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Thread: The Single Tax - Land Value Tax (LVT)

  1. #1021
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    ...you will tell any lie, no matter how preposterous, about what LVT proponents plainly say, and about the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality, in order to deceive people into opposing the LVT that would make them free and prosperous.

    It's just pure evil.
    No, my fine feathered People Repellent, your version enslaves. I think that deep down inside that's what appeals to you most about it.

    It is indisputable that ownership of land and the power to dispose of it are NOT requirements for life...
    No, it's a requirement for security in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Away from your nasty, people enslaving hell of an artificial treadmill that makes swim-or-die sharks out of everyone.

    There is always going to be a barrier, because land is scarce and its supply is fixed.
    Go away with your artificial barriers to the ordinary people you are pretending to protect, but in reality pigeon-holing, and sweeping aside. It's really, really creepy.

    IOW, having realized that you intend to advocate wholesale, uncompensated violation of people's rights, you simply decide that you will not be thinking about other people's rights.
    Again with the creepy assumptions, and no respect for real rights for real individuals.

    If everyone but those acting in privilege have the right to own and dispose of an area of duty-free land, NOBODY'S rights are violated. Your fake human enslaving paradox sees everybody as violating everybody else's rights, even while privileged entities who really are prone to this behavior, and are responsible for the problem, are thrown into the mix and treated as equals. And "$#@! Granny", remember? She can get the hell out of her house and make way for "more productive hands", as we ignore the fact that "production" and "productivity" is not the purpose of a house. I don't buy into your slippery, wet, cold people-hating nastiness for a moment. Never did. Real people have something that Walmart, foreigners, speculators and others can never have, and that is worth far more than your pathetic empty promise of an exemption.

    The opportunity represented by seven acres of mountainside in Alaska is the same as the opportunity presented by seven acres of prime retail space in NYC??
    No, Mr. Coveter and worshiper of prime space in major metropolitan cities, who thinks of land only in terms of its commercial economic value. I'm not even promoting seven acres as a number each individual could have duty-free as a matter of right. Only that a fixed area, not "market value" apply equally to all who actually have human, inalienable rights.

    Even so, seven acres of prime retail space in NYC isn't a primary residence, is it. Not to mention it's usually owned by someone acting as a matter of privilege, not right - which means that LVT would apply. Seven acres of prime RESIDENTIAL space in NYC might be an option for the super-wealthy - but that's true under your nightmare of an all-enslaving plan, where the super-wealth (EVEN FOREIGNERS) can cause someone to be priced out of their home, simply because they were willing to give YOUR ALL-ENCOMPASSING DEVIL version of LVT more due. Under mine the super-wealthy would have to actually have rights, own that land as matter of right, and live on that land, declaring it as their primary residence. Otherwise, LVT applies, so they would have to pony up. Those acting as a matter of right, on the other hand, would be safe and secure - under no pressure or obligation to move or sell to anyone for any price -- a thought so unthinkable to the likes of you that it makes you physically ill to even contemplate it. Dems da breaks.

    As for "opportunity presented" to any individual in an area where they choose to purchase land, that may be a criteria for you personally, but that isn't my business or yours where others are concerned. As long as foreigners, corporations, speculators and others acting as a matter of privilege are paying the tax, speculation is a costly enterprise, and land values naturally go down. How real people with real rights behave with regard to the land they acquire duty-free is part of the free market, with nobody deprived of any right, and therefore none of your concern. They have a floor based on area, not value. You can trade up from there, but at the very least you'll be safe and secure from ravenous people-hating likes of Roy L, who wants all entities foreign and domestic, real and fictitious persons alike, treated as equals.

    As for Alaska - funny you should say that, as I see seven acres of mountainside there as worth more than anything in any metropolitan city. Pure heaven, with all the "opportunity" I need. But that's me. I don't give a $#@! about the concrete metropolises you see as models worth artificially compressing and encouraging.

    So the landowner is privileged to take the value others have created.
    No, the private primary residential landowning homeowner is truly free, is exercising rights that deprive nobody of any rights or value. She is not automatically presumed to have bought land as a commercial investment, nor presumed to be a "producer for all that the community provides". She IS presumed (as an individual with actual rights) to be part of that community that actually PROVIDES the value -- including her conditional permission, as a fellow sovereign in the community, for privileged entities to conduct themselves in her community, provided they pay the price.

    Let me guess: you own seven acres of valuable land that you are not using for anything remotely close to its productive potential.
    Wrong on two counts. I don't own seven acres of land, and I'm not so simplistic in my thoughts as to think of all land (EVEN RESIDENTIAL LAND FOR $#@!S SAKE!) in term of its "productive potential". Aside from the dwellings themselves, which are built and ultimately occupied as a matter of CONSUMPTION, NOT PRODUCTION, what exactly is "produced" on residential land? What is it about HOME LAND that keeps you looking at it only in terms of its "productive potential"?

    PRODUCTIVE TO WHOM?
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 06-16-2012 at 01:35 AM.



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  3. #1022
    Quote Originally Posted by Travlyr View Post
    RoyL. - "Liar liar pants on fire."
    There is no other way to rationalize evil, so you lie. Simple.

  4. #1023
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    No, my fine feathered People Repellent, your version enslaves.
    No, that is a lie, as proved by the slave-like condition of the landless in all countries where land is private property, but government does not intervene massively to rescue them from the invariable economic effects of private landowning. It is also proved a lie, as you know, by the conspicuously non-slave-like condition of the people of Hong Kong, where no land is privately owned.
    I think that deep down inside that's what appeals to you most about it.
    I know that deep down inside, you know that you are serving evil. I have recommended several times that you watch "Judgment at Nuremberg" to see a very astute portrayal of what you are doing and why. It has a very important lesson for you: you knew.
    No, it's a requirement for security in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
    No, Steven, you are lying again, because you know that the contrasting examples of Hong Kong and Bangladesh prove your claim is not only objectively false, but the exact, diametric opposite of the truth.
    Away from your nasty, people enslaving hell of an artificial treadmill that makes swim-or-die sharks out of everyone.
    That is an outrageous, despicable lie. It is the system of landowner privilege that forces the landless onto an enslaving, soul-destroying, artificial hell of a treadmill to power the escalator landowners ride up on at their leisure.
    Go away with your artificial barriers to the ordinary people you are pretending to protect, but in reality pigeon-holing, and sweeping aside. It's really, really creepy.
    No, it is your eagerness to lay millions of human sacrifices on the altar of your Great God Property and your personal greed for unearned wealth EVERY YEAR that is really, really, REALLY creepy.
    Again with the creepy assumptions, and no respect for real rights for real individuals.
    Again a filthy, stupid, stinking lie to rationalize privilege, justify injustice and excuse evil. Liberty is a real right of real individuals. Landowning indisputably removes it. There is no way for you to alter that fact, sorry.
    If everyone but those acting in privilege have the right to own and dispose of an area of duty-free land, NOBODY'S rights are violated.
    Again, that is plainly a lie, as the rights of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land are indisputably violated.
    Your fake human enslaving paradox sees everybody as violating everybody else's rights,
    No, that is another lie. Only those who remove others' rights to liberty by excluding them from land they would otherwise be at liberty to use are violating others' rights. You know this, as I have proved it to you many times.
    even while privileged entities who really are prone to this behavior, and are responsible for the problem, are thrown into the mix and treated as equals.
    That is another lie, as you know. Only human persons have rights to liberty, and therefore only human persons get the universal individual exemption.
    And "$#@! Granny", remember?
    Only if she is stupid, greedy, evil filth, as you claim she is.
    She can get the hell out of her house
    I.e., respond to market price signals and the invisible hand by obtaining accommodation better suited to her needs and means, to the benefit of all.

    Funny how lying anti-LVT sacks of $#!+ are so enamored of the free market, except when it means they don't get to pocket unearned wealth...
    and make way for "more productive hands", as we ignore the fact that "production" and "productivity" is not the purpose of a house.
    Yes, of course it is. The purpose of a house is to produce accommodation for its occupants. You know this. You are just lying about it.
    I don't buy into your slippery, wet, cold people-hating nastiness for a moment. Never did.
    I am trying to end the two Holocausts PER YEAR that your evil belief system causes. You have to lie to serve the evil that inflicts those Holocausts on innocent people.

    And you accuse ME of people-hating nastiness...?

    Watch "Judgment at Nuremberg." It is about you, Steven.
    No, Mr. Coveter and worshiper of prime space in major metropolitan cities, who thinks of land only in terms of its commercial economic value.
    You are lying. I am merely willing to know the relevant facts.
    I'm not even promoting seven acres as a number each individual could have duty-free as a matter of right. Only that a fixed area, not "market value" apply equally to all who actually have human, inalienable rights.
    Which is stupid, dishonest garbage, and nothing but a confession of ignorance and people-hating malice. How could owning the wildly different values of different land parcels of equal area possibly translate to any kind of equality of rights or opportunity? You are just talking stupid, dishonest garbage, and you know it.
    Even so, seven acres of prime retail space in NYC isn't a primary residence, is it.
    It could be, under your satanically evil scheme.
    Not to mention it's usually owned by someone acting as a matter of privilege, not right - which means that LVT would apply.
    All landowning is a matter or privilege, not right. LVT simply makes just compensation for the privilege.
    Seven acres of prime RESIDENTIAL space in NYC might be an option for the super-wealthy - but that's true under your nightmare of an all-enslaving plan, where the super-wealth (EVEN FOREIGNERS) can cause someone to be priced out of their home, simply because they were willing to give YOUR ALL-ENCOMPASSING DEVIL version of LVT more due.
    Right. Under my plan, the super-wealthy must make just compensation to the community for monopolizing the most advantageous land. Under your plan, the wealthy and privileged are empowered to push others out onto land that is of equal area, but so disadvantageous they can't survive there without laboring on the treadmill for the unearned profit of the privileged and greedy.

    Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.
    Under mine the super-wealthy would have to actually have rights, own that land as matter of right, and live on that land, declaring it as their primary residence.
    Forcing others out onto land where they can't survive. Right.
    Otherwise, LVT applies, so they would have to pony up. Those acting as a matter of right, on the other hand, would be safe and secure - under no pressure or obligation to move or sell to anyone for any price --
    Pocketing all the land's publicly created value, and forcing the productive to pay for government twice. Right.
    a thought so unthinkable to the likes of you that it makes you physically ill to even contemplate it.
    It is the relentless dishonesty and evil required to rationalize such hellish ideas that make me physically ill.
    As for "opportunity presented" to any individual in an area where they choose to purchase land, that may be a criteria for you personally, but that isn't my business or yours where others are concerned.
    Lie. It is my business and everyone's that the landowner removes our rights to liberty.
    As long as foreigners, corporations, speculators and others acting as a matter of privilege are paying the tax, speculation is a costly enterprise, and land values naturally go down.
    All landowning is privilege.
    How real people with real rights behave with regard to the land they acquire duty-free is part of the free market, with nobody deprived of any right, and therefore none of your concern.
    No, I already proved you are lying, as you know. Landowning inherently and indisputably deprives people of their rights to liberty. There can be no free-market landowning. It is a logical impossibility.
    They have a floor based on area, not value. You can trade up from there, but at the very least you'll be safe and secure from ravenous people-hating likes of Roy L, who wants all entities foreign and domestic, real and fictitious persons alike, treated as equals.
    Already proved a stupid, sick, vicious, evil lie. Only human persons -- in fact, only resident citizens -- would get the universal individual exemption, which, contrary to your LIES, gives them secure, free access to enough good land to live on.
    I don't give a $#@! about the concrete metropolises you see as models worth artificially compressing and encouraging.
    It is sprawl that is artificial.
    No, the private primary residential landowning homeowner is truly free, is exercising rights that deprive nobody of any rights or value.
    Already proved a stupid, sick, vicious, evil lie, as you know.
    She is not automatically presumed to have bought land as a commercial investment,
    Strawman lie.
    nor presumed to be a "producer for all that the community provides". She IS presumed (as an individual with actual rights) to be part of that community that actually PROVIDES the value -- including her conditional permission, as a fellow sovereign in the community, for privileged entities to conduct themselves in her community, provided they pay the price.
    And therefore gets her equal individual exemption.
    Wrong on two counts. I don't own seven acres of land,
    Ah, so it's more, and you foresee yourself dividing it up into equal untaxed parcels for your family. Check.
    and I'm not so simplistic in my thoughts as to think of all land (EVEN RESIDENTIAL LAND FOR $#@!S SAKE!) in term of its "productive potential".
    That's not simplistic, as it's part of reality. You just have to erase that part of reality to avoid dealing with it.
    Aside from the dwellings themselves, which are built and ultimately occupied as a matter of CONSUMPTION, NOT PRODUCTION, what exactly is "produced" on residential land?
    That is exactly it: accommodation, which is both produced and consumed in situ, and often by the same person. Do you think the residential landlord who provides the improvements, maintenance, etc. isn't producing anything? How is he producing any less if he lives there himself than if someone else lives there? Are you really deceiving yourself by assuming production only happens if there is an exchange??
    What is it about HOME LAND that keeps you looking at it only in terms of its "productive potential"?

