Geoists' Top Semantic Sins

It's hard enough being a geoist. Freehold land ownership is a powerful meme, a disease of almost perfectly optimal virulence. Even a geoist with perfect word choice and a great personality faces a steep climb on the path to winning hearts and minds. (Which is why I recommend we don't even try.)

But many make it harder on themselves than necessary. I'm part of several online discussion groups, and when I see someone make the semantic errors below, it's impossible to tell whether the person committing them is simply a hard-boiled geoist who understands land economics but plays fast and loose with words -- or if he is a self-identified "geoist" who actually doesn't know what he's talking about.

If I can't tell, neither can the average internet user, and that's a problem.

I'm compiling this list for two audiences: (a) People who are interested in geoism but remain unconvinced due to our poor word usage, and (b) Geoists who want to improve their language and widen their appeal.

Without further ado, please:



1. Don't say "land" when you mean "land value" or "land rent."


Example A
"We must make land common property."

This was Henry George's one-sentence summary for how to cure humanity's ills. Surrounded by hundreds of pages of context in Progress and Poverty, this sentence is acceptable; uttered alone on Facebook to Joe Average -- from whom so much is constantly stolen -- it's a red flag.

Geoists see freehold land ownership for what it is: a giant screw plunging billions into the muck by the very energy they use trying to ascend it. Everyone else, screw-bound, sees only rising, spinning muck and the salvation of the spiral stair.  In practical terms, this means that Joe Average's land -- he calls it "his house," and we'll just agree even though he owes $500,000 on it -- is all he's got. It's all anyone's got.  His world is full of takers; you must be out to take his land; why don't you just oil his boots and shove him muckward?

Of course, Henry George had no intention of taking anybody's land. What he meant was, "We must make land rent common property." While this sentence isn't much better on its own, it has the advantage of resulting in confusion ("What the f*** is land rent?") instead of violent backlash. The confusion opens the door for you to do what you should have done in the first place and be a little more systemic in your explanation. I like to say, "Geoism means that instead of paying banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and other large corporations for access to land, we pay each other on the basis of exclusion." Maybe that'll help Joe see why he doesn't own land but in fact is owned by landowners.


Example B
"80% of United States land is owned by the top 10%."

It blows my mind that geoists still say stuff like this. I'll flog it 'til I'm blue in the face: Land area doesn't matter. Land value does.

In my experience, few people are intellectually triggered by land area ownership, and they are right to be so apathetic: If everyone had guaranteed access to a couple of acres of rural land, it would affect their well-being -- and the health of Earth in general -- literally not at all. Rural land is what we call marginal land, land where earnings are shit. Put that shit between the twin buns of today's wage and capital taxation, and working on marginal land yields you a nice shit sandwich.

We want people to have equal access to land by its QUALITY, or rental value. This means guaranteed access to constantly improving communities, which is the way humans are wired to live. Let's use language that communicates that.


2. Don't say "growth" when you mean "efficiency."

I'm pretty passionate about wildlife conservation. I know that geoism is the path to effiency. By the simple stroke of ending economic theft, it will undo suburban sprawl and create cities as efficient and compact as zoning laws will allow. I believe that roads and cars as we know them will become largely obsolete, as will industrial monoculture farming. Eco-friendly food production methods will rule the day for the simple reason that they can sustain themselves without subsidies (and they yield better food output per acre). "Growth" may happen; it may not; but it doesn't matter because growth (output) is not as important as efficiency (output per input).

I think some of my fellow geoists use the word growth just because it's fashionable in mainstream media to support growth. The popularity of this word stems, of course, from land rent dispossession -- the constant theft that leads people to believe more work and more production is the answer to poverty when the answer is simply to stop the theft.

It is a mistake to cater our language to growth-lovers. Sustainability is a hot enough topic that for every growth-lover we may sway to the side of geoism, we will lose at least one green-minded person. It is both inaccurate and politically foolish to say that geoism promotes growth; it promotes efficiency and prosperity by ending theft.
   

