The Single Tax - Land Value Tax (LVT)

[redbluepill]

You must admit it is odd that there would be two people who only post on one fairly obscure issue for such long times and not even try to address each other on the subject and not be on at the same time. The thread is far to long to go through and find you both saying the same things but I seem to recall that happening.

I noticed a couple weeks back that the previous thread was brought to up on a LVT forum which explains the "Georgist invasion".

You think I'm Roy too?

[redbluepill]

I have posted on other issues; but the land question is far more important, and I accordingly devote proportionally more time to it. JohnLVT's name pretty much states where his interests lie.

Same here. Most other issues besides the issuance of money are almost trivial in comparison.

[Roy L]

Tax is still extortion...you pay agianst your will. If you don't pay against your will, Roy L, you are donating or relinquishing payment for service rendered. Tax is by definition compulsory, not voluntary.

<sigh> Wrong. Just as the money you pay for the groceries you take home from the supermarket is a voluntary payment, so is the money you pay for what you take from society by depriving others of their liberty to use the land.

Actually Somalia now is better than before the state collapsed in nearly every measurable category.

No, it isn't. It is better in a few cherry-picked categories like cell phone coverage.

You have to be logical, which is to say comparing Somalia under the state to Somalia without the state...you can't compare Somalia to another country and get a logical conclusion.

If only you had any intention of being logical! You aren't comparing Somalia under the state to Somalia without the state. You are comparing Somalia under one of the worst governments of the 20th century to Somalia without the state. While few African governments earn any merit badges, try comparing Somalia to an African state that actually makes an effort to do government's job, like Botswana.

Please watch:





As you can see in the presentation, your red herring is a failure.

ROTFL!! You can't even see that fool's blatant illogic, such as attributing to statelessness the beneficial effects of Somalia's huge foreign remittance flows, which the video itself acknowledges amount to several thousand dollars per household per year, an amount that dwarfs even the foreign aid the Siad Barre government was living on. Your hero also delicately avoids mentioning the fact that Somalia is home to the world's leading pirate fleet, which feeds Somalia's economic "miracle" with booty and ransoms from peaceful trading nations.

By what right would you ever be an owner of what neither you nor anyone else ever produced, and which everyone would otherwise be at liberty to use?

This was in response to :

"All tax makes you a property renter, not owner. "

This is simply logical fact.

No, it's an absurd fabrication. Do you think the annual taxes some states charge on automobiles make them rented, not owned?

If you do not pay taxes on your land you are evicted from it and it is taken from you and sold to pay the taxes.

Blatant question begging fallacy. What would make it "your land"?

If you do not pay rent you are evicted by the landlord and are sued for the owed money, which can result in your property being sold to pay the difference. Hence, it is illogical to consider yourself an owner of any property being taxed.

More garbage. Pretty much any asset can be seized for any debt. If you don't pay your credit card debt, the credit card company can seize your house. Does that mean you are renting your house from the credit card company? Oops, you are also renting it from the mortgage company, and from the government too.

Your claims are just absurd, dishonest nonsense.

It is clearly rented from the state.

No, it indisputably isn't.

This also ignores imminent domain laws....which further make you a renter.

Wrong again.

Collectives and species do not own natural resources.

Assertion lacking any factual support. There is no basis on which an individual can claim ownership of natural resources that does not also apply to collectives.

Individuals own property and all natural resources on it.

Assertion lacking any factual support other than the fallacious, "it's the law."

All this geoism nonsense is anti-property.

No, that's a lie on your part. Geoist principles support the individual right to property in the products of one's labor.

Proof?:

Do you want to be a "renter" or a thief? Most people want to be thieves.

That's you saying property is theft...congratualtions.

No, that's you lying about what I plainly wrote, congratulations. It is property in land and natural resources that is theft, because it forcibly deprives people of what they would otherwise have. Property in products of labor doesn't, because products of labor did not otherwise exist.

You will now refuse to know that fact.