    PRODUCTIVE TO WHOM?
    The most productive prospective user. Who might well be someone who intends to produce and consume accommodation there himself.

  5. #1024
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    No, that is a lie, proved a lie, serving evil, lying again, objectively false, the exact, diametric opposite of the truth, an outrageous, despicable lie, privilege, enslaving, soul-destroying, artificial hell, millions of human sacrifices, personal greed for unearned wealth, a filthy, stupid, stinking lie, evil, plainly a lie, rights violated, another lie, violating others' rights, another lie, stupid, greedy, evil filth, to the benefit of all, pocket unearned wealth, lying about it, two Holocausts PER YEAR, evil belief system, you have to lie to serve the evil, inflicts Holocausts, You are lying. I am merely willing to know, stupid, dishonest garbage, confession of ignorance, people-hating malice, stupid, dishonest garbage, satanically evil scheme...

    Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

    publicly created value, relentless dishonesty and evil, hellish ideas that make me physically ill. Lie, you are lying, no free-market landowning, a stupid, sick, vicious, evil lie, contrary to your LIES, a stupid, sick, vicious, evil lie, Strawman lie...
    So much guile, so much regurgitated bile, so little substance. A dystopian nightmare that should be a no-brainer to avoid for anyone with even modicum of critical thinking skills.

    You don't give a $#@! about individuals or their rights, Roy. You claim that individual rights are violated with regard to land, and yet you also claim that everything related to land is a privilege -- not a right. So actual rights are really non-existent except as collectivized under your version of a regime where LVT, not individual rights, is paramount, with everything else incidental, completely secondary. Nasty stuff - right down to your "exemption privilege".

    I'll stick with my version, thanks, with focus on individuals and their rights first, and which are above all else and NEVER collectivized.



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  7. #1025
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    So much guile, so much regurgitated bile, so little substance.
    Lie. I demolished and humiliated you for your lies and absurdities again, using indisputable fact and irrefutable logic.
    A dystopian nightmare that should be a no-brainer to avoid for anyone with even modicum of critical thinking skills.
    Which must be why it has always had profoundly beneficial effects every time it has been implemented in practice, to the extent that it has been implemented, and Nobel laureates in economics have supported it on theoretical grounds...
    You don't give a $#@! about individuals or their rights, Roy.
    You always have to lie about what I have plainly written, Steven. Observe:
    You claim that individual rights are violated with regard to land, and yet you also claim that everything related to land is a privilege -- not a right.
    No, you just lied again, Steven. I have stated many times that the legal power to exclude others from land is a privilege, but that the individual liberty to use land is a right. That right, indeed, is what MAKES the power to exclude others a privilege.

    You know this.
    So actual rights are really non-existent except as collectivized under your version of a regime where LVT, not individual rights, is paramount, with everything else incidental, completely secondary.
    Lie. LVT + UIE is merely the necessary tool to achieve the goal: to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor. It is impossible to do it any other way.
    Nasty stuff - right down to your "exemption privilege".
    Stupid lie.
    I'll stick with my version, thanks, with focus on individuals and their rights first, and which are above all else and NEVER collectivized.
    Self-contradiction. Individual rights can only exist as recognized and secured by a community ("collective"). A lone individual has no way to implement rights, which only arise through interactions in the community.
    Last edited by Roy L; 06-18-2012 at 12:31 AM.

  8. #1026
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Nobel laureates in economics have supported it on theoretical grounds...
    The Nobel Prize? No $#@!! I guess I should view that with the reverence and awe it deserves. Say no more! Paul-the-leftist-nutbag-Krugman (whose emphasis on the influence of geography on economics got him the prize), so if anyone in the same league as him is for LVT, who in their right mind could be against it, right?

    Earth to Roy: Invoking the Nobel Prize is about on par, as an appeal to authority, with your self-assertion of a "philosophy degree with honors from a respected university" -- as if that should carry any weight whatsoever here.

    I have stated many times that the legal power to exclude others from land is a privilege...
    And you have been dead wrong every time, unless you are speaking only from the normatives of your peculiar mind.

    The legal authority to use PRIVATE FORCE to forcibly exclude you from trespassing on privately held land, is a legal RIGHT, not a privilege, regardless of ownership or the nature of the taxing regime. And that force can originate privately, even though THAT RIGHT TO FORCIBLY EXCLUDE is ultimately enforceable by the State.

    ...the individual liberty to use land is a right.
    Again, a strictly geolib tenet - a normative I disagree with. But it's incorrect even under your paradigm. Anything that is conditioned on payment (from highest bidders -- to the state, not to those deprived), is an ALIENABLE PRIVILEGE, not a right.

    Furthermore, your paradigm implies that RIGHTS ARE FOR SALE. Beyond your personal proposal for a "universal individual exemption", the so-called "RIGHT" of "liberty" for land use is conditioned on payment to the state, and such "RIGHTS" are equally open - FOR SALE - to all entities (foreigners, corporations, etc.,), all of whom may COMPETE FOR RIGHTS TO LAND USE which then DRIVES LAND VALUES UP.

    Your ultimate respect is not for a "liberty right to land use", but rather the sale of such rights -- like Catholic indulgences -- as your primary and ultimate respect is for anyone's ability to pay for more for that so-called "right" to more and better lands - with the credulous naivete of an economic "trickle-down statist".

    A Universal Individual VALUE exemption for "enough good land to live on" is the bone you personally want thrown equally to all individuals - as PAYOLA for having their rights SOLD to the highest bidder, regardless of their origin or status. The individual's "right to individual liberty to use land" is infringed in exchange for payment TO THE STATE. Thus, while every individual has an equal right TO AN EQUAL EXEMPTION VALUE (whatever that is, and whatever that means) under your proposal, when it comes to better lands, some are more equal in their "rights" than others.

    LVT + UIE is merely the necessary tool to achieve the goal: to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor. It is impossible to do it any other way.
    That's your Koolaid, Roy - the Big Lie that you swallowed hard and made One With Your Soul, and are now spewing out to others. It is a Big Lie because you seem to lack the capacity to acknowledge that LVT in itself is neither a philosophy nor an economic theory. Regardless of the rationale employed by ANY of its myriad factions of proponents, LVT at its very core is nothing more than A TAXING MECHANISM, which necessarily involves the power to destroy, like any other tax.

    The ONLY way to secure the rights of individuals IS TO SECURE THEM DIRECTLY. AS RIGHTS. There is no rule of law inherent in ANY taxing mechanism which provides ANY means of securing the rights of individuals, contrary to your belief that their "rights" will be incidentally secured as a magical economic side-effect of LVT.

    ALL taxing mechanisms erode or destroy rights to property in one form or another, and can be abused as such. LVT just happens to destroy all rights to property in land. (and spare me your stupid-ass philosophical arguments about the evils of landownership).

    Because Roy L IS NEVER GOING TO BE IN CHARGE OF LVT, there is:

    • NOTHING to prevent land from being made artificially scarce, whether withheld from availability or through zoning laws
    • NOTHING to prevent the government from placing a ground rent floor that applies to everyone
    • NOTHING to prevent a multiplier for economic rents (X1.5, X2, etc.,) from kicking in later
    • NOTHING to prevent special treatment through exemptions to privileged entities (e.g., Economic Development Zones)
    • NOTHING to prevent the state from NEVER implementing a "Universal Individual Exemption in the first place

    The fact that Roy L would say, "None of that is what I am proposing, or what I consider LVT" is MEANINGLESS. It is also incorrect, because the only requirement for a tax to be considered "LVT" is that it be ad valorem, and based on land value only. Whether all lands are made available, or whether there is an exemption or dividends comes NOT by virtue of the tax itself, but by virtue ONLY of the political, economic and philosophical arguments presented by LVT proponents -- all separate from LVT. LVT in itself has nothing to do with any of that, including who is exempt or might receive special treatment, or to what extent, or even what "mill rate" or percentage (80%? 100%? 150% 500% 2,000%?) is deemed "necessary for government to function properly".

    Yeah, I know, George, Georgists and all its spinoffs "advocate" only 80-100% ground rent recovery, and have myriad theories (including Henry George's Theorem) in support of their proposals. So $#@!ing what? Theorize and advocate in one hand, and take a crap in the other. Pointing to your favorite "success story" for LVT is no different. That's them, this is us. All governments operate and implement differently, and ours is already proved that it is prone to major economic and political abuses.

    That's not "meeza hatesa gubmint" talk. That's respect for history and political reality that must be acknowledged and can be planned for and preempted in advance.

    There is ONLY ONE way that I can think of that would render all of the abuse possibilities irrelevant. A way that would actually secure individual rights while allowing LVT to exist and function in a positive way in a free market (free to individuals, that is).

    If free and natural Citizens were IMMUNE from LVT, being the only entities with an actual RIGHT IN PROPERTY IN LAND (limited by population/area ratio), there would be a natural check and balance on the taxing jurisdiction that would not otherwise exist. It would be IMPOSSIBLE for the State to directly abuse individuals. It could only INDIRECTLY hurt them through its abuse of privileged entities. The more the taxing jurisdiction taxes privileged entities, the more it would result in a DECREASE IN GROUND RENTS, and an increase in competitive advantages that would inure only to people with actual rights. Because of this fact alone, each taxing jurisdiction (all of which in theory would compete with one another) would be naturally forced to strike a balance, because raising tax rates, which it could only do on the privileged entities it relies on for revenues could result in capital flight, or lower revenues. Meanwhile, the people themselves - the individuals acting and existing as a matter of right, are insulated, immune -- free to the area extent that their immunity rights allow.

    Self-contradiction. Individual rights can only exist as recognized and secured by a community ("collective"). A lone individual has no way to implement rights, which only arise through interactions in the community.
    That's some idiotic logic at work there, as you once again play fast and loose with that nebulous, abstract bull$#@! sleaze word "community". "through interactions with THE COMMUNITY", my ass. There is a world of difference between the power and authority delegated to the State (GOVERNMENT ONLY -- "Our Delegated Security Guards For Hire" -- NOT "COMMUNITY") to secure individual rights, and the idiocy of individual rights that are simply collectivized by the collectivist-minded -- with bull$#@! words like "community", which rights are then made artificially equal in value.

    Equal rights does not mean equal value in rights. We both agree that everyone has a right to their labors, and the fruits of their labor, but that does not mean that they have rights to equal value in their labors. The same goes for LAND under any regime - propertarian landownership OR geoist. Under EITHER regime I have the "right" to pursue and possess lands of any value. But that "right" of pursuit does not translate equally to everyone, as the quality of that right - the value of that land - is conditioned in all cases on one's ABILITY AND WILLINGNESS TO PAY.

    Your "UIE" (as you propose it) provides an exemption of "equal value" for everyone, which you think satisfies "just compensation" to everyone for their "equal right of liberty" NOT to be excluded from use of lands (which are NEVER of equal value). But the fact that the exemption is based on value, and not area, means that the "equal right of liberty" is automatically narrowed when it comes to lands which are valued most (by whomever). And that's where you screw the pooch (screw individuals, actually).

    Where you UTTERLY FAIL is in your assumption that government, nature and "community" provides, or "creates" land values. It's a half truth at best, a bull$#@! assumption in reality, because absent entities (BUYERS) that are able and willing to pay, there is ZERO LAND VALUE. That's fundamental economics, of course, but what does that have to do with the geolib claims that ignore this reality, and focus only on the supply side of value?

    The ultimate reality is that those responsible for creating/providing tangibles and circumstances, and which claiming the right of returns for such, are by definition THE SELLER. It is an inescapable fact of objective reality that there is NO VALUE POSSIBLE WITHOUT A BUYER. That's the fatal missing link in geoist thought regarding land rents. Since land is assumed to be fixed in supply (assuming it is not artificially withheld from market availability), competing entities ("buyers", who are not necessarily individuals) are ALWAYS the ultimate cause, creators and determiners of land values. Increases in the value of land are ultimately "created" by MORE BUYERS DEMONSTRATING THE ABILITY AND WILLINGNESS TO PAY MORE FOR THE SAME THING.

