Topic: Fair Tax and black markets - page 2. (Read 8988 times)

It's not marked out. It's just recorded as being paid rent on. An example could be a cloud based registrar of GPS coordinates.


I think you are misunderstanding. The geo doesn't demand rent. You don't have to pay any rent on that land. You just can't expect an exclusive use of the land, though, and thus cannot use force to prevent people from coming on the land and using it. Also, if someone else rightfully rents the land, you can be evicted. So, as you can see, the choice to pay rent is voluntary, and the amount of rent paid is set by the free market.


This doesn't apply.


You said that all the services and conveniences located nearby is what gives the land the value, and that "they" are fairly compensated for increasing the value of land in L.A. If it were fair, then the actual people who created those services and conveniences would get that value, not a guy who sat on an empty lot with a fence around it for 50 years.

If the geo has marked out the unimproved land as already owned, the Ancap would leave it alone. That's what I've been talking about. However, if the AnCap had marked out unimproved land as owned, the geo would demand rent from him.

Since deriving profit from something you had no hand in making is immoral, It's clear to me that the geo would be in the wrong here.


How did you get from "they're already fairly compensated for increasing the value of land in LA." to "when a person sells their homestead, they need to give a cut of the profit to the services and conveniences located nearby"?

Meh, it's actually not that telling. I did respond to it, but it appears I pasted over it when adding in my response to Topazan. Meanwhile, I included that part because it was embedded in Topazan's post and thought it warranted a clarification. Having parts of my responses accidentally deleted seems like a risk I'm taking when responding to more than one person at a time.

I'm going to summarize the response quickly because I kind of don't feel like typing it all out again. Ancaps can't mix into anarchogeos because an anarchogeo could hold the rent on unimproved land and then an ancap would come along and improve it and claim it's "theirs", creating a conflict.

And I still don't see the point about the importance of tolerance. Ancaps are wrong about their model of property, so I don't see why we need to respect it.


This isn't my contention and so I can't really respond to it because it's not my position. Also both of these examples would fall into contracts enforcement and don't seem to me to be part of a conversation about property. If you contracted with the doctor to provide money for surgery, then I don't see how you would fulfill that with a


So when a person sells their homestead, they need to give a cut of the profit to the services and conveniences located nearby? How does that work to create fair compensation?

The value you are talking about was not made by the land owner, so there's no moral argument for them to have a claim to it. Meanwhile, if someone wants exclusive use of that land, they would need to compensate everyone for that use to have a moral claim to that exclusion. The inherent value in the land causes the rent to be bid higher, giving society more benefit.

But what makes LA land so valuable? In part it's demand, but it's also all the services and conveniences located nearby. The same can be said of every city. The people providing those services and conveniences are compensated for providing them, and charge a rate that they're happy with. In other words, they're fairly compensated for increasing the value of land in LA.

Obviously not, unless that guy you know is a geoist.

Aside from the fact that you can no longer claim that the land owners have an "unfair advantage" over those who don't own land, since those without can simply buy the land from them.

That's where our dispute seems to lie... in the gray area between getting the trail and nothing else, and getting some portion of the forest around it. My position is that allowing someone to claim - and therefore to claim any damages to - a piece of mostly unchanged land is the best way to protect that land from harm. Sure, you could require that you drastically alter land in order to own it, and we'd end up with parking lots instead of forests. That's not a result I'm willing to accept. This does allow speculators to put in a minimal amount of work, and if the market is favorable, profit greatly, but given the options of encouraging people to claim pristine land and forcing them to drastically alter it, I'll take the speculators over the parking lots.

In homesteading, you are taking something from nature, and changing it into a man-made thing. If you carve a block of granite into a statue, you have not only the result of your labor, but a mass of granite, as well. Technically, the result of your labor is all on the workshop floor. What you are selling is what's left over. Is that unfair?

They have the same rights to land as I do, and if they can come up with a purchase price I will accept, I will gladly sell to them.

And here is where collective bargaining comes in. I'm not sure how many other market anarchists are as pro-union as I am, but I do know that a labor union (not a trade union - if you want, I can explain the difference) is the proper response to the sort of situation you're discussing.