Any part of a tax that has DWL will cause distortions in the market with consequences...so if you have DWL the tax is even worse.

I repeat: it is only the improvement value portion of property taxes that have a deadweight loss. Remove that, and tax only land value, and there is no deadweight loss because supply is fixed.

No, they aren't wrong.

Yes, they are.

Deontological ethics hold until extreme circumstances where consequentialist ethics overrule them in an attempt to limit harm in a situation where no non-coercive choice exists.

There is no non-coercive way to allocate exclusive land tenure. It is IMPOSSIBLE.

You want to coerce, with or without extreme circumstance.

No, YOU want to coerce to enable greedy, idle, parasitic landowners to steal from the productive. I am merely willing to know the fact that what you want is to coerce, and that there is no alternative to coercion if anyone is to enjoy exclusive land tenure.

And even in extremes, coercion is a crime...it's just punished differently when there are mitigating and corroborating circumstances.

Except when the coercion is sanctioned by law, such as slavery and landowning.

Extortion is a demand for an unearned benefit, backed by a threat to deprive you of what you would otherwise have. Exclusive tenure to land is not something you would otherwise have, and land rent is a benefit government and the community have earned, but you haven't.

Again, this is anti-property collectivism.

No, it is fact.

No community owns my land, I do.

Blatant question begging fallacy. That is exactly the same "logic" that slave owners used to justify slavery: "No gubmint owns mah niggahs. I do."

And no state is benefiting me.

You are lying. The entire unimproved value of "your" land is a gift from government and the community.

Property rights preceed states in history; see anthropology.

Not property "rights" in land. Indeed, there was no known legal tradition of private property in land until Roman times. Before that, there had always been a recognition that the landholder was a tenure holder only, not the owner of the land.

No one is better off in your anti-property collectivist statist society.

More accurately, no one is impressed by your puerile name calling. There has been no private ownership of land in Hong Kong for over 160 years, yet it has been a beacon of liberty, justice and prosperity, and no one but a stupid, lying ignoramus would claim it is an "anti-property collectivist statist society."

If you want anti-propertry collectivist social contracts among willing participants, have at it...

Unlike my consensual contracts, your anti-justice feudal "contracts" demand UNwilling participants: the enslaved who have been forcibly deprived of their rights to liberty without just compensation.

but this precludes tax from existing (again, at that point, voluntary government not a state, all payments by the willing are donation or payment for service rendered).

Land value taxation is a voluntary, market-based, beneficiary-pay, value-for-value transaction: you pay market value for the economic advantage that government and the community secure to you, and of which you deprive others. You just don't want to pay for what you are taking, because you are accustomed to receiving it as a gift.

Again you make a false comparison.

Nope.

As surely as stateless Somalia is better and improved w/o the state,

No, you are just makin' $#!+ up again. Somalia is only approximately as bad without the state as it was under the horrendous Siad Barre -- who at least didn't infest the sea lanes around the Horn of Africa with pirates.

stateless America would be better and improved w/o the state.

Laughable. While the US government has its problems, the notion that it would be better on the Somali model is hilarious.

You compare apples to oranges and call that logic.

Actually, apples and oranges can usefully be compared in a number of ways.

I compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.

While claiming one of them is a coconut...

Nice try. Please look up "informal logical fallacies" to continue argumentation while simultaneously having logic on your side.

LOL! As they say in Japan, "It's mirror time!"

So let me get this straight...

You are not interested in getting anything straight, as you are about to evade the false claim you made by trying to change the subject.

your understanding of modern economics is that coerced monopolies

See? You are dishonestly changing the subject, which was not "coerced monopolies" but your false and unsupported claim that the market will provide all necessary and desirable services cheaper, more efficiently and with better accountability than a public provider. See your post #503 in this thread.

that aren't subject to competition

Strawman fallacy. No one said anything about not being subject to competition.

You are just lying about what I plainly wrote. Apologists for greed, privilege and injustice always have to lie. ALWAYS.

DON'T cause higher prices, lower quality services, and no accountability?