    How does that affect individuals? Individuals are not the only entities who are buyers. There is a population of artificial individuals with whom they are forced to compete, which entities are regarded as being on equal economic footing with real people. The vast majority of individuals - the average Jane and Joe Six-packs of the Earth, are NOT RESPONSIBLE for major increases in land values. Entities acting as a matter of privilege are.

    The value of your so-called Universal Individual Exemption can be ERODED by competition from foreigners, corporations, and other entities that exist as a matter of privilege only, and have no "inalienable rights". And yet they have the power to influence the value of land itself, and therefore the power to erode the value of the Universal Individual Exemption. That this can be "adjusted" by the taxing authority is meaningless, and represents no security as matter of principle.

    But you don't give a $#@!. You would allow foreigners, corporations and other privileged entities into the fray on EQUAL FOOTING WITH INDIVIDUALS, with no natural checks or balances on the State. These entities can BUY THE RIGHT TO OTHER INDIVIDUALS' LIBERTY by simply showing "evidence of their superior productivity" (willingness to pay more to the State). The net effect: land value increases caused by privileged entities decrease the value of the UIE, or "compensation for natural liberty rights to use of lands". Given that you, like government, are seeking to fix "value" -- not the value of land itself, but the monetary value of the exemption used to acquire the use of lands that are NOT fixed in value.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 06-18-2012 at 06:45 AM.

  9. #1027
    Another tsunami of stupid garbage....
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Earth to Roy: Invoking the Nobel Prize is about on par, as an appeal to authority, with your self-assertion of a "philosophy degree with honors from a respected university" -- as if that should carry any weight whatsoever here.
    It demolishes your puerile claim that LVT advocates "lack critical thinking skills."
    And you have been dead wrong every time, unless you are speaking only from the normatives of your peculiar mind.
    Thank you for admitting you lied again when you claimed I said everything to do with land is a privilege.

    You just lie and lie and lie, and then get all indignant when I identify that fact.

    Beneath contempt.
    The legal authority to use PRIVATE FORCE to forcibly exclude you from trespassing on privately held land, is a legal RIGHT, not a privilege, regardless of ownership or the nature of the taxing regime.
    <yawn> So is the state's legal RIGHT to levy LVT, so you just agreed that you are totally wrong, have always been wrong, and have been lying about everything.
    And that force can originate privately, even though THAT RIGHT TO FORCIBLY EXCLUDE is ultimately enforceable by the State.
    So you agree that you lied, and landowning is nothing but a state-issued privilege. Good.
    Again, a strictly geolib tenet - a normative I disagree with.
    While you clearly do not believe in the right to liberty, calling it "normative" does not alter the fact that the natural liberty to use land is a physical fact our ancestors lived by for millions of years, until the state started issuing exclusion privileges.
    But it's incorrect even under your paradigm. Anything that is conditioned on payment (from highest bidders -- to the state, not to those deprived), is an ALIENABLE PRIVILEGE, not a right.
    <sigh> It is the privilege to exclude that goes to the high bidder, not the right to use. You know this, as it has been explained to you multiple times, and are just deliberately lying about it.
    Furthermore, your paradigm implies that RIGHTS ARE FOR SALE.
    Lie. My paradigm simply is willing to know the fact that when rights are violated, just compensation is due. It is YOUR paradigm that explicitly states that rights are for sale: the landowner sells everyone else's liberty rights to the next landowner.
    Your ultimate respect is not for a "liberty right to land use", but rather the sale of such rights -- like Catholic indulgences -- as your primary and ultimate respect is for anyone's ability to pay for more for that so-called "right" to more and better lands - with the credulous naivete of an economic "trickle-down statist".
    Stupid, evil filth disproved above.
    A Universal Individual VALUE exemption for "enough good land to live on" is the bone you personally want thrown equally to all individuals - as PAYOLA for having their rights SOLD to the highest bidder, regardless of their origin or status.
    No, you're lying again. It's the necessary implementation of the relevant moral principle.
    The individual's "right to individual liberty to use land" is infringed in exchange for payment TO THE STATE.
    Because the state is the only way to secure and reconcile people's equal rights -- and it's better than infringing that right with nothing given in exchange.
    Thus, while every individual has an equal right TO AN EQUAL EXEMPTION VALUE (whatever that is, and whatever that means) under your proposal, when it comes to better lands, some are more equal in their "rights" than others.
    Stupid lie.
    That's your Koolaid, Roy - the Big Lie that you swallowed hard and made One With Your Soul, and are now spewing out to others.
    That is a contentless spew of stupid, dishonest filth.
    It is a Big Lie because you seem to lack the capacity to acknowledge that LVT in itself is neither a philosophy nor an economic theory.
    No, that is another stupid lie from you. I have never said it is a philosophy or economic theory. It's a policy tool, like prohibiting slavery -- but far more important.
    Regardless of the rationale employed by ANY of its myriad factions of proponents, LVT at its very core is nothing more than A TAXING MECHANISM, which necessarily involves the power to destroy, like any other tax.
    True. But unlike other taxes, LVT involves the power to destroy privilege, injustice, poverty, unemployment, tyranny, oppression and despair.
    The ONLY way to secure the rights of individuals IS TO SECURE THEM DIRECTLY. AS RIGHTS.
    That's clearly false, as the Tragedy of the Commons proves. If everyone has a right to use a depletable resource like a fish stock, then it will be depleted, and the right to use it will be removed, not secured. Tax the depletion, OTOH, and you indirectly preserve the resource and the right to use it. That proves you are objectively wrong. As usual.
    There is no rule of law inherent in ANY taxing mechanism which provides ANY means of securing the rights of individuals, contrary to your belief that their "rights" will be incidentally secured as a magical economic side-effect of LVT.
    Proved false above.
    ALL taxing mechanisms erode or destroy rights to property in one form or another, and can be abused as such.
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. A tax on a privilege does not erode or destroy a right to property, because there is no right to property involved. You are just committing another question-begging fallacy by ASSUMING that there are valid property rights in land.
    LVT just happens to destroy all rights to property in land.
    Question-begging fallacy. Blatantly.
    Because Roy L IS NEVER GOING TO BE IN CHARGE OF LVT[/I][/B], there is:
    NOTHING to prevent land from being made artificially scarce, whether withheld from availability or through zoning laws
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. Government's own financial interest prevents land from being made artificially scarce. Why even bother saying something so stupid and dishonest?
    NOTHING to prevent the government from placing a ground rent floor that applies to everyone
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. Government's own political interest prevents it from placing a ground rent floor. You could with equal "logic" claim there is NOTHING to prevent government from just killing everyone and taking all their stuff. It's just stupid, "meeza hatesa gubmint" gibbering. Why even bother saying something so stupid and dishonest?
    NOTHING to prevent a multiplier for economic rents (X1.5, X2, etc.,) from kicking in later
    Another stupid lie. Government can't get more than the rent any more than private landowners can. Why even bother saying something so stupid and dishonest?
    NOTHING to prevent special treatment through exemptions to privileged entities (e.g., Economic Development Zones)
    Already refuted dozens of times. Government's own desire for revenue prevents it. Why even bother saying something so stupid and dishonest?
    NOTHING to prevent the state from NEVER implementing a "Universal Individual Exemption in the first place
    Other than accountability to the voters -- which would be the only thing that could ever get LVT implemented in the first place.
    The fact that Roy L would say, "None of that is what I am proposing, or what I consider LVT" is MEANINGLESS.
    No, it's not, stop telling such stupid, evil lies. You could with equal "logic" claim that anti-abortionists favor late-term abortions, and when they identify the fact that you are lying your evil, lying, $#!+-filled head off, claim that what they say they advocate is "MEANINGLESS."
    It is also incorrect, because the only requirement for a tax to be considered "LVT" is that it be ad valorem, and based on land value only.
    That is technically correct -- you shocked me for a moment by not lying -- but "LVT" is generally considered a short form for "full land rent recovery," which could also be implemented by leasing public land, not just by taxing private landowning.
    Whether all lands are made available, or whether there is an exemption or dividends comes NOT by virtue of the tax itself, but by virtue ONLY of the political, economic and philosophical arguments presented by LVT proponents -- all separate from LVT.
    True. LVT is simply the necessary method of securing and reconciling the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor. It is not a principle but a way of implementing principles -- which must always have priority.
    LVT in itself has nothing to do with any of that, including who is exempt or might receive special treatment, or to what extent, or even what "mill rate" or percentage (80%? 100%? 150% 500% 2,000%?) is deemed "necessary for government to function properly".
    And...? So what? You just don't understand the math of LVT, so you think a 500% land value tax can get more than the land rent. It can't.
    Yeah, I know, George, Georgists and all its spinoffs "advocate" only 80-100% ground rent recovery, and have myriad theories (including Henry George's Theorem) in support of their proposals. So $#@!ing what?
    So you have no arguments, and just refuse to address ours.
    Pointing to your favorite "success story" for LVT is no different. That's them, this is us.
    You are aware of the fact that all factual evidence is on our side, so you have no choice but to dismiss it and refuse to consider it.
    All governments operate and implement differently, and ours is already proved that it is prone to major economic and political abuses.
    Yep. Basically from the time the Founding Fathers knuckled under to evil, greedy landowners and replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution.
    That's not "meeza hatesa gubmint" talk. That's respect for history and political reality that must be acknowledged and can be planned for and preempted in advance.
    I've already proved that claiming some other system will be implemented instead of LVT is not an argument against LVT unless you can show specifically why the attempt to implement LVT would result in that other system being implemented. Which you cannot.
    If free and natural Citizens were IMMUNE from LVT, being the only entities with an actual RIGHT IN PROPERTY IN LAND
    You know I have proved no such right can exist.
    (limited by population/area ratio),
    Blithely contradicting yourself again, I see....
    there would be a natural check and balance on the taxing jurisdiction that would not otherwise exist.
    Lie, as proved above.
    It would be IMPOSSIBLE for the State to directly abuse individuals.
    But easy for individuals to abuse -- in fact, enslave -- other individuals.
    It could only INDIRECTLY hurt them through its abuse of privileged entities. The more the taxing jurisdiction taxes privileged entities, the more it would result in a DECREASE IN GROUND RENTS, and an increase in competitive advantages that would inure only to people with actual rights.
    You don't understand the Law of Rent, either.
    Because of this fact alone, each taxing jurisdiction (all of which in theory would compete with one another) would be naturally forced to strike a balance, because raising tax rates, which it could only do on the privileged entities it relies on for revenues could result in capital flight, or lower revenues.
    No, it would just result in all the land being held tax-free, and the big landholders enslaving everyone else, just as happened in ancient Rome.
    Meanwhile, the people themselves - the individuals acting and existing as a matter of right, are insulated, immune -- free to the area extent that their immunity rights allow.
    No. The landowners would be free, and everyone else would be their slaves.
    That's some idiotic logic at work there, as you once again play fast and loose with that nebulous, abstract bull$#@! sleaze word "community".
    It's a perfectly good word, you just refuse to know the fact it identifies.
    "through interactions with THE COMMUNITY", my ass.
    I said IN the community, and yes, you're ass.
    There is a world of difference between the power and authority delegated to the State (GOVERNMENT ONLY -- "Our Delegated Security Guards For Hire" -- NOT "COMMUNITY") to secure individual rights, and the idiocy of individual rights that are simply collectivized by the collectivist-minded -- with bull$#@! words like "community", which rights are then made artificially equal in value.
    Meaningless gibberish.
    Equal rights does not mean equal value in rights. We both agree that everyone has a right to their labors, and the fruits of their labor, but that does not mean that they have rights to equal value in their labors. The same goes for LAND under any regime - propertarian landownership OR geoist. Under EITHER regime I have the "right" to pursue and possess lands of any value. But that "right" of pursuit does not translate equally to everyone, as the quality of that right - the value of that land - is conditioned in all cases on one's ABILITY AND WILLINGNESS TO PAY.
    Another stupid lie. The UIE is equal for all resident citizens, regardless of ability and willingness to pay.
    Your "UIE" (as you propose it) provides an exemption of "equal value" for everyone, which you think satisfies "just compensation" to everyone for their "equal right of liberty" NOT to be excluded from use of lands (which are NEVER of equal value).
    Stupid lie. Two plots of land that are both worth $50K are of equal value. Why even bother saying something so stupid and dishonest?
    But the fact that the exemption is based on value, and not area, means that the "equal right of liberty" is automatically narrowed when it comes to lands which are valued most (by whomever). And that's where you screw the pooch (screw individuals, actually).
    Stupid, meaningless garbage.
    Where you UTTERLY FAIL is in your assumption that government, nature and "community" provides, or "creates" land values.
    It is indisputable fact.
    It's a half truth at best, a bull$#@! assumption in reality, because absent entities (BUYERS) that are able and willing to pay, there is ZERO LAND VALUE.
    No, I've already proved that stupid, dishonest garbage is stupid and dishonest. The economic advantage conferred by government, the community and nature is what MAKES buyers willing AND ABLE to pay.
    That's fundamental economics, of course, but what does that have to do with the geolib claims that ignore this reality, and focus only on the supply side of value?
    There is no supply side to land value, because supply is fixed. Value is therefore determined exclusively by demand.
    The ultimate reality is that those responsible for creating/providing tangibles and circumstances, and which claiming the right of returns for such, are by definition THE SELLER.
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. The seller could be comatose, and the land would be worth the same. The land seller provides absolutely nothing but a pocket demanding to be filled. You know this.
    It is an inescapable fact of objective reality that there is NO VALUE POSSIBLE WITHOUT A BUYER.
    Nope. Wrong again. Value is entirely possible without a buyer, it just requires a BIDDER. It is PRICE that requires a buyer, and a seller.
    That's the fatal missing link in geoist thought regarding land rents.
    You don't even know what land rent is.
    Since land is assumed to be fixed in supply (assuming it is not artificially withheld from market availability),
    It is a fact that land is fixed in suplpy, and no such assumption is required.
    competing entities ("buyers", who are not necessarily individuals) are ALWAYS the ultimate cause, creators and determiners of land values.
    Wrong, and infinitely stupid and dishonest. It is indisputable that the buyers would not be interested unless the land already had value. You know this.
    Increases in the value of land are ultimately "created" by MORE BUYERS DEMONSTRATING THE ABILITY AND WILLINGNESS TO PAY MORE FOR THE SAME THING.
    No, the buyers only become interested in the first place because government and the community have created the value. Buyer interest only MEASURES value, it does not CREATE value. It is the economic advantage government and the community create at that location that makes buyers willing to pay. This is self-evident.
    The value of your so-called Universal Individual Exemption can be ERODED by competition from foreigners, corporations, and other entities that exist as a matter of privilege only, and have no "inalienable rights".
    No, it can't. If other entities bid up rents, the UIE also rises.
    And yet they have the power to influence the value of land itself, and therefore the power to erode the value of the Universal Individual Exemption. That this can be "adjusted" by the taxing authority is meaningless, and represents no security as matter of principle.
    Stupid, dishonest garbage beneath contempt.
    But you don't give a $#@!. You would allow foreigners, corporations and other privileged entities
    Foreigners are not privileged entities, stop lying.
    into the fray on EQUAL FOOTING WITH INDIVIDUALS, with no natural checks or balances on the State.
    Lie. They would have no UIEs, and I have explained the natural checks and balances many times. You just ignore and lie about them.
    These entities can BUY THE RIGHT TO OTHER INDIVIDUALS' LIBERTY
    No, they buy a privilege of violating it -- but unlike a buyer from a private landowner, they pay the compensation to the right parties.
    by simply showing "evidence of their superior productivity" (willingness to pay more to the State).
    Lie. They have to actually make the payment, not just say they are willing to.
    The net effect: land value increases caused by privileged entities decrease the value of the UIE, or "compensation for natural liberty rights to use of lands".
    Disproved above.
    Given that you, like government, are seeking to fix "value" -- not the value of land itself, but the monetary value of the exemption used to acquire the use of lands that are NOT fixed in value.
    Cannot parse.