Well, again, this situation is sort of moot, since I'd be buying the land, nowadays. But regardless, if I can do the work myself and get 100% of the profit, I most likely will. It's only once I've expanded beyond the ability to do all the work myself that I start hiring people to do some of it, and in practice, the split will most likely be the other way around. They'll be doing the farmwork, and getting 70% (between them) of the profit, and I'll be doing all the annoying paperwork and getting 30%.

Everyone involved in making the car has been paid for their work, and this is reflected in the price you pay for the finished product.  The people who made your LA land rise in value, which is basically every productive member of the community, have not been paid for what they did for you.  You're making money off of their work without necessarily giving anything in return.

If you go back and read the rest of this thread, you'll find that the issue of improvements has been discussed in depth.  You do understand that the discussion is about geoism, not communism right?

For the sake of discussion, can you name a real world example of an improvement to surrounding lands where the builder captures the value of the positive externalities in that way?

How does that work if the person you bought it from wasn't the rightful owner?  If I pay fair market value to to some guy I know, can I take your house?

If "That's the way things are" is enough to justify something in your mind, then there's no need for you to discuss anything at all.  You should be happy with the current system, because people own what they own, and if someone changes that system you should be happy with what they change it to, because that will be the way things are.

Yes, the land will be sold for no more than people are willing to pay for it.  As I said, this doesn't affect the morality, one way or the other.

Under the homesteading principle as I understand it, wouldn't breaking a trail give you ownership of the trail and nothing else?

I said I could understand the homesteading argument, that doesn't mean I agree with it as a system.  It doesn't achieve the goal of allowing a person to only claim their labor.  It gives them their labor, and the land, which is something entirely different.

Yes, but the question is whether the advantage over them that society has given you in terms of land rights is justified.

More accurately, it's a collaborative effort to produce something of value.  They're providing the labor, you're providing the land, and the capital depends on your arrangement.  Even if you provide the capital, ownership of the land will allow you to negotiate for a larger share of the finished product than the capital alone would.

Last year, you worked the land, got 100% of the profit, and the land itself as your reward.  This year, others are doing the exact same work, but only getting say 30% of the profit, and no land.  The only difference between you and them was you got there first, but what a difference it's going to make in your life.

I absolutely agree.  This has been an excellent conversation.

Well, it's a valid point, every system has it's flaws. That people can sometimes collude to make more profit is one of them, in any market system. Geoism is no different, it just has different flaws.

Well, at this point, effectively all land is claimed, everywhere. so, I sort of have to concede this point. Land can be purchased, however. Undeveloped land is typically much cheaper than developed, and land outside the "city" likewise tends toward the cheaper end. So expansion is still possible, often at much lower cost than renting or buying a place inside the city.

Well, I see your point, but I'm trying to allow for those who like nature in it's natural state (for instance, people who would like a hunting preserve) to do so without having to murder any who come in, and without enabling the creation of a state (which any form of geoism would eventually do). Do you have a better solution for those who would like to preserve a patch of nature from development? Would breaking a trail through the patch of land suffice as enough improvement to allow for ownership?

Well, under AnCap, ultimately the justification is that they entered into that arrangement voluntarily. They chose to give X portion of their labor for the ability to keep Y portion. If they're happy with those portions, who are we to say they can't do that? It's essentially wage labor, just with some unusual wage terms.

True. But, again, you're paying them, yes? Essentially, they're renting their labor to you. And as long as they're happy with those terms, I'm not going to step in and prevent them.

It doesn't matter whose effort it is. If I buy a car, so long as I pay fair market value for the car, why does it matter whose effort made the car valuable? Sure, someone mined the steel, someone invented the automobile, someone manufactured the engine, and so on. But if I acquired it at market value, it's all my car. Once you realize that this argument applies to *everything*, not just land, it quickly falls apart.