Right. Especially when private competitors are perfectly at liberty to enter the market, the public provider has democratic accountability, and the alternative is a private monopoly not subject to competition, but WITHOUT democratic accountability.

That's some interesting economic understanding you have there...LOL.

It is fact. You just don't know any economics, and imagine that your infantile "meeza hatesa gubmint" Austrian school websites have something honest and factual to offer.

Every bit of empirical evidence exists and shows that in the absence of coerced monopolies (not to be confused with voluntary monopolies) and monopsonies lower prices prevail, higher quality goods and services prevail, and more accountability exists than in the coerced monopolizaed situation.

<yawn> Nice attempt to change the subject. Try saying something relevant to your false and unsupported claim that the market will provide all necessary and desirable services cheaper, more efficiently and with better accountability than a public provider.

Simply pick up a few books and you'd know this.

ROTFL!! I have read millions of words on economic theory and history, dumpling, and millions more on the theory and history of taxation. You have not.

Georgism isn't modern economics my friend.

And Maxwell's equations aren't modern physics. But they're still good enough for most practical purpose -- and the results of modern physics give much more reason for thinking it is an improvement on Maxwell than the results of modern economics give for thinking it is an improvement on George.

Excuse me while I destroy your argument here

ROTFL!!! Excuse me while I laugh at your rhetorical incompetence, and demolish you utterly:

...when buffalo were communally owned

<yawn> When would that have been? The only communally owned buffalo I know of are in Wood Buffalo National Park -- and they constitute the majority of buffalo in existence, as private appropriators and owners of buffalo had hunted them to the brink of extinction.

they were slaughtered to near extinction.

<sigh> They were slaughtered to near extinction by private interests intent on appropriating an unowned and unmanaged natural resource as private property.

You are destroyed.

When they are owned privately they are brought back from the brink of extinction.

ROTFL!! Your ignorance is astounding. Virtually ALL the increase in buffalo population since the low point of the late 19th century was achieved by the Canadian government, managing the communally owned herd in Wood Buffalo National Park.

You are destroyed. You are destroyed utterly and completely, comprehensively and conclusively. Nothing you can possibly say can make any difference any more, because you have just made such an absolute fool of yourself (OK, I helped a bit).

When streams natives fished were collectively owned

When was that? Provide some evidence for your claim of collective ownership, like a collective plan of management or allocation of use.

Thought not.

they were depleted and the fish got smaller and smaller because people always took the largest fish for themselves. When the tribes owned the fish individually as opposed to all tribes equally claiming ownership, the streams were managed so that everyone was only permitted to fish small fish so the breeding selectively tended to make the fish larger and more plentiful. Soon taking the smallest fish was equal to the past of taking the largest fish, as the entire stock got larger.

Please provide a credible reference for this just-so story.

The stock uof the natural resources got MORE plentiful under property rights, and less plentiful and more polluted under collective ownership.

Garbage refuted above.

When collectives own property, the smaller the collective the better managed the resources. Why? Because the closer you get to individual property rights the better management occurs, and the farther you get from individuals (the closer you get to larger and larger collective groups) the worse the management becomes.

Ah. That must explain the flourishing state of fish stocks worldwide through small private interests appropriating and managing the resource.

Why? Because not having any percieved individual stake in the common property leads to market failure.

We'll add market failure to the economics of which you are known to be ignorant.

Market failure is when individual rational pursuits result in collectively irrational outcomes...like when everyone has this thing called a state and they all push for "free" goodies on someone elses dime...

Like I said, you are ignorant of the economics of market failure, of which the state is most definitely not an example.

this naturally results in deficits and debts,

You are also ignorant of monetary economics. Check.

and when the debt grows to say, idk, 15 trillion dollars, no one wants to give up their goodies (rationally) but the end result is collapse of the economy (collectively irrational. Hence nothing is more susceptible to market failure than the state. Why? Precisely because of it's extortion powers (tax). This is no different in practice than the fish and stream example among natives.