  10. #1028
    While you clearly do not believe in the right to liberty...
    Not your specific brand of "liberty", to be sure - the word you bandy about generically, but which is only intended within the narrowed context of your normative (the specific "otherwise liberty" you think "ought" to be recognized as both a moral and legal right of liberty).

    It is the privilege to exclude that goes to the high bidder, not the right to use.
    You have it exactly backwards. But that's because you don't know anything about legal definitions, the law or how it works.

    Consider any apartment rental. The conditional terms of privileged use are specified in the rental agreement (e.g., must pay full rent, on time, may not alter the premises, paint the walls a different color, etc.,) because the use of that space is a LICENSED PRIVILEGE. It doesn't matter whether the rental is from a private owner or from the state. The only privilege involved in a rental agreement is the privilege to use, conditioned on performance according the terms of the contract.

    Once a contract is entered into, and consideration is exchanged, other RIGHTS, including the RIGHT to forcibly exclude others from that space, transfers from the owner to the tenant. Fourth Amendment rights fully apply, as does the RIGHT to defend that space from intruders and trespassers. None of those types of rights are privileges -- even for renters.

    Likewise with a car rental. Privileged, limited license to use. And if you try to jack my car, and I'm strong enough, I can beat your ass into the dirt (i.e., use only that force required to repel or detain you while protecting myself and the car), as I spider you into a tiny ball, hog-tie and forcibly bind you with tie-wraps, cellophane, clothes hanger wire, or whatever else is handy, until the authorities arrive. That is because it is my right, not privilege, to forcibly exclude you.

    You know this, as it has been explained to you multiple times...
    Explaining the machinations of your strange and anomalous mind - once or multiple times - is not the same thing as establishing fact, truth, morality or anything else.

    My paradigm simply is willing to know the fact that when rights are violated, just compensation is due.
    Well, in the case of an apartment rental, you still think that others in the community have a "natural liberty right" (MORALLY SPEAKING) to use the land beneath that space, regardless who occupies it. That's the "right" (MORAL, NOT LEGAL) that you feel is being violated, the "fact" which you are "willing to know", which means that you are the one who is question begging - from your own premises.

    It is YOUR paradigm that explicitly states that rights are for sale: the landowner sells everyone else's liberty rights to the next landowner.
    Again more question begging, as you don't even acknowledge landownership as a (MORAL) right, but ignore the fact that it is a legal right, even as you see everyone else in the community as having a "NATURAL LIBERTY" (MORAL) right to use of that same land.

    [LVT is] the necessary implementation of the relevant moral principle.
    Gobbletygook. It's an implementation of a taxing mechanism, nothing more, regardless of rationale or relevance to your morality.

    I have never said it is a philosophy or economic theory. It's a policy tool, like prohibiting slavery -- but far more important.
    Semantics, gibberish, and incorrect in the absolute.

    Slavery was not ended by implementing a "policy tool" that promised to end it. Slavery was not ended by a SLAVE VALUE TAX. Slavery was ended by it EXPLICIT abolition, and a full declaration that former slaves were free. PERIOD. NOT a proviso that the governments only could own slaves, or that people could own slaves so long as they paid the SLV, or leased them directly from the government - which would then act as the SLAVE VALUE CAPTURE AND RETURN mechanism for the benefit of slaves.

    But unlike other taxes, LVT involves the power to destroy privilege, injustice, poverty, unemployment, tyranny, oppression and despair.
    Meaningless geolib propaganda gibberish. Anyone can assert the same for any political regime. And they do. Communism, socialism, fascism, brutal despotic dictatorships, leaders of banana republics, etc., all promise to destroy privilege, injustice, poverty, unemployment, tyranny, oppression and despair. All a bunch of Gilligans who "promise to do dis, dat, and da udda ting".

    The ONLY way to secure the rights of individuals IS TO SECURE THEM DIRECTLY. AS RIGHTS.
    That's clearly false, as the Tragedy of the Commons proves.
    The Tragedy of the (unmanaged) Commons (Hardin, 1968) was an indictment of your idea that all individuals, jointly and severally (communally) have "natural liberty rights" to the same resource. It dealt with depletion (read=destruction, damage, overexploitation, extinction) of a natural resource based on unrestricted, unmanaged COMMUNAL usage (aka "equal liberty rights to all"). In fact, it was Hardin himself who recommended that the tragedy of the commons could be prevented by a) more government regulation or b) privatizing the commons property.

    If everyone has a right to use a depletable resource like a fish stock, then it will be depleted, and the right to use it will be removed, not secured.
    That brings us full circle to YOUR big "IF", not mine. When I say "rights of individuals" with respect to land - it's individual rights with respect to individual parcels of land -- I am NOT using your COMMONS PARADIGM (a collectivist notion that is completely $#@!ed up and unsustainable to begin with) concerning what you think the rights of individual rights of liberty to land use morally are, or legally ought to be, as a many-people-to-many-parcels collectivized "Commons-rights-that-need-to-be-managed" relationship.

    I said that the only way to secure the rights of individuals is to secure them directly. As individual rights - not to "liberty rights of access to the same resource". And that is clearly true, as the abolishment of slavery proves. Taxing slave ownership "as a policy tool" was tried in vain.

    A tax on a privilege (question begging) does not erode or destroy a right (question begging, with no understanding of law) to property, because there is no right (question begging, no distinction between moral or legal) to property involved. You are just committing another question-begging fallacy by ASSUMING that there are valid (flagrant question begging, with you the arbiter of what "valid" - presumably "morally valid" - means) property rights in land.
    Yes, it is a question-begging fallacy on your part. Blatantly. Two factors that make it difficult to have any kind of reasonable discussion or debate with you: Firstly, you don't seem to know the difference between a positive and normative statement (which is strange, for someone claiming to have graduated with honors with a philosophy degree from a respected university) - this causes you to repeatedly make false statements, or to challenge statements of fact that are not controversial at all. For example, landownership rights, or property rights in land, DO exist currently as legal rights. But you challenge this as question begging, or false, on moral or philosophical grounds, as not being "valid" or "moral" rights -- even when only the legal definition was used and intended, which makes it a positive statement of fact. Not truth. Not morally right. Just fact.

    You refer to landownership, or property rights in land, as "landowner privilege" on moral, political and philosophical grounds, and try to pass that NORMATIVE off a positive statement of fact. But it's only "fact" when viewed from your mind, and accepting your normative as if it were fact. You alternate willy-nilly, with a convenience that suits your own purposes, and without distinction or clarification, between moral, philosophical and legal definitions of the same word, as if they were all the same -- even though YOUR intent is quite obvious in every context you employ.

    Government's own financial interest prevents land from being made artificially scarce.
    Even IF that was true, there is nothing inherent about government that causes it to act - especially long term - in its own financial interests. Deficit spending, a debauched currency and the very existence of the Fed it created is proof enough of that. The fact that it's long-term economic suicide is irrelevant (to them), as their SHORT TERM financial interests were more than taken care of. And making lands artificially scarce is a reality in your precious Hong Kong - as 95% of the land even now remains raw, undeveloped, and UNAVAILABLE TO THE MARKET.

    Government's own political interest prevents it from placing a ground rent floor.
    That's not naivete on your part, Roy, that's a total disconnect from reality.

    Its "own political interest"? Governments (ideologues and self-interested people in power) test political waters. That's what they do best. Upon finding that there are no political ramifications for a given corrupt act, it is only a matter of degree and time, as those boundaries continue to be tested. Whatever the political market will bear - that's the price we all pay; in ANY political direction. Did political interest prevent the Fed from coming into existence? Did it prevent the right to own gold from being illegally done away with? Did political interest prevent income taxes from getting driven like a wedge into the lives of ordinary wage earners? Did political interest prevent Japanese Citizens from being singled out and put into camps?

    What the $#@! does "political interest" mean anyway? Majorities and oligarchies, governments of all kinds, have PROVED capable of atrocities, and it is often the very ATROCITIES they commit that have proved to be in their "political interest"! In the case of a brutal dictatorship, it may be in the "political interests" of the brutal dictator to KILL ALL DISSENTERS. Ever heard of Mao, Stalin or Polpot?

    You could with equal "logic" claim there is NOTHING to prevent government from just killing everyone and taking all their stuff.
    I don't need to claim such a thing, or use logic in some vacuous hypothetical in a philosophical context. IT IS AN HISTORICAL FACT. Not "killing everyone", because it doesn't work that way and NEVER DID. They kill or otherwise dominate, drive out or marginalize, certain politically weaker everyones. Cowboys and Injuns. Germans and Jews. Bourgeois and Proletariat. Winners and losers. Governments have, in fact, and many times throughout human history, killed MASSES and taken (REDISTRIBUTED) "all their stuff".

    Do you actually even live on this planet?

