Aside from all the psychotic noise, an LVT is superior to taxation on economic activity including not only income, capital gains, inheritance and sales taxes but value added and anything else you can think of.
Blither away about how evil it may be for whatever reasons, valid or invalid, but it stands as superior to all of those options.
If you say "all taxation is theft" then you need to come up with some alternative means of supporting the FORCE that stands behind all property rights claims.
Last edited by jabowery; 04-06-2012 at 10:55 PM.
Defensive force is fine, it is aggressive force which is an inferior means of inter-human interaction. And of course the free market is perfectly capable of providing security services, including whatever force or threats of force might be necessary to protect the persons and property of paying customers. The same principles apply which make the market capable of providing every other type of service.Originally Posted by jabowery
Dear Slimedia: We hate you utterly. Your days are numbered.
Cordially, Every Ron Paul Supporter on Earth.
No. While it is true that the market has to determine land values, that is the intended system anyway, so there is nothing to dispute. It is not true that artificial reduction of the available land would result in a deadweight loss IF the amount of land removed from the market for parks, military use, etc. is economically fixed: i.e., if it doesn't vary according to price. You may be skeptical of that proviso, but when land rent is all recovered for public purposes and benefit anyway, there is no real incentive for individuals or government to add or remove reserved land.
As the benefit is publicly, not privately created, it rightly belongs to the public, no matter how badly greedy thieves want to steal it.That assumes that all benefit from all land belongs to everyone/the state,
They evaporate in at least three different important ways:and I'm still at a loss to understand something: The murders you believe are caused by forcibly excluding others from land where private landownership is involved somehow evaporate when that same forcible exclusion is exercised by the State under LVT.
1. As the productive no longer have to support a greedy, idle, privileged, parasitic landowning class that pockets roughly the same amount of money the government spends on services and infrastructure, they have much more money to spend -- probably double or triple their current disposable income. In most cases, that alone is enough to make them no longer poor or in danger of being murdered by landowner greed.
2. LVT encourages landholders to use their land productively, which usually means hiring people to work on it. This increases wages in two different ways: the margin moves in, reducing land rents as a fraction of production, and unemployment drops off a cliff, compelling employers to offer higher wages.
3. The universal individual land tax exemption guarantees every resident citizen secure tenure on enough land to live on. No one need be poor because they can't afford to pay a landowner for access to the opportunities government, the community and nature provide.
The market would determine land value, "the State" would determine the exemption amount. There are various statistical formulae that could be used to determine the exemption amount without "evil bureaucrat" intervention. Quibbling over the amount is a red herring. It's enough to live on.But let's go with it anyway, continuing within the geolib framework:
Land is one of the basic needs for life itself, a need which varies from person to person. The option to not exclusively use some land on Earth is an impossibility for literally everyone. I know, your particular version of LVT would carry with it individual exemptions - not on quantity of land, but a given value - established not by the market, but by the State.
Actually, lots of ordinary people choose to live on very small amounts of very valuable land. See the high-rise apartment buildings of NYC.Let's say, however, that someone wants to avoid paying outrageous LVT's associated with major metropolitan areas (e.g., not interested in living in someone else's version of a Hong Kong concrete paradise),
You do not know what deadweight loss is.and doesn't consider whatever "exemption" has been offered for that area to be of much value to them personally. They decide instead that they want to live where NOBODY ELSE wants to be -- in the mountains or countryside instead, far away from everyone and their collectivist madness. If all that "other land" is locked up by the State, such that they and everyone else are excluded from using it by force, such that their choices of where to live are artificially narrowed to communities already dominated by LVT - then whatever you are paying in LVT at that point is nearly 100% deadweight loss,
Yes, and in what you are no doubt pleased to call your, "mind," if the government of the LVT state rounded up all the blonde 12-year-old girls and sold them as sex slaves to landowners in Pakistan, that would no doubt be another black mark against LVT.making that particular version of LVT an hypocritical sham, given that all of the benefit of all that unused/reserved land, without any compensation to anyone by the State or anyone else, has been stolen from you.
