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

  1. #961
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Dominion is control, not property. You are seeking to rationalize your mammon worship by misconstruing scripture. Baby Jesus cries when you pervert holy scripture to justify worship of the false god mammon.
    Ah. Now we see where your heart really is. "Baby Jesus cries..."? Shameful.


    I am not the one trying to use scripture to justify mammon worship. You are.
    Owning your property is no more mammon worship than owning the shirt you are wearing. Ownership in and of itself is not mammon worship, in fact our possessions should be realized as blessings from God, to be exercised with godly stewardship. As in the verses I cited with Job, God blessed him with property. It is a blessing from God. God blessed Adam with property. But it can become mammon worship for sure, if it is not realized as a gift of God.


    The inheritance was a tenure right, not a property right, as the flood proved.

    False, as proved by the flood. All those conveyances were overturned by the real owner of the property.
    Now that I showed you that the jubilee laws do not apply anymore, now you are going to "the flood" to attempt to say man's temporal ownership of the earth was revoked. But what do we see in Genesis 9 immediately after the flood waters receeded? We see God reintroducing the dominion mandate to Noah and his sons:

    Genesis 9:1-6

    And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the terror of you shall be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given. Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man's brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.
    The title conveyance that was originally to Adam was simply reapplied to Noah.



    There was no title of property involved. You are just lying about the word of God.
    Uh. Okay. I'm "lying"? Well, I guess we will let everyone else see who is the liar in this conversation. Actually, I don't use those emotionally charged terms, because they are the first indicators that you have lost the debate. I would much rather argue the case for or against and give people the benefit of the doubt that they are sincere about their positions.


    It says inheritance. It does not say property. That is something you made up.
    Okay, let's do some critical thinking here. What is being labeled as an inheritance in this passage? You tell me:

    Ezekiel 47:13-14 NASB

    Thus says the Lord GOD, "This shall be the boundary by which you shall divide the land for an inheritance among the twelve tribes of Israel; Joseph shall have two portions. You shall divide it for an inheritance, each one equally with the other; for I swore to give it to your forefathers, and this land shall fall to you as an inheritance.
    It is the land that is an inheritance. And when you inherit something, you own it. Case closed.


    Dominion is control, not property.
    I already corrected you on this twice. I gave you links and Hebrew definitions. Until you address the links and the Hebrew usage of radah, your mere assertions are meaningless to the argument...almost immature in a way.

    The Hebrew word for inheritance is nachalah. It can be interchanged with the words possession and property.


    Strong's Hebrew:

    Original Word: נַחֲלָה
    Transliteration: nachalah
    Phonetic Spelling: (nakh-al-aw')
    Short Definition: inheritance, possession, property


    RoyL, you have nothing for me man. I have the firm foundation of the Scriptures to lean on. You may be able to convince some of these other people, but what I see from you is not that you are arguing against me, but you are arguing against the Lord...and that's never a good position to be in.
    Last edited by Sola_Fide; 11-28-2011 at 03:56 AM.



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  3. #962
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    I have proved I am right and you are wrong. ...proved wrong; ...proved wrong; ...proved-wrong.
    Come on, Roy, I'm rooting for you! There's a whole lot of new material crying out to be proved wrong now. You gotta come through for me!

  4. #963
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Come on, Roy, I'm rooting for you! There's a whole lot of new material crying out to be proved wrong now. You gotta come through for me!
    Give it up, Helmuth, we have already been thoroughly and repeatedly destroyed. You heard him yell, "Bang Bang! I double-dog justly and self-evidently killed you, so stop lying!"

    How many times does Roy have to do that before you finally realize that you really are dead, and just lie down on the living room carpet and take it like a man? And don't pretend to be deaf or blind, either. We both clearly saw him point his cardboard version of the Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time at you, and declare it. If that isn't a triple-quadruple-dog proof of his justly declared declarations, I don't know what is, so stop pretending (big key there with that projected choice of words) and stop lying.

  5. #964
    Quote Originally Posted by jascott View Post
    If you're not going to let me have the planet just for carving "No trespassing" signs on it, then it's reasonable for Roy to refuse to let you have it just for slamming an asteroid into it.
    Well it's all a matter of degrees. In my system, if you slam enough asteroids/comets into it to make an atmosphere, then you've probably successfully homesteaded it. I suppose the No Trespassing signs could work if they're just very temporary, during the time you're still in the process of making the atmosphere (partly for the trespasser's own safety!), but eventually you're going to have to do something huge to "back up" those signs, so to speak -- to back up such an enormous claim with enormous action.


    I don't understand why you think Mises's economic calculation problem applies to my system. I don't have one firm controlling the whole economy; I just have one firm owning the entire planet
    Umm, read that sentence again. Is it possible to do so without bursting out laughing?

    Anyway, I could be wrong. After all, this is a horizontal integration, not a vertical one, so it's not as easy to see the problem. Mises and Klein and other Austrians I've heard or read all use the example of vertical integration causing calculation problems. So I'm going out on my own limb here. Maybe that's what they call making a unique contribution to the body of thought. Maybe I'm a real economist after all. Anyway, I don't think I'm wrong (yet) and I'll explain why.

    Vertical, it's easy to see the problem: how do you know how much to pay to each layer up and down the vertical structure? Horizontal, just turn the whole thing 90 degrees. The layers are now pieces side-by-side. Your stack of blocks is now a row of blocks. Now you don't know how much to pay (or charge for) the different pieces side-to-side.

    But you can come back and say that the auction system figures that out. Well, that's fine and good, but are there other decisions to be made when you're owning land which are more subtle or complicated or something? I mean, it's not just the price that's the problem. In the vertical integration, not only do you not know how much to pay each layer, or whether it's profitable or not, you don't know which of various choices to make on each layer: should I ship my merchandise on my internal trucking network, or my personal railway? I mean, you can make all these decisions if you have intelligence, and usually quite well, otherwise every single one of us would be independent contractors and you'd never have any firms coalescing at all. But as a firm grows, it loses market signals the bigger it gets and the more operations are taken in house.

    What kind of decisions are there to be made for Adam and Eve as they lease Mars to the waves of colonizers? I don't know! But I'll bet there are some! Owning all the land is kind of like owning all the shoe manufacturers. Owning all the shoe manufacturers would be a horizontal integration, not a vertical one, and yet it would clearly create a risk of inefficiency, because how do you know what kind of shoes to make in the absence of competition to alert you to customer desires you've missed every once in a while?

    So perhaps Adam and Eve will be somehow failing to satisfy the colonists' wants in some way. If so, perhaps Venus or the asteroids or Planet X will start outcompeting them. It will be kind of hard for them to know what to do about it, though, because these other orbs are such a completely different product. The situation is much like if the shoe manufacturer gets so off track that people start buying more socks instead, or pills to make their feet grow thick soles.

    In any case, I am not opposed to them trying this horizontal integration -- have at it, you crazy kids! You created a planet, after all! I'd no more deny them that than I'd want the govt goons breaking up Apple or Standard Oil. I just think that it will not be maximally efficient, and eventually their grandkids are going to be selling off pieces of it outright, trying different things, lazy grandkids will sell their pieces to the more ambitious grandkids, and all in all you'll get some competition and variety and smaller land holdings, all in an attempt to make more money and stop losing business to Ceres and Io.