    If other entities bid up rents, the UIE also rises.
    Bull$#@!. We don't even know if a UIE would exist (UIE is not required for LVT to exist), let alone, and most importantly, how such an exemption would be formulated or determined by those who are NOT ROY L (read= the vast majority of the population, and 100% of those most likely to be in charge of implementation).

    Face it, Roy. It's not "gubmint" meeza hates. Meeza lubza my gubmint. Yousa hatesa-hatesa-hatesa my gubmint, just as meeza hatesa yours.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 06-19-2012 at 02:02 PM.

  11. #1029
    Steven has spewed forth another tsunami of stupid, dishonest garbage, repeating for the hundredth time fallacies, absurdities and lies he knows I already demolished 99 times before.
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Not your specific brand of "liberty", to be sure - the word you bandy about generically, but which is only intended within the narrowed context of your normative (the specific "otherwise liberty" you think "ought" to be recognized as both a moral and legal right of liberty).
    Lie. The liberty right I am talking about is simply recognition of the natural physical liberty all human beings enjoy as a matter of objective physical fact, unless others remove it by violent, aggressive, forcible physical coercion.
    You have it exactly backwards. But that's because you don't know anything about legal definitions, the law or how it works.
    Stupid, dishonest garbage.
    Consider any apartment rental.
    There is no right to apartments. You just have to change the subject.
    The conditional terms of privileged use are specified in the rental agreement (e.g., must pay full rent, on time, may not alter the premises, paint the walls a different color, etc.,) because the use of that space is a LICENSED PRIVILEGE. It doesn't matter whether the rental is from a private owner or from the state. The only privilege involved in a rental agreement is the privilege to use, conditioned on performance according the terms of the contract.
    Another stupid lie. The rental contract explicitly gives the tenant the power to exclude others, including the landlord except under specified conditions. You know this. You just decided deliberately to lie about it. Everything you say is objectively false.
    Once a contract is entered into, and consideration is exchanged, other RIGHTS, including the RIGHT to forcibly exclude others from that space, transfers from the owner to the tenant. Fourth Amendment rights fully apply, as does the RIGHT to defend that space from intruders and trespassers. None of those types of rights are privileges -- even for renters.
    That's because "privilege" is from the Latin for "private law," and a contract is not a law. Land titles, OTOH, are laws.
    Well, in the case of an apartment rental, you still think that others in the community have a "natural liberty right" (MORALLY SPEAKING) to use the land beneath that space, regardless who occupies it. That's the "right" (MORAL, NOT LEGAL) that you feel is being violated, the "fact" which you are "willing to know", which means that you are the one who is question begging - from your own premises.
    Nope. The premises in question are objective, physical facts, not assumptions.
    Again more question begging, as you don't even acknowledge landownership as a (MORAL) right, but ignore the fact that it is a legal right, even as you see everyone else in the community as having a "NATURAL LIBERTY" (MORAL) right to use of that same land.
    You constantly beg the question, so of course you must falsely accuse me of doing so. You have no choice. That is the invariable pattern of the dishonest and evil.
    It's an implementation of a taxing mechanism, nothing more, regardless of rationale or relevance to your morality.
    Nope, that's just another stupid lie on your part. A taxing mechanism can't be an implementation of itself, that's a self-reference fallacy.
    Semantics, gibberish, and incorrect in the absolute.
    It is objectively correct and indisputable.
    Slavery was not ended by implementing a "policy tool" that promised to end it.
    Yes, actually, it was, beginning with prohibitions on importation of slaves, laws defining legal protections for slaves, etc.
    Slavery was not ended by a SLAVE VALUE TAX.
    Because that was not the appropriate policy tool for that problem. Slaves were often taxed, though not by value. In any case you are just spewing stupid, dishonest filth.
    Slavery was ended by it EXPLICIT abolition, and a full declaration that former slaves were free. PERIOD.
    Lie disproved above. We can add the history of emancipation to the subjects of which you have proved yourself comprehensively ignorant.
    NOT a proviso that the governments only could own slaves, or that people could own slaves so long as they paid the SLV, or leased them directly from the government - which would then act as the SLAVE VALUE CAPTURE AND RETURN mechanism for the benefit of slaves.
    Stupid, irrelevant and dishonest garbage. No one has claimed a slave value tax would have been an appropriate policy tool to end slavery.
    Meaningless geolib propaganda gibberish.
    Fact. You claimed that LVT "like any tax," had "the power to destroy." I identified the evils it has the power to destroy. If you think it is going to destroy anything else, anything desirable, the way income tax destroys production and sales tax destroys consumption (the goal and purpose of all economic activity), then you will have to identify it and risk being proved a liar.
    Anyone can assert the same for any political regime. And they do.
    But unlike LVT advocates, without any basis in economic fact.
    Communism, socialism, fascism, brutal despotic dictatorships, leaders of banana republics, etc., all promise to destroy privilege, injustice, poverty, unemployment, tyranny, oppression and despair. All a bunch of Gilligans who "promise to do dis, dat, and da udda ting".
    But unlike them, LVT actually pushes the levers of economic incentive to achieve the destruction of those evils.
    The Tragedy of the (unmanaged) Commons (Hardin, 1968) was an indictment of your idea that all individuals, jointly and severally (communally) have "natural liberty rights" to the same resource.
    Lie. It simply identified a conflict in the unconstrained exercise of those rights.
    It dealt with depletion (read=destruction, damage, overexploitation, extinction) of a natural resource based on unrestricted, unmanaged COMMUNAL usage (aka "equal liberty rights to all". In fact, it was Hardin himself who recommended that the tragedy of the commons could be prevented by a) more government regulation or b) privatizing the commons property.
    No, he recommended public management and rent recovery under broadly geoist principles, and understood that privatization was, for all but the owner, no better than depletion.
    That brings us full circle to YOUR big "IF", not mine. When I say "rights of individuals" with respect to land - it's individual rights with respect to individual parcels of land -- I am NOT using your COMMONS PARADIGM (a collectivist notion that is completely $#@!ed up and unsustainable to begin with) concerning what you think the rights of individual rights of liberty to land use morally are, or legally ought to be, as a many-people-to-many-parcels collectivized "Commons-rights-that-need-to-be-managed" relationship.
    Incomprehensible gibberish designed purely to convince yourself that you have not been proved objectively wrong.
    I said that the only way to secure the rights of individuals is to secure them directly.
    And I proved you objectively wrong.
    As individual rights - not to "liberty rights of access to the same resource". And that is clearly true, as the abolishment of slavery proves.
    It proves no such thing.
    Taxing slave ownership "as a policy tool" was tried in vain.
    It was actually quite effective, and would have worked if continued, but public opposition to slavery grew too intense.
    Yes, it is a question-begging fallacy on your part.
    Lie.
    Two factors that make it difficult to have any kind of reasonable discussion or debate with you: Firstly, you don't seem to know the difference between a positive and normative statement
    No. It is YOU who cannot tell the difference between positive and normative statements, as you constantly protest that my statements are normative, when I am responding to normative claims of yours, which you imagine are positive.
    (which is strange, for someone claiming to have graduated with honors with a philosophy degree from a respected university) - this causes you to repeatedly make false statements, or to challenge statements of fact that are not controversial at all.
    Lie.
    For example, landownership rights, or property rights in land, DO exist currently as legal rights. But you challenge this as question begging, or false, on moral or philosophical grounds, as not being "valid" or "moral" rights -- even when only the legal definition was used and intended, which makes it a positive statement of fact. Not truth. Not morally right. Just fact.
    I have never denied that property "rights" in land enjoy the same legal status that property "rights" in slaves enjoyed in the antebellum South. Indeed, I have stated it repeatedly. I have simply identified the fact that it is question begging to assert this fact as an argument in favor of such rights.
    You refer to landownership, or property rights in land, as "landowner privilege" on moral, political and philosophical grounds, and try to pass that NORMATIVE off a positive statement of fact.
    No. It is a positive fact that a land title forcibly removes others' liberty for the benefit of the landowner and is therefore a privilege.
    But it's only "fact" when viewed from your mind, and accepting your normative as if it were fact.
    Lie.
    You alternate willy-nilly, with a convenience that suits your own purposes, and without distinction or clarification, between moral, philosophical and legal definitions of the same word, as if they were all the same
    Lie.
    -- even though YOUR intent is quite obvious in every context you employ.
    It is indeed.
    Even IF that was true, there is nothing inherent about government that causes it to act - especially long term - in its own financial interests.
    Add public choice theory to the subjects about which you are comprehensively ignorant.
    Deficit spending, a debauched currency and the very existence of the Fed it created is proof enough of that.
    Actually, it isn't. The Fed was created crookedly, by a corrupt minority in Congress.
    The fact that it's long-term economic suicide is irrelevant (to them), as their SHORT TERM financial interests were more than taken care of.
    It's true that privileged private interests are constantly trying to get more government power on their side. Governments must be held to account by informed and thoughtful voters. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
    And making lands artificially scarce is a reality in your precious Hong Kong - as 95% of the land even now remains raw, undeveloped, and UNAVAILABLE TO THE MARKET.
    You have made that claim repeatedly, but have never offered any evidence for it. It is of course false.
    That's not naivete on your part, Roy, that's a total disconnect from reality.
    It is fact.
    What the $#@! does "political interest" mean anyway?
    Interest in keeping power.
    Majorities and oligarchies, governments of all kinds, have PROVED capable of atrocities, and it is often the very ATROCITIES they commit that have proved to be in their "political interest"! In the case of a brutal dictatorship, it may be in the "political interests" of the brutal dictator to KILL ALL DISSENTERS. Ever heard of Mao, Stalin or Polpot?
    They weren't in power in democratic countries.
    I don't need to claim such a thing, or use logic in some vacuous hypothetical in a philosophical context. IT IS AN HISTORICAL FACT.
    Lie.
    Not "killing everyone", because it doesn't work that way and NEVER DID. They kill or otherwise dominate, drive out or marginalize, certain politically weaker everyones. Cowboys and Injuns. Germans and Jews. Bourgeois and Proletariat. Winners and losers. Governments have, in fact, and many times throughout human history, killed MASSES and taken (REDISTRIBUTED) "all their stuff".
    Not democratic governments.
    Do you actually even live on this planet?
    <yawn>
    Bull$#@!.
    You again resort to claiming that what I advocate is different from what will be implemented. That is not an argument against what I advocate, because I could say the same about what you advocate, whatever it is. It's just stupid, dishonest garbage.
    We don't even know if a UIE would exist (UIE is not required for LVT to exist), let alone, and most importantly, how such an exemption would be formulated or determined by those who are NOT ROY L (read= the vast majority of the population, and 100% of those most likely to be in charge of implementation).
    So? We don't know that anything you advocate would be implemented that way. How on earth do you imagine such silly crap is relevant?

  12. #1030
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas
    And making lands artificially scarce is a reality in your precious Hong Kong - as 95% of the land even now remains raw, undeveloped, and UNAVAILABLE TO THE MARKET.
    You have made that claim repeatedly, but have never offered any evidence for it. It is of course false.
    I stand corrected:

    http://www.reprisk.com/downloads/par...ull_Report.pdf

    Hong Kong..has a total land area of around 1,100 square kilometres...a population of approximately seven million, with 6.8 million residents and 200,000 ‘mobile’ workers. Less than 25% of Hong Kong’s total area is developed...with a land population density that stands at around 6,500 persons per square kilometre on average, and Kwun Tong, with over 50,000 persons per square kilometre, was the most densely populated among the District Councils.
    http://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/...s/outdoor.html

    To many visitors' surprise, almost 70% of Hong Kong's total land area is unspoilt countryside and mountains, and an incredible 40% of the territory has been officially conserved in protected country and marine parks.
    Land is artificially scarce in Hong Kong - as a minimum of 70% of the land even now remains raw, undeveloped, and unavailable to the market.

    Following are excerpts from this article:

    It is quite LVT friendly, and while I don't agree with many of his premises, especially as it related to his call for land value capture of residential property (abolished in Canberra in 1970), at least the author makes the attempt to honestly address many of the things I have tried to discuss with you (about the challenges and associated problems with land-leasing systems) -- issues you have already repeatedly dismissed out of hand as non-issues, outright lies, gibberish, garbage, refusal to know facts, etc., given your belief in LVT as a magic panacea. Here they are anyway.

    Excerpted from: Myths and Realities of Public Land Leasing: Canberra and Hong Kong (Land Lines Article)

    CORRUPTION

    Hong Kong's government...provides public officials with generous remuneration and fringe benefits to reduce the temptation of corruption.

    This demonstrates that, in designing a public leasehold system, a government must consider...

