by value, and the same for all resident citizens. The amount would be just enough for a normal person to live on, have access to opportunity, and participate in society. Tenants would apply their land tax exemptions in lieu of some or all of their rent, and their landlords would then apply their tenants' exemptions to the tax on the land the tenant was using.
    I think some of the worst aspects of current property tax and land laws are ones that prevent you from even giving up the land if you can't pay for it. For example, I have basicaly 25 acres of almost unusable and unsailable mountain terrain that I'd gladly give up (except for the 5 acres my house is on), but, the town won't even allow me to just give the land to them. I'm stuck paying 10,000 dollars or more on stuff I can't use (nor can anyone else, which is why they won't buy). Heck, when we wanted to have the land excavated for possible mineral resources (and thus sell it and get a profit and be rid of it and the taxes) the neighbors and the town blocked us. One of our neighbors down the road has about 66 acres (again, moutainous partially, and with some possibly arible land on another side) that he's tried to sell, but, isn't allowed to.

    It seems that a lot of property tax laws are bound to make it difficult to get rid of the stuff you don't want, so that they can continuosly bleed you. Heck, we once told the town, "What happens if we just don't pay the tax on the 20 acres we don't want? Will you just take it and leave the 5 acres we want alone?" "No," they said, "We'll seize everything and all that's on it." Thus, a darned if you do and darned if you don't.
    There are two solutions to that kind of problem: the tax authority can set the assessment, but would be required to buy the land at the assessed value if the landholder thinks it is too high; or the landholder can set the assessed value, but be required to sell it for that amount if anyone offered it.

    I find your situation bizarre. When both improvements and land are taxed, there can be some perverse incentives for the tax office and local landowning interests who often promote a NIMBY attitude because it increases the value of their land if other people can't build on theirs. Straight LVT aligns the tax authority's financial incentives with society's interests.



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  3. #632
    I love the idea of Land Tax to replace most if not all other taxes. I think if coupled with federal budget cuts it would generate a huge economic boom the likes have never before been seen in the modern world. America would become an extremely rich country at all levels and the poor and ignorant would be well taken care. I'd supplement LVT with taxes on pollution (no credits either), taxes on patents, and user fees where they can be easily enforced and make sense.



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  5. #633
    Quote Originally Posted by redbluepill View Post
    Society would probably leave that guy alone unless ‘his’ land includes a natural spring and there is a water shortage. In that case you can expect violent action against the landlord and I would not blame the people. As individuals we want to survive. I will bet you would not lay down and die just so some landholder can keep his spring all to himself.

    But realistically, anyone who is smart would not remove themselves from the community. They can enjoy tax returns from the land values they help create (not to mention the benefits/privileges of being a citizen of the community).

    Curious, why did you put society in quotes?
    Because to me, society is the sum of human interaction, minus aggression. A group stealing someone's land is a mob of barbarians, not a society.

    I don't see seceding from your neighbors' chosen defense and justice vendor as removing yourself from the community, any more than choosing a different grocery or gasoline vendor. Buy a big tank for your back yard and order a truck delivery of 10,000 gallons of gas once a year, instead of buying it from the local station like a normal person. You're different, but you're still part of the community of whomever you associate and trade with.

    Sure. But I strongly believe that any neighborhood that adopts ground rent and eliminates all other taxes will benefit the most economically. This would encourage other communities to do the same.
    Excellent!! And I'm all for as many neighborhoods adopting ground rent as wish to. I think that ultimately the insurance companies from the Rothbardian territories will drive all non-Rothbardian governments out of business by offering insurance against various oppressions and predations, such as asset seizures, arrests, and land value taxation. But I could be wrong.

    In a libertarian or anarchist world, some people might be unaffiliated anarcho-capitalists, contracting with various firms for services. But if we look at markets today, we see instead contractual communities. We see condominiums, homeowner associations, cooperatives, and neighborhood associations. For temporary lodging, folks stay in hotels, and stores get lumped into shopping centers. Historically, human beings have preferred to live and work in communities. Competition induces efficiency, and private communities tend to be financed from the rentals of sites and facilities, since this is the most efficient source of funding. Henry George recognized that site rents are the most efficient way to finance community goods because it is a fee paid for benefits, paying back that value added by those benefits. Private communities today such as hotels and condominiums use geoist financing. Unfortunately, governments do not.
    Geoist communities would join together in leagues and associations to provide services that are more efficient on a large scale, such as defense, if needed. The voting and financing would be bottom up. The local communities would elect representatives, and provide finances, and would be able to secede when they felt association was no longer in their interest.
    The key thing in shopping malls, condos, gated communities, etc., is that their rules and their funding is voluntary. So if that's all you meant by your form of georgism, that people be allowed to coagulate and form contractual communities, we're in total agreement and in fact this writer is confused because having contractual communities is totally Rothbardian (aka anarcho-capitalist). We're on board with it. See the book The Voluntary City. Now these contractual communities need not be geographically-based -- see, for example, the novel The Diamond Age. But, they could be. Some man or men buys up 20 square miles of land and makes it a jurisdiction of "Amish law" or "Greenwich Village law" or "geoist law". There's stipulations written into the deeds that everyone must pay land value "tax", or must never play loud rock music, or whatever the man thinks will make for a successful and pleasant community. Then, the land value "tax" is contractual, and thus voluntary, and thus really not a tax and I will love it to pieces! Voluntary=good, initiation-of-force=bad.

    Geoism would and should be spread through example. Maybe a few communities start off will it. When other communities see how successful it is they will adopt the policies too.
    Perfect! I like your thinking. That's how I feel about Rothbardianism, too.

    Some may practice that. Doesn’t mean I would necessarily agree with all the policies. Keep in mind, I agree with Rothbard 90% of the time. But most of his conclusions on land were way off. Speaking of, did you read the excerpt from Rothbard I posted? What are your thoughts?
    I may disagree with him a bit, based just on these two paragraphs, though he might agree with the objection I'm about to raise. What about if you want to fence off a nature preserve, keeping it in its pristine natural condition? According to this, anyone would be free to tramp in and labor it away from you at any time. I think this would be unjust, and I think Murray might agree. In the particular example he gave, he is right: if the land is claimed but then ignored, never used, never transformed, and forgotten, it's fair game again at some point. But I don't agree with some of the implications of using use and transformation as the sole homesteading criteria. Philosophically, the essential element which brings about ownership is the act of making the claim, and then there is a continuum of certainty in the justice of the claim determined by any factor you can think of: the size of the area claimed, the extent of the transformation the claimant has done, etc. As a practical matter, using and transforming the land are probably the two biggest things you can do to solidify your claim to the land. Without that, your claim is much, much, more precarious, although it is possible, as in the case of the nature preserve. Once you've plowed your farm or built your cabin, your claim is probably set in stone, nobody's going to contest the justice of your ownership (well, except the Georgists/geoists ).

    Anyway, there's no apodictically perfect and true way to determine the exact requirements to homestead land. Do exactly one hour of labor per 10 sq. yards of land, or make transformations increasing the land's value by at least 10%, or... you see? Conventions will arise. The market, including the arbitrators, will decide what constitutes a just claim and what doesn't. "Yes, you filed your claim to this 20 sq. miles and marked the corners with stakes, but that was a year ago and you haven't done anything since; I think it's a bogus claim and call foul", says Smith. The arbitrator is probably going to side with Smith. "But it's a nature preserve!!" Well, how big a nature preserve can you fence off? As I say, it's not an exact science, but I'm confident a free-market justice system will come up with something reasonable and workable and somewhat fair-seeming.



    Also, really, isn't all you are proposing is that we split up North America amongst thousands of landowners? Wouldn't a political map of N.Am. then just be a property map, showing the boundaries of the deeds and plots?
    No. I believe 98% of people will still want to be a part of a community.
    What I mean is, isn't your system really not abolishing land ownership at all, but merely giving us thousands of landowners in the form of political entities? Wouldn't these political entities act as the ultimate owners of their territories, or "plots"?

    Never said our ideas of Utopia are very far off. But our different philosophies on property and land are fairly significant. Also, I believe your 'Utopia' could have some terrible unintended consequences without proper reforms.
    Possible! But it's at least worth a try.

    Society and community should be as voluntary as possible. And a geolibertarian community would be the most voluntary of them all. Failure to pay ground rent would not get you thrown in jail. The community would simply not recognize your privilege to exclude others from the land.
    Most voluntary of them all... assuming that land should not be owned. I do not share that assumption, thus in my view voluntariness is increased by respecting property rights in land.

    Where did I say that political entities have any more right to the land than individuals?
    You didn't. I was just saying that for all practical purposes, your political entities are landowners. Yes, they are supposedly acting for The Public Good and The Welfare of All, with naught but wisdom and selfless love in their hearts, but that is of course a laughable bunk. They cannot be said to "represent" the people in any real way unless the people give their unanimous consent. So the managers of the political entity are the ones in control of the territory they control. Your system has landowners, my system has landowners. My landowners get their land by homesteading it; your landowners get it by... what? Elections, wars, and other bogus political means. So, seizing it, as far as I can tell.
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 10-27-2011 at 02:51 AM.

  6. #634
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    A group stealing someone's land is a mob of barbarians, not a society.
    The someone who presumes to violate others' rights to liberty by forcibly excluding them from land they would otherwise be at liberty to use is a thief, parasite and extortionist, not a producer.
    I think that ultimately the insurance companies from the Rothbardian territories will drive all non-Rothbardian governments out of business by offering insurance against various oppressions and predations, such as asset seizures, arrests, and land value taxation. But I could be wrong.
    You are indisputably wrong that recovering the publicly created rent of land for the purposes and benefit of the public that creates it is an oppression or predation, as well as that it is less efficient or practical than giving it away to landowners in return for nothing.
    The key thing in shopping malls, condos, gated communities, etc., is that their rules and their funding is voluntary.
    Except their exclusion of others from land they would otherwise be at liberty to use.
    Some man or men buys up 20 square miles of land
    From whom? By what right?
    Voluntary=good, initiation-of-force=bad.
    Except when the land thief initiates force against all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land....?
    What about if you want to fence off a nature preserve, keeping it in its pristine natural condition?
    If you want to deprive others of their liberty, make just compensation.
    According to this, anyone would be free to tramp in and labor it away from you at any time.
    Hunter gatherers were always at liberty to tramp in and use whatever land they wished, but never imagined they could do something so absurd as "labor it away" from others. If they wanted to exclude others, they did it the only way it CAN be done: by initiating force.
    In the particular example he gave, he is right: if the land is claimed but then ignored, never used, never transformed, and forgotten, it's fair game again at some point.
    If people have a right to liberty, it's always fair game.
    But I don't agree with some of the implications of using use and transformation as the sole homesteading criteria. Philosophically, the essential element which brings about ownership is the act of making the claim,
    No, that's just baseless nonsense. You can't just extinguish others' rights by declaring them extinct.
    and then there is a continuum of certainty in the justice of the claim determined by any factor you can think of:
    The justice of such claims is self-evidently nonexistent, no continuum about it.
    As a practical matter, using and transforming the land are probably the two biggest things you can do to solidify your claim to the land.
    But only because people recognize rightful property in products of labor, including fixed improvements.
    Without that, your claim is much, much, more precarious, although it is possible, as in the case of the nature preserve.
    No, it just isn't.
    Once you've plowed your farm or built your cabin, your claim is probably set in stone, nobody's going to contest the justice of your ownership (well, except the Georgists/geoists ).
    But in fact, historically, you are just indisputably wrong. It is only when such claims are supported by government force that anyone respects them at all. The colonial "homesteaders" moved into land the aboriginals had used and sometimes improved without a second thought that it might be their land (though they did sometimes try to buy it with beads and trinkets in a process the aboriginal users did not comprehend). The aboriginals in turn often tried to keep using the land after the homesteader had plowed it and built his cabin on it. The cattlemen ran their herds on land the aboriginals had used and sometimes improved, but the aboriginals often tried to keep using it. Then the sodbusters came and appropriated the land the cattlemen and aboriginals had been using and improving, and the cattlemen burned their cabins, trampled their plowed fields and tried to run them off. Etc., until government came and imposed land titles by force.

