We Urgently Need To Revert To Classical Economics

[Steven Douglas]

Do you have Roy grouped with Cyberman as well?

No, actually, that would be you.

Roy's the committed autistic ideologue type; the Professor Nash, Jr. of LVT, who has barricaded himself in a room, in a house high atop Mount Crumpet. Thousands of charts, clippings and other sundry LVT-related minutia paper every square inch of his walls, ceiling, and every other flat available surface. Hundreds of yards of yarn, rubber bands and colored string criss-cross and weave in and out from tack to well placed tack, confirming to Roy what he knew all along: that landownership is despicable, evil, people-enslaving and murdering filth which MUST be stopped. But how?!

EcoWarrier(sic) seems more the harmless Cyberman type, who actually fancies himself a kind of LVT GeoSuperhero, who is on a quest for Truth, Justice, and the LVT way. Armed with simple LVT-affirming soundbites, and fortified by a brown paper sack filled with tracts and propaganda leaflets from which to copy and paste, he is equally committed (and should be), as he is motivated by the pure and basic blind faith of a zealous believer, one who lives in a very simplistic LVT fantasy world.

[EcoWarrier]

I am a GeoSuperhero. Thank you.

You are institutionalized, unable to shake off the pre-conceived notions bouncing around your head. That is sad. Also, unable see basic common sense devoid of simple logic. Again sad. Think outside the box that your mind has been put into.

Your idea of freedom is the freedom to free-load.

[Len Larson]

[WilliamShrugged]

I am a GeoSuperhero. Thank you.

You are institutionalized, unable to shake off the pre-conceived notions bouncing around your head. That is sad. Also, unable see basic common sense devoid of simple logic. Again sad. Think outside the box that your mind has been put into.

Your idea of freedom is the freedom to free-load.

Pointless post here.

[EcoWarrier]

Pointless post here.

So you are saying most people's idea on this forum is that freedom is the freedom to free-load.

[erowe1]

A tax shift is Stalinism.

You keep calling it a tax shift. How is switching from no taxes to taxes just a tax shift?

[WilliamShrugged]

So you are saying most people's idea on this forum is that freedom is the freedom to free-load.

No im regarding your waste of time post...

You are institutionalized, unable to shake off the pre-conceived notions bouncing around your head. That is sad. Also, unable see basic common sense devoid of simple logic. Again sad. Think outside the box that your mind has been put into.

[EcoWarrier]

You keep calling it a tax shift. How is switching from no taxes to taxes just a tax shift?

You are confused. LVT as the Single Tax, removes Income, Sales & Property (tax on the buildings)taxes. It reclaim community created wealth that crystallized as land values. Simple.

[EcoWarrier]

No im regarding your waste of time post...

So you are saying they would never understand anything from personal free-loading, so my post will not penetrate their conditioning. We have to try.

[WilliamShrugged]

So you are saying they would never understand anything from personal free-loading, so my post will not penetrate their conditioning. We have to try.

When THIS is 90% of the post, it's useless.

You are institutionalized, unable to shake off the pre-conceived notions bouncing around your head. That is sad. Also, unable see basic common sense devoid of simple logic. Again sad. Think outside the box that your mind has been put into.

Notice that i haven't brought up free loading, yet you keep thinking that. I'm pointing out your stupid elitist remarks.

[EcoWarrier]

When THIS is 90% of the post, it's useless.

Notice that i haven't brought up free loading, yet you keep thinking that. I'm pointing out your stupid elitist remarks.

Elitists? Stupid? Have you just dropped in from La-la land as well? The post was to the point. They are brainwashed regurgitating the same indoctrinated tripe continually. One keeps saying a tax shift is Stalinist and all sorts of things that come to head. Amazing of course.

[erowe1]

You are confused. LVT as the Single Tax, removes Income, Sales & Property (tax on the buildings)taxes. It reclaim community created wealth that crystallized as land values. Simple.

I'm not confused. I already explained this.

The people criticizing LVT aren't saying that it's worse or more collectivist or Stalinist or whatever than we have now. It may well be an improvement over what we have now. They're criticizing it in comparison with no tax at all. A switch between an income tax and an LVT is a tax shift. But a switch between nothing at all and an LVT is not.

ETA: To put it another way...
Let us suppose for the sake of argument that our federal government right now instituted a revenue neutral tax shift from the income tax to a land value tax. And for the sake of argument, I grant that that revenue neutral tax shift would be an improvement, or, at least, that is not the point at which I really differ with you.