And only land ownership will make it possible for people to capture the value of improvements to land. Say I want to build something that will go on one piece of land but increase the value of a number of surrounding pieces of land. In the absence of full private ownership, there's no way I can capture the value this project will add. However, if all that land is privately owned, I can go to each owner and get them to agree to share with me some of the increased value. I may not get them all to agree, but at least I have a chance. Without private land ownership, there's no way at all I can get a share of the value I'm creating.

The solution is simple -- if you buy land at fair market value, it's yours. All of the land on Earth has an owner right now, though admittedly some have acquired it unfairly. But we're not going to give America back to the Indians. So we have now what we have. Pretty much everyone who owns land today has acquired it at fair market value anyway. And it would be truly bizarre to treat some present-day landowners different from others.

If you want to talk about what the rules should be for the Moon or if we build underwater cities, we can. But most land is already owned by people who, by and large, paid fair market value for it. So unless you want to try to right ancient injustices (which is basically impossible since the victims are dead) people own what they own.

So things will eventually return to normal... AFTER the cartel has made a pretty penny.

Let's be clear, I'm not disputing that a full private property system can survive.  I know ours is still going fairly strong.  So, when I point out the various ways that people can manipulate the system, I'm not saying they'll bring down the whole society, just that they'll make undeserved gains.  There's no reason to keep pointing out the ways to mitigate the problems they cause, that's not the issue.  While people might find ways to adapt to the artificial copper scarcity, that doesn't change the morality or lack thereof of inducing that scarcity.

What makes you think the land bordering the city wouldn't be claimed? And the land bordering that and so on?  I think it's quite possible that all land that could be considered 'in' the city by any reasonable definition could be claimed.

I'm sorry, I just don't see the reasoning behind marking land granting exclusive ownership.

I was talking about the sharecropper landlord.  And apparently it does still happen.  Some mines in Peru use the cachorreo system, where miners are given one day a month to dig up some ore for themselves, which is their only payment.

Now, granted these countries probably have other problems with corrupt governments and such that may be limiting opportunity, but all of this would be legal under AnCap, so the point remains.  The landowners have the power to collect the labor of others who want to work the land.  If the basis of their claim to ownership is that they put work into the land, how can they justify confiscating the labor of others upon the land?

I meant that you gain the products of the labor of anyone who wants to work on the land while you own it.  Whether you hire them as as employees, sharecroppers, or renters the work that would have gained them the land if you hadn't been there goes to making you richer instead.

And what I meant when I said you get more than you put in, I mean, for instance, that if you build a shack you get the shack and the land it sits on.  I don't think you can say they're one-and-the-same.  The land can be much more valuable.  You plant a garden one year, and the next year people could be begging you to let them do the same.  You'll both do the same labor, except your reward was even more than what you harvested, and they'll only get their harvest minus rent.  I say taking control of land means more than taking control of the labor you put into it.

For my response to the rest of your post, see my first response up above.

Some of it was the result of human effort, but not necessarily the effort of the owner.  That's the problem many geoists perceive with the current system.  It allows people to profit from the industry of others.

All raw materials come from some form of land in the economic sense.  If a solution can be found for land, it will cover everything else.

Your definition obsessively focuses on an irrelevant detail while ignoring the things that are actually important. While humans don't make land, the value of land comes from human effort. The difference in value between an acre in the middle of Los Angeles and an acre in the middle of Australia was all the result of human effort.

This same argument about land would apply to everything. Why should anyone be entitled to anything since all the raw materials it is made out of weren't made by anyone? Copper isn't made by man any more than land is. But just the same, all the value *does* come from the actions of humans.

Oh, certainly it's possible, but remember that copper is not the only thing you can use to make many things, and it's recyclable, so if the price goes too high, replacements can be found, and people looking for copper can shift from buying from mines to buying from recycling centers.

Collusion tends to fall apart for the same reasons that it gets started... people get greedy, realize that they can get more money by undercutting their buddies, and the cartel falls apart. Also, buying all the mines in an area is expensive. "Cornering the market" never happens, for exactly that reason. The more you buy, the more expensive the rest becomes.

How do you think cities expand? "Scarce" is relative.