The LVT state HAS NO MOTIVE to lock up large areas of land from use. It simply gives up potential revenue. All you are doing is concocting something stupid, and claiming a government that implemented LVT would also do whatever stupid thing you concocted. It's just stupid, dishonest garbage.
Last edited by Roy L; 04-07-2012 at 03:37 PM.
And landowning requires aggressive force to deprive people of the liberty they would otherwise enjoy to use the land.
Which is working exactly according to the blandishments of anarcho-ninnies -- in Somalia.And of course the free market is perfectly capable of providing security services, including whatever force or threats of force might be necessary to protect the persons and property of paying customers.
The main principle being that you have to be an economic ignoramus who refuses to know anything about externalities, market failures, public goods, or historical fact.The same principles apply which make the market capable of providing every other type of service.
My nomination for Unconscious Self-Reference of the Month.
<yawn>And in reply to that he will write "Were you under the delusional impression you were contributing something to the discussion?" or "On the contrary, I have demolished every point you have made and you have nothing left to say." or what-ever. It really is hard to believe that a real person would be as repetitive, redundant, and tiresome as he is perfectly satisfied in being. And in spending hours upon irreplaceable hours of his life being so! It's really pretty tragic. But, it's affirming and heartening to the denizens of liberty to see our opponents so bankrupt. So carry on!
No, Helmuth, you are just lying. "Everyone" doesn't know that, because it is indisputably false. Of course appropriating natural resources as private property uses force against others. Just as soon as they show up, the resource thief ("homesteader") will enslave them. We have already established that fact by the examples of Dirtowner Harry and Thirsty, Robbingthem Crusoe and Friday, and the freed slaves of the post-Civil War South who were worse off landless and "free" than they had been when legally enslaved.And remember, as everyone knows: homesteading doesn't use force against anyone.
No, that's clearly just a lie on your part. You will always have to tell lies to rationalize greed, privilege, injustice and evil. Always. There is no other way to do it.If you're the first person to appropriate something, obviously no one else had appropriated it, so they are no worse off than before.
People don't have to have appropriated stuff to be made worse off when others appropriate it. People have liberty without appropriating it, and are made worse off when their liberty is forcibly removed without just compensation whether they have "appropriated" anything or not.
Two men are walking in the desert. One stumbles on a natural spring and "appropriates" it. Then the other arrives, and the "non-violent" "homesteader" decides that the price of a drink of water is a day's labor. He uses force -- violent, aggressive physical coercion -- to prevent the second man from drinking the water he would otherwise have been at liberty to drink, and thus permanently enslaves him, making him indisputably worse off than before.
I just proved you lied, Helmuth. Again.
You are telling evil lies again, Helmuth. It's not nice to tell evil lies to rationalize and justify two Holocausts a year worth of robbery, oppression, suffering, injustice, starvation, despair, and death.Yet you are better off, at least in your own opinion, or else you wouldn't have appropriated it. So, you are better off, no one is worse off, everyone wins.
You are lying, Helmuth, as proved above. What is blatantly, self-evidently, indisputably obvious is that someone's rights HAVE been violated. The "homesteader" couldn't enslave the other man without violating his rights.And obviously no one's rights have been violated,
Except the people that the "homesteader" enslaves once they ARE around. By what right could the "homesteader" remove other people's rights to be there and use the resources he himself claims a right to use? If anything, he has had his turn, and it is now someone else's turn.no one was around to be violated, just the homesteader by his lonesome, so again everyone wins.
I just refuted it, root and branch.This is really elementary logic, it cannot be refuted,
I definitely have. Your whole "argument" is based on your false, absurd and dishonest premise that "appropriating" for yourself what nature provided for all does not harm anyone else or violate their rights. But I have proved many times that it does. As soon as anyone else shows up, the "homesteader" will use force in an attempt to enslave them.and I already know which talking points Roy will drag out of his copy-paste text file to claim to refute it all the same, so there's no need to even bother, old buddy. Just stipulate that you already refuted it umpteen times, which, according to your definition, you have.
Roy merely proves that insane people like him have opinions too.
Last edited by Black Flag; 04-07-2012 at 12:36 AM.