Where I really differ with you is that I would insist that if that revenue-neutral tax shift were to occur, then we could continue to improve the situation even more by lowering the rates of that LVT. And the lower we took them, all the way down to zero if possible, the better the situation would get. You, it seems, disagree with this. And it is because of this disagreement, and not simply your support for a tax shift, that you have been called "Stalinist." The rest of us think tax cuts are always a good thing. You don't.

[The Free Hornet]

I am a GeoSuperhero. Thank you.

Would a superhero address some questions from a late thread comer?

1) Why not link to the Wikipedia article (Land Value Tax) on it?

As poor as that link may be, it is ten times better than the one-sided descriptions by the proponents of LVT who overpromise and underdeliver. Also, rectify differences between the wiki ("Requires clear ownership [of land]") and the proselytization of Roy ("[Owning land] is legalized theft").

Are you advocating an ideology or a revenue system? Although I agree you might need both (especially statists who love those revenue systems), it is too mucked up for me to understand what you're getting at.

<LVT_protest>I may have to pay your stinking LVT, but I don't have to agree with your BS!</LVT_protest>


2a) What do you want the government to do regardless of how the income is raised? Hopefully you are libertarians or minarchists or something. There is never justice or fairness in coercive redistribution. Is it fair if one family gets more free fruit because they had twins and the other family had one really fat baby?


2b) Can you justify taxation... AT ALL??!! Views on tax vary from a necessary or unnecessary evil, to those who see absolute goodness radiating from every paycheck FICA deduction. If I wander onto unoccupied state park territory and start living off the land and living in a ramshackle dwelling, then it could be said maybe that I own nothing and owe nothing. True or False?


3) If you can't own land, what else can't you own? Land versus stuff is just an artificial distinction. Land is just the crusty stuff we presently store on top of the mantle. My neighbors would be pissed if I rented some land and took all the crust with me. Mighty pissed indeed as they gazed into the ten-mile deep hole which I miraculously dug between the iron spikes of my plot.


From your first post, "All thinking about the world involves a degree of abstraction." I think you need another layer of abstraction to unify certain concepts. Drop the focus on land, land, land. Does it matter if the gubblemint defends and builds roads to my land or my pile of sugar?



But if I defend that sugar myself...



Provide for its transportation...



What right do you have to partake in it?




Additionally, here is a link for discussion:

Founder David Nolan supports land value tax as the only tax that does not fall on productivity, and the late Karl Hess often described land value tax as the one tax to levy until the state could be abolished entirely.

What is the plan to end/minimize the LVT???

[WilliamShrugged]

Elitists? Stupid? Have you just dropped in from La-la land as well? The post was to the point. They are brainwashed regurgitating the same indoctrinated tripe continually. One keeps saying a tax shift is Stalinist and all sorts of things that come to head. Amazing of course.

And you question being called elitist. Many could say the same about you..

[Roy L]

Nobody is a slave if they have the right to own property.

No, that's a just another stupid, flat-out lie from you. Slaves have often had the right to own property: there is no other way a slave could ever have purchased his freedom from his owner, is there? There were slaves in ancient Rome who became quite wealthy.

Turning somebody away from a free lunch is not slavery.

It is if you demand they labor for you in return for access to a lunch they would have been free to eat if you did not forcibly stop them. That is precisely what the landowner does.

As you emphasize "evolutionary process", the process is for humans to claim land and own it.

No, that is a process of theft, not evolution.

They do.

As they once owned slaves.

Mother Earth has no voice.

The landless have voices. It is they whose rights to liberty have been forcibly removed, not "Mother Earth's."

The idea that land must be shared is not fact, it is fantasy.

The fact that people shared land for millions of years before greedy, evil, parasitic thieves started stealing it is most definitely a fact.

Either land is shared, or the landless are enslaved. That is also a fact.

The fantasy is your notion that forcible removal of others' rights to liberty can somehow be justified.

[Roy L]

And you question being called elitist. Many could say the same about you..

But they would be (surprise!) lying. There is nothing elitist about advocating equal human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor.

[Roy L]

How do those things indicate ought and not just is?

We've been through this. The concept of ought only arises because human beings have evolved a capacity for moral reasoning to replace instinctive primate social behaviors. That is a fact: what IS. I.e., we don't have to derive an ought from an is, because we start with factual premises about what ought is: a way of reconciling individual people's animal self-interest with their subtler, longer-term, less direct but equally important interest in being members of successful societies. In terms of reproductive success, to be a member of a failed society is probably worse than personal extinction even if you survive your society's fall, not only because your subsequent survival and reproduction are so prejudiced, but because fellow members of your society tend to carry so many copies of your genes, and their survival and reproduction is also prejudiced.