Well, "no one" is not the same as "anyone". You don't own it until you've transformed it in some way.

"Without me or someone like me, you'd have to build and maintain your own house" There's a reason sharecropping doesn't happen anymore...

As for the rest, while you don't gain the products of the labor of future owners, if you've claimed land with lots of intrinsic (say, mineral) value, you're right that you might be able to get more than you've put into it. Like I said, however, make a wise investment, and you get more out than you put in, too. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with profit.

Not all the land. Remember, cities grow. Cities grow in almost exactly that way: People expand out looking for new space for their business, or their home, or whatever.

Land can also be bought from previous owners, and even someone deriving rent income can be convinced to sell... the house I'm living in now, we bought from the landlord.

Most people aren't simply going to be pounding in stakes and then resting on their laurels. Especially in a frontier area like a new city. They're going to be grabbing up land to build businesses and homes, not simply to speculate. Any speculators that do grab some land, will likely be bought out pretty quick, or find that their investment was not worth what they thought it was.

@Fjordbit - So, your contention is that we only own the physical forms of the products of our labor, and not their value?  "Thanks spell-checking my book.  I can't pay you, so just copy down the words you fixed for your own use."  "Thanks for the lifesaving surgery, as payment have a cadaver that's had the same operation."

I'm only about an eighth of the way into Progress and Poverty.  So, I'm curious if your ideas come from Henry George.  If so, I hope he explains them a little better.

Is it not possible for the price of copper to be increased through collusion?  For that matter, what would stop one person from acquiring all the copper mines in the area?  Competition tends to drive down prices, but when there are a fixed number of possible competitors, the effect is less certain.  In many industries, new competitors can enter the market at any time.  Not so with natural resources.  That's what I meant by monopolistic control.  There might be more than one mine, but still a limited number.

If you acknowledge land is a scarce resource, perhaps it would be logical to refrain from saying things like "...there are plenty of other sites to set up coffee shops, and plenty of demand."?

The question of ownership of raw land is the real heart of the issue.  Actually, I'm tempted to say I agree with you that it belongs to no one.  However, while you do not accept that "no one" is the same as "everyone", I do not accept that "no one" is the same as "anyone".

I actually do understand now the reasoning behind the homestead principle, at least some forms of it.  If you build a house, you own the house, and if someone wants to remove it to use the land for something else, they have to buy it from you.  That makes sense.

However, land ownership gives you much more than that.  Under a personal property system, you now control not only the house but also the land underneath.  The market price for selling or renting the house will depend heavily on the location of the house.  If we're talking about stakes or signs, you can't even pretend that the value of the property has much to do with your labor.  You say that you only have the right to claim the products of your own labor, but when you "claim" land, you can get quite a bit more from it than you put into it.  At the very least, you gain not only the products of your own labor, but the products of the labor of everyone who works the land in the future.

This is clearly illustrated with practices like sharecropping.  There have been many businesses past and present that basically consist of letting someone else work the land and taking all but a small portion of the product of their labor.  The mechanic can say "Yes, my fees are high, but without someone like me your car would still be broken."  The doctor can say "Yes my fees are high, but without someone like, you'd be dead."  The landlord can say... what?

Actually, the scenario is unrealistic assuming they had the homestead system from the start- by the time the city is large enough to support a coffee shop, all the available land would have been claimed by speculators.  He might have to rent the space for his coffee shop.

Why might some people claim land and others not?  There could be any number of possible reasons.  Maybe the first ten people to arrive grabbed it all, then left it only to their eldest sons.  Maybe some of them happened to be slow runners.  Maybe they were busy doing something productive.  Maybe the city was founded in a less-enlightened time when only certain types of people were allowed to own land, and their descendents have maintained their markers since.

Whatever great qualities the speculators showed - initiative, foresight, creativity, athleticism, they were wasted in pursuit of the arbitrary and non-productive task of pounding in stakes, and so are the fortunes that the successful of them will make in rent.

I didn't respond to it because I'm not an economist, and those graphs have always just looked like pretty colored lines to me. But what I do know is that those lines move. Find me a graph without the tax?