You have been demolished utterly, you know it, and you have no answers. Simple.
The "intended system"? Whose intended system, specifically? Whose intentions? And why would that not be open to dispute? Is there something inherently indisputable about an intention?
Red herring, as those are examples of lands reserved for actual use.It is not true that artificial reduction of the available land would result in a deadweight loss IF the amount of land removed from the market for parks, military use, etc. is economically fixed: i.e., if it doesn't vary according to price.
The United States has a total land area of nearly 2.3 billion acres.
Forest-use land, 651 million acres (28.8 percent)
Grassland pasture and range land, 587 million acres (25.9 percent)
Cropland, 442 million acres (19.5 percent)
Special uses (primarily parks and wildlife areas), 297 million acres (13.1 percent)
Miscellaneous other uses, 228 million acres (10.1 percent)
Urban land, 60 million acres (2.6 percent).
Out of that 2.3 BILLION ACRES, I am not referring to Urban land, Special uses, or other land that is actually put to some use. And the value of those particular lands is irrelevant, as they are not on the market, not available for use. There's over a BILLION acres of land that is not put to any use whatsoever. I would be forcibly excluded from using them.
Government at all times has built-in incentive to increase revenues. IF the market truly did decide the value of all lands, artificial scarcity (via land reserves, zoning laws, special use restrictions, etc.,) are most certainly a way to increase those revenues.You may be skeptical of that proviso, but when land rent is all recovered for public purposes and benefit anyway, there is no real incentive for individuals or government to add or remove reserved land.
The reason that incentive is most definitely in place: Not all commerce requires a major metropolitan hive center from which to operate, and WILL move to the cheapest, most economically feasible areas they can find. With LVT in place as a single tax - that means CAPITAL FLIGHT to the least expensive lands.
Hershey specifically chose Oakdale, CA, to build a big plant, and received all kinds of tax breaks to do this, on the assumption that it would provide work for those in the community. The problem - the plant was mostly automated, and provided less than 600 jobs. Oakdale and other areas with similar problems finally addressed that problem -- and Hershey ultimately responded by moving its American and Canadian plants to Mexico.
Yeah, until someone (read=MANY) say, "You can keep all your wonderful publicly created value. I'll shop elsewhere -- if I am not forcibly excluded from doing so, thanks."As the benefit is publicly, not privately created, it rightly belongs to the public, no matter how badly greedy thieves want to steal it.
IF the market actually determined the land value, and that value was not distorted -- meaning that land was not made artificially scarce. Which the State has the built-in incentive to manipulate.The market would determine land value, "the State" would determine the exemption amount.
That's your red herring. Bully for those "lots of ordinary people" who actually do choose to live on "very small amounts of very valuable land" in a concrete metropolitan hive. That's them, and their choices, and not a model for everyone to follow. There are also "lots of ordinary people" who would not make that choice, and want nothing whatsoever to do with high-rises or anything that resembles a concrete hive. To me it looks like insanity, and a recipe for something "not-so-human". But I've lived in them, and see why it appeals to some. What does that have to do with those who would NOT make that choice, and want to live as far from that as possible?There are various statistical formulae that could be used to determine the exemption amount without "evil bureaucrat" intervention. Quibbling over the amount is a red herring. It's enough to live on. Actually, lots of ordinary people choose to live on very small amounts of very valuable land. See the high-rise apartment buildings of NYC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_lossYou do not know what deadweight loss is.
I was quoting wiki, which can always be wrong. Instead of merely asserting that I do not know what deadweight loss is, perhaps you could expound, and actually make an argument and explain why my understanding is wrong. Or, better yet, explain what you believe deadweight loss to be, and why my reference (which I did not write) or anything I wrote about it fell short of the mark in your mind.
You can KNOCK THAT CRAP OFF NOW. We have all been warned against making ad hominem attacks. I have stopped making them. Do likewise.Yes, and in what you are no doubt pleased to call your, "mind," if the government of the LVT state rounded up all the blonde 12-year-old girls and sold them as sex slaves to landowners in Pakistan, that would no doubt be another black mark against LVT.
