Funny how so-called “libertarians” (monarchists) believe that as long as you can violently “protect” a chunk of land, you should have an unconditional claim to it.
With today’s technology, I think it would be relatively easy for one person to “protect” 100 acres. So under the aforementioned “libertarian” worldview, Earth would have 360 million fence-erecting landowners controlling 100% of the planet's landmasses, pointing guns at and charging rent from the remaining 7 billion of us for nothing more than permission to exist — under whatever rules they dictate — on "their" planet.
…and yet somehow those 360 million landowners aren’t a government.
It’s almost like these so-called "libertarians" haven’t thought about what a government is. Or what freedom is.
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Scott Santens Starting to See the Cat
We geoists have been hen-pecking prominent basic income advocate Scott Santens for a while, and it looks like he might be starting to come around.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/extreme-wealth-inequality-alaska-model
First, THANK YOU to Scott for writing this. You're a big voice, and we need you.
But of course I'm picky. Scott takes the approach of caution, saying: "Even with a land-value tax functioning to create a more progressive distribution of wealth after taxes, it still doesn’t confront the question of why national productivity is being so unequally distributed in the first place."
It does, and I must try to make this clear because it shows why public land rent collection is so important.
The best way I can think to explain it is by repeating what it seems I try hardest to make people understand: land value "taxation" is not a tax. It is the market rental value of land titles. It is what land users willingly pay to exclude other land users from a location due to its productive advantage. "Incomes" -- what people have before paying market land rent -- will always be grossly unequal because some people are using excellent locations while others are using shitty ones.
In the current economy, it's even worse, of course, because land users don't keep the rent at all; they pay it to title holders: banks, private equity firms, REITs, etc. It's really just a few tens of thousands of people throughout the world who are collecting in any significant way the unearned rent of land.
Rent -- the rental value of privilege -- explains all unequal and unearned income distribution. The only other way to derive income, fundamentally, is by creating labor or capital -- in other words, by earning it.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/extreme-wealth-inequality-alaska-model
First, THANK YOU to Scott for writing this. You're a big voice, and we need you.
But of course I'm picky. Scott takes the approach of caution, saying: "Even with a land-value tax functioning to create a more progressive distribution of wealth after taxes, it still doesn’t confront the question of why national productivity is being so unequally distributed in the first place."
It does, and I must try to make this clear because it shows why public land rent collection is so important.
The best way I can think to explain it is by repeating what it seems I try hardest to make people understand: land value "taxation" is not a tax. It is the market rental value of land titles. It is what land users willingly pay to exclude other land users from a location due to its productive advantage. "Incomes" -- what people have before paying market land rent -- will always be grossly unequal because some people are using excellent locations while others are using shitty ones.
In the current economy, it's even worse, of course, because land users don't keep the rent at all; they pay it to title holders: banks, private equity firms, REITs, etc. It's really just a few tens of thousands of people throughout the world who are collecting in any significant way the unearned rent of land.
Rent -- the rental value of privilege -- explains all unequal and unearned income distribution. The only other way to derive income, fundamentally, is by creating labor or capital -- in other words, by earning it.
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