    Your claim that only geoists would presume to question the justice of landownership based on use and improvement is false and absurd.
    Anyway, there's no apodictically perfect and true way to determine the exact requirements to homestead land.
    The perfect and true fact is that acquisition of land titles by "homesteading" is nothing but forcible appropriation, like any other method of privatizing land.
    The market, including the arbitrators, will decide what constitutes a just claim and what doesn't.
    There can be no such thing as a just claim to violate others' rights without making just compensation.
    As I say, it's not an exact science, but I'm confident a free-market justice system will come up with something reasonable and workable and somewhat fair-seeming.
    As landowning inherently violates people's rights to liberty in order to give a welfare subsidy to the landowner, it is impossible to have a free market or a system of justice that includes landowning.
    What I mean is, isn't your system really not abolishing land ownership at all, but merely giving us thousands of landowners in the form of political entities? Wouldn't these political entities act as the ultimate owners of their territories, or "plots"?
    The sovereign authority that administers possession and use of land is government. But administering possession and use is not the same as owning.
    Most voluntary of them all... assuming that land should not be owned. I do not share that assumption, thus in my view voluntariness is increased by respecting property rights in land.
    But I have already proved to you that that claim is objectively false. Respecting property rights in land is precisely what makes Saudi Arabia a feudal dictatorship. "Voluntariness"??? Don't make me laugh. You already know that Dirtowner Harry is a thief, extortionist and parasite. You already know that Crusoe seeks to use his property "right" in land to enslave Friday. You KNOW this. Of course you do. You just have to refuse to know it, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.
    I was just saying that for all practical purposes, your political entities are landowners.
    Fallacy of composition.
    Yes, they are supposedly acting for The Public Good and The Welfare of All, with naught but wisdom and selfless love in their hearts,
    They are acting in their own interest in a society that truly respects their rights to liberty, and their actions are consequently led by Smith's invisible hand to benefit each other.
    but that is of course a laughable bunk.
    It is your absurd attempts to justify landowner parasitism that are laughable bunk.
    They cannot be said to "represent" the people in any real way unless the people give their unanimous consent.
    No, that's just more stupid, dishonest garbage from you. Unanimity is never required for collective action to secure people's rights, because there is always someone like you who prefers to violate others' rights.
    So the managers of the political entity are the ones in control of the territory they control.
    As long as the rest of the people think that control is being exercised justly.
    Your system has landowners, my system has landowners.
    His has land administrators, yours has land thieves.
    My landowners get their land by homesteading it;
    No, they don't. That is just a lie. Please identify one square inch of land, anywhere on earth, whose title of private ownership can be traced in an unbroken sequence of consensual transactions to the first person who used and improved it without violating anyone else's rights in doing so. Just one square inch.

    Thought not.

    All land titles are originally obtained by forcible appropriation. There is no other way.
    your landowners get it by... what?
    Efficiency in securing the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.
    Elections, wars, and other bogus political means.
    War is not political, and elections need not be bogus.
    So, seizing it, as far as I can tell.
    There is no possible way to allocate exclusive possession of land but by force. You just want that force to be applied at public expense, to violate people's liberty rights without just compensation, for private gain.

  7. #635

    To Sir, With Love

    Dearest Mr. L,

    You may continue to merely repeat your assertions ad nauseum, pretending that to assert is to prove, and to type ROTFL is to refute. Quite honestly I could write your replies to me myself, as could most intelligent people, I think. In fact, if this thread were a Turing test, I think it would be a close call whether you might be just piece of software programmed to generate certain phrases in response to certain key words. So by all means, continue your mind-numbing replies if you wish.

    Or, you could instead make a couple realizations and get serious about defending your position.

    Realize first the fundamental ethical difference we have. You think land should not be owned. I think that it should. Repeating over and over and over that land should not be owned is not persuasive. It's not even persuasion, not any method I'm familiar with. So not only has your method not been successful, it is impossible for it to ever be successful, because you cannot persuade without using persuasion. Pick a type, any type, but let's use persuasion of some variety, let's use our minds, not just display our intractability via impressive willingness to spend time engaging in numbing repetition. For example:
    But I have already proved to you that that claim is objectively false...You already know that Dirtowner Harry is a thief, extortionist and parasite. You already know that Crusoe seeks to use his property "right" in land to enslave Friday [unless he leaves, which he is free to do in the real world, which is why I invent an imaginary scenario in which it is impossible for him to do so, rather than address the real world]. You KNOW this. Of course you do. You just have to refuse to know it, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.
    I already told you that I really and truly do not know what you claim I know. Rather, I wholeheartedly know that Harry and Crusoe are decent fellows, heroes even, for being willing to stand up for their property rights against moochers and looters. Because, you see, I know that natural resources should be privately owned. I am totally OK with Friday and Thirsty Guy dying because the property owners they're begging from refuse to give them a dime or a pint. You're not, but I am. That's a difference in our ethics. It's not because I "refuse to know" anything! I could say "you refuse to know that land ownership is right and good". And that would be meaningless and unpersuasive. You have not given me a reason to believe that economic land ought not to be owned. You just repeatedly accuse me of disagreeing with you, and scream that this disagreement is a despicable crime, akin to the Holocaust. So I will again explain: yes, Mr. L., I do disagree with you. Thank you for noticing. Now rather than just add various rhetorical exclamation points to your repeated revelation that "You disagree with me!", how about you attempt to convince us why my point of view is slavery and Nazis and dictatorship and death, whereas yours is sunshine and rainbows and lollipops and love. Bring out the logic. Make the deductions. Otherwise, it comes down to this:

    "But I think land shouldn't be privatey owned."

    "But I think it should be."

    And that's it! That's as far as one can go!

    Realize second the fundamental practical issue on which we differ. You believe being a landowner is not a productive occupation. I believe it is productive. I see the landowner as an entreprenuer for his land. I see decision-making as an extremely important economic function. You do not, apparently. When I say that I think that making correct decisions for the disposition of the land is vital and wealth-producing, you just snark about slave owners making decisions. Prove to me you can address a thought on its own level. Explain why we should not consider the decisions a land owner makes to be valuable or value-destroying, but we should consider the decisions a capital owner makes to be valuable or value-destroying.

  8. #636
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    You believe being a landowner is not a productive occupation. I believe it is productive. I see the landowner as an entreprenuer for his land. I see decision-making as an extremely important economic function. You do not, apparently. When I say that I think that making correct decisions for the disposition of the land is vital and wealth-producing, you just snark about slave owners making decisions. Prove to me you can address a thought on its own level. Explain why we should not consider the decisions a land owner makes to be valuable or value-destroying, but we should consider the decisions a capital owner makes to be valuable or value-destroying.
    While its true owning land and directing its use can be a productive occupation, its also true that taxing land does not interfere with this function but rather enhances it. I disagree with your assumption that landowners do a good job managing land today, in fact I think many of them do a terrible job and often its done with public subsidies to fire and sewer and roads and whatever. Look around at the sprawling wastes of suburbs, empty cities with vacant lots, high costs for infrastructure and services, and all of it paid for on the backs of people's wages and purchases. If landowners really do act as decision makers to manage the use of land, they have failed massively. Have you ever been to Atlanta? Ever been to New Jersey? They are giant parking lots; the people are taxed heavily to pay for all this sprawling waste, and its not cheap to live there either. Most of America looks like that. City planners have attempted to reverse this by "Smart Growth" and smart city planning and zoning, but tax on Land is the key.

    By taxing land the landowner is given a choice, either use the land in a way that benefits the community or suffer the consequences of losing the land to someone that can. It sounds hostile when I put it like that, but what should we think if someone wanted to farm a city block in the middle of Manhattan? But for zoning restrictions, what is stopping them? Certainly not a land tax. You say "Its my land I can do as I want; I'm serving the function of entrepreneur." We say "Build a damn skyscraper or let someone else, rent is expensive and we need more apartments." By taxing land it causes the owner to use the land for its highest purpose, which in Manhattan is clearly the construction of tall buildings. What we have throughout this country is basically people using land in many, many, unproductive ways, because unlike Manhattan the opportunity costs are not so obvious. By taxing the land the true opportunity costs of land use are revealed. It becomes crystal clear, very fast, what is the best way to use land. We think this will make our cities and towns will be much better places to live.

    And IMO empirical evidence bears this out.

  9. #637
    Quote Originally Posted by MattButler View Post
    While its true owning land and directing its use can be a productive occupation
    Thank you! I love it when people see reason. Or perhaps I just like it when they agree with me. I kind of like it when they disagree with me in an intellectually stimulating way too, though. Welcome to the world-famous Ron Paul Forums, by the way.

    its also true that taxing land does not interfere with this function but rather enhances it.
    Why?

    I disagree with your assumption that landowners do a good job managing land today
    I actually never made that statement. "Good job" is relative, anyway. How good? Humans are fallible.

    in fact I think many of them do a terrible job and often its done with public subsidies to fire and sewer and roads and whatever.
    I don't think I've mentioned explicitly in this thread yet that I completely agree with anyone who wants to end these communist scams (you call "public subsidies"). The cost of a road should be borne, like the cost of anything else, only by those who choose to bear it. If I want to build a subdivision, it is immoral for the taxpayers to be forced to pay for my roads. Roads, water distribution, waste collection, fire extinguishing, etc., etc., everything should be done by the private, free, voluntary market. Government doesn't work. Government is an amazing load of bunkum. Government is an unnecessary evil.

    Look around at the sprawling wastes of suburbs, empty cities with vacant lots, high costs for infrastructure and services, and all of it paid for on the backs of people's wages and purchases.
    You're losing me here.

    If landowners really do act as decision makers to manage the use of land, they have failed massively.
    Again, it's all relative, and not everyone shares the same values. Someone must make the choices. Right now the government makes a lot of the choices and I would argue that problems such as the the ones you describe are the result of government action, not the free market.
    Have you ever been to Atlanta?
    Yes.
    Ever been to New Jersey?
    No.
    They are giant parking lots
    That did indeed seem to be true of Atlanta, moreso than other large cities I've been to. Again, this is government's fault. Obviously! Who owns the roads? Government! If transportation were a private enterprise, pricing would counteract congestion. Real costs would have to be borne by the users, rather than shunted off to the taxpayers, a distortive process you so rightly decry. Without the crazy distortions which are created by having communist roads, urban travel by road would be a much more pleasant experience. Communism doesn't work. Sitting in traffic jam for an hour on communist road = waiting in line all day (literally!) to buy toilet paper at communist store. It's the same forces at work. De-communistize the roads!

    the people are taxed heavily to pay for all this sprawling waste
    Yes: let's end that.

    Most of America looks like that.
    Umm, have you been to most of America? I would have to respectfully disagree. Most of America looks really empty.
    City planners have attempted to reverse this by "Smart Growth" and smart city planning and zoning, but tax on Land is the key.
    City planners are infuriating morons who should be exiled from any decent society. Just saying...


    By taxing land the landowner is given a choice, either use the land in a way that benefits the community or suffer the consequences of losing the land to someone that can.
    In a free market, if an owner of anything -- land, machinery, money -- does not use his property in a way that benefits others, he misses out on profits. That's a strong incentive which rewards the competent and beneficial, and punishes the incompetent and non-beneficial. Those who make profits by "benefiting the community" as you say, become wealthier and wealthier, which means that more and more property comes under their control. The opposite happens to the non-beneficial owners. In this way, property gravitates to and concentrates in the hands of the ablest owners.

    It sounds hostile when I put it like that, but what should we think if someone wanted to farm a city block in the middle of Manhattan?
    Go for it! That's freedom, baby, and I love it. He's going to pay dearly for his eccentricity, and that's his right. What, we're going to have "the community" decide what can and can't be done with the land? What are we, the Borg? Rugged individualism! Think different! Here's to the crazy ones! Maybe the farm will bizarrely be the most successful venture ever.