    My firm doesn't even produce anything, besides defensive services. The calculation problem doesn't apply here.
    I explained why I think the calculation problem would apply, even if it's not providing defensive services, but merely leasing all the surface area and charging for extraction. I reply to this because I see no reason for A&E to provide defensive services. I mean, if they're really good at it, too, maybe they could make some money on it, but it would be a separate business, having nothing to do with their land management operation. I see little if any "synergy" potential in a merger of security services and land management. But, again, let them try if they want! If Apple wants to go into the orchard business -- have at it!


    Let's divide Mars into hemispheres, or even divide it steradially into a thousand pieces, with each piece independently owned and governed, but each piece independently using the same quasi-geoist system which I originally proposed for a unified planet. Now, the rent money goes just to the local government, and each citizen gets a dividend only from his local government; no planet-wide landlord or government exists. All of the governments have treaties for no tariffs, no restrictions on the movement of goods or people (except that people must acknowledge a government's legitimacy before entering its territory), and no restrictions on anybody in any place bidding on and renting parcels of land at any other place on the planet. How does that solve the problem which you claim my unified planet has?
    It provides competition that you can watch. You can peek over at what they're doing, cheat off their paper, so to speak. You don't have to come up with every single good land management idea yourself, you can sometimes adopt those of others. The customers are able to more effectively signal the market as to what's working and what's not than they could if they have to go to a whole different planet to send their signal. If the wedge Enoch is managing is going swimmingly, Noah can likely be able to make some good guesses as to why and modify his own management accordingly. Etc.

  6. #965
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Roy, statements like that are compelling evidence that you are operating strictly from within your own private bubble and calling it reality and truth. Not only can you declare, axiomatically and with utter certainty, what is "self-evident" and "just" in the absolute regarding land and liberty and rights, including declarations as to what has been "proved" (both right and wrong as you declare it), but you also claim with equal certainty and authority what is going on in other people's minds.

    I don't buy that you're clairvoyant, Roy. Oddly enough, however, your self-perceived potent omniscience, as implied by both your attitude and words, seems honest to me. I believe that you really do believe that you have not only proved all points beyond any shadow of doubting, but that you also know exactly what is in the minds of others.
    When someone starts whistling, "Yankee Doodle," it doesn't take clairvoyance -- or even much intelligence -- to know that the rest of the tune is also in his head, and likely to be produced in due course.
    Is it possible that you are serving evil? Is it possible that you will "...say, believe, and do ANYTHING WHATEVER to avoid..." even the exploration of such a possibility?
    No, it isn't, because greed -- unfortunately mistranslated as "love of money" -- is indeed the root of all evil. Greed is excessive, rapacious desire for more than one needs or deserves. It is greed that impels people to commit evil. As the landowner does not need and has done nothing to deserve the publicly created rent of the land he owns, his desire to pocket it rather than repay it to the community from which he takes it is greed. The government-issued and -enforced private landowning privilege that enables him to pocket the rent rather than repay it via LVT or some similar arrangement is simply evil implemented as public policy. As I oppose that evil -- the greatest evil in he history of the world -- there is no possibility whatever that I am serving evil. Do you really think it is some sort of accident that the landowner has for thousands of years been an archetype of greed, privilege, rapacity, parasitism, depredation, inhumanity and wickedness?
    Well, call me simple, then, because if I disappear into a forest, and dig an underground fortress for the sole purpose of excluding you and anybody else who is possessed with nasty, truly evil tentacles of collectivist expectations, and I occupy and use land that nobody else even wants to visit, let alone is interested in, let alone knows I am using, there isn't a chance in even your own private hell, Roy, that you can demonstrate that I have deprived anyone of their "liberty".
    Indeed, it's clear you haven't: no one else wants to use the land, so they suffer no deprivation. And as the land consequently has no market value, you would owe no LVT on it. Simple.
    Truth is, Roy, you believe in land ownership far more than I do. In the collectivist absolute. That's your dirty little secret.
    Obviously, that's just a stupid, evil, dirty little lie from you. How sad. You were doing so well, too....

  7. #966
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    As the landowner does not need and has done nothing to deserve the publicly created rent of the land he owns, his desire to pocket it rather than repay it to the community from which he takes it is greed. The government-issued and -enforced private landowning privilege that enables him to pocket the rent rather than repay it via LVT or some similar arrangement is simply evil implemented as public policy.
    "publicly created rent of the land he owns" - now there's a big cannon just loaded with presumptions and a slew of begged questions.

    Incidentally stow the "rent" and anti-landlord arguments with me. For the sake of our discussion only, my SOLE concern is for the rights of individuals and families who occupy and use land strictly for their own survival, not those who simply have titles to land which they do not occupy, but only sell, lease or otherwise charge rents to others.

    Somehow - and this is logical in your mind - an original homestead is endowed with "publicly created" value, even though no "rent" is charged to anyone, and nobody occupies the dwelling save the original dweller who improved the land. This results in value that the homesteader owes to others by way of circular logic that argues from your initial premise - that everybody has a natural liberty right to occupy and/or use the same land. To me that is a tax to reward those who simply covet.

    PUBLICLY CREATED VALUE

    I'm a pretty amicable, social guy in real life. I tend to make friends quite easily, and mostly because I show genuine interest in others, especially one-on-one. I have learned over the years that this is a fairly rare thing. Most people are more guarded, for whatever their reasons, which I don't judge. Since the value of any supply that is in demand increases with its scarcity, this Showing Of Genuine Interest quality can result in popularity whether or not it is desired. And popularity, while neither good nor bad in itself, can have definite drawbacks. For example, my private personal attention to individuals sometimes results in the drawing of an unwanted crowd in larger social situations. Not a crowd for the sake of a crowd, where I am just a member thereof - I actually like that - but rather a crowd of too many individuals who desire my personal focused attention at the same time. For me personally, that can be very taxing.

    While the actual 'value' of my attention might appear to have 'public' appeal, and strictly by virtue of the number of people who desire that attention simultaneously, that can produce the illusion that it was "publicly created". That would be false. It was not created for "the public", nor does "the public", nor any individual member thereof, have any "right" to it - any more than I have a right to anyone else's attention.

    An improved piece of land can have the same dynamic associated with it. A lone homesteader can go into what is an otherwise unoccupied and barren land, one that NOBODY WANTS, and can make aesthetically pleasing improvements - for himself only. Not to draw a crowd. Not to entice anyone or "rent" the property out to others. In fact, there is no "public" motive whatsoever to it. It is just land for him to live on, occupy and enjoy for himself, and possibly even a family if he has one. It may be a Rembrandt, but it wasn't for sale, and was never intended for public consumption. Artists have that right.

    Another man sees the lone beautiful house in the middle of nowhere, and considers it Good. He does not COVET that man's house - which of course would be EVIL. No, this man doesn't want to take possession or control of what someone else has created (NOT the land - only the "privately created value", or improvements). No, this man is not an Evil Coveter of other people's works. He is actually a Good Man. He only admires the example of what has been accomplished. He wants to be near it, and to be associated with that kind of energy that he admires. So he does likewise. He builds a house of his own and makes improvements to his own land - right next to the original house.

    Now, the man who built the original house may not 'like' the fact that a new neighbor has gotten so close to him, any more than he wants to be seated next to a crowded table in an otherwise empty restaurant. He also wouldn't choose a urinal next to one man in a bathroom that has thirty empty urinals. Personal bubbles and all that. Why shoulder to shoulder? Why next door? Was there no other place to live?

