No, you are just spewing stupid, anti-economic garbage.
He is objectively correct, and he did not say ONLY infrastructure.His first premise is that while everyone is paying taxes, and he admits freely that the wealthy pay progressively more, the landowners, he says, are more than getting this all "back" from increased land values. -- then comes nothing but false gibberish on how infrastructure was responsible for this "value increase".
Wrong. Infrastructure and services are what make a growing population and economy possible AND ECONOMICALLY ADVANTAGEOUS.Land values appreciate in the midst of any growing population with a growing economy, but that is not primarily due to "infrastructure".
Wrong. Specie is a product of labor and not in fixed supply. You are just spewing stupid, anti-economic garbage again, as usual.Land itself is similar to hard specie.
<sigh> Specie is not inflation-proof, as the Spanish specie inflation of the 16th C proved.It is naturally rare, and therefore inflation-proof.
Garbage. Inflation hits creditors hardest, and tends to benefit the lowest income earners, who are more often debtors.A HEDGE against a debased currency, one that is deliberately diluted, and which depreciates in value, which hits the lowest income earners, who have no hedges, the hardest.
What, through squatters' rights? ROTFL! You are just talking stupid, anti-economic nonsense again.He focuses on the fact that the lowest income earners tend not to be landowners (tend not have access to the same "hedging" security of landowners). One response to this could be the obvious: Homestead. Turn renters into owners.
Land ownership is itself the biggest artificial barrier to individual liberty, prosperity and home ownership.Remove all artificial barriers to individual land ownership.
That is economically impossible. All your "solution" will do is make the productive into the permanent slaves of rich, greedy, idle, privileged, parasitic landowners. Which is just pure evil.FREE EVERYONE FROM EVIL $#@!ING RENT.
You are talking nonsense. Rent is simply a fact of the market. It makes no more sense to hate rent than to hate wages or interest.But no, that would defeat his underlying aim and central purpose, because he also (and rightly) hates income taxes. Does he hate income taxes more than he hates rent? NO. He starts off by decrying rent, but that's really the last we hear of it.
We have no more choice about the existence of rent than we do about the existence of wages or interest, and for the same reasons.He's off in Georgist La-La land after that, because really - the one thing that he said hurts the poor is the very thing he wants to keep in place, and call for as the Grand Solution.
No, they are hit by high taxes, high rents (which go together), and being forced to pay the former (often through burden shifting) while forcibly being deprived of the liberty to take advantage of the latter.See, the poor are hit by low taxes and high rents.
Nope. They need access to opportunity. Not being renters through "homesteading" and owning land off in the wilderness somewhere does them no good at all. Your proposed "solution" is just stupid, anti-economic nonsense.If they were not renters, they would just be hit by low taxes.
The mystery here, Steven, is how you can so obviously understand that people have and need a right to use land, yet still deny it. People can't exist without using land, and you know that. But your brain has been so twisted into irrationality by landowner greed, illogic and absurdities that you think somehow people have more of a right to own land than to use it, despite the indisputable fact that ownership of land is precisely the measure of how much of people's rights to use it have been removed.
The poor, not being creditors or having much money, are already inflation-proof anyway.His aim is not to allow the poor to make themselves inflation-proof,
Rent is the price of access to an economic opportunity that would otherwise be available. So “freeing” them from rents just means forcibly depriving them of their liberty to access economic opportunity by violent, aggressive, physical coercion.and RENT FREE (free of the ONLY thing he said hits them hardest), by making them landowners, freeing them from rents,
I.e., the value they are taking. Right. Whereas you want them to keep it, as a welfare subsidy giveaway paid for by robbing the productive.and limiting (OR EVEN ABOLISHING) income taxes. Not on your life. His solution is, instead, just to make everyone renters! Rich and poor alike. Make the rich pay "their fair share" of RENT.
As already proved, LVT is inherently the only possible way to make government self-financing.Then all is well, and all the other taxes (magically, we promise and guaran-damn-tee it), go away.
Garbage. Commodities generally decline in real value in a growing economy. It is natural resources that grow in value, as they are in FIXED SUPPLY, and represent economic opportunity.Land, like any scarce and valuable commodity, really does appreciate in value in a growing economy.
Nope. That's just more false, dishonest and stupid garbage from you.The most important reason for appreciation, which can be seen as you move away from insane metropolitan centers, which should not be held up as examples or used as models, is that land simply does not DEPRECIATE in value relative to a thoroughly and incessantly debauched currency. That's not "publicly created" value for the land, but rather "publicly AND privately DESTROYED" value for the currency itself.
As private interests cannot provide efficient amounts of investment in infrastructure, it must be paid for publicly. There are only two ways to do that: by recovering the value the infrastructure itself creates, or by stealing other value from its private creators and giving it to the landowners near the infrastructure. LVT is the former choice. All other taxes are the latter choice.The solution is not LVT OR income tax. That's a FALSE CHOICE, as both should be abolished wherever they exist, and forbidden where they do not. Infrastructure does not require EITHER of these mechanisms as revenue streams to exist.
Irrelevancy.The second solution (which is really the first in terms of importance): STOP DEBAUCHING THE CURRENCY.
That would solve nothing. Only about 1/8 of the US land area is managed by the BLM, and most of it is effectively uninhabitable. What happens when the inhabitable part is all gone?The third solution: STOP WITHHOLDING PUBLIC LANDS FROM LANDLESS INDIVIDUALS. MAKE HOMESTEADING FOR INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT LAND A RIGHT.
How special -- for those who already own all the good land...If you inherited land, or already have land, you're out of luck. Declare your homestead, and it's INVIOLABLE.
There's no reason to think that would solve anything.The fourth solution: ABOLISH THE PROPERTY TAX AND THE INCOME TAX. Neither are necessary.
It's self-evidently not sustainable, as proved above. When all the land is owned, how does a new citizen get to be a landowner?But this nonsense of making everyone renters, paying perpetual rents on land they can NEVER own -- that notion can kiss my ass forever, along with all the collectivist, socialist fantasy-land rationale invented to support it. The solution is NOT to make everyone renters. It's the opposite - make it so that everyone can be landowners. That is the ONLY solution that is sustainable, and that I would support.
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