    By taxing the land the true opportunity costs of land use are revealed. It becomes crystal clear, very fast, what is the best way to use land.
    How is that? Even more crystal clear than a totally free market would make it?
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 10-27-2011 at 07:36 PM.

  10. #638
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    How is that? Even more crystal clear than a totally free market would make it?
    Yes. Even more crystal clear than a totally free market anarcho-capitalist society would make it. This is not to say that a Geoist society is superior or equal to an anarcho-capitalist society in all ways. However in one particular way, maximizing the economic utility of land, a Geoist system does a better job. This is especially true within communities.

  11. #639
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    You may continue to merely repeat your assertions ad nauseum, pretending that to assert is to prove, and to type ROTFL is to refute.
    I identify facts and their logical implications. Stop lying.
    Quite honestly I could write your replies to me myself, as could most intelligent people, I think.
    Correct. You know very well you are lying, and how. And most intelligent people could write my responses -- if they were also as knowledgeable, articulate, persistent and honest as I am.
    Realize first the fundamental ethical difference we have. You think land should not be owned. I think that it should.
    No, our fundamental ethical difference is that I believe in equal human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor, and you do not.
    Repeating over and over and over that land should not be owned is not persuasive. It's not even persuasion, not any method I'm familiar with. So not only has your method not been successful, it is impossible for it to ever be successful, because you cannot persuade without using persuasion.
    It is your choice whether to find logical demonstrations persuasive or not. You do not. I have no power to change your mind on that score, and no interest in using other methods of persuasion.
    I already told you that I really and truly do not know what you claim I know.
    You do, because everyone over the age of about six does.
    Rather, I wholeheartedly know that Harry and Crusoe are decent fellows, heroes even, for being willing to stand up for their property rights against moochers and looters.
    They are the moochers and looters. Your "heroes'" property "rights" are nothing but a transparent pretext for their extortion rackets. Your "decent fellows" are the ones initiating forcible, coercive, violent physical aggression to obtain unearned wealth by depriving others of their rights to liberty, like any enslaver. You know this. Of course you do. You just have to refuse to know it.
    Because, you see, I know that natural resources should be privately owned.
    You have offered no support for such a claim, just your bald ASSERTION, which flies in the face of self-evident fact: the earth's atmosphere, the sun, the oceans, etc. are all natural resources, and it is indisputable that their private ownership would result in tyranny and enslavement far exceeding the worst humanity has ever experienced. You will now refuse to know that fact.
    I am totally OK with Friday and Thirsty Guy dying
    Because your ethical beliefs are false and murderously evil. Correct.
    because the property owners they're begging from refuse to give them a dime or a pint.
    Harry and Crusoe have no logically or morally defensible claim to own the spring or the island; to call them "property owners" is therefore just a question begging fallacy. Thirsty and Friday are not begging, that is just a flat-out lie. They are not asking Harry or Crusoe to give them anything; that, too, is just a lie. They simply purposed to exercise their rights to liberty, and were prevented from doing so by threats of violent, aggressive, forcible physical coercion.
    You're not, but I am. That's a difference in our ethics.
    Of course. I have told you on numerous occasions that your ethical beliefs are false and evil. Mine are true and good. Simple.
    It's not because I "refuse to know" anything!
    Yes, it is, quite precisely. See above. You refuse even to know the fact that the atmosphere, the sun, the oceans, etc. are not rightly private property.
    I could say "you refuse to know that land ownership is right and good".
    That is merely an opinion. What you refuse to know are facts.
    You have not given me a reason to believe that economic land ought not to be owned.
    I have proved it many times: it unilaterally abrogates others' rights to liberty without just compensation. This is self-evident and indisputable. You just refuse to know it.
    Now rather than just add various rhetorical exclamation points to your repeated revelation that "You disagree with me!",
    Stop lying. Anyone who has read this thread knows you are lying about what I have plainly written. Including you.
    how about you attempt to convince us why my point of view is slavery and Nazis and dictatorship and death, whereas yours is sunshine and rainbows and lollipops and love. Bring out the logic. Make the deductions.
    See above.

    In every country where private landowning is well established and enforced, but the government does not make significant provision to alleviate its effects on the landless, they exist in crushing poverty, oppression, suffering, enslavement, injustice, stagnation, and despair, from which the only escape is typically a slow and painful death by exhaustion, disease or starvation. The eradication of their rights to liberty inherent in landowning kills MILLIONS of them EVERY YEAR.

    Your murderously, satanically evil "point of view" is directly responsible for this Annual Holocaust of the Landless.
    Realize second the fundamental practical issue on which we differ. You believe being a landowner is not a productive occupation. I believe it is productive.
    But in fact, it indisputably isn't an occupation at all, as I have already proved to you. The market decides what the most productive use of the land would be, not the landowner, and the most productive user simply offers the most rent in return for not being stopped from using it. The landowner could be comatose, and the land would still be used just the same. His only "contribution" is not exercising his power to stop the productive from using it just as they would if he had never existed:

    "The widow is gathering nettles for her children's dinner; a perfumed seigneur, delicately lounging in the Oeil de Boeuf, hath an alchemy whereby he will extract the third nettle and call it rent." — Thomas Carlyle
    I see the landowner as an entreprenuer for his land.
    Unlike a landowner, an entrepreneur aids production. And to prove that the landowner does not, you cannot answer The Question:

    "How, exactly, is production aided by the landowner's demand that the producer pay HIM for what government, the community and nature provide?"

    And no one else can answer it, either.
    I see decision-making as an extremely important economic function.
    Decision making is only an important economic function when it aids production. The only decision the landowner makes is whether to deprive the producers of their liberty to use the pre-existing opportunity or not.
    You do not, apparently. When I say that I think that making correct decisions for the disposition of the land is vital and wealth-producing, you just snark about slave owners making decisions.
    The landowner does not and cannot make the correct decision for the disposition of the land, as the market has already done so, and transmitted the information to him in the form of the high bid.
    Prove to me you can address a thought on its own level.
    I don't know how to sink to that level.
    Explain why we should not consider the decisions a land owner makes to be valuable or value-destroying, but we should consider the decisions a capital owner makes to be valuable or value-destroying.
    The capital owner contributes capital that would not otherwise exist or be applied to production. The landowner only STOPS producers from using a resource that was already there, ready to use, with no help from him or anyone else, unless they pay his extortion demands. What would stop the producer from simply using the land, if the landowner had never existed?

  12. #640
    Quote Originally Posted by MattButler View Post
    While its true owning land and directing its use can be a productive occupation,
    It is then the "using the land" part of his occupation that is productive, not the owning it part. Simple question: if the same guy was making the same land use decisions as the land's lessee rather than its owner, would he be any less productive? The answer is obvious, and proves landowning does not contribute to production.



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  14. #641
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    The capital owner contributes capital that would not otherwise exist or be applied to production.
    Really? By owning capital, he creates the capital. Interesting theory.

    What would stop the producer from simply using the land, if the landowner had never existed?
    What would stop the producer from simply using the capital, if the capital owner left the scene? Would his machine tools cease to exist without him?

  15. #642
    Quote Originally Posted by MattButler View Post
    Yes. Even more crystal clear than a totally free market anarcho-capitalist society would make it. [In] maximizing the economic utility of land, a Geoist system does a better job. This is especially true within communities.
    Why is that? Could you explain it to us?

  16. #643
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Simple question: if the same guy was making the same land use decisions as the land's lessee rather than its owner, would he be any less productive? The answer is obvious, and proves landowning does not contribute to production.
    The owner chooses anyone who may substitute for him in making decisions. That choice of who to appoint as manager, or who to lease to, is a critical decision and may be good or bad. The owner is thus still the ultimate risk-bearer and decision-maker. That is, he is an entreprenuer.

    Just so, the owner of a restaurant bears ultimate responsibility for whether his restaurant succeeds or fails, even though he may delegate all or part of the decision-making to a manager. Just as that restaurant owner creates value in the economy (or doesn't) by making good decisions and selecting others to make good decisions (or not), so the landowner creates (or destroys) value with his good (or bad) decisions. Appropriating the fruits of his labors is just as wrong and harmful to the economy as approprating the fruits of the restaurateur's.

  17. #644
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Thank you! I love it when people see reason. Or perhaps I just like it when they agree with me.
    Bingo. And proving you wrong is horrible and wicked, and anyway it never happened, ever...
    Why?
    Because the landowner will lose money if he does not permit the most appropriate and productive use the market has decided on.
    I don't think I've mentioned explicitly in this thread yet that I completely agree with anyone who wants to end these communist scams (you call "public subsidies").
    The only way to do that is by recovering their value from landowners, who get to pocket it.
    The cost of a road should be borne, like the cost of anything else, only by those who choose to bear it.
    Sorry, that can't work because people will shirk paying for things they can't be deprived of if they don't pay. You are comprehensively and immutably ignorant of the economics of public goods.
    If I want to build a subdivision, it is immoral for the taxpayers to be forced to pay for my roads.
    It's not immoral if the landowners who get all the benefit are.
    Roads, water distribution, waste collection, fire extinguishing, etc., etc., everything should be done by the private, free, voluntary market.
    Sorry, but it is a known fact of economics that the private market cannot invest efficient amounts in public goods. It is merely a fact that is not known to you, because you do not know any economics.
    Government doesn't work.
    Except by comparison with no government.
    Private ownership of natural resources is an amazing load of bunkum. Private ownership of natural resources is an unnecessary evil.
    There. Fixed it for you.
    You're losing me here.
    Sales tax, income tax, payroll tax, etc. Hello?
    Again, it's all relative, and not everyone shares the same values. Someone must make the choices.
    Better producers should do it, rather than parasites.
    Right now the government makes a lot of the choices and I would argue that problems such as the the ones you describe are the result of government action, not the free market.
    Right, because a free market would not include massive government welfare subsidy giveaways to landowners.
    Again, this is government's fault. Obviously! Who owns the roads? Government! If transportation were a private enterprise, pricing would counteract congestion.
    And no one would be able to go anywhere. How many roads have private entrepreneurs built in Somalia?
    Real costs would have to be borne by the users, rather than shunted off to the taxpayers, a distortive process you so rightly decry.
    It's only a distortion because the landowners who pocket all the benefit are not asked to pay for what they get.
    Without the crazy distortions which are created by having communist roads, urban travel by road would be a much more pleasant experience.
    Silliness. How's that morning commute in Mogadishu workin' for ya?
    Communism doesn't work.
    Brainless name calling doesn't persuade.
    Sitting in traffic jam for an hour on communist road = waiting in line all day (literally!) to buy toilet paper at communist store. It's the same forces at work.
    Nope. Toilet paper is a private good. You just do not know any economics. None.
    In a free market, if an owner of anything -- land,
    There can be no landowning in a free market other than empty, formal landowning, because any other kind is inherently a welfare subsidy to the landowner, and there is no place for welfare subsidies in a free market.
    machinery, money -- does not use his property in a way that benefits others, he misses out on profits.
    But if it is land he owns, he also misses out on risk and trouble:

    "The most comfortable, but also the most unproductive, way for a capitalist to increase his fortune is to put all his monies in sites and await that point in time when a society, hungering for land, has to pay his price." -- Andrew Carnegie
    That's a strong incentive which rewards the competent and beneficial, and punishes the incompetent and non-beneficial.
    Land rent goes to the incompetent and non-beneficial landowner just the same as the competent and beneficial one -- but at less risk.
    Those who make profits by "benefiting the community" as you say, become wealthier and wealthier, which means that more and more property comes under their control.
    No, because the more they benefit the community, the higher the land rents go and the less property they can afford.