    ...the need for a system of checks and balances to prevent opportunism or political maneuvering.

    FAVORITISM

    [The] issue of competition is particularly important for developing economies where local governments are eager to attract investment. They may be willing to compromise by collecting a smaller amount of land premiums and rent from both domestic and foreign land investors. <--- exemptions, favoritism, Economic Development Zones.

    CARTELIZATION

    The use of land as a source of public funds may require some level of inter- or intra-regional cooperation to prevent developers from playing one government against another.

    LAND SPECULATION AND LAND VALUE INCREASES (INCREASED REVENUES) DUE TO ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY

    In Hong Kong the government's reliance on land revenues as a source of public funds presents another problem:

    ...its financial interest in land conflicts with its public role in stabilizing land prices.

    The government has relied heavily on initial land premiums because demanding premiums from lessees during lease renewals has proven to be politically difficult.

    In addition, the assembly of land rights for land redevelopment involves high negotiation costs because most land leases in Hong Kong have multiple leaseholders. These high costs deter private developers from undertaking land redevelopment by acquiring lease rights and modifying contract conditions. As a result, the government is unable to utilize this method fully to recoup land value. As for the land rent, before 1997 the amount of annual rent paid by lessees was fixed and bore no relationship with increases in land value.

    These difficulties have encouraged the government to retain land value at the beginning of the lease. <-- Value fixing

    Yet, this method can work only if officials lease land slowly to private developers. <--- Control of supply

    A rapid disposition of land when its value is low would impede the government's ability to recoup land value in the future.

    Restrictions on land supply, however, have encouraged private land banking and property speculation, leading to high land and property prices and making Hong Kong one of the world's most expensive cities.


    Officials of other countries could avoid this problem by relying more on lease renewals, contract modifications and the annual land rent than on the initial assignment of leases to capture land value. The plausibility of doing so, however, remains an empirical question. The experiences of Hong Kong suggest that such an attempt could encounter strong public resistance and high negotiation costs.

    ZONING LAWS AND MANDATORY DEVELOPMENT PROVISIONS (not just natural "encouragement" by virtue of the tax)

    In principle, public leasehold systems allow the government to manage urban growth by incorporating land use regulations into land leases. If lessees do not develop their land according to the lease provisions, the government has the right to take back the land, a contractual right not available to the government when land is privately owned.

    To take full advantage of this special land right, the government must be capable of enforcing the contractual agreements. Despite having the ability to repossess land, there is no evidence to show that enforcement costs under public leasehold systems are lower than those found under freehold systems.

    In Hong Kong...the government incorporates land use regulations into land contracts as conditions at the beginning of the lease. Unless lessees initiate a lease modification, these conditions will remain until the lease expires, which could be as long as 50 years in Hong Kong (and 99 years in Canberra).

    CONCLUSION

    The difficulties that Canberra and Hong Kong face in leasing public land show that...

    ...leasehold systems in and of themselves do not resolve land management problems.

    This does not mean, however, that leasing is not a viable means to manage land. In Hong Kong, the government retains a large portion of increased land value for public infrastructure investment. Canberra's public leasehold system enables the government to obtain low-cost land for building the Australian capital.

    The important lesson is that...

    ...policymakers should not set unrealistic expectations on what public leasehold systems can achieve.

    Failure to deliver their promises could frustrate a well-intended reform and bring the effort to a halt.

    Because no land tenure system is perfect,

    ...the debate should not focus on the choice between leasehold and freehold systems. They are not mutually exclusive
    .

    Instead, future research should concentrate on designing specific institutions according to...

    ...different political, economic and social contexts...

    ...to minimize problems associated with both systems.
    You're not discussing, Roy. You're preaching, evangelizing and proselytizing like a zealot on behalf of a rigid, dogmatic fundamentalist religion, with select economics and political scripture that you've canonized in your mind, as you ignore and dismiss anything or anyone that disagrees with or runs contrary to your theories, your system, your beliefs. If it ain't in Roy's babble, it's evil.

    I had never even heard of LVT before coming to RPF. It has been an eye-opener to say the least, and has gotten me thinking about land in a different light than I'd ever considered before. But while you're spewing, regurgitating the same old turing machine $#@! by rote (and with all the charm of a rabid chihuahua), I'm actually learning. And adapting.

    I'm actually in favor of LVT now. In its proper place. But your version can kiss my ass forever, as it's nothing short of a recipe for human enslavement in my mind (second only to the entire Keynesian-spawned monetary system religion). Your version would be the cure that is far worse than the disease you misdiagnosed, which would do more far more harm to the very individuals whose rights you think it would incidentally secure and protect.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 06-19-2012 at 06:10 PM.

  13. #1031
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    I stand corrected:
    Land is artificially scarce in Hong Kong - as a minimum of 70% of the land even now remains raw, undeveloped, and unavailable to the market.
    Yes, and much of it is too steep, too low and wet, too unstable, too inaccessible, etc. for efficient development. Anyway, I've never said HK is perfect. Its history and current politics -- especially the massive, corrupt giveaways to rich, greedy private landholders -- preclude that. But HK does prove that, contrary to your stupid lies, private ownership of land is entirely unnecessary to a society's attainment of world-leading liberty, justice and prosperity.
    It is quite LVT friendly, and while I don't even agree with many of his premises, at least the author makes the attempt to honestly address many of the things I have tried to discuss with you (about the challenges and associated problems with land-leasing systems)
    You have never tried to discuss anything of the sort with me. You just claim government is always wrong, and so inherently corrupt that there is no way to implement any policy I advocate.
    -- issues you have already repeatedly dismissed out of hand as non-issues, outright lies, gibberish, garbage, refusal to know facts, etc.,
    Which YOUR claims are.
    given your belief in LVT as a magic panacea.
    Strawman lie.
    Here they are anyway.
    And they are all the results of letting lease holders pocket publicly created land value. "Politically difficult" just means, "inconvenient to the greed of rich, greedy, privileged, parasitic filth."
    You're not discussing, Roy.
    True. That would require another person capable of engaging in discussion of issues, and not just constantly lying about the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality and what I have plainly written.
    You're proselytizing like a zealot on behalf of a rigid, dogmatic fundamentalist religion,
    Stupid lie. I prove my statements with fact and logic.
    with select
    I.e., relevant and accurate...
    economics and political scripture that you've canonized in your mind, and ignoring and dismissing anything that runs contrary to your beliefs.
    <yawn> You are lying, and you know it. I do not ignore or dismiss, I refute, and it takes a lot of time and thought. When you can come up with something better than stupid lies, let me know, and we can discuss it.
    I had never even heard of LVT before coming to RPF. It has been an eye-opener to say the least, and has gotten me thinking about land in a different light than I'd ever considered before.
    Careful with that red pill, Steo. Once you've seen the cat, there's no going back.
    I'm actually in favor of LVT now. In its proper place. But your version can kiss my ass forever, as it's nothing short of the penultimate recipe for human enslavement in my mind (the Keynesian-spawned monetary system being the ultimate).
    I think you know that's false.
    Your version would be the cure that is far worse than the disease you misdiagnosed, which would do more far more harm to the very individuals whose rights you think it would incidentally secure and protect.
    And I think you know that's false, too.
    Last edited by Roy L; 06-19-2012 at 06:16 PM.

  14. #1032
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    But HK does prove that, contrary to your stupid lies, private ownership of land is entirely unnecessary to a society's attainment of world-leading liberty, justice and prosperity.
    Strawman stupidity. I don't buy into panacea-thinking, and never once claimed, or even implied, that private ownership of land was necessary or a requirement of "society's attainment" of ANY $#@!ING THING. You're the ONLY one claiming that "truth, justice, liberty, blah blah..." is IMPOSSIBLE without a given system (LVT, as envisioned by you).

    You have never tried to discuss anything of the sort with me. You just claim government is always wrong, and so inherently corrupt that there is no way to implement any policy I advocate.
    That's your projection, which is contradicted by the facts. I am also proposing solutions to government (not "government solutions") as they equate to individual rights (AS I SEE THEM) and revenue sources. So it's not "government" that is always wrong, Roy, although I have good cause to believe that it must ALWAYS be presumed inherently corrupt, and certainly inherently corruptible given it is run and influenced by self-interested humans.

    The policies you advocate, on the other hand, are utterly naive in my mind, with an incredible presumption of honesty, wisdom and incorruptibility of government that is absolutely refuted by history, current reality and common sense. The policies you advocate are also the antithesis of individual liberty and rights AS I SEE THEM, but only as they are applied to actual individuals.

    ROY'S ASSERTION: I do not ignore or dismiss, I refute, and it takes a lot of time and thought.

    ROY'S SELF-CONTRADICTION: When you can come up with something better than stupid lies, let me know, and we can discuss it.
    Bwahaha...

    Have a nice loop-dee-loop.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 06-19-2012 at 06:40 PM.



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  16. #1033
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Strawman stupidity. I don't buy into panacea-thinking,
    Sure you do. You think privatizing everything is a panacea.
    and never once claimed, or even implied, that private ownership of land was necessary or a requirement of "society's attainment" of ANY $#@!ING THING.
    Lie. In post #1021, you falsely claimed, "No, it's a requirement for security in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness."

    In post #1026, you falsely claimed, "If free and natural Citizens were IMMUNE from LVT, being the only entities with an actual RIGHT IN PROPERTY IN LAND (limited by population/area ratio), there would be a natural check and balance on the taxing jurisdiction that would not otherwise exist. It would be IMPOSSIBLE for the State to directly abuse individuals."

    And there are many more examples I could quote.
    You're the ONLY one claiming that "truth, justice, liberty, blah blah..." is IMPOSSIBLE without a given system (LVT, as envisioned by you).
    It is certainly true that absent recovery of publicly created land rent for public puposes and benefit, for which "LVT" is a common shorthand term, liberty and justice are impossible, because anything else automatically removes people's rights (i.e., their liberty) for the unearned profit of landowners (an injustice).
    That's your projection, which is contradicted by the facts.
    Nope. In post #1026 you falsely claimed:

    "Because Roy L IS NEVER GOING TO BE IN CHARGE OF LVT, there is:

    NOTHING to prevent land from being made artificially scarce, whether withheld from availability or through zoning laws
    NOTHING to prevent the government from placing a ground rent floor that applies to everyone
    NOTHING to prevent a multiplier for economic rents (X1.5, X2, etc.,) from kicking in later
    NOTHING to prevent special treatment through exemptions to privileged entities (e.g., Economic Development Zones)
    NOTHING to prevent the state from NEVER implementing a "Universal Individual Exemption in the first place"

    The policies you advocate, on the other hand, are utterly naive in my mind, with an incredible presumption of honesty, wisdom and incorruptibility of government that is absolutely refuted by history, current reality and common sense.
    Wrong. A government wise and honest enough to implement LVT is by definition wise and honest enough to implement LVT. A subsequent government might be unwise and dishonest enough to dismantle or corrupt LVT, but then it wouldn't be LVT.

  17. #1034
    I haven't finished reading this article yet, but its an interesting take on the LVT movement from the view of someone who used to be very skeptical of it.

    http://speaklibertynow.com/2012/06/2...on-refutation/
    http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/
    http://www.wealthandwant.com/
    http://freeliberal.com/

  18. #1035
    Quote Originally Posted by redbluepill View Post
    I haven't finished reading this article yet, but its an interesting take on the LVT movement from the view of someone who used to be very skeptical of it.

    http://speaklibertynow.com/2012/06/2...on-refutation/
    Whoa! Dan Sullivan's demolition of Wendy McElroy's "arguments" is masterful, comprehensive and conclusive.

  19. #1036
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Whoa! Dan Sullivan's demolition of Wendy McElroy's "arguments" is masterful, comprehensive and conclusive.
    That was a nice read. Long, so I took time out to read. I do not like the idea that non-Geoists think Henry George is some sort of cult figure. He is not. I clearly do not regard George as like Reverend Moon. He is one in a long line of people who thought the same way refining as they went along. George's views have been refined since his death.
    “I have made speeches by the yard on the subject
    of land-value taxation, and you know what a supporter
    I am of that policy.”

    - Winston Churchill


    The only war Winston Churchill ever lost was
    against the British landlords.

    - Fred Harrison (economic writer)

  20. #1037
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    Whoa! Dan Sullivan's demolition of Wendy McElroy's "arguments" is masterful, comprehensive and conclusive.
    I thoroughly enjoyed it as well.
    http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/
    http://www.wealthandwant.com/
    http://freeliberal.com/

  21. #1038
    Too rich to pass up. The left panel is an old Georgist comic strip panel from an Aussie Georgist/LVT site: http://www.prosper.org.au/comedy/.

    I added the right panel to complete the picture.


  22. #1039
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Too rich to pass up. The left panel is an old Georgist comic strip panel from an Aussie Georgist/LVT site: http://www.prosper.org.au/comedy/.

    I added the right panel to complete the picture.

    No, of course you didn't. You added it because you hate liberty, justice and truth. You were trying to deceive your readers, and make them forget the fact that LVT automatically forces the state to serve the community, while private landowning without LVT automatically forces the community to serve private landowners.

    It's not rocket science, Stevil. You hate good, and love evil. You spray in your shorts every time you think of the millions of innocent people who are murdered every year for the unearned profit of greedy, idle, parasitic landowners. Simple.

  23. #1040
    I thought you'd like it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    LVT automatically forces the state to serve the community
    The other way around. Certainly. Automatically. As usual, you have everything exactly backwards, Roy. Mandatory revenues paid to any monopolistic entity forces absolutely nothing from that entity. People will continue to require land for life and commerce regardless whether it is under a public or private landownership regime, and without regard to whether any publicly funded infrastructure or improvements are made.

    It's no surprise to me that you think this way, Roy, as you don't even believe it's possible for a state to withhold land availability to the market as a means of increasing its value, the state's revenues, through artificial scarcity. But that's because you don't know any real-world economics.



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  25. #1041
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    The other way around. Certainly. Automatically.
    Nope. That's just more stupid garbage from you with no basis in fact, logic, economics, or anything else other than your own hatred of liberty, justice, humanity, and truth.
    As usual, you have everything exactly backwards, Roy.
    ROTFL!! I am not the one who claims Hong Kong cannot possibly be free or prosperous, Steven. You are. I am not the one who claims the people of Bangladesh or Guatemala or the Philippines enjoy liberty while the people of Hong Kong do not, Steven. You are.
    Mandatory revenues paid to any monopolistic entity forces absolutely nothing from that entity.
    <yawn> LVT revenues are not mandatory, Stevil, stop lying. They are simply the market price for the economic advantage use of the land provides. If the government does not make use of the land advantageous -- IF IT DOESN'T MAKE USING THE LAND WITHIN ITS JURISDICTION MORE DESIRABLE, WHICH IS ALMOST A DEFINITION OF GOOD GOVERNMENT THAT SERVES THE COMMUNITY -- then it won't get the revenue. People won't pay it. They can't be forced to pay it any more than a private landowner's tenants can be forced to pay more than the market rent.

    Everything you say is the exact, diametric opposite of the truth.
    People will continue to require land for life and commerce regardless whether it is under a public or private landownership regime, and without regard to whether any publicly funded infrastructure or improvements are made.
    But they WON'T PAY AS MUCH for land that does not provide the advantages that desirable and efficient government services and infrastructure provide.
    It's no surprise to me that you think this way, Roy, as you don't even believe it's possible for a state to withhold land availability to the market as a means of increasing its value, the state's revenues, through artificial scarcity.
    It's possible -- but not with LVT, because LVT recovers the full rental value of the land. The government can't get more than that by withholding land from the market any more than a private landowner can increase his rent income by withholding his own land from the market.
    But that's because you don't know any real-world economics.
    ?? ROTFL!! I am not the one who claims the supply of land is determined by how much landowners want for it, Steven. You are.

  26. #1042
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    You added it because you hate liberty, justice and truth.
    His self-centeredness and greed gets the better of him. He believes in a winner takes all and exploit the rest - all fair play to his warped mind. He will tell himself lies and believes them. He think Geoism is some sort of state collectivism - how further from the truth. It is sad really.
    “I have made speeches by the yard on the subject
    of land-value taxation, and you know what a supporter
    I am of that policy.”

    - Winston Churchill


    The only war Winston Churchill ever lost was
    against the British landlords.

    - Fred Harrison (economic writer)

  27. #1043
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    I am not the one who claims Hong Kong cannot possibly be free or prosperous, Steven.
    Neither am I, but then again I don't have a collectivist hive mindset, and would never refer to "Hong Kong" or any other state or jurisdiction as if it was a single entity, like A PERSON. When you say "free or prosperous", WHO in Hong Kong are you referring to, exactly? Under any state monopoly there will be BIG winners, just as there will be BIGGER LOSERS. And for the actual winners there, the majority of the wealth in Hong Kong came from financial activity OUTSIDE of Hong Kong.

    Hong Kong's poorest living in 'coffin homes'
    Hidden amid the multi-million dollar high-rise apartments and chic shopping malls of Hong Kong's urban centers are scores of tiny, unseen tenements -- some no bigger than coffins -- that many people call home.

    [Mak is a] Hong Kong native, he went bankrupt after a series of unsuccessful ventures in finance and now makes barely enough to cover his rent -- around $150 a month. He is now among the 1.2 million Hong Kong residents who currently live in poverty, according to a government advisory group.

    For Sze, the "coffin home" phenomenon is the result of an urban perfect storm: a combination of skyrocketing real-estate prices and arguably the biggest wealth gap in Asia.

    A 2011 survey by Savills -- a real estate company based in the UK -- found that the city's top end properties sell for a confounding $10,550 per square foot.

    "Hong Kong has gotten more and more wealthy, but these people have been left behind," she said. "A dweller once said to me, 'I'm not even dead yet but I'm already living in my coffin -- four walls and nails'."

    Sze said more than 300,000 people in Hong Kong are currently waiting for public housing. And although the average waiting time is three years, many wait in cramped spaces, like coffin homes, for as many as 10 years.
    Sound like LVT heaven to you? Is that "good enough land to live on"? Sound like freedom and prosperity to you? Are you going to credit LVT for that, or will you conveniently blame whatever doesn't make Hong a "free and prosperous" place on something else, or the lack of more LVT? You cite Hong Kong as an example of LVT success (or "prosperity-despite-LVT" at worst) when convenient, but when equally convenient you will say that Hong Kong has other problems, and is not really LVT as it should be implemented.

    Or how about this related gem:

    Hong Kong under pressure as poverty levels rise

    All four of them live in a room that measures just six feet by 10 feet... Altogether, they earn just HKD9,000 a month (Ł740) and immediately shell out over 40 per cent of that in rent.

    Their large tenement building is a maze of what have become known as "coffin homes", apartments that have been subdivided by slumlords into tiny plywood boxes, some too small for anything other than a camp bed.

    "Housing is the worst issue, because they have almost stopped building public housing," said Eddie Tsang at the Hong Kong Council of Social Security.

    Last year, the city only built under 14,000 units, despite the island having a huge amount of land available.

    Critics suggest that the government, which once promised to build 85,000 units a year, is in thrall to the island's property tycoons, who are keen to keep apartment prices high. Prices have risen 76 per cent since 2008.
    I can pretty much assure you that someone is prospering in all of that - including Hong Kong THE STATE. But so much for a mere tax causing a state to be "automatically forced" to do anything at all. Hong Kong has LVT and other taxes.

    So much for your ideal that:

    IF IT DOESN'T MAKE USING THE LAND WITHIN ITS JURISDICTION MORE DESIRABLE, WHICH IS ALMOST A DEFINITION OF GOOD GOVERNMENT THAT SERVES THE COMMUNITY -- then it won't get the revenue. People won't pay it. They can't be forced to pay it any more than a private landowner's tenants can be forced to pay more than the market rent.
    And now we return you back to the regularly scheduled real world....

    What Hong Kong proves to me is that LVT (Socialism Lite) is FAR worse than Marxism, in that it might actually persist much longer under the cesspool of the Crony Capitalism it would engender, encourage and feed (your "most productive hands" doctrine, which really means "most productive to the state"). That's not free market capitalism, where value is discovered as a result of myriad individual preferences. It's a state sponsored, state controlled dog fight/cockfight ring, where the winners and losers are all decided on the basis of who serves the state's interests best.

    Geoists hit the nail on the head when they talk about the effect that monopoly ownership of land can do to keep the effects of slavery alive. But that's where the Geoist sanity ends, as their solution is to make the entire state a land-controlled plantation, with the state LICENSING slave ownership by extension. At least sharecroppers and other victims of rent-seeking land monopolists could actually move away, even if to the frontier. For Hong Kong residents, the only "frontier" available to them, besides leaving the state altogether if possible, is a COFFIN.

    With LVT there is no longer a frontier. It's no longer a question of who is a slave to which rent-seeking private monopolist. That monopoly on land rents question is finally settled. The only question that remains is which Plantation Commune-ity a slave "chooses" to belong, and to what extent he wants to actually serve as a slave for that community. He is free to choose which master he serves, but he is not free to choose none.

    Your nasty Socialist Lite human enslavement experiment is ripe for corruption from the onset:

    Zoning laws and land and resource preservation schemes that cause artificial scarcity (rent-seeking by the state)
    Renaissance and Enterprise "partnership" Zones whereby the state can pick winners and losers, giving the wealthy and politically well-connected decided economic advantages.
    Rent-seeking crony capitalists would be the real winners, the ultimate "Licensed Plantation Renters" in all this, just like in Hong Kong, like so many mafia bosses buying up territories, so long as they give proper tribute to the ultimate mafia Don. But that's OK with you, because whomever wins the bidding war is presumed, not just to have the most money, but also to be "the most productive hands". And $#@! Granny with her unproductive hands in her unproductive "good enough land to live on" promise while she waits in living coffin.

    ?? ROTFL!! I am not the one who claims the supply of land is determined by how much landowners want for it, Steven. You are.
    Go roll on the floor laughing in your Hong Kong coffin, Roy, and pray for the state to place you on a short-list that will save you from a slumlord, because LVT sure in the $#@! hasn't - and won't.

    And speaking of Hong Kong, this just in:

    Leung Faces Record Hong Kong Wealth Gap as City’s New Leader

    Leung, 57, has pledged to raise the income of the poorest and boost Hong Kong’s housing supply. City officials said this month that its wealth gap, the biggest in Asia, widened to the worst since records started being kept in 1971.

    Public discontent in Hong Kong may draw as many as 100,000 protesters at the start of Leung’s term to push the government to address rising living costs and hold China to its promise to allow direct leadership elections in Hong Kong by 2017. Leung will need to address that pressure from below while meeting China’s demand for stability as it goes through its own once-a- decade leadership transition later this year.

    “He’s going to make a number of changes in livelihood issues,” said Martin Lee, the founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, which is questioning the legitimacy of Leung’s election victory. “He will do it right away because he wants to endear himself to the Hong Kong people. These are the things that would make Hong Kong people less afraid of Communist rule.”
    Scary religion you believe in, Roy.

  28. #1044
    Double post from a server error.
    Last edited by Steven Douglas; 07-01-2012 at 03:53 AM.

  29. #1045
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    that LVT (Socialism Lite)
    This clearly indicates your political conditioning. This is sad.
    “I have made speeches by the yard on the subject
    of land-value taxation, and you know what a supporter
    I am of that policy.”

    - Winston Churchill


    The only war Winston Churchill ever lost was
    against the British landlords.

    - Fred Harrison (economic writer)

  30. #1046
    Taiwan To Close Land Tax Loophole
    The government’s proposed action is in response to those property developers who, instead of building on undeveloped land to provide much-needed residential properties, leave the real estate idle to profit from its untaxed rise in value, thereby contributing to inflationary property pressures.

    http://www.tax-news.com/news/Taiwan_...____45858.html


    Taiwan’s land taxes were a major cause of its economic success. In the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan was transformed from an impoverished agricultural backwater to a thriving industrial state with one of the world's strongest economies. If the tax is applied to land value rather than the value of the harvest, then the land-value tax is not a burden on farmers, since it reduces the price of farmland, and does not add to the market rent of land.

    A major strength of Taiwan's property tax system is its constitutionality. The implementation of the equalization of land rights is stipulated in the Constitution, rather than merely in laws that can be more easily changed or eliminated.


    http://course.earthrights.net/node/102


    Taiwan, 1940s. Old Formosa was mired in poverty and fast breeding. Hunger afflicted the majority of people who were landless peasants. Less than 20 families monopolized the entire island.
    ..
    ..
    A follower of Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China and an adherent of Henry George, Chiang knew of the Single Tax. Borrowing a page from George via Sun, the new Nationalist Government of Taiwan instituted its "land to the tiller program" which taxed farmland according to its value. Soon the large plantation owners found themselves paying out about as much in taxes as they were getting back as Rent. Being a middleman was no longer worth the bother, so they sold off their excess to farmers at prices the peasants could afford.
    ..
    Working their own land with newly marketed fertilizers, new owners worked harder. They produced more,
    ..
    Taiwan began to set world records with growth rates of 10% per annum in their GDP and 20% in their industry. (Fred Harrison, Power in the Land, 1983)


    http://www.progress.org/geonomy/Numbers.html



    New York City, 1920s. After World War I, many New Yorkers suffered from lack of housing. To solve the problem, Governor Al Smith borrowed a page from Henry George (who ran for mayor of New York City in 1886, finishing second ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, and again in 1897, dying four days before the election). Smith persuaded the New York legislature to pass a law allowing New York City for the next ten years to tax land but not the buildings on it.