3. Don't say "Development" when you mean "Best Use."
See #2 above. People sometimes say geoist policy will cause more land to be developed. This is inaccurate and, again, scares as many people as it intrigues. What geoist policy will do is cause different locations to be developed: Good locations (urban centers) will be developed first because that's where the demand is, and less-demanded locations (the countryside and wilderness) will be developed last because that's where the demand isn't.


4. Be careful about the word "wages."

First, when you do use the word "wages," try to use it by its useful, classical definition: the earnings that workers keep after paying market rent for the use of land.

Second, be aware that most people are completely unfamiliar with this definition. If you are referring to this, it might be more illustrative to use a phrase like "post-rent wages" (even if to us that is redundant) or "kept wages" or even just be a bit wordy and say "the earnings you keep after paying rent for the use of land." Or maybe "the earnings you keep after paying the landlord, whether that's an apartment owner or a mortgagee bank."

Use your imagination. Just be aware.

Geoists Need a Spot in the Tournament

I'm going somewhere with this, I swear. TLDR: I think geoists should focus on starting a viral city over any other strategy.

I'm on Twitter @urbanlandrights.

 ***

Outside of Geo-Libertarianism, I'm part of another niche community, the "Melee community." We play Super Smash Brothers Melee ("Melee"), a fighting video game, competitively.

In Melee, anyone is allowed to enter a tournament. Anyone, if they are good enough, can win. But only 5-6 people in the world are the best; with few exceptions in the last several years, anyone who has faced them has lost.

Not all of these top players are popular. One in particular, going by the tag "Hungrybox," is known for being ruthlessly un-sexy, sometimes running out the 8-minute clock during matches to win. This is "boring" or "lame" to many in the community.

What do you suppose would happen if tournament winners were decided by vote? Would Hungrybox win? No. Would he ever have won? Probably not. Would the game be fun, interesting or competitive? Not even close. Players would argue online about how THEIR play-style is the best, and they would back up their claim with pictures of their kissing babies, shaking the hands of construction workers, or cutting the ribbon at the opening of a free health clinic. The game would likely not be played at all.

The concept seems absurd, but that's what democracies do with economic policy: They poll, by vote, the dogma and feelings of the majority, grant a monopoly to the prevailing ideas and let them determine the fate of an entire nation for the next four years or whatever the term may be.

Participating in politics-as-usual, in my opinion, is a waste of time for geoists. We are the Hungrybox of economic policy. People won't even know their own ideas suck until they see us compete. Asking the average person to become a geoist is like asking them to vote for Hungrybox to win a tournament because he kisses babies. Why should they think he's different from any other player who kisses babies? Any player can make promises and kiss babies.

What we need is a spot in the tournament. Right now, there are 195 or 196 nation-state players, and although there are some skill differences among them, they all suck. Their play styles are ass. They're frauds. But people can't really know that because those 196 shitty play styles are the only ones they've seen in action. Expecting a majority to vote for any significant change in any jurisdiction, no matter how you draw it, is a fool's game -- or at least one for which I doubt we have time. Our overrated species is crashing fast. We could try to convince the proverbial lizard to warm itself by wearing a coat -- condemning ourselves to eternal frustration -- or we could simply point to other, coat-wearing lizards so the naked one can say, "Why don't I have that?" An observation is worth a thousand explanations.

I realize the irony of what I'm saying: in order to get an land-monopoly-ending economic system, we first need to break the land monopoly. But it's already been done to a small degree with Special Economic Zones (SEZ), and examples like Shenzhen in China show how explosive the growth can be even for a non-geoist city. A rent-sharing geoist city even in a relatively small, low-population area should have no problem.

If there's anything I know about human beings, it's that, no matter how impossibly crappy their lives are, they will vote for change in piecemeal at best, and likely not at all. They are creatures of fear. The mere existence of SEZ's shows we neither must nor should depend on their votes for progress.

So let's do it. Or maybe we can somehow convince Singapore to make the transition, since they're already pretty well structured for it?