    The productive are on a treadmill that powers the landowners' escalator. The faster the productive run on the treadmill, the faster the treadmill goes, and the faster they have to run just to stay in place. Meanwhile, the landowners' escalator lifts them upward faster and faster, purely at their leisure, with no contribution required of them whatever.
    The opposite happens to the non-beneficial owners. In this way, property gravitates to and concentrates in the hands of the ablest owners.
    Nope. Too bad the economic ignorami who make such puerile claims are unable to account for the fact that the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in Britain, is the heir of a long line of idlers who did nothing but collect land rent and use it to buy up more land.
    That's freedom, baby, and I love it.
    You hate, fear, and oppose real freedom.
    He's going to pay dearly for his eccentricity, and that's his right.
    Garbage. What right has he to deprive others of their liberty without making just compensation?
    What, we're going to have "the community" decide what can and can't be done with the land?
    Of course. The use to which that land is put affects everyone around it.
    What are we, the Borg?
    Not so much: the Borg is highly intelligent.
    Rugged individualism! Think different! Here's to the crazy ones! Maybe the farm will bizarrely be the most successful venture ever.
    And maybe you will say and believe ANYTHING WHATEVER in order to avoid knowing the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality that prove your beliefs are false and evil.
    How is that? Even more crystal clear than a totally free market would make it?
    A totally free market requires abolishing the welfare subsidy to landowning.

  18. #645
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Really? By owning capital, he creates the capital. Interesting theory.
    By BUYING (or producing) capital, he creates the capital. Even if he does not produce it himself, his purchase of it initiates and enables its creation, either directly or indirectly. His devotion of his purchasing power to its production makes available an aid to further production that would otherwise not have existed or been available to production.
    What would stop the producer from simply using the capital, if the capital owner left the scene?
    Nothing. But unlike the landowner, if the capitalist had never been on the scene in the first place, his gift to the producer would not be there to use.
    Would his machine tools cease to exist without him?
    They would never have existed in the first place without him, or someone he paid to make them.

    You will now refuse to know these facts.

  19. #646
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    The owner chooses anyone who may substitute for him in making decisions.
    Holding a power to stop production and not doing so is not the same as being productive, sorry.
    That choice of who to appoint as manager, or who to lease to, is a critical decision and may be good or bad.
    And would be made just as well or even better by the market, had the landowner never existed.
    The owner is thus still the ultimate risk-bearer and decision-maker. That is, he is an entreprenuer.
    Like a protection racketeer. Sorry, but exercising a power to allow or not allow productive activity is not the same as actually engaging in productive activity.
    Just so, the owner of a restaurant bears ultimate responsibility for whether his restaurant succeeds or fails, even though he may delegate all or part of the decision-making to a manager.
    Garbage. The manager is responsible, as proved, repeat, PROVED by the fact that if the restaurant fails, it will be the manager who loses his position, not the owner.
    Just as that restaurant owner creates value in the economy (or doesn't) by making good decisions and selecting others to make good decisions (or not), so the landowner creates (or destroys) value with his good (or bad) decisions.
    More stupid garbage from you. The land's value is already there, like the land, ready to use, with no help at all from the owner or anyone else; and the market will tell him how it can be used most profitably, by means of the high bid from among the prospective users. The restaurant, by contrast, had to be created by labor, either the owner's labor or the labor of someone he paid to create it, and the market will not tell him how to make it profitable.

    Your claims are false, absurd and dishonest.
    Appropriating the fruits of his labors is just as wrong and harmful to the economy
    What labors? The landowner performs no labor. He just pockets the high bid and (at best) stays out of the producer's way. And far from being wrong or harmful, recovering publicly created land value for public purposes and benefit is one of the most reliable ways to reduce injustice and supercharge an economy.
    as approprating the fruits of the restaurateur's.
    The restaurant owner created something, if only by initiating and enabling its creation through his investment. The landowner did not.

  20. #647
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Why is that? Could you explain it to us?
    Not to you, because you refuse to know facts of economics.

    But for others' benefit: people do not treat opportunity costs like cash costs, because they are risk averse. The prospect of a possible gain is much less motivating than the threat of a certain loss of the same size.

  21. #648
    You just do not know any economics. None.
    Thanks!

    ~~~

    Mr. Roy L., could you describe your ideal Georgist or whatever you want to call it (what do you want to call it? You said you aren't a Georgist.) world? Please, as thoroughly as possible. You've done a lot of attacking, but precious little putting forward your solution. What would your proposed world look like, how would it work? Thank you!



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  23. #649
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Why is that? Could you explain it to us?
    The Default position is not anarcho-capitalism. I do not have the burden of proof showing that my system is better than yours in order to dethrone the reigning champion anarcho-capitalism. Because anarcho-capitalism is not the reigning champ. Its scarcely possible, and I think Nozick does a good job showing that its impossible. And I've read Rothbard's response to Nozick and Rothbard loses the argument, he has no argument actually. So I don't think your system can even exist, for one thing. Yet even if it were possible, you'd still have the burden proving its better with regard to land use, and it simply isn't. Your argument thus far is that profit drives land use in an anarchic society. Well guess what? Profit drives land use in a Geoist society. So that argument is awash.

    More importantly.

    In anarchy, while the landowner may be motivated by profit to act or not act, it is not true that owners always act or act wisely. You have already admitted that owners are imperfect, and may make stupid decisions. You say eventually the market sorts it out and leads to the best outcome, but you don't explain why an idiot landlord should ever be parted from his land. An idiot landowner can hold land indefinitely and pass it to his idiot children and so on and so forth and idiots end up owning the land indefinitely, never to sell it, only to lease it---in many cases for purposes far less good than what it could be used for. It would take intelligence and drive to use the land for the highest and best purpose, yet there is no reason it should ever be done under a pure anarchy. Idiots may not know how to manage or use land for its highest and best purpose, but they aren't idiot enough to sell or mortgage their land. Even if they wanted to, their parents, who were a little less idiotic, set up trusts to prevent it from being sold.

    So as a starting point we recognize there will be some really lazy idiots owning land in your anarchy who need never lose the land, transfer it, or be compelled to use it for much good. Anarchy also permits this situation to continue indefinitely.

    In Geoism, the Tax on land is expensive to bear if you are a poor manager. Its a shot in the arm and kick in the pants. You may personally think its best to farm a block of land in Manhattan...you as an anarchist may value highly that freedom. My value is that you own land as steward charged by God to do a good job managing the land, and if you can't do it then someone else should. So I reject your value that you get to use land any way you see fit, you may do that, but you will pay a heavy price for being ignorant or lazy. I won't stop you from farming in Manhattan, but you are going to pay so much tax to you will never choose to do this. So that is why I say land tax enhances use of land. Does not me geoism is superior to anarchy in every way! Anarchy most definitely maximizes individual freedom. Geoism also seeks to maximize individual freedom, but it places a limit on this freedom, to wit, you will pay for being lazy or stupid about land.

  24. #650
    Quote Originally Posted by MattButler View Post
    The Default position is not anarcho-capitalism. I do not have the burden of proof showing that my system is better than yours in order to dethrone the reigning champion anarcho-capitalism.
    I didn't want you to feel like you had any burden of proof, I just wanted an explanation of why instituting LVT would increase the efficiency of land allocation, not necessarily compared to an-cap or compared to anything in particular, but at all. This explanation you have provided in this post, for which I thank you very much. Any spark of intelligence is such a breath of fresh air in the stifling atmosphere that is reading Roy L.

    Because anarcho-capitalism is not the reigning champ. Its scarcely possible, and I think Nozick does a good job showing that its impossible. And I've read Rothbard's response to Nozick and Rothbard loses the argument, he has no argument actually. So I don't think your system can even exist, for one thing.
    Rothbard is not the only one to defend an-cap against its detractors. Nozick is not even a particularly strong detractor. There are gigabytes and even terabytes by now of books, lectures, articles, and videos on Mises.org explaining why an-cap is the bomb-diggity. If you want to talk about it, start a thread! There are certainly a lot of interesting aspects to discuss. Or at least post a specific statement from Nozick that you want to dare us to refute.

    So, OK, on to "why land will be used better if there is a Land Value Tax":

    In Geoism, the Tax on land is expensive to bear if you are a poor manager. Its a shot in the arm and kick in the pants....I won't stop you from farming in Manhattan, but you are going to pay so much tax to you will never choose to do this.
    So, the logic is: add a tax into the expenses of a land owner, and he will use the land more productively. Why? Because the very moderately profitable use of the lazy, stupid land-steward, will no longer be profitable with an LVT. If you're incompetently making 5% profit on the land, but the LVT is 6%, then actually you're making a loss now and will have to either get your act together or sell your monopolization rights to the smart, motivated guy who can make at least 7%. Without an LVT, you could have gone on indefinitely making 5%, or even 1%, and depriving the economy of that extra potential productivity.

    To talk about this, let me first go off on a tangent for a while.

    Once upon a time, when in elementary and then middle school, I believed sprawl was bad because, of course, I'd been pumped full of the enviromentalist message. I lived on the edge of town and over the hill there was a farm. I used to think "boy, wouldn't it be nice if that farm could stay there forever and we wouldn't have to have sprawl in all its unaesthetic evil." I thought "couldn't the farm just refuse to sell? Even if the evil developer is offering him millions of dollars, he could just say no, right? That's his right. How come no farmer ever does that? You'd think that at least every once in a while, you'd have a hold-out who loved his farm so much, been in the family 100 years and all, that he would not sell no matter what". Then grown-ups explained to me that no, that wouldn't work because of property taxes. Once the asssessor decides his land is worth millions because the evil subdivisions are springing up all around him, his taxes go up accordingly. The income produced by his farm is not going to be enough to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in property tax every year, so he will have to sell.

    The taxes, just as you say, Matt, will be a kick in the pants to comply, obey, submit, and go along with the will of the masses to put the land to its "highest use". The fact that the "highest use" to the individual was to keep growing the best beets in the state, just like his pappy and grandpappy and great-grandpappy before him, that's irrelevant. The will of the individual does not matter; the will of the mob is what counts. To let the individual reign supreme would be ever-so wasteful and inefficient. So the moral of the story is: the mob knows best. Collective intelligence is always much better than the intelligence of one single man. Right? Right?

    Let's come back from the tangent. You see, I oppose any kind of land value tax, for the same exact reason you support it! Ever since receiving this no-farm-hold-outs explanation, I have been opposed to it. Pressuring the farmer to sell via taxes does not increase efficiency. The farmer already has pressure to sell from all the offers he's getting from delelopers to buy it. That's enough pressure. In fact, it's exactly the right amount of pressure, the market amount, taking into consideration all the entreprenuers' forecasts and balancing them out. You just want to give him a double-whammy by adding some ongoing theft to the equation. That will mess things up. That will make it less efficient.

    Example:

    North Dakota is having an oil boom right now. Everyone is moving in, rent is way up, property prices are way up, people are moving up mobile homes and doing construction like crazy. Towns are expanding. The market is responding to demand. Entreprenuers are looking at the situation and sizing it up, taking into consideration all the factors. They're thinking things like "OK, I predict this boom will go on for about 7 years, then it will bust and be done"; another guy might think 5 years; another guy might think 20. Also "I think that Dickinson will be the center of the action, that's where they'll find the most oil"; "I think Williston"; "I think Minot"; "I think 20,000 new people are going to come up"; "I think 100,000"; "I think 50,000". I know, because I'm one of these entreprenuers -- I just got back from North Dakota day before yesterday. Now no one really knows for sure what the future holds, but in the free market, all the entreprenuers make their predictions and then put their money where their mind is. Those with the best minds get the most votes on what to do, because money follows competence in a free market. We end up with the most optimal solution fallible and non-omiscient humans can come up with. The towns all expand by the optimal amount; just the right amount of ranches and wheat fields are swallowed up by man camps, trailer parks, and fast food; that's insofar as the optimal amount is knowable.