I also know that it's ridiculous to think that a copper miner is going to lose money rather than raise prices.The only way that that will happen is if the price is already so high that consumers are starting to look for alternatives to copper, and if the price goes up any more, they'll switch.

You say that the supply of land is inelastic, so increasing the tax won't affect the price. But while that's true, the supply of copper is elastic. Even though there's a fixed amount in the land, some is easier (and therefore cheaper) to get out, and some is more difficult, and more expensive, to reach. Cutting into profits means that the more difficult to reach copper will be left where it is (no longer profitable to get to), reducing the supply. So raising the tax probably won't affect the price of the land, at least until the point where it makes the land worthless for it's intended purpose, but it certainly will affect the price of copper.

Of course it's two parts, that's why I provided you with a supply & demand graph on the previous page (I suppose it's telling that you didn't respond to it). You'll see that land taxes don't change market prices because the quantity of land is fixed. It doesn't matter how pressured the landlord feels; marginal costs are unaffected.

Once again you prove you don't actually read what you respond to. I've corrected an error that should make the statement more clear, but even assuming you read my statement incorrectly, (which admittedly was the way it was written) your response makes no sense.

Also, It's telling that you chose this to respond to, rather than attempting to refute my previous statement.

Let's just be clear, the temporary exclusive right to land come from the outbidding in the rent auction. Recreating the improvements is simply to give a person the product of their own labor. So you need to compare the pounding of stakes to the rent auction. Everything relating to the improvements is pretty much the same under ancap in that in ancap you are going to pay for the improvements, or you might contract the buyer to replicate them.


A mine on it's own doesn't produce wealth. The wealth comes from extracting the, say, copper from the wall and selling it on the market. The hole itself doesn't give you a gain, so not having the hole doesn't give you a loss. The copper isn't yours. You didn't create it. It's not a loss, because it wasn't yours.


A person is entitled to the actual result of their labor, not compensation for their labor. In fact the system is designed specifically to punish a man who puts more labor into a similar task. So you could amble for 40 years digging in the wrong place or take a week to strike a vein, but in neither case should you be compensated for your labor. You didn't actually produce anything. I could go take a walk and that would be considered labor, but no one is required to pay me for it. This isn't communism.

I'm sure some ancap will chime in on how this prevents mineral exploration. It is considered a weak point on the effect of Georgism, but it isn't important to the morality of Georgism. Even then, it isn't fully true that there would be no mineral exploration, as there are several ways for an individual to ensure a monetary result for their efforts (e.g. extract in a hidden way in situ and then sell all at once, negotiate rent for as long of a term as possible, etc), and there is also socially funded exploration (people want copper so they would be willing to fund exploration even if they don't get ownership of the result because they will get the result of the labor, or the people in the area contract with an explorer that they will exclusively buy from them over a given period of time given certain production metrics are met). The fact is that people would come up with ways to handle this in ways we cannot think of. This is the power of freedom.

This isn't related to this discussion, but since you seem interested in Georgism, this is a pretty good high level paper on it.


Just to clarify here. They'll only beat you up if you try to force them to pay to pee, as they should because you're the aggressor trying to take their money. If you wanted to charge them, then you should have secured a temporary exclusionary right to the land the toilet is on instead of free riding.

Well, no, actually, they can't. Unless you mean merely violent among themselves? In that case, your analogy is exactly the same as geoists living among AnCaps. The AnCaps are peaceful among themselves, and to the geoists among them, but the geoists would not be be peaceful to AnCaps living among them.

You have no right to claim ownership (rent) from raw land, since you can only claim profit from the products of your labor. Raw land is the product of no human's labor, and therefore you cannot claim rent from it, nor loss when it is altered.

Remember that the market price of copper is composed of two parts: the amount that the people who want copper are willing to pay, and the amount that the people who sell copper are willing to accept for it. Raising overhead puts pressure on the mine owners to not accept lower prices, raising the market price.

If your goal is to reduce conflict, then why nonaggression instead of pacifism? Violent people can easily live among pacifists but not vice-versa.