    But...he is also not an Evil Man, so he holds his peace. After a little thought, he makes room in his mind. He fully recognizes that the world is not only his, and must be shared; that even if he preferred to live in isolation, he would never attempt to deny others their equal right to a place of their own in the world.

    Well, social gravity being what it is, and complex social beings being what humans are, two beautiful cottages in the middle of nowhere attract enough attention that it soon becomes ten thousand houses in the middle of what is now somewhere. Gravity. Strange attractors. Accretion. Planetary formation.

    Now enter His Honor Roy L., the new Mayor of the new town. He goes to the man who built and still lives in the original house - the one that was once in the middle of nowhere - and declares to this man that his house now has Publicly Created Value for which he must now pay RENT to the public. Why? Because many of them now COVET his location...the one that nobody wanted before...a location that he alone improved with no intention to sell...a location not unlike many other locations which still exist as unimproved and otherwise undesired land. But now, because "the public" values this land, he must pay RENT to that public. He must compensate them for their covetousness. Or else he must leave.

    An LVT on Homesteaders is nothing more than Payola To Those Who Covet, as this kind of "Publicly Created Value" is another word for COVETOUSNESS.

    Thou shalt not covet.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 11-29-2011 at 01:36 PM.

  8. #967
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Yeah, the meek shall inherit [tenure of] the Earth. Or something to that effect. (It's very important to add parts in sometimes, or it won't make sense.)
    The alternate sarcasm would be, "the meek shall inherit the Earth, and shall keep ownership even if they become no longer meek." Is that what you think it means? Or if the Earth can justly be taken away from those who are no longer meek, doesn't that mean that they don't own it?
    Unless I'm mistaken, Roy is an atheist. But for the sake of those of us who believe in God, Roy appears to be willing to make his argument from the premise that God exists. With that premise, from the Judeo-Christian perspective, God owns everything. We all agree that I "own" my shirt, and the fruit of my labor, and myself, but what this really means is that God has delegated stewardship of these things to me. I don't actually own myself.
    What are the conditions of the delegation? God told Noah that a person didn't receive unconditional delegation of stewardship even of himself; if he committed murder, then he forfeited stewardship of himself, and other people had the right and responsibility to kill him. Of course, if not even stewardship of self is unconditional, then neither is stewardship of anything else.
    So, what about stewardship of land? Despite the distracting arguments over the definition of the word "property", everybody here, including Roy, agrees that God does grant stewardship of land to people, including in particular the right to exclusively use it. However, Roy says that one of the conditions of the grant of stewardship is that an exclusive user pay LVT to the authorities whom God has established to rule over the land. The anti-geoists say that there's no such condition.
    My question for the anti-geoists is this: at whose expense are the authorities established by God supposed to rule? The apostle Paul said that such authorities do exist, and were established by God, and we're supposed to pay taxes to them. If not LVT, then what form of taxes did God authorize them to levy, and will those taxes supply enough revenue to fund all of the legitimate federal, state, and local functions?

  9. #968
    jascott, I'm actually just playing with the scriptural references since they're getting bounced around in this thread. I have my own personal beliefs, but consider them irrelevant to the discussion. As such I try not to argue matters of policy except as they might equate to equally secular principles - or persuasions most, and only on the broadest of principles that can actually be felt or observed (i.e., coveting). What Paul, Isaiah, Noah or anyone else said as matters of "God's view" brings it purely into a realm of religious bearings - and there will never be agreement, even among people who supposedly share the same "core" beliefs. In truth, religion and religious beliefs, especially Christianity, are as fractionated and diverse as they could possibly get. As such, I can quote "thou shalt not kill", but if I'm arguing from a political framework, I have to recognize that it needs to be rooted in reason and logic that atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and anyone else can respond and and relate to, and not circular references that are forever moot.

    Having said all that, I think that the best that most individuals are going to get out of interpreting scriptures is an impetus, or rationale, for maintaining or pursuing a position that many probably arrived at quite apart from scripture anyway. In other words, whether scripture supports your position in truth or not remains to be seen in eternity, but it is often the case on Earth where scripture is individually tailored to fit the man, and not the man who tailors himself to fit the scripture.



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  11. #969
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Let the peasants rejoice, for the time has come to at last talk about Hong Kong! Yey! Party Time!
    Readers will note that you have deleted all context from my references to Hong Kong in order to be able to lie freely about what I plainly said. Up to now, I have proved that all your criticisms of LVT and the arguments for it, and your attempts to rationalize private landowning, have been fallacious, absurd, and dishonest. That will not be changing. In fact, I predict that you will now be lying, absurdly, that Hong Kong has private landowning, which it does not as a matter of objective fact.
    For one thing, no large populations are going to submit to having their lives wrecked for decades in order to prove that XYZ does wreck lives.
    "History is philosophy teaching by examples." -- Thucydides.
    Despite all these caveats and disclaimers, I shall nevertheless dive into addressing Hong Kong as an alleged empirical proof of the benefits of a Land Value Tax. Hong Kong is claimed to be a shining example of the success of the theories of Henry George and his LVT disciples.
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. Hong Kong is a shining example of the success of no private landowning, not of LVT. HK does not use LVT, because LVT is a remedy specifically designed to redress the injustice of private landowning. HK uses leasing of public land to recover publicly created land rent, as ancient Rome and Athens did in their periods of greatest efflorescence. It does not have LVT.
    The empirical evidence has been suggested roughly as follows:

    1) Hong Kong has a high LVT and no land-owning.
    No, that is nonsensical. HK has NO LVT BECAUSE it has no private landowning. LVT can only apply to privately owned land. If land is not privately owned, it will be leased, not taxed.
    2) Haiti (or Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma...) has no LVT and does have land-owning.
    Or at least any land-based taxes they may have are not levied on unimproved land value, and recover only derisory amounts of publicly created land rent.
    3) Just look at the results. LVT and lack of land ownership are vindicated as leading to wealthiness.
    More accurately, lack of private landowning does not prevent wealthiness, and private landowning does not support it (except for the landowners), contrary to the claims of anti-LVT liars.
    Are there any problems with this methodology? Yes. Are there any problems with this data? Yes. Are there any problems with this conclusion? Yes.
    Are there any problems with this strawman fallacy? Ooooooh, yes.
    Method:Could pairing up Hong Kong vs. Haiti even conceivably give us a slam dunk case as to the efficacy of LVT? Is LVT/lack-of-LVT really going to be named by anyone as the defining difference between these two countries? Is that going to come to anyone's mind other than Mr. L.'s as the answer to "what's the difference between Hong Kong and Haiti"? Will it even be in anyone's top ten of differences? Highly doubtful, outside of those poor souls obsessed with this particular hobbyhorse.
    You always have to lie about what I have plainly written. ALWAYS. I did not propose any experimental method, data or conclusions such as you describe, as it is self-evidently unscientific. I identified the facts about Hong Kong and the poor countries listed to refute a specific false and idiotic claim: that the economic benefits of private landowning could be established simply by comparing countries that have it with countries that don't. I proved that comparison establishes instead that freedom and prosperity are readily achievable without private landowning, while tyranny, poverty and stagnation are entirely consistent with private landowning.
    Data: Furthermore, in what meaningful way can Haiti be said to have more land-ownership than Hong Kong?
    In the sense that Haiti has private landowning, and Hong Kong doesn't.
    In Hong Kong, if I have a lease with few if any restrictions, as is the case with most leases issued many years ago (the more recent the lease, the more restrictions tend to be written into it), and if it will not expire for another 935 years, is that not pretty close to ownership?
    It would be if such leases existed, but they don't. There were nominal 999-year leases until 1898, but under the agreement under which sovereignty reverted to China in 1997, these and most other leases that were extended 50 years (to 2047) will be subject to unilateral revision by the Chinese government in that year.
    The Hong Kong government will leave me alone and not seize my land.
    No, if you don't pay the lease or ground rent, or if the land is deemed necessary for public use, or if you defy land use regulations, the HK government will seize "your" land.
    My effective property rights to the land will be respected.
    You only have a tenure right, not a property right.
    I can sell it, trade it, rent it, or gift it, and I am the one in charge of deciding what to do with that land -- the government, for the most part, will not interfere. For all practical purposes, I am the owner of the land,
    No, because anyone you try to sell it to knows their tenure will be at the Chinese government's pleasure after 2047.
    at least as much so as a typical owner in the USA, and more than many owners, say, in New London, Connecticut.
    Leased Hong Kong land is also subject to eminent domain, although the HK government does not invoke it to force sales to private interests.
    In Haiti, on the other hand, can we say that land-owners are secure in the knowledge that they will be left unmolested by the state to use the land however they choose? That they have effective property rights to the land which will be respected? I would say no.
    And you would be wrong. While Haiti has a small and weak government that doesn't do much of anything but serve the rich, greedy, privileged landowning elite (the kind of government lying anarcho-capitalist ninnies say is best!), that is one thing it does do:

    "In March, Haitian landowners and police authorities began kicking displaced Haitians out of their makeshift cities at the behest of the owners of the land on which the camps sat."

    http://www.swp.ie/international/hait...sts-swoop/3583


    "VIDEO: Haiti to Evict “Squatters” – Private Landowners Want Homeless Gone"

    http://hcvanalysis.wordpress.com/201...homeless-gone/


    "Wealthy landowners vow the "new Haiti" will become yet another vast slum unless the government rebuilds on their terms."


    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/...n6668155.shtml

    What was that, Helmuth? "No private landowning in Haiti"? Yet somehow, "wealthy landowners" are telling Haiti's government what to do. Wealthy landowners who somehow got wealthy without owning any land....

    Your constant lying to rationalize privilege, injustice and evil is grotesquely sickening.

    And the Haitian government isn't the only one subservient to Haiti's private landowning elite:

    "The “international community,” which dominates the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission – didn’t want to pressure Haiti’s landowners to accept what would be done in any other country, including the United States: taking available land, with compensation, for the necessary shelter."

    http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds...the-great-fear
    According to a Habitat for Humanity official, only 5 percent of Haiti's land has documentation of proprietorship,
    But it's the most useful 5%. Most of Haiti is rocky hillside people can't survive on.

    And if having only a low percent of the land area under documented private ownership was the criterion of whether a country has private landowning or not, Canada would not have private landowning:
    "Just 9.7% of the land of Canada is privately held. The majority of the land, 90.3%, is Crown Land, otherwise known as Public Land. Of this, 50% is Crown land administered by the Provincial governments and 40.3% is Crown land administered by the federal government."

    http://www.whoownstheworld.com/canada/

    But that is a claim that would clearly be about as stupid, absurd and dishonest as your claim that Haiti doesn't have private landowning.
    and land is often forcibly redistributed. (source)
    From squatters to landowners.

    In reality, despite the current weakness of its government, Haiti has a long history of private landowning and increasing concentration of landownership that has led to its current desperate poverty:

    "The [1971 census] also documented that 60 percent of farmers owned their land, although some lacked official title to it. Twenty-eight percent of all farmers rented and sharecropped land. Only a small percentage of farms belonged to cooperatives. The 1950 census, by contrast, had found that 85 percent of farmers owned their land."

    http://wn.com/Agriculture_in_Haiti
    So, in practical reality, Hong Kong effectively does offer secure land ownership to potential buyers,
    No, that's a flat-out lie, as proved above.
    whereas Haiti, while it may have land ownership on paper, effectively does not.
    No, that's just another flat-out lie, as proved above.
    The political situations in the Philippines, Bangladesh, etc. are likewise not exactly paragons of respect for private property rights, not in land nor anything else.
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. Private property in land is much more strongly enforced in those countries than in Haiti (which you cherry-picked only because it has such a weak government and is still in post-earthquake chaos), and is indisputably the basis of their highly unequal social and economic structures and consequent poverty and stagnation.
    I would say that on a continuum between no land ownership and absolutely secure land ownership, Hong Kong one of the closest in the world to the latter,
    No, that is just an absurd lie. There is no private landowning whatever in Hong Kong. What people have in HK is not ownership of land but leases with a limited transferable tenure right.
    whereas Haiti is within spitting distance of the former.
    Refuted above.
    If I "owned" land in Haiti, I would have no comfort whatsoever that my land might not be seized at any moment by any number of statist groups claiming to be in charge there.
    But such discomfort is in no way justified by the facts. Land titles in Haiti are not threatened by "statist groups" claiming to be in charge. That is just another silly fabrication on your part. They are threatened by OTHER PRIVATE LANDOWNERS who may have documented claims to ownership at least as good as yours.
    If I owned land in Hong Kong, I could sleep peacefully knowing that chances were good that no one is going to seize my land for at least 935 years (or however long my lease)
    False. The continuations of lease terms granted in 1997 are all up for unilateral review by China in 2047. Your "935 year lease" is a fairy tale, and one that never applied to more than a microscopic fraction of the land in any case.
    and that even at the end of that time, 99.9% odds I can simply renew the lease with no hassle.
    False. Lease renewal terms will be up to the Chinese government.
    Which ownership is the more ownery? Hong Kong's situation offers a lot more of those qualities of owneryness which vile land parasites look for in a jurisdiction, even if it's not officially called "owning".
    It's true that HK's bigger and stronger government, and the positive economic climate created by land rent recovery through leasing, makes it far more attractive for real estate investors even though they do not own the land, and have to pay far more tax on it than Haitian landowners do.
    Point of information: Hong Kong has no LVT.
    Because it has no private landowning. Duh. If your goal was something other than deceit, this would not even be worth mentioning.
    This would seem to be an important fact for those claiming that Hong Kong proves and vindicates all they've ever said about LVT,
    Nobody claimed that, so you are just lying again. What it does prove is that claims of the necessity of private landowning to prosperity made by apologists for landowner privilege are also just stupid lies.
    but it is nevertheless one which seems to have escaped their attention or in any case which they pass over.
    Hong Kong only proves that private landowning is not needed for growth, freedom or prosperity. Secure lease tenure on public land is quite sufficient.
    Hong Kong has no LVT; it does have a property tax. Hong Kong's property tax is 16%, or 17% profit tax for land-owning corporations (yes, I'm simplifying). What portion of that tax is on the value of the pure land? Not much -- Hong Kong is highly urban and the value of improvements and buildings far outweighs the value of the land.
    No, that's false. Land is worth more than improvements because the mathematics of exponential land appreciation and building depreciation guarantee that for most of the lifetime of improvements, the land is worth far more.
    So I don't know what the haul of Hong Kong's "virtual LVT" would be if we were to separate it out, but it is not all that much, relatively. So does Hong Kong even have a high virtual LVT? Higher than average? That remains to be proven.
    <yawn>

    "Between 1970 and 1996, land revenue (land premiums, annual rent, rates and property tax) accounted for, on average, 33% of annual government budgets. If profits tax from development companies and taxes on mortgage portfolio profits are included, up to 45% of the government’s annual revenue was based on land."

    http://www.hkjournal.org/archive/2011_spring/3.htm
    I myself have skepticism, as the pro-LVT side has shown to be warranted.
    That is an outrageous lie. I have consistently told the truth. The anti-LVT side, by contrast, has CONSTANTLY LIED.
    Does Haiti have a low or non-existent LVT? Haiti's property tax rate is 15%.
    Of what? Some decades-old amount of pre-inflation money?
    Now I'm sure there's a tax code a mile long in both places complicating the situation, but on the face of it, 15% is not dramatically lower than 16-17%. In fact, another site, doingbusiness.org, says that Haiti's property tax rate is 15%, while Hong Kong's is 5%. So maybe, in fact, Hong Kong's virtual LVT is much lower than Haiti's, for a typical businessman vile land parasite.
    As proved above, HK gets a third of its revenue from land, far higher than any sovereign country. Haiti's property tax, by contrast, raises so little revenue it is more accurately considered a cartoon of a property tax. All the yak about rates and assessments doesn't mean a thing. Where the rubber meets the road is fraction of total revenue obtained, and fraction of total land rent thereby recovered.
    HONG KONG'S "PROPERTY TAX" DOESN'T INCLUDE LAND LEASE OR GROUND RENT PAYMENTS, DUH.
    And in Haiti, as YOUR OWN SOURCE proves, the "property tax" accounts for just 1/80 of a typical firm's total tax burden!
    So as far as the data goes, reality is almost backwards from the claims we've heard:
    No, that's a flat-out lie, as proved above.
    Hong Kong has a stronger land ownership regime than Haiti in every meaningful sense,
    Lie. There is no private landowning whatever in HK. It is LEASEHOLD TENURE that is more secure in HK, because its larger and stronger government is more able to secure people's rights than Haiti's near-anarcho-capitalist regime that simply works for the highest bidder.
    and the tax rates on land in both are either similar, or Hong Kong's is much lower.
    No, that's just pure deceitfulness, as proved above. HK gets a large fraction of its total government revenue from land, and recovers a large fraction of total land rent. Haiti does neither.
    Conclusion: Because comparing Hong Kong to Haiti is not an acceptable method for proving LVT's benefits,
    Agreed, because neither of them use LVT. Which proves how absurd and dishonest your garbage is, as usual.
    and because the data presented is very, very wrong,
    No, the data are correct; you just edited, cherry-picked and lied about them.
    the conclusion that was based on this method and this data cannot be supported by this experiment
    Because all three were fabrications by you.
    Knowing the, umm, level of academic rigor to which the researchers have held themselves thus far in their careers,
    Referring to yourself, there...
    I have taken it upon myself to ponder such an experiment. My hypothesis is that Hong Kong has some of the lowest tax rates
    Because it recovers a lot of publicly created land rent through leasing and ground rents.
    To test this hypothesis, let's look at two nations with very high degrees of economic freedom, respect for property rights, low taxes, etc., but one which taxes land and one which does not. This way, we come closer to somewhat sort of isolating that single variable -- land value taxation -- that we want to look at. Even though the quality of isolation is inevitably still low, it at least is better than when we compare Hong Kong and Haiti, a comparison where obviously the one minor factor of Hong Kong having similar or lower property tax rates than Haiti
    Disproved above.
    is making a much smaller difference than the cumulative effect of the million other ways in which Haiti's economy is horribly unfree and Hong Kong's outstandingly free.

    So, I take Hong Kong vs. Dubai.
    Oh. My. God.

    Are you serious? This is just too funny.
    Both very free, economically speaking, according to the libertarian standard, UAE being ≈ the 14th freest country, and Hong Kong being the 1st. (source) Hong Kong has a property tax; Dubai does not. If my hypothesis is correct, Dubai is that much better off by having no property tax, though that benefit can be offset by additional other taxes or state interventions. If the pro-LVTers are correct, Dubai is dramatically worse off by not having a property tax and their economy should be doing much more poorly than that of Hong Kong which at least has some property tax.
    Ah, no, actually, because it is not "having a property tax" that matters. It is recovery of the land rent that government spending creates to fund that spending. Property taxation is just one (not very good) way of doing that.

    But as you seem intent on sleep-walking off the rhetorical cliff where you have chosen to make your last stand, I think I will just let you:
    In examining the facts and figures, I find that Dubai has a much higher rate of GDP growth than Hong Kong -- a much, much higher rate. From 2000-2010, GDP of Hong Kong increased 133%, while GDP of Dubai increased 503-542% (I found varying figures for 2010 Dubai GDP). It's not even close. No mitigating factors can begin to mitigate this difference.
    Well, there are a few, actually. Like the fact that just 55 years ago, Dubai got its first concrete building, quite a change from the palm-frond huts the few hundred pirates, brigands and ruffians that inhabited the place had lived in up to then.
    Pro-LVTers may claim that Dubai's prosperity is still due to LVT principles, for though there is no tax on land, the government does control oil reserves, another form of economic "land". However, the share of Dubai's economy coming from oil and natural gas extraction has plunged to vitually zip at the same time that the rest of its economy has soared. So that argument will fall as flat as Dubai's oil revenues.
    Yes, well, it would... except for the inconvenient (for you) fact that the government -- i.e., Sheik Mohammed al-Maktoum and his family -- also happens to own ALMOST ALL THE LAND IN DUBAI. Most is owned either directly by him and his family or by their development companies. Except for a microscopic fraction, all the land other development firms are using for all the fantastic real estate projects is all LEASED from the al-Maktoum family on terms generally ranging from 50 to 99 years. LVT is the method of recovering publicly created land rent to fund government expenditures when the land is mostly privately owned. When it is government owned, as in Hong Kong and Dubai, the rent can be recovered either by leasing or by government ownership of real estate developments like public housing. Both HK and Dubai use both methods. Dubai's explosive growth has been built on massive infrastructure and education investments PAID FOR OUT OF LAND RENTS.

    So do you see how completely you have destroyed and humiliated yourself? DUBAI'S GOVERNMENT RUNS ON RECOVERED LAND RENTS EVEN MORE THAN HONG KONG'S!!

    It's over, Helmuth. Nothing you can possibly say matters any more. You have proven yourself a complete ignoramus and have made yourself a laughing stock. The (let's be charitable) "argument" that you triumphantly offered to show how LVT was inferior to private landowning in fact proved me absolutely and irrefutably right, and you absolutely and irrefutably wrong. You have refuted and demolished yourself, comprehensively and conclusively.
    Again, looking purely at empirical data, would it be too extreme to claim that humanity is better off today than at that time thousands of years ago when, you claim (based on no data) that humanity had not yet started homesteading nature?
    Lie. All anthropological data show consistently that pre-agricultural societies don't recognize private landowning unless they have imported the concept from more technologically advanced societies.
    I venture that it would not be. Thus, the period of human history with land ownership clearly has a better economic track record than the period which you claim (based on no data)
    Lie.
    was without. It's not even close.
    It's also a blatant post hoc fallacy. Landowning arises with agriculture and fixed settlements, which is obviously more economically productive than hunter-gatherer ar nomadic herding economies. But it was the more productive economic regime that produced landowning, not the other way around.
    I mean, Dubai being quintuple as good at Hong Kong at generating wealth was not even close.
    LOL! You need a refresher in arithmetic as well as basic logic and facts about Dubai.
    This, where land-owning humanity has generated millions upon millions of times the wealth as (supposedly) non-land-owning humanity,
    Idiocy. You could with equal "logic" claim that as children's brains grow far faster before they are weaned than after, they should never graduate to solid food.