    Now what if you added a hefty land tax to the picture. As I said, property values have skyrocketed into the stratosphere. I don't know what your proposed mil rate is, but if it's high, much higher than the land value component of current-day property taxes, it is going to drastically affect the choices of the land-stewards. And that's you're whole point, isn't it -- that choices will drastically change with an LVT and that will be a good thing. So let's examine what will happen with an LVT. All of a sudden a ranch that was paying $10,000 a year gets a bill for $100,000. Due January 1st. They've got to sell! Everybody's got to sell. The old little diner in town has to sell, because their prime location means they owe a million in taxes. All local establishments that are not wildly profitable enough to still have a positive profit margin in light of ten times higher property value and thus 10X the LVT, all of them will have to sell. You'll get a lot of new fast food and man camps. You got that anyway above, without the LVT, but now you'll get a lot more. All the businesses that were built around the way the local economy used to be, that don't exactly cater to roustabout workers, they will all be annihilated. Sewing shop, tack and saddle store -- ha! -- make way for another McDonalds and another bar.

    So you see, LVT doesn't encourage efficiency exactly, it encourages uniformity. It makes the land market too "efficient". With just the single whammy of possible windfall profits by selling, everything balances out as perfectly as possible. The sewing shop might decide to just keep piddling along, while the tack store does decide to convert into a drive-through liquor. You would say "That sewing shop's inefficient!" And short term, you might be right. They could make ten times more money and thus benefit the community ten times more by converting into the town's twelfth fast food place. We've got a Hardees, but all the workers are wishing there was a Carl's Jr. Something like that.

    Eventually, however, the oil boom ends. The mobile homes are hauled back out to Wyoming or wherever the boom is now. And then the town is left with a whole bunch of empty trailer parks, vacant strip malls, and acres of empty houses selling for pennies on the dollar. It's a skeleton. Now that's going to happen anyway in the non-LVT scenario. I personally may help it to happen. But it will happen in a much bigger way with a hefty LVT. Without the LVT, the opinions of the oil-boom-profit entreprenuers has a counter-balance. Their opinions carry the weight of the single whammy of their money, but there's another whammy on the other side of the teeter-totter: the opinions of the locals who already own the land. The LVT plunks a second whammy on the one side of the teeter-totter and now there is no balance. The locals on the other side are slingshotted off the teeter-totter and hurtle across the park. When the boom ends, all the old local businesses are long gone, they're all destroyed. Now what? The correction to a non-boom optimality will be a lot slower in coming than without the LVT. Wouldn't it have been better to have a little bit more inefficiency for five or ten years in exchange for a lot more efficiency afterwards? Well, who's to say? But who is in a better position to say than those with a financial stake in it? Who's smarter: all the private landowners, or the central planners and land assessors of the government? I say let all the landowners decide, don't let the socialist land assessment board skew the outcome. We entreprenuers, speculators, whatever you want to call us, we have enough power without an LVT -- just the right amount of power. Put in a big LVT and now we can get a lot more land for a lot lower bids, because you're pushing the existing stewards out by charging them taxes they can't afford. They can't afford it because they're not as "efficient" in their land utilization by your definition. We are. We will come in and fill every field and cranny with housing. Then when comes the bust you will have a whole lot more skeleton and a whole lot less life left than would otherwise be the case.
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 10-28-2011 at 03:22 PM.

  25. #651
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Mr. Roy L., could you describe your ideal Georgist or whatever you want to call it (what do you want to call it? You said you aren't a Georgist.) world?
    Call it geoist if you need a term. It's just a world where government by and for the people makes a serious effort to secure the equal, natural human rights of all. Natural rights are correctly understood as the things one would have if others did not forcibly deprive one of them: mainly life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor. The liberty people have a right to is thus correctly understood as the liberty they would have if others did not deprive them of it: the liberty to use the resources of the earth that nature provided for all, and to deal with their fellows by mutual consent.
    You've done a lot of attacking, but precious little putting forward your solution.
    This thread is all about the solution: land value taxation (or more generally, recovery of the publicly created rent of land for the purposes and benefit of the public that creates it) and abolition of all the unjust and harmful taxes that burden production and exchange. I would only add that restoration of the individual human right to liberty via a uniform, universal individual exemption to the land value tax, ensuring free, secure tenure on enough good land of the individual's choice to live on and participate in society must also be part of the solution. I have only attacked ignorant and dishonest derogation of this self-evidently just and moral plan.
    What would your proposed world look like, how would it work?
    It would look a lot like this world, but with much more liberty, justice and prosperity.

    Of course, there are other policies I advocate too, like ending the evil and insane War on Drugs; abolition of union monopolies; opening up publicly funded education to private providers; ending private bank debt money issuance; abolishing patent and copyright monopolies; etc., but they are not very relevant to this thread. Also, justice in land policy as described above would render unnecessary a great deal of current government spending that is undertaken in futile attempts to repair the social and economic damage inflicted by landowner privilege. A good government could be quite a bit smaller, and spend its revenue much more productively.

  26. #652
    Roy, I am just trying to imagine how it would function and do not yet have enough information. Here's my understanding of what you want:

    • There would be nation-states, similar to today.
    • These nation-states would not tax anything except for land value. Period. No exceptions for emergency taxes for wartime, no taxes on pollution like Matt wants, read my lips: no taxes but LVT.
    • With the LVT revenue, these nation-states would fund roads, electricity generation and distribution, water distribution, sewers, fire extinguishing, and any other things you consider "public goods" (although one defining element of "public goods" is inability to exclude non payers, and one can easily exclude non-payers from all these things, but I digress), as well as pension plans, low-income assistance, orpanages, and many of the other features we have come to regard as normal parts of the modern nation-state.
    • There would be some libertarian reforms to these nation-states. The state would no longer take on so much. Some departments, e.g. labor and drugs, would be ended.
    • Other than all that, things would continue basically as they are. Democracy would continue. Legislation would continue. A court system more or less like our current one would continue. Military spending would continue. The government would still be in charge of money, though directly, with no private bank. You are just wanting something like amending the Constitution to ban all taxes but LVT, and then amendments or legislation to enact other beneficial reforms.


    This still leaves some questons.
    • With land, do people still buy and sell their right to exclude just as they buy and sell their property deed today? Or can anyone come in and offer to pay "society" more land rent and thus bid it away from the current excluder? Or something else?
    • Going along with that, exactly how are land values determined? A central government Land Assessment Board, or a market mechanism, or what?
    • What about laws? You want to repeal drug laws, but what about all other victimless crimes? Insider trading? Environmental regulation? Minimum wage? Weapons regulation? We don't need to go off too much on this, as it's not strictly on topic, I'm just wanting to determine if it's a minarchy or a typical social democracy or what. Would monarchy be within your realm of acceptability as long as the only tax was on land?
    • Are you actually philosophically opposed to the initiation of force?
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 10-28-2011 at 03:25 PM.

  27. #653
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Any spark of intelligence is such a breath of fresh air in the stifling atmosphere that is reading Roy L.
    You feel stifled by me because I won't let you get away with the bull$#!+ that has been your stock in trade your whole adult life.
    Once upon a time, when in elementary and then middle school, I believed sprawl was bad because, of course, I'd been pumped full of the enviromentalist message.
    Sprawl is bad because it wastes resources.
    I lived on the edge of town and over the hill there was a farm. I used to think "boy, wouldn't it be nice if that farm could stay there forever and we wouldn't have to have sprawl in all its unaesthetic evil." I thought "couldn't the farm just refuse to sell? Even if the evil developer is offering him millions of dollars, he could just say no, right? That's his right. How come no farmer ever does that? You'd think that at least every once in a while, you'd have a hold-out who loved his farm so much, been in the family 100 years and all, that he would not sell no matter what".
    So as a child, you were not thoughtful enough to ask yourself how it could somehow be more profitable for the developer to pay a premium for good farmland, and put roads, water lines, power lines, etc. on it, and then build houses on it, rather than to build the houses on vacant or underutilized lots in town that already had the roads, water, power, etc. in place.

    And as an adult, you still aren't thoughtful enough.
    Then grown-ups explained to me that no, that wouldn't work because of property taxes. Once the asssessor decides his land is worth millions because the evil subdivisions are springing up all around him, his taxes go up accordingly. The income produced by his farm is not going to be enough to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in property tax every year, so he will have to sell.
    Why is it more profitable to build 1000 houses on good farmland rather than 1000 apartments in a few towers in town?

    Blank out. You just refuse to know the fact that LVT encourages the kind of compact, higher-density, in-fill development that eliminates the economic pressure to build on farmland.
    The taxes, just as you say, Matt, will be a kick in the pants to comply, obey, submit,
    I.e., to pay attention to what the market is telling him.
    and go along with the will of the masses to put the land to its "highest use". The fact that the "highest use" to the individual was to keep growing the best beets in the state, just like his pappy and grandpappy and great-grandpappy before him, that's irrelevant. The will of the individual does not matter; the will of the mob is what counts. To let the individual reign supreme would be ever-so wasteful and inefficient.
    Correct, because as a landowner he would also be reigning over other individuals, depriving them of their liberty to do better than he.
    So the moral of the story is: the mob knows best. Collective intelligence is always much better than the intelligence of one single man. Right?
    The market is reliably more intelligent than one single man.
    You see, I oppose any kind of land value tax, for the same exact reason you support it! Ever since receiving this no-farm-hold-outs explanation, I have been opposed to it. Pressuring the farmer to sell via taxes does not increase efficiency.
    That depends on the tax. Pressuring him with the market signal of LVT DOES increase efficiency.
    The farmer already has pressure to sell from all the offers he's getting from delelopers to buy it. That's enough pressure. In fact, it's exactly the right amount of pressure, the market amount, taking into consideration all the entreprenuers' forecasts and balancing them out.
    No, it is not the right amount, nor the free market amount, because it includes the welfare subsidy giveaway to the landowner. As long as his land is rising in value at a faster rate than the property tax rate, why would he sell? Why would he EVER sell?
    You just want to give him a double-whammy by adding some ongoing theft to the equation.
    It is the landowner who is committing the ongoing theft, sunshine, and don't you forget it.
    That will mess things up. That will make it less efficient.
    Garbage with no basis in fact.
    North Dakota is having an oil boom right now. Everyone is moving in, rent is way up, property prices are way up, people are moving up mobile homes and doing construction like crazy. Towns are expanding. The market is responding to demand. Entreprenuers are looking at the situation and sizing it up, taking into consideration all the factors. They're thinking things like "OK, I predict this boom will go on for about 7 years, then it will bust and be done"; another guy might think 5 years; another guy might think 20. Also "I think that Dickinson will be the center of the action, that's where they'll find the most oil"; "I think Williston"; "I think Minot"; "I think 20,000 new people are going to come up"; "I think 100,000"; "I think 50,000". I know what they are thinking, because I'm one of these entreprenuers -- I just got back from North Dakota day before yesterday.
    Oh. My. God.

    So in fact, you are a professional landowning parasite; your whole life revolves around stealing publicly created land value and shoveling it into your own pockets. You are a professional rent seeker.

    How utterly inevitable. At least that explains why everything you write on this subject is stupid, ignorant and dishonest. I was beginning to wonder how someone so obviously intelligent could keep spewing such nonsense. Now I know: you need somehow to prevent yourself from knowing that you are a professional practitioner and disciple of the greatest evil in the history of the world.

