Topic: Average Land Rent - Free Land for the average person. (Read 4377 times)

Redistribution:
Or, in your case, paying people for using shit land, and punishing them for using valuable land.

I think you are mistaken.  Today to rent farmland costs over $250 an acre.  Under this system the farmer that actually does all the farming would see their rents go down.  Maybe $100 per acre.  Thus, the farmer will receive more profit from farming the land and overall the productivity of the United States farmland rises.  It rewards efficiency since land rents don't go to the landowners.  The most efficient farmers will win bids.

There is no redistribution, it says land is free like air and owned by the people of the USA.  If you use more, you pay more.  The current land laws of the United States offers dual ownership, the land is owned by the States and private property.  The States get their share in property tax.  The reason why States want you to build big houses as they cost more and they can charge higher property tax. 

well that does make your definitions consistent ill give you that.

As I said, your plan is marginally better. But it has the same flaw of all redistributive systems:

It punishes efficiency, and rewards waste.

Read all of the responses, amazing how threads warp.  George wanted a large property tax going to the city.  I think he made a major mistake, he assumed money going to the city was like money going to people it is not.  He does not realize the city unions retire at 40 and collect $100K pensions with Cadillac insurance.  His system you still are paying $5000-410,000 to the city every year.

My tweak, average land rent, in the average city and average lot $0 is going to the city.  You only pay the city for the sewer water parks libraries that you want to use.  They can't force you to pay for them.  They can't tell you what color to paint your house, what size to make your house.   You don't even need a house.  You don't need a permit to build a house.

If you decide to give the beach or farm up for the desert, you can actually collect a check to use substandard land.  So you work in Silicon Valley.  You won't have the rent seekers trying to tap into your wages.  You pay $0 rent there.  You pay for house not rent.

Imagine if you make $50,000 a year and you don't pay $2,000 monthly rent.

Nope, no crime. Dick move, maybe, but not a crime.

No positive obligation may be imposed upon another person against their will.

That's libertarianism 101. You're not - nor can you be, under any libertarian code of law - legally obligated to act on behalf of another.

Ok lets try again. You happen across a man locked in a prison cell. He was locked there by accident and has done nothing wrong. Additionally his ending up there is not a product of poor choices but rather pure bad luck. He has been there for a long time. You are the first person to come across him since he became imprisoned. Its very easy for you to set him free, there is a large red button that says push here. He can not reach the button but you can.

Lets say you chose not to help him. Now he will be trapped in that cell for ever because of your choice. do you still say that by choosing not to set him free you have not imposed a cost on him? I mean not pushing the button doesnt take anything away from him that he currently has, it just denies him opportunity.

if we accept that you have not imposed a cost on him by not pushing the button than doesnt it follow that not pushing the button could never be considered a crime? It seems to me that it ought to be a crime.

Quite right. These costs were imposed upon myself by my stubborn insistence on finding employment rather than working to provide these needs for myself. Now, if you have lied about me to prevent my employment, that's fraud. Not against me, interestingly enough, but against the employers. You lied to them, and thus denied them the product of my labor.

Do you believe you have a right to your reputation? Slander is similar to the case of lying to the employers to prevent them from hiring me. Or trademark infringement. If I were to sell people a "MacDownalds" burger, I've committed an act of fraud by willfully misrepresenting my product as a McDonalds burger. Not, again, against McDonalds, but against the customers who thought they were getting a McDonalds burger.

ok then this gets down to the heart of the matter. This is going to be a rather abstract analogy so please bear with me. Lets say i hated you and so i stalked your every move. you were unemployed and looking for a job. so with each interview you went to i would create some elaborate scheme to ensure that you did not get hired. You fail to get a job and die of starvation. Now i never caused any of your existing wealth to be diminished. That was diminished entirely by your needed to eat and drink and pay for shelter and stuff.

So according to you i have imposed no cost on you and according to my definition of the word crime it is when someone imposes a cost on you without your consent. If all of these premises follow than it should be the case that i have not committed any sort of crime against you. Would you say this is accurate, that in the aforementioned example i did not commit a crime or would you say that the premises or conclusions are faulty?

Nope, no more than the early adopters have imposed a cost on you by snagging the low-difficulty coins. You imposed that cost on yourself by not homesteading everything you wanted to use, or not getting into Bitcoin sooner.

It's simple. If you are demonstrably diminished - if your wealth has been reduced, and not merely potential wealth, but actual current wealth - then that is a cost imposed upon you. If your potential wealth has been reduced, then that is a missed opportunity. If we are to start punishing people for taking opportunities that others have missed, then should we allow Starbucks to sue Folgers for "stealing" potential sales of their coffee?