    Landowning, like slavery, was a quick and dirty solution to a real problem that arose with the advance to settled agriculture; it did not cause the advance to settled agriculture, let alone any later technological advance. And as with slavery, we now have better solutions.
    this is at a level where all blowing-out-of-water wiping-the-floor-with idioms fail.
    ROTFL!! Those idioms already failed when you blew yourself out of the water, above, sunshine.
    In conclusion, empirical data supports land-owning as an economically successful practice.
    Of course it has been economically successful. So was slavery. Very. But we now know there are better solutions.

  12. #970
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    All use is exclusive.
    Garbage. Hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders use land non-exclusively all the time.
    You can switch back and forth who's excluding who. You can make fine divisions to split up the exclusivity among parties.
    More relevantly, you can use land without imposing any deprivation on others, who also remain at liberty to use it. That is what hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders do.
    But you cannot use matter nor space without excluding others from it. Sharing, thus, is never an option in the sense you want it to be.
    No, sharing is only never an option in the idiotic and absurd sense that you want to substitute for the sense that all reasonable, informed and honest people (i.e., doesn't include you) always use.
    Sharing in that sense doesn't exist.
    No, it is only sharing in YOUR idiotic and absurd sense that doesn't exist.

  13. #971
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Use and control is what ownership is.
    No, it is not. The owner of a rented car neither uses nor controls it.
    If every thirsty bum on Earth (and off) has a "right to liberty" which amounts to a right to drink some water, that means every thirsty bum owns that water.
    No, that's just more stupid garbage from you.

  14. #972
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Use and control is what ownership is.
    No, it is not. The owner of a rented car neither uses nor controls it.
    If every thirsty bum on Earth (and off) has a "right to liberty" which amounts to a right to drink some water, that means every thirsty bum owns that water.
    No, that's just more stupid garbage from you.

  15. #973
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    No, it is not. The owner of a rented car neither uses nor controls it.
    Renting a car is momentary use of it, not control. You can't repaint a rented car, you can't tune the engine, you can't sell it...

  16. #974
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    You only have a tenure right, not a property right. There is no private landowning whatever in Hong Kong. What people have in HK is not ownership of land but leases with a limited transferable tenure right.
    I already explained all that in my post. Then I said that in order to consider Hong Kong!!11!1 scientifically, let us look at the reality and not merely the words and labels which are flung about by the political system. You, on the other hand, accept labels completely and without further examination (when they suit you), with no concern for the reality.

    Leasing, owning, what does it matter what they call it? One wonders whether the US could fix everything and make Mr. L. happy, as he's happy with Hong Kong!!11!1, by merely changing its terminology. All property owners are now leasors. The governments now own all the surface area. Property tax is repealed and lease rent is instituted. The leasors can only keep their tenure right if they pay their lease rent. All better now? The words have changed, though nothing else has, and now we are suddenly much closer to Mr. L.'s utopia. All the government must do now is change the property tax, whoops I mean lease rent, to be based upon the value of the land only and not of the improvements and we'd be in hog heaven. Of course, not even Hong Kong!!11!1 has done that and Mr. L. has no complaints nor criticism for that Georgist paradise, so we need not be in any hurry. Just change the words and we'll be 90% there to the land of Shang-ri-la with universal sharing and free spring water for all! Hand holding, baby, not land holding. Leasing and peacing, not leeching and preaching.

    Change the words, make this a better place,
    For you and for me and the entire human race...


    You didn't have any refutation whatsoever for my assessment of Haiti as not having a very high regard for property rights. It very clearly doesn't. A title there is clearly much more tentative, much more iffy, than a title, whoops I'm sorry an exclusive lease, in Hong Kong!!1!1!11. Even worse, while I as a foreign investor might be able to come in and get a clear official title, for most of the population that is not feasible, so they instead pass down land for generations unofficially and informally. That would be not so bad if the legal system had a strong respect for these unofficial claims in a common law / homesteading kind of way, but it doesn't, so the reality for the vast bulk of the population is that whatever degree of land ownership they have is a fragile and tenuous thing indeed.

    I didn't choose Haiti because it had a hurricane, I chose it because it began with H. Choose whatever countries you like and make your case.

    I'm glad that you knew Hong Kong!!11!1 had no LVT, or at least that you claim to have known, though you certainly gave us no indication of that knowledge. That's the danger, you see, of never presenting your side of things in a positive and solid way, but merely "refuting" the other guy's side. Any details we have about your views, their practical implementation, your particular deviations from Georgism, etc., we have only because I dragged them out of you like pulling teeth. You're much happier to just tag posts with "liar!" as a street gang tags picnic pavillions with "word up".


    As far as Dubai goes, you demolish that by pointing out (with no specific figures nor sources; that is, as always, with no data) that the elite own most of the land. Which, I think, is likely true. It seems plausible based on my own knowledge, despite your giving no one any reason to believe you. This appears to be one of those cases where Roy Reality has an intersection point with Regular Reality. But is that (the elite owning most of the land) not exactly what you say is the evil of my system and the grace of yours? Is not the elite owning everything what I want, and what you want to end as a great evil?

    The fact is, land is untaxed in Dubai. No land rent is recovered. Land is taxed in Hong Kong!!11!1. Land rent is recovered. You would look at that "indisputable fact" and predict that Dubai would be a poor and horrible place, especially compared to Hong Kong!!11!1. Everyone should be eking out a bare subsistence, virtual slaves and peasants to the land-owning elite. Dubai is your worst dystopia come alive. No land rent is recovered, elites own most of the land, and everyone is free to speculate and leave Evil Vacant Lots laying around to their heart's content. In George's Inferno, this would be the innermost circle.

    In contrast, I would look at the situation and see that the levels of respect for freedom and property are high in both places. I would expect and predict the economies of both places to be growing and the people's well-being to be increasing.

    My prediction fits the reality better. Dubai is doing well, and even better than Hong Kong!!11!1.

    It's also a blatant post hoc fallacy. Landowning arises with agriculture and fixed settlements, which is obviously more economically productive than hunter-gatherer ar nomadic herding economies. But it was the more productive economic regime that produced landowning, not the other way around.
    So in other words, the last thousand years have been wealthy and successful in spite of land-owning, not because of it. Is that about it? Now where have I read something like that before...?

    Of course it has been economically successful. So was slavery.
    Wow. So you just completely conceded the practical side of the point. You openly concede the empirical data does not seem to support your theory. Rather it supports the theory that land-owning, to quote Roy L., "has been economically successful". Splendid quote! We agree completely at last. And so you fall back upon the moral side of the point ("slavery was successful too, but immoral, just like land-owning") which is now all you have left.

    Normally, no one ever openly concedes anything in these discussions except for me. So this concession is pretty unprecedented and pretty surprising. Thank you for your new-found candor.
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 11-30-2011 at 11:20 PM.

  17. #975
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Garbage. Hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders use land non-exclusively all the time.
    They just switch back and forth who is being exclusive, as I said. In this case, between themselves, when they're there, and no one, as they move on and leave it empty. Whenever they are using either matter or space, they are using it exclusively. Think about it.

  18. #976
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    No, it is not. The owner of a rented car neither uses nor controls it.
    He does both. Obviously. Think about it for two seconds.