    Good luck. I pity you. Being at the mercy of the truth can't be very comfortable.
    Now no one really knows for sure what the future holds, but in the free market,
    There is no such thing as a free market in rent seeking.
    all the entreprenuers make their predictions and then put their money where their mind is. Those with the best minds get the most votes on what to do, because money follows competence in a free market.
    Competence in rent seeking. Not production.
    We end up with the most optimal solution fallible and non-omiscient humans can come up with.
    Garbage. You end up with rampant inefficiency as speculators try to grab publicly created value for themselves. The point of rent seeking behavior is that it tends to expand to absorb all the rent.
    The towns all expand by the optimal amount; just the right amount of ranches and wheat fields are swallowed up by man camps, trailer parks, and fast food; that's insofar as the optimal amount is knowable.
    More stupid garbage with no basis in fact. You forgot the speculators holding land vacant in the towns, pushing development out into the farmland where it is inefficient and doesn't belong.
    Now what if you added a hefty land tax to the picture. As I said, property values have skyrocketed into the stratosphere. I don't know what your proposed mil rate is, but if it's high, much higher than the land value component of current-day property taxes, it is going to drastically affect the choices of the land-stewards.
    You misspelled, "greedy, idle parasites."
    And that's you're whole point, isn't it -- that choices will drastically change with an LVT and that will be a good thing. So let's examine what will happen with an LVT. All of a sudden a ranch that was paying $10,000 a year gets a bill for $100,000. Due January 1st. They've got to sell! Everybody's got to sell.
    Nonsense. The first to sell are those who weren't using the land anyway. LVT encourages the most productive use, so the land boom never gets off the ground: builders are fully occupied building on vacant and under-used land in town, and no one is fool enough to offer much above recent market rates for farmland that will not be needed. The bubble values you are talking about happen NOW, under the CURRENT system, not under LVT. Everywhere LVT has been tried, the result is the same: compact, efficient development; no land price bubble; no stampede to sell.
    The old little diner in town has to sell, because their prime location means they owe a million in taxes.
    Now you are just being silly. A million in taxes is a million in land rent. That implies the diner's site would be worth about $20M in the absence of LVT. REALLY?? With thousands of empty acres all around it?

    Give your head a shake.
    All local establishments that are not wildly profitable enough to still have a positive profit margin in light of ten times higher property value and thus 10X the LVT, all of them will have to sell.
    Stupid nonsense refuted above. Many will simply take advantage of the opportunity to expand their businesses. Remember: LVT is limited to what someone is willing and able to pay for the site. The locals are generally going to have a better idea of how to take full advantage of local conditions.
    You'll get a lot of new fast food and man camps. You got that anyway above, without the LVT, but now you'll get a lot more.
    With LVT, you'll get the right amount.
    All the businesses that were built around the way the local economy used to be, that don't exactly cater to roustabout workers, they will all be annihilated. Sewing shop, tack and saddle store -- ha! -- make way for another McDonalds and another bar.
    Possibly, if that is what the market wants.
    So you see, LVT doesn't encourage efficiency exactly, it encourages uniformity.
    Silliness.
    It makes the land market too "efficient". With just the single whammy of possible windfall profits by selling, everything balances out as perfectly as possible.
    Garbage with no basis in fact.
    The sewing shop might decide to just keep piddling along, while the tack store does decide to convert into a drive-through liquor. You would say "That sewing shop's inefficient!" And short term, you might be right. They could make ten times more money and thus benefit the community ten times more by converting into the town's twelfth fast food place. We've got a Hardees, but all the workers are wishing there was a Carl's Jr. Something like that.
    So? I told you that you hated and feared real freedom.
    Eventually, however, the oil boom ends. The mobile homes are hauled back out to Wyoming or wherever the boom is now. And then the town is left with a whole bunch of empty trailer parks, vacant strip malls, and acres of empty houses selling for pennies on the dollar. It's a skeleton. Now that's going to happen anyway in the non-LVT scenario. I personally may help it to happen. But it will happen in a much bigger way with a hefty LVT.
    We've seen it happen lots of times without LVT. Where has it ever happened WITH LVT? Remember, LVT also recovers the value of depletable natural resources like oil, gold, copper, etc., so the mad scramble to grab the resource never happens, and the ghost town never happens. There is just a measured, gradual, efficient and rational exploration, identification and extraction of the resource as it becomes economic to extract it.
    Without the LVT, the opinions of the oil-boom-profit entreprenuers has a counter-balance.
    But WITH LVT, their opinions are not animated entirely by a feeding frenzy of rent seeking.
    Their opinions carry the weight of the single whammy of their money, but there's another whammy on the other side of the teeter-totter: the opinions of the locals who already own the land. The LVT plunks a second whammy on the one side of the teeter-totter and now there is no balance.
    Wrong. LVT removes the parasites' feeding frenzy, replacing it with a requirement to contribute something to production if you want to make money.
    The locals on the other side are slingshotted off the teeter-totter and hurtle across the park. When the boom ends, all the old local businesses are long gone, they're all destroyed. Now what? The correction to a non-boom optimality will be a lot slower in coming than without the LVT.
    Wrong AGAIN. LVT means the correction is smaller, and happens faster.
    Wouldn't it have been better to have a little bit more inefficiency for five or ten years in exchange for a lot more efficiency afterwards? Well, who's to say?
    Not the parasite who wants something for nothing, anyway.
    But who is in a better position to say than those with a financial stake in it: all the private landowners, or the central planners and land assessors of the government?
    The market.
    I say let all the landowners decide, don't let the socialist land assessment board skew the outcome.
    And I say you are a name-calling apologist for feudalism.
    We entreprenuers, speculators, whatever you want to call us,
    "Parasites."
    we have enough power without an LVT -- just the right amount of power.
    No, you have too much power. That's why you always f*ck things up, like the rent-seeking Wall Street parasites who screwed over the entire world in their frantic greed to stuff trillions into their own pockets.
    Put in a big LVT and now we can get a lot more land for a lot lower bids,
    But have to pay a lot more tax...
    because you're pushing the existing stewards
    "Parasites."
    out by charging them taxes they can't afford.
    You can't afford them either, because you are not productive.
    They can't afford it because they're not as "efficient" in their land utilization by your definition. We are.
    No, you're not. You'd go broke without your welfare subsidy giveaways.
    We will come in and fill every field and cranny with housing.
    Nope. You won't, because you can't make any money by building housing. You only make money by pocketing welfare subsidies.
    Then when comes the bust you will have a whole lot more skeleton and a whole lot less life left than would otherwise be the case.
    Wrong. That has never happened anywhere LVT has been tried.

  28. #654
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    land-stewards.
    You misspelled, "greedy, idle parasites."
    If there was an LVT, presumably they would not be greedy, all greed is irradicated of course if we have LVT, they would not be idle, because no one is ever idle if there's LVT, and they would not be parasites, because they would be paying LVT, which somehow magically ("by definition", perhaps, that's been a faithful fall-back for you so far!) would be set at the perfect rate to exactly zero out their parasitic benefit. They would also not be the absolute owners of the land. Matt used the term steward. I went with it. Seemed fair enough.

    Again, in case you missed it again: This is under Matt's system, not mine. Your quote of me referring to "land-stewards" is where I'm assuming an LVT.

  29. #655
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    There would be nation-states, similar to today.
    Yes, I think it's a form that has proved its value, though in many cases legacies of colonial borders have made them unjust, and ungovernable under democratic rules.
    These nation-states would not tax anything except for land value. Period. No exceptions for emergency taxes for wartime, no taxes on pollution like Matt wants, read my lips: no taxes but LVT.
    No, I don't believe in the Single Tax (another reason I don't call or consider myself a Georgist). I would favor taxes on other forms of privilege (if they can't be abolished), on depletion of natural resources (severance tax), Pigovian taxes to recover the costs imposed on the community by private actions like smoking and drinking, user fees where they are efficient, etc.
    With the LVT revenue, these nation-states would fund roads, electricity generation and distribution, water distribution, sewers, fire extinguishing, and any other things you consider "public goods" (although one defining element of "public goods" is inability to exclude non payers, and one can easily exclude non-payers from all these things, but I digress),
    LVT most appropriately funds goods that are more accessible from certain locations, and thus add to land value. There is no need to restrict it to public goods in the technical sense. Some services and infrastructure are natural monopolies, and can't be provided efficiently by the private sector.
    as well as pension plans, low-income assistance, orpanages, and many of the other features we have come to regard as normal parts of the modern nation-state.
    Part of the purpose of the individual land tax exemption is to reduce or eliminate the need for pensions and income support. People have a right to liberty, not to money. Orphanages and other child-protection programs would still be provided, though probably much less needed once the relentless financial duress imposed by landowning was removed.
    There would be some libertarian reforms to these nation-states. The state would no longer take on so much. Some departments, e.g. labor and drugs, would be ended.
    Right.
    Other than all that, things would continue basically as they are. Democracy would continue. Legislation would continue. A court system more or less like our current one would continue. Military spending would continue. The government would still be in charge of money, though directly, with no private bank.
    Banks would be merchant or investment banks engaged in financial intermediation, not creators of demand deposits. Money would be issued to the Treasury by the Mint, in quantities calculated to keep prices stable or very slowly rising.
    You are just wanting something like amending the Constitution to ban all taxes but LVT, and then amendments or legislation to enact other beneficial reforms.
    I don't know about the Constitutional side, and don't support banning all taxes but LVT. The main thing is to make the legitimate functions of government self-financing by recovering the land value its spending on services and infrastructure creates.
    With land, do people still buy and sell their right to exclude just as they buy and sell their property deed today?
    Yes, its value is just dominated by pre-paid rent and/or long-term tenure agreements, rather than the privilege of pocketing future rents.
    Or can anyone come in and offer to pay "society" more land rent and thus bid it away from the current excluder? Or something else?
    I envision a system whereby people can pre-pay rent for up to say, 10 years, or lock in rent indexed to GDP for 50 years, for a modest fee. The outside bidder's higher offer just increases the measure of market rent. If he wants the title, he has to buy it from the holder.
    Going along with that, exactly how are land values determined? A central government Land Assessment Board, or a market mechanism, or what?
    Market data, probably using a computer model. The model and data would all be public, and subject to appeal and amendment. Anyone would be able to check the assessments for themselves.
    What about laws? You want to repeal drug laws, but what about all other victimless crimes?
    Pretty much.
    Insider trading?
    I would prefer full disclosure.
    Environmental regulation?
    Some is probably necessary.
    Minimum wage?
    Not needed if people have their rights.
    Weapons regulation? We don't need to go off too much on this, as it's not strictly on topic, I'm just wanting to determine if it's a minarchy or a typical social democracy or what.
    Neither.
    Would monarchy be within your realm of acceptability as long as the only tax was on land?
    Of course not.
    Are you actually philosophically opposed to the initiation of force?
    Yes.

  30. #656
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    If there was an LVT, presumably they would not be greedy, all greed is irradicated of course if we have LVT,
    They might still be greedy, but they would not be able to rob the productive by owning land.
    they would not be idle, because no one is ever idle if there's LVT,
    They might be idle, but they wouldn't be forcing idleness on others.
    and they would not be parasites, because they would be paying LVT, which somehow magically ("by definition", perhaps, that's been a faithful fall-back for you so far!) would be set at the perfect rate to exactly zero out their parasitic benefit.
    There is nothing magical about measuring market rent. What do you think landlords and tenants both do? And zero tolerance is unscientific nonsense.
    They would also not be the absolute owners of the land. Matt used the term steward. I went with it. Seemed fair enough.

    Again, in case you missed it again: This is under Matt's system, not mine. Your quote of me referring to "land-stewards" is where I'm assuming an LVT.
    Well, you confused me with a contradiction:

    Now what if you added a hefty land tax to the picture. As I said, property values have skyrocketed into the stratosphere.
    The second can't happen with the first, so I assumed you didn't know what the first meant. The lower bound of a "hefty" land tax is more than the expected land value increase. That eliminates any possibility that property values could "skyrocket" anywhere, or even rise very much.



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  32. #657
    Thank you, I understand much better now where you're coming from.

    In your last post, you wrote:
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    The second can't happen with the first... The lower bound of a "hefty" land tax is more than the expected land value increase. That eliminates any possibility that property values could "skyrocket" anywhere, or even rise very much.
    This seems to preclude the possibility of massive sudden changes in expectations. Do you not agree that we live in an uncertain world? I can already answer for you: you think that LVT is going to smooth out and take care of a lot of that uncertainty. As you wrote, "Remember, LVT also recovers the value of depletable natural resources like oil, gold, copper, etc., so the mad scramble to grab the resource never happens, and the ghost town never happens. There is just a measured, gradual, efficient and rational exploration, identification and extraction of the resource as it becomes economic to extract it." So there are no sudden massive oil discoveries if we have an LVT. LVT solves all of that. Everything just goes along on a smooth, steady, even, predictable keel.