And you claim Georgist economics is not up to the modern standard? ROTFL!!

Lastly, the free-rider problem is obvious. Around 50% of citizens in the state curently pay 0$ in net income tax, but recieve a disproprtionate amount of the servies...essentially free.

No, they do not. They must pay landowners full market value for access to them.

So about half of people under the state are free-riders.

Why are you lying that income tax is the only tax people pay?

So how is it you can use the 'free-rider problem' criticism to suggest in anarchy this problem would be a cataclysmic aspect that would lead to the collapse of such a stateless system?

I said no such thing. Free riders are the least of Somalia's problems.

Of course, this is logical nonsense.

More accurately, it is dishonest garbage that you made up.

It no more collapses the state now on it's own than it would anarchy. In fact, w/o legalized extortion (tax) the free-rider problem would DECREASE logically because no one could get "free" goodies at their neighbors expense w/o their neighbors consent.

You need to stop using the word, "logically."

Everyoe would have to at least show to others they were attempting to pull their own weight, or no one would hand them anything.

You clearly have no idea how the privileged use their privileges to make others hand them things.

So all three of these economic criticisms effect the state far more than anarchy, logically.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

I don't care what his intention was...his intention was wrong.

He was correct.

The fact stands that collective stewardship is far less efficient and far more detrimental to "commons" than private ownership.

Refuted above. And by YOUR OWN EXAMPLE.

BTW, I was aware that a commonly used leftist criticism of markets was in fact anti-privatization...I simply show how it's a bad argument.

See above. You buffaloed yourself, chum.

Also, Orwell intended 1984 to be a story about showing one world government was preferable to multiple nations.

LOL!! Hilariously wrong. Your ignorance is monumental.

Unfortunately for him (but fortunaely for mankind) people saw the point as "wow, the state can be scary". It's now considered a great work of fiction that was intended to be statist, but ended up resulting in the best argument for libertarianism (anarchism).

Orwell in no way intended 1984 to be "statist." You are just makin' $#!+ up.

[Xerographica]

If only you had any intention of being logical! You aren't comparing Somalia under the state to Somalia without the state. You are comparing Somalia under one of the worst governments of the 20th century to Somalia without the state. While few African governments earn any merit badges, try comparing Somalia to an African state that actually makes an effort to do government's job, like Botswana.

Hey! Look! I wonder if your reputation is badder than my own? They should just make it a number instead so we can know for sure who is the most hated member.

helmuth_hubener told me to come visit this thread and do battle with you or something. Remember that time when you posted in one of my very first threads about pragmatarianism... Confessions of a Libertarian? Oh the good old days.

So...pragmatarianism says absolutely nothing about the taxing and the LVT says absolutely nothing about the spending. So it's not really like the two are mutually exclusive. I just don't promote the LVT because I don't think the problem has anything to do with the taxing. Why do you think the problem is with the taxing rather than with the spending?

Do you RSS subscribe to Mark Wadsworth's blog?

[Roy L]

Hey! Look! I wonder if your reputation is badder than my own? They should just make it a number instead so we can know for sure who is the most hated member.

I am, because I am promoting the real threat to greed, privilege, injustice and evil. The evil therefore hate me more than anyone.

helmuth_hubener told me to come visit this thread and do battle with you or something.

At least he knows when he is overmatched.

Remember that time when you posted in one of my very first threads about pragmatarianism... Confessions of a Libertarian? Oh the good old days.

Ah, another thread ruined by Reiver's monumental tediousness.

So...pragmatarianism says absolutely nothing about the taxing and the LVT says absolutely nothing about the spending.

Wrong. LVT recovers the value the spending creates. If the spending is wasteful or corrupt, LVT won't raise as much revenue.

So it's not really like the two are mutually exclusive. I just don't promote the LVT because I don't think the problem has anything to do with the taxing. Why do you think the problem is with the taxing rather than with the spending?

