Topic: Average Land Rent - Free Land for the average person. - page 2. (Read 4377 times)

Perhaps he cleared it. Perhaps he removed the wild animals that were menacing it. Perhaps he was simply the first to recognize that the land had agricultural value. What value does your Georgeist provide in exchange for the rent he is demanding?

Nope, You did:

And indeed it could have been cultivated, perhaps, in fact, by those same people now working it. That's not the point. The point is, they weren't working their land. They were working his land. You might even say that they were employed by the land owner to work his land.

How much start-up capital do you think the average freedman had?  Even if by some miracle they could find someone to lend them the money, the question remains: what value did the landlord provide in exchange for the money that he's demanding?

You said the land would be fallow without the landlord.  I'm saying it could still be cultivated, possibly even by the same people.

Missed opportunity is not a cost.

As for the rest, read the Kinsella quote. First appropriation is the only fair way to go about it.

claiming land as your own does impose a cost on other people who now have been denied the opportunity to claim that same land as their own. And really just saying "well i got there first" really isnt a very good argument either Competition of the bad arguments! figure out which one is worse and go with the other.

Indeed. But which set of rules is more fair? "You got here first, so it's yours," or, "I live on the other side of the planet, but you're stealing that land from me, so pay up."

Right, but you specified that the land was fallow. Not that they were working it. They would indeed have been better off if they were working land they owned, rather than land someone else owned. But they were working someone else's land. So it was not a lack of agricultural ability, but a lack of economic sense that caused their impoverishment. They should have bought land instead of leasing it in exchange for a portion of their crops.

Any property system is dependent on people accepting your rules.

Sometimes, people cultivate fallow land, and then it's not fallow any more.     Lack of agricultural ability was not the reason sharecroppers were impoverished.

No, it really doesn't.
Allow me to quote Stephan Kinsella:
Fallow means unused. If the land was unused, then by definition, they're not using it.

A homesteading system has that problem as well.  Who decides where homesteading is the law of the land and where it isn't?

Why would they be doing nothing?  Is it impossible for them to till the soil without the blessings of a white-suited gentleman?

And who decides what is and is not "within" the community? Can I tell my neighbor that he's now within my community, and therefore owes me rent on the land he owns?

Possibly. But then you would be complaining how they, and not I, had "stolen from the community."
No, if the land was fallow, they'd be doing nothing and keeping 100% of that - which is to say, nothing.

Whoever occupies land that's within the community.

Um, no someone else would have taken it.  Possibly your current tenants.

In what way were the sharecroppers in the post war south better off thanks to their landlords than they would have been if that land was fallow?  They'd still be doing the same work except they'd be able to keep their entire crop.

More importantly, who is and isn't a part of the community for purposes of determining who owes a share of the rent.

Bullshit. If you didn't exist, that land would just have lain fallow and unused. Nobody would have benefited from it. Land profits are made by providing people something that you created on that land.

AnCap is an appealing idea, and I'm extremely open to it, but I take an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude towards it for the time being.  I would say, though, that if it's possible to enforce traditional property rights without a state, I don't see why communal rights would be much different.  Anyways, there are anarchists who seem to think it's possible.

Actually, one tricky part I see would be determining who is and isn't a part of the community for purposes of determining who's owed a share of the rent.  I believe freedom of movement is an important one, and that there would be no such thing as citizenship in a free society.

"Buying from the community" would be a one time thing, and a short time later you're in the same situation you would have been without georgism, so it defeats the purpose.

To others: Land is distinct from capital.  Capital profits are made from creating things for others to use.  If you didn't exist, that capital would not have been made.  Land profits are made by selectively depriving people of something that existed before you were born. 

I actually have considered whether or not this applies to bitcoin, and ultimately I've concluded it doesn't.  Early investors helped bitcoin grow to where it is today, and miners help maintain the network, so in that sense it's created like capital.   Bitcoin is fungible, so holding bitcoin doesn't really deprive anyone of anything.  There is always the possibility of creating new cryptocurrencies.

I think something like this has been going on for a while in Ethiopia, and they are not, um, doing too well.  Something about not working that hard on land you rent versus land you own.

What could possibly be wrong here?

Exactly.  If an acre of this hypothetical land nets $250 per year in rent, then the present value (i.e. purchase price) is something like 20x annual rent cashflow or $5K per acre.  100 acres @ $5K ea = $5M.  If you have $5M in performing assets the reality is you likely don't need to work.  Land isn't special in that respect.

Of course once you redistribute land them people will store more of their wealth in other assets.  So what is next?  Free stocks & bonds for the average person?

Look, you need to get with the program.  We need to create elaborate groups of words, then build on top of them a secondary layer of words with derived meanings, then build a set of reasonable,just, justifications on top of that for taking peoples' stuff away from them.  You can have some of their stuff, too.  There's a lot of it out there to be taken.

You can survive solely by owning Bitcoins, as well. What you can't buy directly with bitcoins, you can buy with currencies you can buy with Bitcoins. It sounds like your problem is with rent... Fine, don't rent, buy land. Problem solved.

ah ok then. who ever wrote that wikipedia article has a very different definition for the word ownership than i do.

In principal i quite like this idea. I would be lying if i said that i hadn't explored this line of reasoning myself. It matches with my idea of social justice more than homesteading. (obviously homesteading still applies 100% to things you actually create but its difficult to justify the ownership of 3d space on philosophical grounds)

and i should also add that this would probably work quite well in a small community where individuals could gather togather once a year and conduct some sort of ceremony where the money exchanged hands infront of everyone. So it would be like bitcoin in that way, everyone would be auditing everyone. But as your society becomes larger this would quickly become uneconomical. You would soon find yourself needing an agency to conduct this business. As soon as you did that you would face some serious principal agent problems.

If you could think of a way to allow georgism to work without the need of a central authority. A way where the redistribution could be handled in a distributed fashion, possibly with a technology similar in some ways to bitcoin, than i think i could definitely be convinced to prefer georgism to homesteading.

keep following this path there is a lot of merit to this idea but be very careful. If improperly implemented it would likely lead to the development of a state and it may very well be the case that there is no way to implement it with out leading to the development of a state.

*edit* oh also a better rule than renting from society would be buying from society. This would be just or unjust for the same reasons that georgism is just or unjust but it would lead to much better outcomes. Imagine a person rents a bit of land from society and builds a house on it then a year later he is outbid and he loses his house.

The idea is the one who occupies the land rents it from those who don't.  People still own land in a sense, but they pay a "land value tax" on it, which goes to compensate those who do not occupy as much or as valuable land.

From wikipedia:
"Georgism (also called Geoism[1] or Geonomics[2]) is an economic philosophy and ideology which holds that people own what they create, but that things found in nature, most importantly land, belong equally to all."

Because georgism doesnt solve the aforementioned problem. If the same space belongs equally to more than one person how do we determine who gets to occupy that space if more than one person wishes to occupy that space? you are back to needing to invent a property rule to solve this problem.

If someone does not voluntarily pay, what should happen to them?