If no one has any right to claim use over raw land, even if they pay 100% restitution, then any level of development (including stakes) beyond hunter-gatherers would be unethical. Since this seems to make everyone worse off, I think the restitution is reasonable. IFF the system of restitution is more efficient with private law than statist law when transaction costs are taken into account, then geoanarchism is preferable to statist geoism.

More than one person can run the copper mine better than its current owner. With less than a 100% land tax (or other taxes) the rational owner would simply rent it out to the highest bidder, not sell. The land tax doesn't distort copper prices or incentives because the land supply is perfectly inelastic - you will always sell copper for its market price regardless of overhead. Any difference from overhead will only determine if the owner goes into the red or gets higher profits.

Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of "among themselves"? That's the only explanation that makes sense, unless you just didn't read what I typed.

The idea of a system of land ownership is to reduce conflict over land. Thus, tolerance, to a point, is a good thing. If we have a group of geoists within a larger AnCap system, there is peace, because the AnCaps tolerate the geoists within them. They do not come in and try to take their land away. If we have a group of AnCaps within a larger geoist system, there is conflict, because the geoists view the AnCaps as "stealing" from them. Since conflict resulting from people doing things between themselves voluntarily is against the principles of Voluntaryism, AnCap is more compatible with that than geoism.

Well, I suppose that's better, but it still does not address the inefficiency or possible corruption.

Market forces would accomplish these goals. As you note, the tax/rent simply increases overhead, and thus, prices. Overhead is a market force. Even using a land tax, you're using market forces, encouraging efficiency by raising overhead. Profit does not come simply from monopoly control of a resource (especially when it's not a monopoly), it comes from providing that resource to the public. Let's say that instead of pay toilets, it's copper mines. There's a significant amount of overhead already in digging up copper, to say nothing of the expense of finding and getting to that copper in the first place. That sets a lower limit on the price of copper, which a land tax would only raise. If someone comes up with a more efficient method of mining copper, that allows a lower baseline price of copper, he can then underbid the others not using that process. The overhead without the land tax is more than sufficient to encourage efficiency in an open market.

On the contrary, I acknowledge that land is a scarce resource. Where we disagree is in the ownership of it in it's raw state. You contend that the land belongs to all, I contend that it belongs to none. As you say, you have the right to own the products of your labor. You also argue that the land, in it's raw state, was created by no human. I actually agree with both points. What I add to that is that you only have the right to claim the products of your own labor. The land in it's raw state is not created by human labor, thus no man has right to lay claim on it. It is unowned by anyone, and most definitely, unowned by "everyone."

He should compensate them for the loss of the right to claim the land that he claimed? I would see that, if they did not have the exact same opportunity that he did, and simply failed to take it. It's not compensation for opportunity lost, it's reward for waiting. One should not be paid for doing nothing. Initiative is not, in and of itself, something that entitles you to reward, but neither is the lack of it. The man who builds the coffee shop will not be getting rewarded simply for his initiative, but for his initiative in producing value - selling coffee. To say nothing of the labor and expense involved in setting up the coffee shop.

@Fjordbit - We both agree that a person has the right to own the products of their own labor, yes?

You say that recreating improvements to land elsewhere, the out-bidders have fulfilled their obligation to the previous owner.

This seems to me to be a completely arbitrary gesture; even more arbitrary than pounding in stakes.  I built a mine.  I don't want a useless hole in the ground.  It has practically zero value to me.  Building one would be a waste of resources, and wouldn't mitigate the financial loss I suffered from the loss of the mine that was mine at all.  

Besides, what about the labor of picking an ideal site in the first place?  How are you going to recreate my labor of finding the copper vein?

You know, I think one of the things that's happening in this conversation is you keep assuming a situation where unclaimed land is abundant, I keep assuming one where it's scarce.  Can we agree that both situations are possible?  Different purposes require different types of land, so at any given time some types of land might be abundant while others are scarce.  It doesn't change the moral dimension, though.  Taking something that's abundant may inflict less of a loss than taking something that's scarce, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

Initiative is a great thing when it's applied towards producing value.  It is not, in of itself, something that entitles you to a reward.  No one's being rewarded for their lack of initiative either.  It's about giving them what belongs to them.  Even you would say they all had an equal right to claim that land.  They lost this right when someone else claimed it.  The claimant took something from them.  Whether it was abundant or scarce, they have less of it than they had before.  This is what the claimant should compensate them for.