There are problems with both, but you can't solve the spending problem until you solve the taxing problem, because the incentive to pocket publicly created value will be too strong. No matter what you do, without LVT, landowners will force excessive and inefficient spending to line their own pockets. Remove that problem, and it becomes possible to address spending.

Do you RSS subscribe to Mark Wadsworth's blog?

I know of Wadsworth, of course, but I don't subscribe to his blog. He has done a pretty good job demolishing some stupid anti-LVT garbage.

[Xerographica]

There are problems with both, but you can't solve the spending problem until you solve the taxing problem, because the incentive to pocket publicly created value will be too strong. No matter what you do, without LVT, landowners will force excessive and inefficient spending to line their own pockets. Remove that problem, and it becomes possible to address spending.

Can I spend your money "better" than you can?

[Roy L]

Can I spend your money "better" than you can?

Maybe. But that's not the point. When you have paid the supermarket for the groceries you took home, it is not your money any more. It's the supermarket's money, because they earned it by providing you with commensurate value, for which you voluntarily exchanged your money. In exactly the same way, when you voluntarily choose to take land and the associated advantages from the community of those who would otherwise be at liberty to use them, and compensate them justly for taking it from them, the money you paid in compensation is not your money any more.

What is happening here is very simple, Xero: government and the community have been giving the landowner a welfare subsidy, financed by taxes that rob the productive. I have identified the fact that this system is unjust and economically destructive, and propose that instead, those who get the benefit of government spending should be the ones who pay for it. You oppose this idea because you are accustomed to getting your welfare subsidy giveaway, and do not want to pay for it. You oppose justice and economic efficiency, and are in favor of injustice and inefficiency, as long as you benefit by them. You do not care that others' rights are violated, that they are forced into poverty, that millions of them are killed every year by the system you profit from. Considerations of right and justice and simple human decency are of no more interest to you than they are to Steven or Helmuth or Eduardo or any other apologist for greed, privilege, injustice and evil.

The landowner has a magic button that puts a dollar into his bank account and kills a random poor person he doesn't know every time he presses it. He is happy to press that button all day long, and to scream stupid lies about socialism, statism, collectivism, property rights, blah, blah, blah if anyone suggests his magic button is an evil thing that no one should be pressing, or even possess.

[Roy L]

Most other issues besides the issuance of money are almost trivial in comparison.

Right. The only other one of comparable significance is intellectual property monopolies, which have increased in importance relative to land as government and the courts have broadened them, and will almost certainly continue to do so. As technology advances faster and faster, and affects more and more of what people do, it will become difficult even to participate in society without paying off IP protection racketeers.

[helmuth_hubener]

Considerations of right and and simple human decency [and the Apple Pie Way] are of no more interest to you [you horrible land-owner, Xero] than they are to Steven or Helmuth or Eduardo or any other apologist for greed, privilege, injustice and evil.

Hey, I made the list!

I'm a bit unsure as to what Mr. X. did to deserve to be on the list, as he seems quite open to and happy about LVT, but you are both internet addicts so it must be something he said on some other forum, probably years ago.

The landowner has a magic button that puts a dollar into his bank account and kills a random poor person he doesn't know every time he presses it. He is happy to press that button all day long, and to scream stupid lies about socialism, statism, collectivism, property rights, blah, blah, blah.

As for my own part, my posts were not screaming. They were obviously lies and were unceasingly stupid, but screaming they were not. No, I pride myself that I did not respond in kind to your vitriol, except for one time and that was only as a joke to try to show you how ridiculous your tactics are (it didn't work). There are many of your posts, however, which are just over-the-top with rage, epithets, and fury. Righteous fury, of course, at my ceaseless lies and stupidity, but certainly fury.

Anyway, just wanted to make sure to keep the record straight. Carry on.

[helmuth_hubener]

In this article, I will criticize the followers of Henry George, or Georgists, from a libertarian perspective. I see Georgism as a problematic philosophy incompatible with a free society.