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  20. #977
    Quote Originally Posted by AquaBuddha2010 View Post
    Did anybody see the Stossel segment about property on Fox tonight?
    They don't call it Faux News for nothing....
    It was awesome...talked about private property in China, about our history of property, about forests and parks, and about how the denial of property in Indian tribes have decimated their entire culture.
    Oh, right, it wasn't being forcibly dispossessed of their liberty and imprisoned on land they couldn't survive on that decimated them. It wasn't alcohol, massacres, or even pandemics of Old World diseases. It was "denial of property." The same "denial of property" that they and their cultures thrived on for thousands of years...

    Help me, Jebus....

  21. #978
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    He does both. Obviously. Think about it for two seconds.
    I have, and he does neither.

  22. #979
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Yeah, the meek shall inherit [tenure of] the Earth. Or something to that effect. (It's very important to add parts in sometimes, or it won't make sense.)
    <yawn> Feudalism was characterized by INHERITED tenure rights and associated obligations. The inheritance was NOT PROPERTY.

  23. #980
    Quote Originally Posted by mport1 View Post
    Landowning is theft, period.
    There. Fixed it for you.

  24. #981
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    If every thirsty bum on Earth (and off) has a "right to liberty" which amounts to a right to drink some water, that means every thirsty bum owns that water.
    No, that's just more stupid garbage from you.
    In other words, I have said something which not only can you not refute, not only can you not interface with the statement in an intelligent way, not only all that, which has been true for almost all your posts throughout this discussion, in this case you do not even have a talking point to regurgitate for it. If I were you, I'd just keep repeating this statement over and over, thinking that its uncontested repetition proves me right somehow; the righter the more it is repeated. Unfortunately you are you, and so we'd just have 20 posts where I repeat my statement and you repeat your Total Destruction of my statement by typing "No, that's just more stupid garbage from you." That would pretty definitely decrease the total number of Utils in the Universe. So I'll skip that.
    Last edited by helmuth_hubener; 11-30-2011 at 11:59 AM.

  25. #982
    Quote Originally Posted by helmuth_hubener View Post
    Come on, Roy, I'm rooting for you! There's a whole lot of new material crying out to be proved wrong now. You gotta come through for me!
    I have, of course.

    How many more times, and in how many more different ways, must I prove you wrong before you will become willing to consider the possibility that you actually ARE wrong?

  26. #983
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    I have, and he does neither.
    He uses it to make money. He controls it because he makes the ultimate decisions for it.

    Come on!

    A restaurant owner also neither uses nor controls his restaurant's food. His chefs use it to make their dishes, and control it by doing whatever they want with it -- shaping it, combining it, altering it, heating it, moving it about. His customers use it to fill their bellies, and control it by choosing what dishes to order. But the owner's out of the loop. He's just sitting at home having no involvement whatsoever. Right?

    Wrong! He uses the food to make money. And he controls it because he makes the ultimate decisions for it.

    Ownership means use and control. If you can disprove that, have at. If you have an alternative definition, bring it on out. Until then,

  27. #984
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    "publicly created rent of the land he owns" - now there's a big cannon just loaded with presumptions and a slew of begged questions.
    Google "economic rent" and start reading.
    Incidentally stow the "rent" and anti-landlord arguments with me. For the sake of our discussion only, my SOLE concern is for the rights of individuals and families who occupy and use land strictly for their own survival, not those who simply have titles to land which they do not occupy, but only sell, lease or otherwise charge rents to others.
    And $#!+ on the people who would otherwise be at liberty to use it. Check.
    Somehow - and this is logical in your mind - an original homestead is endowed with "publicly created" value, even though no "rent" is charged to anyone, and nobody occupies the dwelling save the original dweller who improved the land. This results in value that the homesteader owes to others by way of circular logic that argues from your initial premise - that everybody has a natural liberty right to occupy and/or use the same land.
    There is nothing circular about it. They would otherwise be at liberty to use the land, and the advantages created by government and the community would still be there if the owner and all his works vanished.
    To me that is a tax to reward those who simply covet.
    <yawn> But that is objectively false. Wanting your liberty back, or just compensation for its removal, is not "coveting."
    PUBLICLY CREATED VALUE

    While the actual 'value' of my attention might appear to have 'public' appeal, and strictly by virtue of the number of people who desire that attention simultaneously, that can produce the illusion that it was "publicly created". That would be false. It was not created for "the public", nor does "the public", nor any individual member thereof, have any "right" to it - any more than I have a right to anyone else's attention.

    An improved piece of land can have the same dynamic associated with it.
    No, it can't.
    A lone homesteader can go into what is an otherwise unoccupied and barren land, one that NOBODY WANTS, and can make aesthetically pleasing improvements - for himself only. Not to draw a crowd. Not to entice anyone or "rent" the property out to others. In fact, there is no "public" motive whatsoever to it. It is just land for him to live on, occupy and enjoy for himself, and possibly even a family if he has one. It may be a Rembrandt, but it wasn't for sale, and was never intended for public consumption. Artists have that right.

    Another man sees the lone beautiful house in the middle of nowhere, and considers it Good. He does not COVET that man's house - which of course would be EVIL. No, this man doesn't want to take possession or control of what someone else has created (NOT the land - only the "privately created value", or improvements). No, this man is not an Evil Coveter of other people's works. He is actually a Good Man. He only admires the example of what has been accomplished. He wants to be near it, and to be associated with that kind of energy that he admires. So he does likewise. He builds a house of his own and makes improvements to his own land - right next to the original house.

    Now, the man who built the original house may not 'like' the fact that a new neighbor has gotten so close to him, any more than he wants to be seated next to a crowded table in an otherwise empty restaurant. He also wouldn't choose a urinal next to one man in a bathroom that has thirty empty urinals. Personal bubbles and all that. Why shoulder to shoulder? Why next door? Was there no other place to live?

    But...he is also not an Evil Man, so he holds his peace. After a little thought, he makes room in his mind. He fully recognizes that the world is not only his, and must be shared; that even if he preferred to live in isolation, he would never attempt to deny others their equal right to a place of their own in the world.

    Well, social gravity being what it is, and complex social beings being what humans are, two beautiful cottages in the middle of nowhere attract enough attention that it soon becomes ten thousand houses in the middle of what is now somewhere. Gravity. Strange attractors. Accretion. Planetary formation.

    Now enter His Honor Roy L., the new Mayor of the new town. He goes to the man who built and still lives in the original house - the one that was once in the middle of nowhere - and declares to this man that his house now has Publicly Created Value for which he must now pay RENT to the public. Why? Because many of them now COVET his location...
    They "covet" it because there is now a community there, regardless of anything he does or did.
    the one that nobody wanted before...a location that he alone improved with no intention to sell...a location not unlike many other locations which still exist as unimproved and otherwise undesired land. But now, because "the public" values this land, he must pay RENT to that public. He must compensate them for their covetousness.
    It is not compensation for "covetousness," that is just a lie from you. It is compensation for depriving them of the advantages government, the community and nature provide at that location.
    An LVT on Homesteaders is nothing more than Payola To Those Who Covet, as this kind of "Publicly Created Value" is another word for COVETOUSNESS.
    Garbage. Wanting your liberty back, or just compensation for its removal, is not "covetousness."
    Thou shalt not covet.
    Accusing those who oppose injustice of envy for its beneficiaries is one of the most evil acts any human being can commit, because it seeks to undermine all opposition to evil.



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  29. #985
    Give us our liberty*!!!