Wrong. Exactly the opposite, since free market competition is ostensibly the primary value determinant, and therefore revenues. The success of LVT requires active competition for land that would drive up revenues. A finite number of competitors actively pursuing an equally finite quantity of land.The LVT state HAS NO MOTIVE to lock up large areas of land from use. It simply gives up potential revenue.
All your seeming knowledge, and you seem not to comprehend the basic fundamental role that supply scarcity plays in economics, including value, price and revenues. Land is not the only thing that has a finite quantity. In the moment, so are competitors for all land. If the government opened up all land for use under an LVT regime, more land would mean less people competing for the same land that was otherwise limited in supply. That would place downward pressure on land values in the aggregate. Hence, less revenue overall, as each competitor for land pays less overall. Increased productivity from greater use could EVENTUALLY result in increase revenues, but that would be to those communities only, and a long way off - like to the tune of generations.
Mine, of course. I'm not trying to defend other people's erroneous ideas. Life's too short.
That would be an ignoratio elenchi fallacy.And why would that not be open to dispute?
Yes. If you are not talking about the intended system, you are just trying to change the subject.Is there something inherently indisputable about an intention?
The folks who typically hoard land completely out of use are land speculators, not governments, and they are waiting for capital gains, not pursuing rent income.Red herring, as those are examples of lands reserved for actual use.
But of course, your claims are just objectively false. The billion acres you are apparently referring to are being used for forestry, grazing cattle, etc. The land is merely being used for things that you choose to call, "nothing." Furthermore, you would not be excluded from them. There's no reason to exclude you from them.The United States has a total land area of nearly 2.3 billion acres.
Forest-use land, 651 million acres (28.8 percent)
Grassland pasture and range land, 587 million acres (25.9 percent)
Cropland, 442 million acres (19.5 percent)
Special uses (primarily parks and wildlife areas), 297 million acres (13.1 percent)
Miscellaneous other uses, 228 million acres (10.1 percent)
Urban land, 60 million acres (2.6 percent).
Out of that 2.3 BILLION ACRES, I am not referring to Urban land, Special uses, or other land that is actually put to some use. And the value of those particular lands is irrelevant, as they are not on the market, not available for use. There's over a BILLION acres of land that is not put to any use whatsoever. I would be forcibly excluded from using them.
Nope. The land market is always a monopoly market. That means one rational (i.e., profit-maximizing) landowner will act the same as a million rational landowners. So if the government wants to maximize its revenue, it can only do so by charging what the market will bear on all the land. Any attempt to game the market by holding land out of use will lose more revenue on the idle land than can be gained through the increased price of the rest of the land. The only time this relationship doesn't hold is when the idle land is an actual amenity for users of nearby land, like a park in an urban area. There is a certain level and distribution of parkland that maximizes the total land rent of an urban or suburban area. But that condition obviously doesn't apply to the vast areas of marginal or sub-marginal land you are talking about.Government at all times has built-in incentive to increase revenues. IF the market truly did decide the value of all lands, artificial scarcity (via land reserves, zoning laws, special use restrictions, etc.,) are most certainly a way to increase those revenues.
Nonsense. It just means capital will seek its most appropriate and productive allocation, rather than having to account for the opportunity cost of land appreciation. Your position is simply absurd. The expensive lands are expensive BECAUSE users are willing to pay so much to use them.The reason that incentive is most definitely in place: Not all commerce requires a major metropolitan hive center from which to operate, and WILL move to the cheapest, most economically feasible areas they can find. With LVT in place as a single tax - that means CAPITAL FLIGHT to the least expensive lands.
So? The problem was the local government's attempt to second-guess the market. Hershey just took advantage of a proffered gift of land value. LVT ends all such nonsense.Hershey specifically chose Oakdale, CA, to build a big plant, and received all kinds of tax breaks to do this, on the assumption that it would provide work for those in the community. The problem - the plant was mostly automated, and provided less than 600 jobs. Oakdale and other areas with similar problems finally addressed that problem -- and Hershey ultimately responded by moving its American and Canadian plants to Mexico.