Also, aren't all those things present in all societies, including those without whatever hallmarks you might be using to classify certain societies as "civilizations"?

No, because all the societies that no longer exist failed the existence and growth tests, and most failed the reproduction test (i.e., their peculiar qualities are not represented in the current population of societies).

[WilliamShrugged]

But they would be (surprise!) lying. There is nothing elitist about advocating equal human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor.

When did i say his ideology was elitist? Man you and Ecowarrior take the cake on stupidity.

[Steven Douglas]

There is nothing elitist about advocating equal human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor.

Which nearly everyone in this forum advocates, of course. Just not by your geolib-centric intended meanings of every single term you used. They're not faced with your false choice between LVT and other taxes. And they 'dontsa hatesa gubmint' either, because they're actually calling for a gubmint -- one that would cause you and everyone else with taxing tentacles to draw back bloody stumps.

It's not a case of "let the right one in". You're just another statist bloodsucker to them, trying to argue that you're the one being bitten, by landowners who are not "justly compensating" you for your loss of liberty to use whatever land they now hold as property.

[Roy L]

So if The 3rd Reich had succeeded and lead the world in science and engineering, would it have been morally right?

Hypothesis contrary to fact fallacy. You could with equal "logic" ask, if 2 + 2 equalled 5, would 2 - 2 equal 1?

Let me answer the more interesting and perceptive question that you didn't ask: all societies and all moralities, like all organisms, are evolutionary works in progress. There isn't an end point of evolution that results in a perfect organism or a perfect morality.

This is nothing more than utilitarian, B.S.

No, it isn't. Utilitarianism takes aggregate human "happiness" (by some measure) as the test of morality, not societal evolutionary success. You would be more accurate to call it pragmatism, but it is actually subtler than that, as the determination of right and wrong is never actually completed.

There is a Right and a Wrong.

Indeed. But what are they, and why?

You learn it as a kid. Don't hit, don't steal, don't lie, and don't kill.

OTC, lots of people learn to hit as children, and some even learn to steal and lie. A very few learn to kill.

So, what then?

Those actions are universally wrong in all societies and all spheres of human life, except for government which breaks all the rules and is therefore immoral.

Nonsense. Your view of morality is jejune, as is your view of government. Of course it is not universally wrong to hit, nor to steal or lie or kill. Sometimes we have to do these things to defend ourselves, our family members, our rights, or our society. In general these actions tend to weaken society, and that is why they are considered wrong. But they are not the test of right and wrong.

[Roy L]

When did i say his ideology was elitist? Man you and Ecowarrior take the cake on stupidity.

I didn't say you did. Learn to read.

[Roy L]

Which nearly everyone in this forum advocates, of course.

No, they don't, which is the point.

Just not by your geolib-centric intended meanings of every single term you used.

The area of disagreement is actually quite limited, and revolves around the manner of reconciling property rights with liberty rights. The anti-LVT side advocates property in things IN ADDITION TO the fruits of one's labor. That is logically impossible except by removing others' liberty rights to access and use those things.

They're not faced with your false choice between LVT and other taxes.

It's not a false choice. It's not even a false dichotomy. It's simply an alternative: we can fund public expenditures as we currently do, by confiscating privately created wealth and using it to give value to landowners, or we can fund them by recovering the value the expenditures themselves create, rather than giving it away to landowners in return for nothing. It's really just that simple.

And they 'dontsa hatesa gubmint' either, because they're actually calling for a gubmint -- one that would cause you and everyone else with taxing tentacles to draw back bloody stumps.

Lurid imagery aside, that's just silly garbage. No taxes --> no government --> no civilization.

It's not a case of "let the right one in".

True: it's more a case of "let the actual facts in."

You're just another statist bloodsucker to them,

Then they are stupid as well as ignorant and dishonest.

trying to argue that you're the one being bitten, by landowners who are not "justly compensating" you for your loss of liberty to use whatever land they now hold as property.

That is indisputable: they forcibly deprive me of liberty I would otherwise have, and you appear to know that very well. I suspect you might be closer to the collapse of your false and evil beliefs than you realize.

[Roy L]

I think that he was mocking you in that line...

Then it backfired.

I think you missed something with this little property freedom rant. Owning or forcing of a slave itself is a violation of property (individual owns himself therefore not a slave).