    *your land

  30. #986
    I don't get it Roy, why exactly are you here? You only post in this thread, nothing of which has to do with getting Ron Paul elected, you obviously don't even believe in one of the most important priciples of the liberty movement, namely the right property (yes that includes owning land) and all you do is insult people who don't buy into your ridiculous notion that land owning is theft. So I repeat, why are you here? This thread has gone on for 99 pages...aren't you bored of owning us and destroying our nonsensical, immoral apologies for evil, greedy land owning parasites?

  31. #987
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Google "economic rent" and start reading.

    And $#!+ on the people who would otherwise be at liberty to use it. Check.
    "otherwise at liberty" is your argument in a nutshell, and the genesis of your false dichotomy - your biggest lie - that everyone has a liberty right to occupy the same space as everyone else, given they "would otherwise be at liberty to use"...meaning, "If they did not exist I would have access to their space, wherever it is."

    You believe in a right based on a non-existent reality. My right to "otherwise be at liberty to occupy your space" can only end if you cease to exist, because the moment you move, that space becomes exclusively occupied as well. So everyone's "right to otherwise be at liberty" is immediately transferred to any new space you might occupy. No rest for the weary - wherever you go, that space has some measurable value to me, however negligible, that you are taking from me - so pay up, space occupation thief.

    When I forcibly remove you out of your spot for non-payment, you will owe me for occupying the new spot I put you in, because my claim to a natural liberty right extends to that space as well. Which makes you an automatic debtor or a thief wherever you go - by virtue of your very existence. I would follow you to the ends of the earth and tax you to death, but what I really want is for you to pay rent for a spot that I consider collectively owned.

    And yes - you ARE the ultimate propertarian. Stop lying about that. It is a flagrant tautology regardless how you phrase it.

    Gypsies, nomads, vagabonds and other wandering souls would be excepted, I assume, because they are always on the move. Wouldn't it be just peachy keen to you - wouldn't that delight your sensibilities if that's all we were on Earth?

    Oh, and you did make an exception for me - if I lived underground - provided nobody knows about it, of course, or moved in next door to me. Somehow association was key. It is only if I occupy space in plain view of others that I would owe anything. That's why it is a simple matter of coveting. Don't lie. And it is also a tax on free association. You cannot cluster together and circle your wagons for any length of time without some idiot calling it a "deprivation", and holding out his nasty, covetous tentacle demanding payment for something he did not improve, and for which he has no right - not even a half-baked "natural liberty right".

    This is the ABSOLUTE INSANITY of the world we live in now - multiple claims on the same physical wealth - which you have extended to space itself. That's your lie, your insanity, Roy.

    My right to live and to exist requires space that is exclusive to me. It does not become a privilege-by-proxy because someone figured out how to swallow a BIG FAT LIE in the form of a goofy-stupid false dichotomy which says, in effect, "You have a right to live, but not an exclusive right to your own personal, non-moving space."

    Since occupation of space can never be anything but exclusive, your very existence becomes a matter of "privilege of exclusive space occupation" (there is no other kind) which can then be taxed. And since the power to tax involves the power to destroy - your very life, which depends upon exclusive space occupation, is subject to being taxed out of existence.

    It's funny, because I don't see this right extending to corporations, governments, or other collectives, the existence of which really are both fictitious and highly qualified, and without anything approaching a "right". I don't see property ownership as an untrammeled right, as a matter of survival, to anyone but free and natural persons - and even there I could see it qualified. For example, I don't see amassing enough wealth to claim title to half a country as anyone's individual right. That is a form of sovereignty that extends past one's right to survive, and really does affect the public interest - as it relates to INDIVIDUAL survival - not some abstract collective which I don't believe in.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 11-30-2011 at 06:10 PM.

  32. #988
    Roy, might I make a suggestion? Regardless of my position on whether I agree with you or not....your condescending, sarcastic, and snarky remarks are major turn-offs to your larger point(s), regardless of how valid (or not) they are. Because of this, might I recommend not being so insulting?
    Last edited by Fox McCloud; 11-30-2011 at 06:51 PM.

  33. #989
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    For the sake of our discussion only, my SOLE concern is for the rights of individuals and families who occupy and use land strictly for their own survival
    And $#!+ on the people who would otherwise be at liberty to use it. Check.
    We've talked about this a few times already, but this statement of yours just makes the insanity of your position so stark. Those who are using some surface area of the Earth to farm and try to have something to eat, or some branches in a tree to put their treehouse to try to stay warm and dry, those folks are actually mistreating and abusing others in an extremely rude and evil manner by virtue of their doing that. Who are they abusing? Those who would, if they offered it for sale, be willing to buy it.

    Now when I would be willing to buy something, it's not because I disapprove of the person who has it now continuing to have it. If it were not for sale, I would not feel deprived or slighted in any way, much less like I was having sewage dumped up me by vindictive evil-doers whose black hearts just couldn't see the Self-Evident Truth that I have just as much right as them to their land. I don't know anyone who would. It's just not rational. It's just not civilized. The other guy's tree house isn't hurting me. The other guy isn't being rude to me by having the tree house. I don't accept that he is "monopolizing" the tree in any correct nor historical sense of the word monopoly. I don't accept that I have a right to his tree. It's just sociopathic to think you are entitled to other men's stuff. Such an attitude prevents you from functioning in society. Perhaps that's why you spend your life posting on the internet about your excuses for your pathology.

    Just because someone would be willing to buy it if it were for sale, doesn't mean he has any desire to buy it if it's not for sale. That is your fallacy (another one). He probably is positively unwilling to buy it if it's not for sale! Most people are decent and respectful like that. So your whole idea that a violation of rights is occurring because people would probably buy it if it were for sale, and thus the guy is picking their pocket by not selling it, and besides that even if it were for sale the only correct sale price is zero and anything more than that is picking Humanity's pocket too, this whole idea is based on an inaccuracy. Most people don't feel that people owe it to them to transfer their stuff them-ward, "nature-given" or not (and as I've said, everything is ultimately nature-given). Those who do are sociopaths.

    They "covet" it because there is now a community there, regardless of anything he does or did.
    Again, actually normal people don't covet it at all, community or not. They have no interest in taking it unless and until the current owner is willing to sell it. So in a way, actually the community being there hasn't given the land any value at all. It's totally valueless, except to its owner and those he permits to use it, and except to sociopaths, until and unless the owner is willing to sell it.

    Accusing those who oppose injustice of envy for its beneficiaries is one of the most evil acts any human being can commit, because it seeks to undermine all opposition to evil.
    Steven, you just committed one of the greatest evils possible. Rape, move over. Murder, eyh. Torture? Fogetaboutit. If we're going to have crimes, this is one of the grand-daddies. It's even up there above drinking hot coffee in public. Maybe even above smoking in public. Under Roy's Beneficent Utopia, making the post you just made is going to get you fried in the electric chair. Roy will trace your IP address and hunt you down like the foul, sick evil-doer that you are.

  34. #990
    Quote Originally Posted by Fox McCloud View Post
    Roy, might I make a suggestion? Regardless of my position on whether I agree with you or not....your condescending, sarcastic, and snarky remarks are major turn-offs to your larger point(s), regardless of how valid (or not) they are. Because of this, might I recommend being so insulting?
    Ha, ha, ha... you need to read the whole thread! Well, OK, no that's not true. I shouldn't wish that on anyone. I don't know what to recommend. But rest assured that I have told him this before. Your advice has been duly filed... in the circular file.

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