No, it is an opportunity cost, self-imposed by putting off homesteading that land. You valued whatever you were doing instead of homesteading that land more than the value you would have gained by homesteading that land. You took a risk in that leaving that land unowned, someone else could come along and take it. That risk turned out to be the case. Intention is not the deed. It does not establish a claim.

a man cant homestead everything. if someone else homesteads a piece of property that you would have otherwise homesteaded yourself at some future date, is it not a fact that this action has imposed a cost on you?

saying x is not a cost because it is only denying an opportunity seems a bit silly. What else is a cost other than a denied opportunity. If i break your arm i am denying you the opportunity to play tennis. If there is a clear line where one thing is a real cost and another is simply a denied opportunity can you as specifically as possible explain how to draw this distinction?

i mean if i was a farmer and i was planning on planting a crop in the next logical location that was as easy to access from my house as possible and i show up only to find that some other farmer has planted the crop that i intended to plant there i would be atleast very annoyed. Now i have to go and plant my crop somewhere less convenient. This is a real cost and it has been created simply by someone homesteading unowned land.

so i hope that at-least in principal i have demonstrated that homesteading unowned land can impose a cost on other people.

Then you shouldn't leave that land up for grabs.

maybe im building a structure somewhere else at the moment but fully intended to build a structure on the disputed land as soon as i was finished with my present task.

If someone can remove that option, then you weren't using it. You're no worse off than you were the day before. A cost is something that diminishes you. You are not diminished, you just can not grow in a particular direction. To the minimal extent that it is a cost, as I said, it is self-imposed. If you wanted to grow in that particular direction, you should have done it. You missed that opportunity, he did not take it from you.

ok ok even if i grant you all of that. eliminating the opportunity for other people to claim a given piece of land DOES impose a cost on them. We dont need to get into heated debate over it just think about it. Its very very very obvious. I would prefer to have the ability to build new structures next to my house, if someone removes that option for me than that makes me worse off. Like i said though simply because something implies a cost doesn't necessarily mean its a bad thing. We shouldn't not breath because it imposes a cost on other people and we shouldn't seek damages for other peoples breathing just because it imposes a cost on us either.

And undeveloped land in the middle of a community contributes nothing to that community, while developed land in the middle of nowhere will often collect a community.

First appropriation is anything but arbitrary. It does not lead to stratification and systemic poverty. And if you're looking for a justification for tyranny, nothing says "tyrannical use of force" like "pay us all for the privilege of living here."

Land isn't a zero-sum game, either. It's simply a scarce resource, just like bitcoins. Once all 21 million are mined, The only way to get more will be to provide a good or service to the community. In fact, that's the only way to get some now. The block reward is payment for providing the service of securing and enabling transactions.

You're misusing the term "opportunity cost." Opportunity cost is what you "pay" when you use your scarce resources to select the best option from among several (two or more) mutually exclusive options. To the extent that missing out on the chance to grab available land is an "opportunity cost," it is one imposed by the person who chose to use the time they could have been homesteading a patch of land to do something they wanted to do more. The homesteader doesn't impose the "opportunity cost" of not having that land available, it is self-imposed by the lazy ass who sat at home watching TV instead of claiming the land he's now complaining he can't grab.

I dont think this is a fair criticism. after all in economics speak we do call these this phenomena "opportunity cost" so im pretty sure it is a cost.

With that being said now that i think about it georgism has a regression problem. How is one supposed to acquire the means to bargain with out first appropriating things and how is one supposed to appropriate things if he must first bargain in order to acquire the means to appropriate. I think this sort of chicken and egg problem is the best way to demonstrate the superiority of the homesteading principal.

A "Georgist" doesn't provide anything, just like an "anarchist" doesn't.  If you mean the surrounding community, chances are they're the real reason the land has value in the first place.  Remote land is worth very little, land located in developed communities is worth considerably more.  Granted, there's no reason to assume that every member of the community contributed equally.

I consider homesteading a completely arbitrary way of determining land ownership.  I recognize that in some ways considering land communal property is just as arbitrary, but when one conception of property rights leads to stratification and systemic poverty and the other doesn't, I'm inclined towards the one that doesn't.  Land ownership can be and is used to enable tyranny and injustice.  I don't see how that can be disputed.

I've already explained the differences between bitcoin and other land.  Currencies like bitcoin are not a zero-sum game.  No one is prevented from using bitcoin as a medium of exchange, or starting their own crypto-currency, and the wealth it can buy is always growing.

What a shame. I truly wanted to know what value the Georgeist provides to justify the rent that he is demanding.

If none, and his argument is based simply on the fact that he missed the opportunity to take advantage of the available land, how is that any different than a new bitcoin user being upset about the early adopters having "all the coins"?

Meh, we've had this conversation many times.  No point in continuing if nothing new is added.