Fine. So what? You don't seem able to comprehend that LAND VALUE AUTOMATICALLY MEASURES AND ACCOUNTS FOR ALL SUCH PREFERENCES.Yeah, until someone (read=MANY) say, "You can keep all your wonderful publicly created value. I'll shop elsewhere -- if I am not forcibly excluded from doing so, thanks."
Refuted above. You just don't understand what fixity of supply implies.IF the market actually determined the land value, and that value was not distorted -- meaning that land was not made artificially scarce. Which the State has the built-in incentive to manipulate.
No, it's a reminder to you that you speak for yourself, not others.That's your red herring.
LVT gives everyone the opportunity to pay for exactly as much government as he wants.Bully for those "lots of ordinary people" who actually do choose to live on "very small amounts of very valuable land" in a concrete metropolitan hive. That's them, and their choices, and not a model for everyone to follow. There are also "lots of ordinary people" who would not make that choice, and want nothing whatsoever to do with high-rises or anything that resembles a concrete hive. To me it looks like insanity, and a recipe for something "not-so-human". But I've lived in them, and see why it appeals to some. What does that have to do with those who would NOT make that choice, and want to live as far from that as possible?
Deadweight loss is not just some circumstance some individual doesn't like. It's a reduction in the AGGREGATE production of goods and services as a result of the disincentive effect of a tax.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
I was quoting wiki, which can always be wrong. Instead of merely asserting that I do not know what deadweight loss is, perhaps you could expound, and actually make an argument and explain why my understanding is wrong. Or, better yet, explain what you believe deadweight loss to be, and why my reference (which I did not write) or anything I wrote about it fell short of the mark in your mind.
So instead you make outlandish accusations about what a government that used LVT "would" do, like deprive people of access to low-value land for no reason. Cute.You can KNOCK THAT CRAP OFF NOW. We have all been warned against making ad hominem attacks. I have stopped making them. Do likewise.
Nope. You do not understand the implications of land's fixity of supply. The government CANNOT increase total revenue by holding large areas of low-value land out of use, because what it loses on the swings, it cannot make up on the roundabouts. By forcing an inefficient allocation, it could only reduce total available land rent. It can only gain by holding land out of use to the extent that the vacant land functions as an amenity -- like "green space" in urban areas -- for users of nearby land.Wrong. Exactly the opposite, since free market competition is ostensibly the primary value determinant, and therefore revenues.
The quantity of land is not only finite (everything is finite -- except the stupidity and dishonesty of apologists for landowner privilege, of course) but FIXED. You basically just haven't accepted the economic implications of fixed supply.The success of LVT requires active competition for land that would drive up revenues. A finite number of competitors actively pursuing an equally finite quantity of land.
The supply of land is FIXED. An ordinary monopoly increases its profits by reducing supply below the market clearing price. Land is not like that. Because the supply is fixed, its production cost is zero. That means there is no way to reduce costs by reducing production, and no way to increase aggregate profit by taking any of the supply off the market.All your seeming knowledge, and you seem not to comprehend the basic fundamental role that supply scarcity plays in economics, including value, price and revenues.
No. You are getting confused with the economics of a normal monopoly. Land rent is economic advantage as already revealed in the market. By taking some land off the market, you can increase the rent of substitutable parcels; but unless that idle land actually increases the usefulness of nearby land, total rent will decline because some of the resource is being misallocated.Land is not the only thing that has a finite quantity. In the moment, so are competitors for all land. If the government opened up all land for use under an LVT regime, more land would mean less people competing for the same land that was otherwise limited in supply. That would place downward pressure on land values in the aggregate.
Wrong. That's your mistake. Each competitor doesn't pay less, because the competitors who wanted to use the land being held vacant aren't using other land as productively. They can't compete with the more efficient users of the other land, so they end up paying less for land -- so much less that the total rent is less -- and not being as productive.Hence, less revenue overall, as each competitor for land pays less overall.
You'd see increased economic growth almost instantly.Increased productivity from greater use could EVENTUALLY result in increase revenues, but that would be to those communities only, and a long way off - like to the tune of generations.
The insane make such grand claims, don't they?
Last edited by Black Flag; 04-08-2012 at 01:05 AM.
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