There are a couple issues the Georgists have to deal with. First, to summarize the Georgist position: Land was not created by any human, thus it cannot be owned by any human and all landowners are really usurpers and thieves, depriving their poor fellow humans of the land they so ruthlessly claim.

Now, if the Georgists really believe this and if they really believed in justice and morality, it would follow that all land must be held in common forever and ever, amen. There can be no private land monopolization. Instead, they propose a land-value tax. This land-value tax is a fee paid in order to secure permission to rip people off! To steal land from the masses! If we are seeking justice and morality, we do not base our society on handing out a phony "right" to steal and rip people off in exchange for money. Why not have the whole mass of people own the land in common and have the workers' council make all land decisions? Because the Georgists understand the incentive problem and perhaps they understand some of the other problems also involved in collective ownership.

So the first point to realize is that Georgism is a philosophy about expedience and utilitarianism. Absolute rights and justice are sacrificed right off the bat. They will get very excited about how landowners are thieves and property (in land) is theft, but do they call for an end to this theft? You know, I criticize theft because I am against it. Are they? Not at all! The solution they propose is: "because landowners are all thieves, we have to allow them to keep thieving but have them pay a recurring fee to 'society' for the right to continue their brigandry." Look, if landowners are thieves, they're scum. The immoral looting needs to be abolished, not taxed. One gets the feeling they would call for taxation on the owners of chattel slaves in order to pay back society for their crime and that such a tax would make everything OK.

The second issue is physical. In Georgism as in economics generally, land is defined as the entirety of the raw universe, excluding our bodies and the goods we create. That is, every ocean, every planet, every star, every bit of stray hydrogen, and the vast expanse of space in the cosmos. In Georgism, no one can own any of that. As soon as they improve it, they do own the improvement, but they still can never own the "land", that is, the space and matter which nature provided.

So, if a man homesteads a section of forest, cuts down some trees, and uses them to build a house there, he now owns the house, but not the land it sits on. Even if he fundamentally changes the make-up of the land by, e.g. planting a wheat field or digging a big hole, the underlying land can never be owned, only the improvements. That in and of itself seems fair and consistent. The man didn't create the land, he just happens to be using it (and thus preventing any of his equally-deserving fellows from using it, by the way) so how could he have any just claim to own it? The wheat, on the other hand, he very much had a hand in. The wheat would not exist without him, he created it with his laboring, and so it rightfully can be said to be his absolute property.

The problem becomes apparent when one realizes that not only is the wheat field making use of the matter and space provided for free via the existence of the universe, the wheat itself is making use of that free matter and space as well. The matter that was originally in the soil has been percolated up through the wheat stalk to become the kernel. One cannot simply create matter out of nothing. As Carl Sagan said: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” I think we can all agree, then, that everything in existence, no matter how man-made, has land as one of its major components. That is, everything consists of raw matter gotten from the universe and of space for it to occupy.

Let us consider two different assets: a parking lot, and a chain saw. Both are considered fully ownable by libertarians, and indeed by most people. Georgists consider only the chain saw to be fully ownable. That is because the parking lot has a strong "land" ( land in the common sense, not the economic sense) component while the chain saw does not. Now the parking lot qua parking lot is ownable, the Georgists would be quick to clarify. The pavement, the painted lines, all of that is an improvement and thus ownable. The land that it is blanketing, however, is not ownable. That raw land should be taxed according to whatever its value would have been were it not leveled, tamped, and covered with pavement.

To be consistent, the same reasoning must apply to the chain saw. The chain saw should be taxed according to whatever value the ore, petroleum, etc. would have had were it not refined, cracked, made into steel, made into plastic, cast, injection-molded, and assembled into a chain saw. The raw elements composing the chain saw are just as much a part of the universe as the raw elements composing the parking lot.