Garbage. Self-ownership is a logical contradiction. Furthermore, if people owned themselves, they would be able to sell themselves into slavery -- that has certainly been done -- in which case owning a slave would NOT be a violation of rights.

Crusoe also would be violating Friday's property (himself).

Lie. Crusoe is simply enforcing his claim to own the land, same as any other land "owner" pointing a gun at a "trespasser" and telling them to clear out. Giving Friday the option of permanent servitude is just an offer of "voluntary" trade.

According to you, that is...

So if you have a society that follows some system of rules (whether that's voluntarism or a government) property should be protected.

So, in your view, property in slaves should have been protected instead of abolished?

Sadly governments (thanks to ideologies like yourself) care very little about protection of individual property.

That is an absurd and outrageous lie. Governments are ALL ABOUT protection of individual property. That's how the rich get rich, stay rich, and get rapidly richer:

"Government has no other end than the preservation of property." -- John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Personally, i would have more trust in a voluntarist society filled with many others that follow NAP. Know that that still doesn't prevent violations 100%. I also have the power to protect myself further (multiple ways).

Yes, and your favored system would end in feudalism as landowning gradually concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, as it always has before.

[Roy L]

http://archive.mises.org/1610/murray...-henry-george/

Heinrich's anti-LVT "arguments" are garbage, as Rothbard's were. I'm not going to take the time to demolish them all in detail here. If you pick one or two that you think are particularly strong, I'll demolish them before your very eyes.

[Roy L]

Roy's the committed autistic ideologue type; the Professor Nash, Jr. of LVT, who has barricaded himself in a room, in a house high atop Mount Crumpet. Thousands of charts, clippings and other sundry LVT-related minutia paper every square inch of his walls, ceiling, and every other flat available surface. Hundreds of yards of yarn, rubber bands and colored string criss-cross and weave in and out from tack to well placed tack, confirming to Roy what he knew all along: that landownership is despicable, evil, people-enslaving and murdering filth which MUST be stopped. But how?!

You have quite an imagination.

[Roy L]

You keep calling it a tax shift. How is switching from no taxes to taxes just a tax shift?

Where are there no taxes?

[Roy L]

Notice that i haven't brought up free loading, yet you keep thinking that.

The landowner qua landowner is always inherently a freeloader. See post #6 in this thread.

[Roy L]

The people criticizing LVT aren't saying that it's worse or more collectivist or Stalinist or whatever than we have now.

Yes, of course they are. AFAICT, they are explicitly claiming that because it is levied specifically on the basis of property ownership, LVT is more collectivist, Stalinist, communist, socialist, blah, blah, blah than income tax, sales tax, excise tax, poll tax, value added tax, estate tax, gas tax, luxury tax, and every other kind of tax.

It may well be an improvement over what we have now.

It is certainly an enormous improvement over what we have now. That is why evil, greedy, lying, anti-LVT filth oppose it with such maniacal ferocity: they know that if anyone actually tries LVT, it will immediately be obvious that their "all taxes are evil" rant is objectively false.

They're criticizing it in comparison with no tax at all.

If they are, then they are being dishonest as well as stupid.

A switch between an income tax and an LVT is a tax shift. But a switch between nothing at all and an LVT is not.

No tax at all is not one of the options.

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that our federal government right now instituted a revenue neutral tax shift from the income tax to a land value tax.

You mean, as the Founding Fathers tried to do in the Articles of Confederation?

Where I really differ with you is that I would insist that if that revenue-neutral tax shift were to occur, then we could continue to improve the situation even more by lowering the rates of that LVT. And the lower we took them, all the way down to zero if possible, the better the situation would get.

But you are just objectively wrong about that. Increasing the welfare subsidy giveaway to landowners can never be beneficial. Never.

You, it seems, disagree with this. And it is because of this disagreement, and not simply your support for a tax shift, that you have been called "Stalinist."

Absurdly and dishonestly.

The rest of us think tax cuts are always a good thing. You don't.

And you are wrong and we are correct, as explained in post #135 in this thread.

[WilliamShrugged]

Garbage. Self-ownership is a logical contradiction. Furthermore, if people owned themselves, they would be able to sell themselves into slavery -- that has certainly been done -- in which case owning a slave would NOT be a violation of rights.

exactly, they wouldn't be a slave. They would be a servant. Fail.

[WilliamShrugged]

I didn't say you did. Learn to read.

Then why state this to me stupid

There is nothing elitist about advocating equal human rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor.