Topic: Fair Tax and black markets - page 3. (Read 9019 times)

We briefly touched on this during "defend taxation". An important detail is that the money is being shifted from those with the most wealth. Diminishing utility returns from wealth imply that the average person is better off, and land taxes are nearly 100% efficient (minus transaction costs like you said).


With monopoly land pricing, we introduce the same inefficiency as any other monopoly. It incurs a deadweight loss.

(Edit: At the risk of seeming misleading, I should point out these similar graphs are really showing two different things, and that land taxes penalize land monopolies but don't completely eliminate them.)

I can see where you're coming from regarding how to spend this revenue: a basic income might reduce crime and other short-term desparate actions, but it also slightly increases unemployment and introduces a free rider problem. I personally would be OK with voting (or using a futarchist prediction market) on several budgets, but won't claim to represent the other geoists there.

Likewise, yours is just an idea, and I don't see it's merit. I do, however, see and can explain the merit of mine: Mine is tolerant of others, who, among themselves, have a different opinion of land ownership, and yours is not.

So just to be clear. That's just your definition of property. iIn my definition, people can't own land because they didn't make it. Their exclusionary right is only temporary and based on a system of winning a rent auction. You follow Locke, and I follow George. Yours is just and idea, and I personally don't see it's merit.

No, they get to keep other people from using that land not simply because they were born there, but because they were given that land by their parents. Who were in turn given the land by their parents, and so on, until you get to the original owner, the person who transformed the land from it's raw state into something man-made, and therefor the only person with the rightful ability to transfer ownership - and the only person with the rightful ability to transfer that rightful ability.

So because people were born on a plot of land, they are allowed to use force to prevent anyone from using that land? Sounds like monarchism.

Voluntaryism allows you to protect your rights to property and self. In this case to gain temporary exclusionary rights to land, you have to win it in a bidding process and pay rent to society. There is nothing contradictory in voluntaryism in asserting your right to land using violence as long as your are the one with the right to do so. This is true in ancap societies too.


Everyone wants something for free. I don't get why you're so special as to own land that you didn't create. Your labor doesn't mix in. Your fences can be moved and your house can be replaced. The whole 'This is our home' thing is a bunch of hippy crap. You're feelings of attachment don't create a social urgency.


There's no such thing as an immovable improvement. If it can be done to one plot of land, it can be done to another. This isn't a philosophical question of can God make an improvement so big that He cannot move it. This is stuff done by humans.


I thought I answered this but it seems like that answer was lost probably as I was cutting and pasting responses together. The answer, of course, is that you lose the exclusionary right to that land. So, in the case of the Empire State building, you would still own the building, but you couldn't prevent squatters from coming in. You couldn't even use locks to keep them out as that would be an aggression against them. Those people could damage your building (unless they subsequently repair it), but they could use it because you don't have an eclusionary right to the area.


I absolutely see the difference, I just don't care. It's not society's imperative to keep you having access to copper, or to keep your seaport accessible, or keep your rail connected. What if I invented a new maglev system that was 10 times more efficient than rail and thus could easily outperform your tracks. So we should just keep your tracks lying where I should put my mag rails? Because why? Because you want it to connect? No, too bad. My system is better. I can prove that by paying more rent and completely displacing your rail. And society is better for it because my system brings greater efficiency. Free markets win.


There no way to determine compensation in a moral sense that can apply universally. If you have a government, then maybe they could try to make a ruling on it, but you and I know that this will just devolve into the courts being captured by special interests who stack judgement in their favor. So the moral imperative is that they need to replicate the work you put in, not "provide compensation." If you want compensation, then you would need to go to him and say "I don't really want a hole in the ground, how about $X dollars instead."

If you had previously claimed that land, then you, and not everyone else on the planet, have suffered a loss, and should be compensated. As for the other residents of Marrakech, there are plenty of other sites to set up coffee shops, and plenty of demand. All they have lost is the opportunity to set up a coffee shop right there, which they could have done, had they acted earlier. Should the residents of Marrakech, then be rewarded for their lack of initiative?

Well, this is effectively an inevitable result, regardless of the system we use. All the resources are inevitably going to get grabbed, if there is a limited supply of them. But consider: We now have several pay toilets which are competing for your business. Now we have two options:
In my system, if you don't like that, you can find a spot to set up a new pay toilet (probably not an option in a playground), or you can buy out one of the owners.
In your system, you can "buy out" the owner of the pay toilet, not by giving him enough money to make him give up the business, but by paying the rest of the kids to let you be the one to beat them up if you don't pay to pee.

Now, let's examine the practical consequences of these two scenarios.

In my scenario, the various owners would like you to pee in their bathroom. Since that won't happen if they're more expensive than the other toilets, their prices tend to be as low as possible. Buying them out is as simple as finding a purchase price that they will accept, and taking over.

In your scenario, the prices will likewise try to trend lower, because they still want you to pee in their bathroom instead of someone else's. But in addition to the upkeep costs, the owner also has to pay rent. Moreover, they don't want to be outbid, so any time someone wants to buy their business from the "commons", they have to outbid that person. This, of course, raises rent. Since this is a pressure all the bathroom owners will have to deal with, it will act as an upward pressure on the price of peeing. If they are outbid, they then need to be ejected from their ownership of the bathroom. They would be understandably upset about this, and may need to be forced to move. Even if they do not, the rent has still gone up, and thus, so has the cost of peeing.

But that money goes to rent, right? It goes right back to the people, doesn't it? Sure, of course it does. But it comes from the people in the first place. This is why I say that the money is simply shifted around to no benefit. The money comes from the people, and then goes right back out. If there was no need for rent paid to the people, there would be no need to charge the people the money to pay the rent. And you can't ignore the administration costs. Call it "friction" in that movement of money. Someone has to maintain the records, and collect and disburse the money, and that someone has to get paid. The people do not get back all of the money that they are charged extra, because some of that money is paid to the people who handle it.

Would they not be better off paying lower rates, and keeping their money, than paying someone to give them their money back?

Would you say that even if I had marked the land with stakes?  I was never going to do anything with it, so it's no loss when someone else builds on it without permission, right?  And while *I* might not have wanted to set up a coffee shop in Marrakech, others in Marrakech might have wanted to, others in my country might have wanted to immigrate.  Even in your value system, their right to claim it was no greater than mine, so can it be said that my loss was smaller?

How about: one kid draws a line around the only bathroom that doesn't already have a line around it?  The number of bathrooms/resource sites is irrelevant.  If there is a good substitute available, the loss we suffered has been reduced, but not to zero.

The loss of an opportunity you were never going to take is no loss.

In your example, if that were the case, I would agree. But a better analogy is: One kid draws a line around one of the several bathrooms. Unless you know of any resources which can be found in one, and only one, location on the planet?

In your extreme example, the loss is relatively small, but there still was a loss.

Let me try an extreme example.  Let's say our world is an elementary school playground.  One say, a kid takes some chalk and draws a line around the bathrooms and says "From now on, if you go in here you have to give me something, or I'll beat you up."  Can you really say the denizens of the playground have lost nothing?

Planning on moving to Marrakech to set up a coffee shop?

The potential to do the same.  Or use that land for any other purpose.

What is some guy in Marrakech losing by you claiming a plot of land in Nebraska to farm, and respectively, what are you losing by the guy in Marrakech claiming a plot of land to set up a coffee shop?

I can agree to disagree about the benefit, but you're right about the rest.  I've been convinced it is a moral necessity to compensate the commons for what you take from them, but the question of how to do this is one to which I'm still searching for an answer.

So, actually, that's not so different from homesteading.  Building an immovable improvement keeps you from ever being outbid without you agreeing to sell your improvements.

Of course this really goes back to the question I asked earlier:  What happens if I default on rent?

You really don't see a difference in value between a hole that leads to copper and one that doesn't?  What about a seaport that's on the see and one that isn't?  If it's the natural nature of these things that's confounding the issue, what about a railroad station that's connected to the tracks, and one that isn't?  A storefront on a crowded downtown street, vs one in the middle of the desert?  Unless you compensate me for my labor in a form that has value to me, you didn't really compensate me at all.

Why didn't I outbid him?  Maybe I had other financial obligations that had nothing to do with the mine.  Maybe I wouldn't sell, maybe he didn't bid, maybe he calculated that it will be cheaper to give me a useless hole in the ground than pay me a fair price for my work.  Perhaps this is the case because the new land is softer than the copper vein.  But that's not really important- even if it's true that he'll be a better miner than me, he still owes me compensation for the improvements I made, right? 

You, who advocate forcing people to move off the land they were born on, for no better reason than they can't pay the rest of the world more than you can, say I do not understand voluntaryism? Do you even understand the word? Voluntary means not forcing someone.


If you come on to the land that I have mixed with my labor, I will treat you as a guest, or an invader, depending on your actions. You say that I have not payed you for the exclusive right to that land. It's not your land. Before I mixed my labor with the land, it was nobody's land. Now it is mine. You're claiming ownership of the entire planet, I just want my little piece. Yours is the most dangerous of collectivist fallacy.

If you can't picture it, then don't worry about it. Just picture people selling the improvements as they change land. The need to move improvements is a moral imperative to prevent people from just outbidding once a person has made many improvements. It's doubtful that this would commonly be done.


In this case, you don't have a right to the copper, so the fact that you have a hole that leads to no copper isn't a big deal. But likely the miner who won the land doesn't really want to spend the money on a big deep hole and you don't really want one on your new land (btw, you pick where it goes on the new land), so you can come to some kind of monetary agreement that discharges him of his moral responsibility. The real question is why didn't you outbid him to keep the mine if it was worth so much to you and to all of society?


That can be moved. It's not a basis for establishing any right of property. The work you do to improve the land is morally yours, but the land is not.


Still don't see it. You didn't make the land so it doesn't magically become yours because you did some stuff to it.


Nope, you're not stealing anything because the land wasn't theirs. You can't steal something that isn't owned. Furthermore, you aren't getting ownership of it either because you are just getting a temporary exclusive right to the land.


It's not a justification. The fact is that there's no justification for this family to think that they have ownership of the land. Because they put a fence up? It's complete madness. I don't understand a social system that says the poor should have a right to ocean front views.


The rich can only take what they can pay for. The benefit of these payments goes to everyone. In your system, the rich create price shocks and endebt the poor to leverage themselves into ownership of of all the land and resources. No one has a chance to break out of the lot their given and people fall into despair as they never have any exclusive right to any land and must pay rent to benefit a small few. This is the world we live in and it has created a ruling class.

You're saying that because poor people can choose the best places to live, that this is a system endemic with oppression and it just doesn't make any sense. If those poor wanted to, they could get a loan, bid out someone fro m a resource patch and mine it more effectively than the person before and come out way ahead. There no systemic oppression.


These things are easily moved.


These things don't get compensation. The land isn't yours, you just have a temporary right to it. You can't have an expectation of keeping your community nor never moving if you are not willing to match rent. It's not simply because someone wants mineral resources, it's because someone is willing to give a greater social benefit than you are for the right to that land. It's not your land so get the hell off it and let the guy who is doing more use it.


When I come onto your land that you mixed with your labor, you would likely put a gun to my face to tell me to get off. But you but have not paid me for the exclusive right to that land, so you are the aggressor, and I am in my rights to fire on you as you have violated the NAP. The person who does rent that exclusive right is within their moral right to use force to get me off the land, also as part of the NAP. I think you do not understand voluntaryism.

Even assuming that the payout only goes to those who pay in, You're still shuffling resources around to no benefit, and likely with appreciable loss to administration costs, and that's assuming there's no corruption.

It's not a flag. It's at minimum, a fence, or some marker posts. It's the physical effort which alters the land that was there into something separate, something different. If all I was requiring was a pole with a flag on it, then you might have a valid point. But I'm not. It's not "everybody's" land, it's nobody's, until that alteration changes it from the state of nature to a man-made product. From a piece of prairie to a tilled field, or from a chunk of forest into a log cabin with driveway, and a garden around back.

The problem is, you are stealing the prime real estate with the ocean view from people who have lived there all their lives, simply because you can pay more than they can to some nebulous "commons", rather than paying them the fair market value for the land. And you are justifying this by saying, "Not to worry, in your new home, we'll pay you a small slice of the rent paid for this place. You'll also get a small slice of the rent paid for everywhere else, too, which the person who is currently living in your family home will also be getting."

No, I am saying that your system will enable the rich to take whatever they want, leaving no recourse for the poor but to "out-bid" them. When one class of people can take from another with no recourse, that is a ruling class, by definition.


Can you move the nick in the wall that Suzie made when she slid down the stairs in a laundry basket? Can you move the pencil marks that Mom made, to show the heights of the kids as they grew up? Can you move the tire swing in the front yard? Can you move the community in which the house resides? Even if you can, How does that compensate for being uprooted and moved, simply because someone wants the mineral resources underneath your home?

If someone is more competent at getting out copper or oil or whatever from underneath the land, they have the means to get the landsteaders off and get access to the resources. They can offer them a purchase price for the land. Anything else is initiation of force. And if you support initiation of force, you're not anarcho- anything, you're a statist.

I still can't get my head around the idea of "moving" improvements, or even replicating them.  Aside from the fact that some improvements are pretty much immovable, changing the location of an improvement can destroy its value.

"Sorry, I outbid you on this copper vein, but don't worry, I had my people dig you a mine just like this one down by the river.  Enjoy your big, muddy, copperless hole in the ground.  Well, until it gets flooded, anyway."

The moral basis for land ownership and property in general:



Whoever uses the above the most effectively, gets the property. It's how it will always work. It's how a government gets property taxes. It's how a man protects his livestock.

Right and wrong go out the window in the face of the highest power.

And humorous TV shows. Though I believe it needed an assist even there.