But Georgists do not apply the same logic to the chain saw as to the parking lot. Part of this doubtless is because of their placement of expediency above the concepts of justice or consistency. The land in the case of the parking lot is big, static, and, as they are fond of pointing out, impossible to hide from the tax man. The land tucked away in the chain saw is small, portable, and can be hidden from the tax man. Thus, the Georgists want to tax the land of the parking lot, but not the land of the chain saw, because of the ease of taxation and for other practical reasons. Thus, when they speak of land-value taxation they mean only that very particular class of land that lays horizontally at the surface of the Earth and upon which men walk.

This inconsistency opens them up to all kinds of hypothetical absurdities and conundrums. What if a man were to fly to an asteroid and claim to own it? That claim would be invalid under Georgist thought, since the land of the asteroid is unownable. What if instead he were to carve a large chunk out of the Earth and launch it into space as an artificial asteroid? Since it becomes an artificial asteroid only through herculean human effort, it would seem to be fully ownable, for the same reasons the wheat kernel and the chain saw are fully ownable. Thus, a thousand years down the road, all the inhabitants on Asteroid B are enjoying full allodial property rights while on asteroid A they must pay land-value tax to humanity for the crime of monopolizing their pieces of the asteroid. But what is fundamentally different about these two asteroids at this point? Should the distant, murky past of the asteroids' respective beginnings really affect their property situation so?

What if I were to tunnel a shaft a mile down and at the bottom of it hollow out an enormous cavern. Would I then be responsible to pay land value tax? Would not this be essentially the same type of endeavor as the asteroid launch? One is putting solid mass where there is emptiness in order to create new livable square footage. The other is creating emptiness where there was solid mass in order to create new livable square footage.

If the artificial asteroid people and the hollow earth people can both escape the LVT via their shenanigans, what of those who drain swamps, manufacture islands, blow up mountains, or heat icy wastes and in so doing make these places habitable or useful when before they were not? The typical Georgist response to, e.g. the artificial island manufacturer, would be that while he may own the island, he does not own the land under the island and thus must pay tax on the value of the land under his island. But what about the land over the island? What about the land <i>in</i> the island which has merely been shuffled around? Why do we only care about what's underneath? Is land only land when it is "under" -- when men can stand on it? To figure out the taxable land do we simply calculate the surface area of the Earth's sphere, despite the fact that much of this is covered in ocean, making it impossible to "stand on" without application of improvements or technology?

The artificial island builder created the value of the land under his island, value which did not exist until he arrived. No one was using the land before him. For all practical purposes, it was not land. He has thus created new usable land, just as the Earth hollower created new usable land, and just as the asteroid launcher created new usable land. They have not created new land in an absolute sense if one defines land as the entirety of the universe, but they have changed the nature of the land. In doing so, they have created a valuable asset where none existed before. If the chain saw manufacturer, who does the same thing -- he rearranges the matter given by nature to create a new valuable asset -- if he can own his creation, these real-estate-improvers ought to be able to own their creations as well. To a lesser extent, the irrigator, the forest clearer, the mountain blaster, and the explorer all create value where there was none before. Their creations are tied to the horizontal surface of the Earth, true. That is a laughably arbitrary reason to deny them the fruits of their labors.

The chain saw monopolizes the scarce matter, or land, of the universe just as the parking lot does. The Georgists say that the parking lot owner must pay tax on the scarce matter his creation is monopolizing, but the chain saw owner need pay no tax on the scarce matter his creation is monopolizing. Why? Because one collection of matter is arranged in a way that the Georgists recognize as land -- dirt laid out horizontally at the surface of the Earth.

Georgists are guilty of not thinking three-dimensionally. For them, the world is still flat and horizontal land still holds some sort of almost mystical quality making it unownable. As technology progresses, very small or nontraditional real-estate, as well as very large manufactured items, blur the line between what is taxable land and what is not. One path forward to rigorize this school of thought would be to introduce the idea of taxing the underlying land in boats, hammers, and chain saws in the same way as the land underlying skyscrapers, fish ponds, and parking lots. Another path forward would be to admit that although man did not create the universe we will nevertheless allow the entire universe to pass into private ownership, since the alternative is to create some sort of tax on the universe, whose purpose and benefit would be singularly unclear.