Don't confuse me and fjordbit.  In "my" system, you cannot be outbid.  As long as you pay your tax you have the exclusive right to transfer ownership.

As far as the playground analogy, typed out a long detailed response 2-3 times then deleted it when I felt it was getting too silly.    When you say the money is being shifted needlessly, coming from the community and going back to the community, you're ignoring that it would be the same for all bathrooms regardless of success.  Less profitable ones would be paying more into the community than they're taking out, motivating the owner to either sell them or let them revert back to the commons.  This means that future entrepreneurs can enter into the market more easily.  While they'll pay more overhead in rent, they'll also have smaller start-up costs.  The goal is to make sure that business profits come from production, not from monopoly control over scarce resources.

You may be correct that in a state of perfect competition and perfectly rational actors, market forces might accomplish many of these goals.

I don't see how your system is tolerant of me coming in and using the land that you were born on. In fact, I see intolerance because you are awarding individuals exclusive control over land they don't own.

Beside, when it a system of morality supposed to be about tolerance. Universal morality is almost explicitly against tolerence, so when a person is doing something wrong (like, say, claiming private ownership of land because their grandfather built a fence on it), then you are supposed to specifically be intolerant towards it. You don't just let it slide.


Topazan, I found the lost post. I pasted it into a local doc to merge it with my responses to myrkul in post #94, but I guess I didn't copy it back. I think this might explain some disconnect since I thought I had said the items below.


The free riders in other regions can't claim the rent if they aren't in the same system. This is a recognize my rights while I recognize yours thing. If it's just one town then the people in that town get the rent. If someone one town over wants rent, then they'll be opening themselves up to having their land taken in a bidding process.


That person would be morally responsible to move the mother. If this is done in a way so as to endanger her, that would be an aggression. And again, it won't be cheap for him or her to keep doing this.

One thing to be clear on, though. This isn't supposed to suddenly make some kind of utopia where people don't make choices in their life. The person being coerced needs to take a stand here and act responsively if the coercer is acting in aggression. The point isn't for the construct of society to resolve all your problems but instead to make you able to resolve them.

Also it's not possible to have rent cycles of a day.


Immobile would not be the same as immoveable.

Actually, though, I was giving a high level for the responsibility. You don't have to move the specific improvement but just have the same improvement done on the new land. An example is a well. It doesn't make sense to move a hole, but you can dig another one.

And I'm sorry, but the system doesn't 'break down' because of improvements. Again, people buy and sell property all the time and pay taxes on that property so it's not a stretch to have them buying and selling improvements and paying rent on the exclusive right to the land.


They lose exclusive right to the land. So, in the case of the Empire State building, they would still own the building, but they couldn't stop people from squatting in it. Those people couldn't damage the building (or rather, they could, but would need to replace the damage) but you can't keep them out, and an attempt to keep them out (even with a lock) would be an aggression on them.


Explodicle,

 Good post. I just want to expand on this in that without the right to bid out a person from their land, it means that the deadweight loss goes directly to the individual who "owns" the land.

 Going back to the rail track vs maglev example. This means in a system of land ownership, when I negotiate for the land for the maglev, the rail track "owner" does not sell the land for the fair market price of a rail line but for the maximum price I would allow for my maglev line to be profitable. This makes it so that all the benefits of my new invention go to that individual and not to the commons. This is egregious because the rail line owner did not do anything for that value. I was the one who made the maglev system. So I get the profits above what you can support on your rail system, and the everyone else gets what you would support on your rail system. You get the value you put into your rail system, which compensates you for your personal effort while excluding you from the efforts of others.

 In short, you can't simply extract value from land because you put a fence on it. You have to be providing something to society because it's not your land, it's everyone's.