  33. #658
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    This seems to preclude the possibility of massive sudden changes in expectations.
    No, it just precludes the economic disruptions and discontinuities associated with massive sudden expectations of grabbing unearned wealth.
    Do you not agree that we live in an uncertain world? I can already answer for you: you think that LVT is going to smooth out and take care of a lot of that uncertainty.
    Yep. It removes a large element of positive feedback: prices rising in expectation of rising prices, and falling in expectation of falling prices.
    As you wrote, "Remember, LVT also recovers the value of depletable natural resources like oil, gold, copper, etc., so the mad scramble to grab the resource never happens, and the ghost town never happens. There is just a measured, gradual, efficient and rational exploration, identification and extraction of the resource as it becomes economic to extract it." So there are no sudden massive oil discoveries if we have an LVT.
    The massive discoveries would still happen (maybe not quite as early), but the mad rush to grab it first never happens.
    LVT solves all of that. Everything just goes along on a smooth, steady, even, predictable keel.
    Removing positive feedback doesn't make things entirely predictable, but it does remove the violent gyrations.

  34. #659
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    I didn't want you to feel like you had any burden of proof, I just wanted an explanation of why instituting LVT would increase the efficiency of land allocation, not necessarily compared to an-cap or compared to anything in particular, but at all. This explanation you have provided in this post, for which I thank you very much. Any spark of intelligence is such a breath of fresh air in the stifling atmosphere that is reading Roy L.

    Rothbard is not the only one to defend an-cap against its detractors. Nozick is not even a particularly strong detractor. There are gigabytes and even terabytes by now of books, lectures, articles, and videos on Mises.org explaining why an-cap is the bomb-diggity. If you want to talk about it, start a thread! There are certainly a lot of interesting aspects to discuss. Or at least post a specific statement from Nozick that you want to dare us to refute.
    Another day another thread. Our views are already so similar whats the point? Its an anarchist and a geoist arguing over some minutiae. I don't want you to think I'm a litmus test poster solely on these forums to advocate geoism. I have, as a matter of fact, commented on and started several other threads having nothing to do with geoism in my short history here. I'm a regular poster since 2007 at Ann Coulter Online. Corresponding with you, let me tell you, THAT is a breath of fresh air!

    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    So, OK, on to "why land will be used better if there is a Land Value Tax":

    So, the logic is: add a tax into the expenses of a land owner, and he will use the land more productively. Why? Because the very moderately profitable use of the lazy, stupid land-steward, will no longer be profitable with an LVT. If you're incompetently making 5% profit on the land, but the LVT is 6%, then actually you're making a loss now and will have to either get your act together or sell your monopolization rights to the smart, motivated guy who can make at least 7%. Without an LVT, you could have gone on indefinitely making 5%, or even 1%, and depriving the economy of that extra potential productivity.
    That is correct. However, this line of thinking ignores a critical argument on which Geoism rests. Let us consider my earlier example of farming in Manhattan. Farming is obviously not going to work in Manhattan with a LVT. Some type of high-density commercial or residential use is compelled by the LVT. Yet LVT does not specify anything beyond this. LVT merely sets a baseline threshold for what the owner must do. It might be that in Manhattan all that is required to meet this threshold is a 4-story building with 90% use of available acreage. If the owner constructs a 50 story high-rise, all of the surplus will accrue to him.

    Consider next an area that the market deems optimal for industrial or warehouse uses. The LVT may dictate that at a minimum the owner use the space for some type of warehouse building. If he does that, he can pay the tax. However if he goes beyond warehouse space, constructs some type of factory with enormous capital investment, he will earn surplus profits far beyond the amount he would otherwise have been taxed. The principle is that LVT sets a floor for the minimum required use. Its the owners decision to go beyond that floor, and when he does, he keeps the surplus.

    Consider next a rural area deemed optimal for some type of farm use. The market dictates that some type of use beyond growing pine trees is required. Any type of use beyond growing pine will suffice to cover the tax. If the owner grows grass, he can meet the tax. With a little more capital investment he can operate a catfish pond, all of the surplus will belong to him. The same is true if he grows cash crops, or fruit and produce, or he operates a dairy farm.

    So while its true at a general level an LVT creates a "floor" for uses of land, landowners have a definite ability to go beyond that floor and pocket the surplus earned on their capital investment.

    Let me tell you something most Geoists disagree with me about, or rather they would disagree if they heard my argument. I think it will please you to hear something you might not already know! I do not agree with Geoists who say that the entire tax on land is born solely by the owner. I believe owners will in fact pass off some amount of the tax to his tenants. The proportions will vary based on the market, but in most cases, tenants will not completely escape the tax. In theory, the amount passed on to the tenant should enable the landowner to earn the prevailing real interest rate in the market's structure of production. As I tried to explain in above paragraph, landowners earn and keep all surplus income on capital assets above and beyond the required uses imposed by LVT, but as for the land itself, assuming they are an average entrepreneur, their income and capital gains from pure ownership of the land will equal the prevailing real interest rate found in the rest of the structure of production. So you see this is different than the view that the owner alone bears the tax and accrues no profits from owning land! Instead I say he will earn no excess profits above the prevailing market rate of interest in the structure of production. Owning and managing land is, after all, an essential function in the structure of production. If you have understand Hayek, you ought to understand me.

    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Once upon a time, when in elementary and then middle school, I believed sprawl was bad because, of course, I'd been pumped full of the enviromentalist message. I lived on the edge of town and over the hill there was a farm. I used to think "boy, wouldn't it be nice if that farm could stay there forever and we wouldn't have to have sprawl in all its unaesthetic evil." I thought "couldn't the farm just refuse to sell? Even if the evil developer is offering him millions of dollars, he could just say no, right? That's his right. How come no farmer ever does that? You'd think that at least every once in a while, you'd have a hold-out who loved his farm so much, been in the family 100 years and all, that he would not sell no matter what". Then grown-ups explained to me that no, that wouldn't work because of property taxes. Once the asssessor decides his land is worth millions because the evil subdivisions are springing up all around him, his taxes go up accordingly. The income produced by his farm is not going to be enough to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in property tax every year, so he will have to sell.

    The taxes, just as you say, Matt, will be a kick in the pants to comply, obey, submit, and go along with the will of the masses to put the land to its "highest use". The fact that the "highest use" to the individual was to keep growing the best beets in the state, just like his pappy and grandpappy and great-grandpappy before him, that's irrelevant. The will of the individual does not matter; the will of the mob is what counts. To let the individual reign supreme would be ever-so wasteful and inefficient. So the moral of the story is: the mob knows best. Collective intelligence is always much better than the intelligence of one single man. Right? Right?
    Let me offer the pithy and trite observation that with LVT there probably be a lot less sprawl and lot fewer million dollar subdividisions! Let me say too that local farming and sustainable local produce and all that stuff which is so en vogue today, the reason it does not work well is because our cities resemble Atlanta or Houston and not Manhattan or San Francisco. Large, sprawling, suburbanized cities make it hard for your beet farmer on the edges of town to stay in business. There is no center square or no place that large #’s gather. He is instead forced to make the rounds selling to grocery store chains, driving around a lot, its very hard. You should visit Union Sq. in Manhattan. On most days of the week you will find it teeming with farmers selling out of their stands to huge crowds. Its called economy of scale.

    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Let's come back from the tangent. You see, I oppose any kind of land value tax, for the same exact reason you support it! Ever since receiving this no-farm-hold-outs explanation, I have been opposed to it. Pressuring the farmer to sell via taxes does not increase efficiency. The farmer already has pressure to sell from all the offers he's getting from delelopers to buy it. That's enough pressure. In fact, it's exactly the right amount of pressure, the market amount, taking into consideration all the entreprenuers' forecasts and balancing them out. You just want to give him a double-whammy by adding some ongoing theft to the equation. That will mess things up. That will make it less efficient.
    I think it is wrong of you to call it pressure. Incentive maybe, yes, but not pressure. As for calling it theft, I think that is unfair. This is not an uncompensated taking of land. If the tax is high and the farmer can’t afford it there is good reason. We can assume there are a number of buyers waiting in line to pay the higher price for the land. The owner is lucky to be in such a position! With the money earned he can double his acreage at a different site and farm even more. I respect that people have sentimental attachment to land in some cases were born there and inherited. If that is an argument you make then I can’t rebut it.

    Example:

    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    North Dakota is having an oil boom right now. Everyone is moving in, rent is way up, property prices are way up, people are moving up mobile homes and doing construction like crazy. Towns are expanding. The market is responding to demand. Entreprenuers are looking at the situation and sizing it up, taking into consideration all the factors. They're thinking things like "OK, I predict this boom will go on for about 7 years, then it will bust and be done"; another guy might think 5 years; another guy might think 20. Also "I think that Dickinson will be the center of the action, that's where they'll find the most oil"; "I think Williston"; "I think Minot"; "I think 20,000 new people are going to come up"; "I think 100,000"; "I think 50,000". I know, because I'm one of these entreprenuers -- I just got back from North Dakota day before yesterday. Now no one really knows for sure what the future holds, but in the free market, all the entreprenuers make their predictions and then put their money where their mind is. Those with the best minds get the most votes on what to do, because money follows competence in a free market. We end up with the most optimal solution fallible and non-omiscient humans can come up with. The towns all expand by the optimal amount; just the right amount of ranches and wheat fields are swallowed up by man camps, trailer parks, and fast food; that's insofar as the optimal amount is knowable.
    I am so happy you mentioned North Dakota. I heard the NPR story a few weeks back and was blown away. Apparently we are living on top ofon more oil than is found in all the Middle East and north Africa combined, by a factor of 2X. Its truly mind-boggling. Something like 2 trillion barrels? I understand Canada has even more. At USA’s present consumption of 20MM barrels a day, this represents over 200 years supply of oil, all of it buried here. Canada has enough oil to power itself for the next 2,000 years. Like I said, its mind boggling. Peak oil can be put aside as a credible argument for at least another century.



    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Now what if you added a hefty land tax to the picture. As I said, property values have skyrocketed into the stratosphere. I don't know what your proposed mil rate is, but if it's high, much higher than the land value component of current-day property taxes, it is going to drastically affect the choices of the land-stewards. And that's you're whole point, isn't it -- that choices will drastically change with an LVT and that will be a good thing. So let's examine what will happen with an LVT. All of a sudden a ranch that was paying $10,000 a year gets a bill for $100,000. Due January 1st. They've got to sell! Everybody's got to sell. The old little diner in town has to sell, because their prime location means they owe a million in taxes. All local establishments that are not wildly profitable enough to still have a positive profit margin in light of ten times higher property value and thus 10X the LVT, all of them will have to sell. You'll get a lot of new fast food and man camps. You got that anyway above, without the LVT, but now you'll get a lot more. All the businesses that were built around the way the local economy used to be, that don't exactly cater to roustabout workers, they will all be annihilated. Sewing shop, tack and saddle store -- ha! -- make way for another McDonalds and another bar.

    So you see, LVT doesn't encourage efficiency exactly, it encourages uniformity. It makes the land market too "efficient". With just the single whammy of possible windfall profits by selling, everything balances out as perfectly as possible. The sewing shop might decide to just keep piddling along, while the tack store does decide to convert into a drive-through liquor. You would say "That sewing shop's inefficient!" And short term, you might be right. They could make ten times more money and thus benefit the community ten times more by converting into the town's twelfth fast food place. We've got a Hardees, but all the workers are wishing there was a Carl's Jr. Something like that.