    New construction more than tripled while in other big cities it barely doubled. Not only was there more housing, and thus lower cost apartments, there were more jobs and higher wages for construction workers, and more business for merchants who sold goods to the employed workers.

    Economic good times in New York came to an end, though, when owners in 1928 began to anticipate the expiration of the tax-shift law. (“How New York Solved Its Housing Crisis”, Charles Johnson Post, 1931?, Schalkenbach Fdn, Mason Gaffney, 2001) Some say that the drastic decline in building starts, not the stock market crash of 1929, was the real trigger of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
    ..
    ..
    Watching land prices inflate in the 80's, followed by farm takeovers and slowed housing starts, land-focused econometricians predicted land prices to hit bottom in about 1990, then next around 2008.
    Last edited by EcoWarrier; 07-02-2012 at 04:24 AM.
    “I have made speeches by the yard on the subject
    of land-value taxation, and you know what a supporter
    I am of that policy.”

    - Winston Churchill


    The only war Winston Churchill ever lost was
    against the British landlords.

    - Fred Harrison (economic writer)

  31. #1047
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Neither am I,
    Yes, you are.
    but then again I don't have a collectivist hive mindset,
    <yawn> Stupid, dishonest, deceitful filth.
    and would never refer to "Hong Kong" or any other state or jurisdiction as if it was a single entity, like A PERSON.
    ROTFL!! Of course you would, and do, because it is perfectly correct English to do so. You do it as often as anyone, so stop lying.
    When you say "free or prosperous", WHO in Hong Kong are you referring to, exactly?
    The people.
    Under any state monopoly there will be BIG winners, just as there will be BIGGER LOSERS.
    No, you're just spewing stupid lies again. Who are the BIG winners and BIGGER LOSERS under the US Postal Service monopoly, hmmmm?

    Stupid, dishonest, deceitful filth.
    And for the actual winners there, the majority of the wealth in Hong Kong came from financial activity OUTSIDE of Hong Kong.
    No, that's just more of your stupid, dishonest, deceitful filth.
    Sound like LVT heaven to you? Is that "good enough land to live on"? Sound like freedom and prosperity to you?
    No, it sounds to me like you are trying to change the subject. You do that a lot. HK is one of the richest places on earth, and routinely tops lists of the world's freest economies, and there has been no private landowning there for 160 years. You just have to tell any sort of lie in order to avoid knowing that fact.
    Are you going to credit LVT for that, or will you conveniently blame whatever doesn't make Hong a "free and prosperous" place on something else, or the lack of more LVT?
    HK doesn't use LVT, you know that, and I will definitely blame the poverty, inequality, and overcrowding there on lack of LVT, because that is what is causing them.
    You cite Hong Kong as an example of LVT success (or "prosperity-despite-LVT" at worst) when convenient,
    That is a lie. HK does not and cannot use LVT because the land is not privately owned. I cite HK as proof that private landowning is entirely unnecessary to prosperity and economic freedom.
    but when equally convenient you will say that Hong Kong has other problems, and is not really LVT as it should be implemented.
    HK definitely has other problems, lack of democratic accountability being the biggest, and its system is definitely not LVT as it should be implemented. Approximately 3/4 of land rent is left in private leaseholders' hands, the government consequently tries to increase its initial lease payment revenues by restricting releases of public land for private use, and there is no universal individual exemption.
    I can pretty much assure you that someone is prospering in all of that - including Hong Kong THE STATE.
    It is private leaseholders who are ripping money out of the state, as proved by the astronomical exchange value of the leases.
    But so much for a mere tax causing a state to be "automatically forced" to do anything at all. Hong Kong has LVT and other taxes.
    It does not have LVT, stop lying.
    So much for your ideal that:
    So much for your lie that HK uses a system similar to full recovery of publicly created rent for public purposes and benefit under democratic accontability, with a universal individual exemption to restore the right to liberty.
    And now we return you back to the regularly scheduled real world....
    The signal that you are about to tell more absurd lies.
    What Hong Kong proves to me is that LVT (Socialism Lite)
    Which HK doesn't use, and isn't socialism, stop lying.
    is FAR worse than Marxism,
    That is a stupid lie, as proved by every statistic, and the fact that the Chinese who actually lived under Marxism in the Maoist era were so desperate to get to HK millions of them risked their lives to do it.
    in that it might actually persist much longer under the cesspool of the Crony Capitalism it would engender, encourage and feed (your "most productive hands" doctrine, which really means "most productive to the state").
    Stupid lie with no basis in reality. The market decides what the most productive use is, and it is the most productive use to the economy.
    That's not free market capitalism, where value is discovered as a result of myriad individual preferences.
    Indeed it isn't, as free market capitalism is a logical impossibility. It is an oxymoron, as capitalism requires private landowning, and the resulting subsidy to landowners contradicts the free market. A true free market, as under LVT (and closely approached in HK, as every credible international comparison proves), does discover value through myriad individual preferences.
    It's a state sponsored, state controlled dog fight/cockfight ring, where the winners and losers are all decided on the basis of who serves the state's interests best.
    No, that's nothing but a cretinous lie from you with no basis in fact. It is precisely because LVT's perfect justice rewards people in exact proportion as they contribute to production of goods and services that OTHER PEOPLE DESIRE that you hate it with such maniacal ferocity.
    Geoists hit the nail on the head when they talk about the effect that monopoly ownership of land can do to keep the effects of slavery alive.
    Thank you for agreeing that your agenda here is to serve an evil equivalent to slavery.
    But that's where the Geoist sanity ends, as their solution is to make the entire state a land-controlled plantation, with the state LICENSING slave ownership by extension.
    No, that's just another stupid lie from you. The geoist solution REMOVES the privilege of the slave owner, and restores the individual liberty to use land via the universal individual exemption. No one is privileged, no one is disadvantaged.
    At least sharecroppers and other victims of rent-seeking land monopolists could actually move away, even if to the frontier.
    Already proved a stupid lie. The landowners kept them so poor they couldn't move away: they'd starve before they got to the frontier.
    For Hong Kong residents, the only "frontier" available to them, besides leaving the state altogether if possible, is a COFFIN.
    Another stupid lie. The people of HK are mostly housed in very modern and comfortable, if small, accommodation. Of course there are poor people in HK who squander their earnings on alcohol, gambling, drugs, etc. and can't afford a decent place to live, just as there are anywhere else. And as HK doesn't have a universal individual exemption, they are deprived of their liberty without just compensation, just as homeless people in the USA are.
    With LVT there is no longer a frontier.
    Lie. All land is free up to the universal individual exemption. Stop lying.
    It's no longer a question of who is a slave to which rent-seeking private monopolist.
    Right, because no one is a slave to any rent seeker.
    That monopoly on land rents question is finally settled.
    Right: rents are devoted to the purposes and benefit of the public that creates them.
    The only question that remains is which Plantation Commune-ity a slave "chooses" to belong, and to what extent he wants to actually serve as a slave for that community. He is free to choose which master he serves, but he is not free to choose none.
    Stupid lie. No one is a slave, stop lying, because the UIE ensures no one can be compelled to labor for another's benefit, stop lying. He doesn't serve any master, because no one is privileged to take the value of his labor from him, stop lying. He has his right to liberty restored, stop lying, the right that you want to strip him of without just -- or any -- compensation.

    STOP LYING.
    Your nasty Socialist Lite human enslavement experiment
    Despicable, dishonest, deceitful filth.
    is ripe for corruption from the onset:
    Zoning laws and land and resource preservation schemes that cause artificial scarcity (rent-seeking by the state)
    Already proved a lie. If ALL land rent is being recovered for public purposes and benefit, the state can't get more revenue by holding land out of use any more than a private landowner could, because SUPPLY IS FIXED (cue stupid attempts not to know that fact). You just don't know any economics.
    Renaissance and Enterprise "partnership" Zones whereby the state can pick winners and losers, giving the wealthy and politically well-connected decided economic advantages.
    That is a phenomenon utterly unrelated to LVT. You are just spewing stupid lies and claiming LVT is something else entirely. It doesn't even matter what: socialism, fascism, communism, feudalism, Marxism, crony capitalism -- any idiotic lie will do when your whole life is devoted to hatred of liberty, justice and truth.
    Rent-seeking crony capitalists would be the real winners, the ultimate "Licensed Plantation Renters" in all this, just like in Hong Kong, like so many mafia bosses buying up territories, so long as they give proper tribute to the ultimate mafia Don.
    You again have no arguments, so you again just tell lies about what LVT is.
    But that's OK with you, because whomever wins the bidding war is presumed, not just to have the most money, but also to be "the most productive hands".
    It's not an assumption. It's a clear fact of the market.
    And $#@! Granny with her unproductive hands in her unproductive "good enough land to live on" promise while she waits in living coffin.
    Evil, deceitful vomitus unrelated to fact. The UIE is sufficient to obtain secure tenure on enough good land to live on. If Granny wants to take more than that from others, she can pay them for it. You just lie and lie and lie and lie and lie.
    Go roll on the floor laughing in your Hong Kong coffin, Roy, and pray for the state to place you on a short-list that will save you from a slumlord, because LVT sure in the $#@! hasn't - and won't.
    It has, everywhere it has been tried.
    And speaking of Hong Kong, this just in:
    Notice the salient point:
    Public discontent in Hong Kong may draw as many as 100,000 protesters at the start of Leung’s term to push the government to address rising living costs and hold China to its promise to allow direct leadership elections in Hong Kong by 2017.
    HK is not a democracy, and hasn't been for 15 years -- during which time corruption has greatly worsened its problems, including poverty, inequality, landholder privilege, and artificial land scarcity.
    Scary religion you believe in, Roy.
    <yawn> Scary amount of lying you do, Steven. Scary hatred of liberty, justice and truth you indulge in, Steven. Scary god you believe in, who demands millions of human sacrifices be laid on his altar EVERY YEAR, Steven.

  32. #1048
    Stupid, dishonest, deceitful filth.
    Why is it that I picture you as an old nun spitting bits of morning egg out of her angry mouth when she says that.

    No, that's just more of your stupid, dishonest, deceitful filth.
    See? Did you get the visual?

    Evil, deceitful vomitus...You just lie and lie and lie and lie and lie. Scary god you believe in, who demands millions of human sacrifices be laid on his altar EVERY YEAR, Steven.
    Can we just get on with the excommunication, burning at the stake, or whatever it is you people do with blasphemers and heretics?



  33. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  34. #1049
    Quote Originally Posted by Roy L View Post
    That is a lie. HK does not and cannot use LVT because the land is not privately owned. I cite HK as proof that private landowning is entirely unnecessary to prosperity and economic freedom.
    Letchworth Garden City in England has all land leased out as per HK - although some 99 year leases when expired were sold as freehold which should never have occurred.

    The land in HK is owned by the HK government, the people, the state. In Letchworth the land is owned by a charitable status "foundation" and leases the land. Homeowners are just that, they own the home on the land - the bricks. The income from the leases funds infrastructure in the town. There are no vacant plots as there is no speculation on "land".

    If the UK had full LVT enshrined in a constitution, then land could be sold off, as it would make little difference.
    Last edited by EcoWarrier; 07-02-2012 at 11:24 AM.
    “I have made speeches by the yard on the subject
    of land-value taxation, and you know what a supporter
    I am of that policy.”

    - Winston Churchill


    The only war Winston Churchill ever lost was
    against the British landlords.

    - Fred Harrison (economic writer)

  35. #1050
    Quote Originally Posted by Steven Douglas View Post
    Why is it that I picture you as an old nun spitting bits of morning egg out of her angry mouth when she says that.
    Because you are looking in a mirror?
    Can we just get on with the excommunication, burning at the stake, or whatever it is you people do with blasphemers and heretics?
    The worst punishment I could visit on you would be realization of the true magnitude and nature of the evil you serve.

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