    Eventually, however, the oil boom ends. The mobile homes are hauled back out to Wyoming or wherever the boom is now. And then the town is left with a whole bunch of empty trailer parks, vacant strip malls, and acres of empty houses selling for pennies on the dollar. It's a skeleton. Now that's going to happen anyway in the non-LVT scenario. I personally may help it to happen. But it will happen in a much bigger way with a hefty LVT. Without the LVT, the opinions of the oil-boom-profit entreprenuers has a counter-balance. Their opinions carry the weight of the single whammy of their money, but there's another whammy on the other side of the teeter-totter: the opinions of the locals who already own the land. The LVT plunks a second whammy on the one side of the teeter-totter and now there is no balance. The locals on the other side are slingshotted off the teeter-totter and hurtle across the park. When the boom ends, all the old local businesses are long gone, they're all destroyed. Now what? The correction to a non-boom optimality will be a lot slower in coming than without the LVT. Wouldn't it have been better to have a little bit more inefficiency for five or ten years in exchange for a lot more efficiency afterwards? Well, who's to say? But who is in a better position to say than those with a financial stake in it? Who's smarter: all the private landowners, or the central planners and land assessors of the government? I say let all the landowners decide, don't let the socialist land assessment board skew the outcome. We entreprenuers, speculators, whatever you want to call us, we have enough power without an LVT -- just the right amount of power. Put in a big LVT and now we can get a lot more land for a lot lower bids, because you're pushing the existing stewards out by charging them taxes they can't afford. They can't afford it because they're not as "efficient" in their land utilization by your definition. We are. We will come in and fill every field and cranny with housing. Then when comes the bust you will have a whole lot more skeleton and a whole lot less life left than would otherwise be the case.
    Well, as a starting point, let me point out that you are lamenting the fate of Jed Clampet, a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed, yet up from ground came a bubbling crude. Oil that is. Texas tea. It turns out that collectively all the old Jed’s out there are sitting on about $185 trillion dollars of oil reserves. So pardon me if I don’t feel pity that Jed is forced into selling his coon-skin store and Ma Clampet no longer keeps the sewing store. They are filthy stinking rich. Its off to Beverly Hills now. No assessment board will set the value of their land, all the people clamoring for their oil will. In case I’ve not been clear, I think its completely appropriate and reasonable that society’s desire to get at 2 trillion barrels of oil trump the quaint wishes of Jed to continue hunting coons and Ma to continue sewing dresses. Jed is now going to be producing luxury furs with offices in Paris and Hong Kong and Ma is partnering with Ralph Lauren.

    As for the teeter-totter. There are thousands of entrepreneurs just like you, and I believe that between you all you will determine just how rich you intend to make old Jed and Ma Clampet. I also believe that you will scarcely allow large strip malls and vacant parking lots to cut off your access to the most amazing treasure trove of natural resources ever discovered in human history. I think between you all the teeter totter will balance just fine.

    Most of the world, and most cities and people, are not sitting on $185 trillion dollars of oil. When you sit on that kind of treasure, efficiency and uniformity are one in the same. It is truly all about the oil. For the rest of us, we are subject to more subtle market forces. Its not all about uniformity. There is a place for diversity. We will have diversity. Yet in that diversity, we will also have efficiency.

  35. #660
    Quote Originally Posted by MattButler View Post
    Another day another thread. Our views are already so similar whats the point? Its an anarchist and a geoist arguing over some minutiae. I don't want you to think I'm a litmus test poster solely on these forums to advocate geoism. I have, as a matter of fact, commented on and started several other threads having nothing to do with geoism in my short history here. I'm a regular poster since 2007 at Ann Coulter Online. Corresponding with you, let me tell you, THAT is a breath of fresh air!
    Wow. I think I'm feeling empathetic pain just contemplating the possibility that someone would do that.

    That is correct. However, this line of thinking ignores a critical argument on which Geoism rests.... while it's true at a general level an LVT creates a "floor" for uses of land, landowners have a definite ability to go beyond that floor and pocket the surplus earned on their capital investment.
    Oh yes, I understand that, definitely. That was the critical argument you were referring to, right? Yeah, obviously, just as just because the "floor" is zero without land tax, yet nothing is stopping the man from earning way more than zero, the sky is the limit with a land tax, too.

    Let me tell you something most Geoists disagree with me about, or rather they would disagree if they heard my argument. I think it will please you to hear something you might not already know! I do not agree with Geoists who say that the entire tax on land is born solely by the owner. I believe owners will in fact pass off some amount of the tax to his tenants. The proportions will vary based on the market, but in most cases, tenants will not completely escape the tax. In theory, the amount passed on to the tenant should enable the landowner to earn the prevailing real interest rate in the market's structure of production.
    This is sounding suspiciously Austrian...
    As I tried to explain in above paragraph, landowners earn and keep all surplus income on capital assets above and beyond the required uses imposed by LVT, but as for the land itself, assuming they are an average entrepreneur, their income and capital gains from pure ownership of the land will equal the prevailing real interest rate found in the rest of the structure of production. So you see this is different than the view that the owner alone bears the tax and accrues no profits from owning land! Instead I say he will earn no excess profits above the prevailing market rate of interest in the structure of production. Owning and managing land is, after all, an essential function in the structure of production. If you understand Hayek, you ought to understand me.
    Ha! Yes, because if nothing else, even if the guy's a bum, he is still delaying consumption by investing his resources in land rather than nights on the town, thus lowering the average time preference of society and enabling the structure of production to either get stretched out or shrink less quickly. And yes, assuming an evenly rotating economy (no North Dakotas, nor people changing their mind about how big of yards they like, no change in where or how they want to live and moving to or fro for any reason) all land will get that average rate of return we call the interest rate, because investors (if there's no uncertainty I guess we can't call them entrepreneurs) will gravitate towards putting money into land if it's earning a higher rate of return than the average, and thus bidding that rate until it reaches the average, or towards pulling money out if it's earning below-average returns, thus leaving the remaining land investors with less competition, enabling them to charge higher prices and earn a greater rate of return, until it goes up to the average. Boy, that was a long sentence. Anyway, you already understand all that, so I guess I just put it out there for anyone reading to partially explain what in the world we're talking about the interest rate for, though after 60 pages of the quality of conversation we've mostly had here, I kind of doubt anyone's still torturing themselves by reading.

    Let me offer the pithy and trite observation that with LVT there probably be a lot less sprawl and lot fewer million dollar subdividisions!
    Maybe. I understand the more-efficient-utilization argument, but I don't see why that should necessarily mean more-densely-packed-cities. Add a tax and people will stop preferring having a backyard to living in a high-rise apartment? Please feel free to explain. I tend to think that an even bigger factor in sprawl is that the government, always picking winners and losers, took the side of sprawl for 50 years and still does to an extent, using it's resources to make it happen through subsidies, zoning, building lots of beltline higways and roads in general, utilities, etc. which no one has to pay for (and so everyone has to pay for), etc., etc. Ending all that would make a bigger difference in how people distribute themselves than raising land taxes.
    Let me say too that local farming and sustainable local produce and all that stuff which is so en vogue today, the reason it does not work well is because our cities resemble Atlanta or Houston and not Manhattan or San Francisco.
    I actually really like Houston. Everything is so remarkably new and shiny and modern, in contrast to, say, Chicago. Traffic isn't bad either (relatively speaking). San Francisco was a lot of fun -- to visit; I'm sure I wouldn't like all their laws and taxes if I lived there. Especially Chinatown. Lots of amazingly cheap bizarre vegetables and unrefrigerated raw fish in buckets everywhere. In your face, food safety inspectors!

    Large, sprawling, suburbanized cities make it hard for your beet farmer on the edges of town to stay in business. There is no center square or no place that large #’s gather. He is instead forced to make the rounds selling to grocery store chains, driving around a lot, its very hard. You should visit Union Sq. in Manhattan. On most days of the week you will find it teeming with farmers selling out of their stands to huge crowds. Its called economy of scale.
    Yeah that makes sense. I think all these produce farmers should get their own freeze-drying machines and distribute things that way. That way you can pick the stuff when it's actually ripe, you don't have to use breeds with superior transportability but inferior taste, there's no time crunch to get it to your customers, you thus don't so badly need the economies of scale you're talking about, and the nutrition is locked in and the cell structure is preserved, even better than the fresh in some cases, which can suffer oxygen damage.

    I think it is wrong of you to call it pressure. Incentive maybe, yes, but not pressure. As for calling it theft, I think that is unfair.
    I think that land is a legitimate subject of ownership, so it is unavoidable for me to believe taxing it would be theft. Just so, you would believe that taxing me for using a computer would be theft, I think.
    This is not an uncompensated taking of land.
    I have lower standard of theft than that: involuntary taking is theft, compensated or not. One man's "need" doesn't cancel another man's right. I don't agree with so-called eminent domain. Do you?
    If the tax is high and the farmer can’t afford it there is good reason. We can assume there are a number of buyers waiting in line to pay the higher price for the land. The owner is lucky to be in such a position! With the money earned he can double his acreage at a different site and farm even more.
    True. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But neither would it be the worst thing if you had this same set-up for capital goods. You charge a CVT (capital value tax) on capital goods, determined based on assessors, market prices, and some sophisticated computer model Roy L. has. Just like LVT. The owners of injection molds and CNC lathes would then pay an annual tax. Normally, as long as they were putting them to reasonably good use they'd be able to afford the tax. If the tax is high and the factory can't afford the tax, there is some reason. We can assume there are many buyers waiting in line to pay the higher price of the machines. Perhaps society needs every available unit of a specialized machine the factory has, in order to produce the new iPhone which is in a desperate shortage. The owner is lucky to be in such a position! With the money, he can buy even better machines and twice as many, and manufacture to his heart's delight.

    But if you believe in an absolute property right in capital goods, such a CVT would still be theft.

    I am so happy you mentioned North Dakota. I heard the NPR story a few weeks back and was blown away. Apparently we are living on top ofon more oil than is found in all the Middle East and north Africa combined, by a factor of 2X. Its truly mind-boggling. Something like 2 trillion barrels? I understand Canada has even more. At USA’s present consumption of 20MM barrels a day, this represents over 200 years supply of oil, all of it buried here. Canada has enough oil to power itself for the next 2,000 years. Like I said, its mind boggling. Peak oil can be put aside as a credible argument for at least another century.
    Amen. Score another point for Julian Simon. Human ingenuity truly is The Ultimate Resource. We will never run out of any natural resource, as long as we have freedom.

    Well, as a starting point, let me point out that you are lamenting the fate of Jed Clampet, a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed, yet up from ground came a bubbling crude. Oil that is. Texas tea. It turns out that collectively all the old Jed’s out there are sitting on about $185 trillion dollars of oil reserves. So pardon me if I don’t feel pity that Jed is forced into selling his coon-skin store and Ma Clampet no longer keeps the sewing store. They are filthy stinking rich.
    In the absence of an LVT, in fact, even such stores would be prospering, because the old clientele is still there, and with a much higher population (with lots of excess spending money) some small percentage of the oil workers may have wives needing sewing needles, and some larger percentage will definitely decide they need a coon-skin cap. So business will increase. It's only if the taxes increase even more than the profits do that it must be the end of the road for them.

    I personally do tend to think there will not be a bust in ND for quite some time. But there was a North Dakota oil boom a few decades ago and the locals still remember what happened afterwards when the bust came. So you never know. But yeah, it wasn't as big last time.

    I'm just saying the future's uncertain. Thousands of different land owners, all with ultimate veto power, is a leavening and moderating influence. It means that there is always going to be a little bit of diversity in the approach taken to any given situation. This means it is more likely humanity will be prepared to deal with whatever unforeseen events may arise. Plus, I just like hold-outs. They make me smile. I like to see someone bucking the norms of the community, doing his own thing, and the community being fine with that. That makes me feel comfortable that I will be able to do my own thing; if I get some crazy idea I'll not be harrassed for doing it, even if everyone thinks it's harebrained.

    As for the teeter-totter. There are thousands of entrepreneurs just like you, and I believe that between you all you will determine just how rich you intend to make old Jed and Ma Clampet. I also believe that you will scarcely allow large strip malls and vacant parking lots to cut off your access to the most amazing treasure trove of natural resources ever discovered in human history. I think between you all the teeter totter will balance just fine.
    Thank you for your vote of confidence!
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 11-17-2011 at 11:35 AM.

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