Topic: Fair Tax and black markets - page 4. (Read 9019 times)

But it's not their land. It never was their land and it will never be their land or anyone else's land because they didn't make the land themselves. It's everybody's land and if someone wants a temporary exclusive right to it, then they can bid the rent.

I'm sorry but I just don't see the moral basis of ownership coming from the fact that some guy put a flag in a square of land 300 years ago. It completely makes no sense to me.


The person who shoved you you out of your house is (likely) paying more in than they are getting out in rent. The case where they are not paying more in, it's because you decided that you yourself don't want to bid enough to put an equal or more amount in. This means you are living on society. They are paying all of your rent and probably they are paying for your food and improvements.  Soory, but, yeah, you don't get the prime real estate with the ocean view. I don't see the problem.


I was simple stating that our current model of capital ownership of land has empirically lead to a ruling class. You are a kettle saying 'well, your pot might end up black.'


And yet if someone is more competent at getting that copper or oil out, then we should give them the means to force the land steaders offf and give access to those resources. Any improvements will be moved (or replicated) elsewhere so don't worry about that. All the effort you put in will not be for naught.

I have no issue with resources going to those who can develop them. Where I take issue is the fact that you're paying everyone else for the right to kick someone off their land. Buy the land from them, don't pay "rent" to some nebulous "commons" because some nebulous "society" wants their land, and then notify the poor bastards that it's not their land anymore.

"Quit bitching about your plot of desert land, and enjoy your tiny slice of the rent from what used to be your house, and all the other people who also got shoved out of their houses. And never mind that the person who shoved you out of your house is also getting an equal slice."

Your great grandfather built the house you were raised in, with his own hands. Your entire family has spent their whole lives living in that house. How does that make you a "ruling class"?

No, the natural resources are not created by anyone, but the means of accessing them are. A copper vein does not become a copper mine by itself. Oil (barring unusual circumstances) does not come bubbling up out of the ground on it's own. And ignoring the resources beneath the land, a piece of the prairie does not become a home without human effort. You start pushing people out of their property, don't be surprised if more than one of them pulls an Ellis Wyatt on you.

That's assuming that the majority of the world practices anarchogeolibertarianism.  If we're talking about starting with, say, one anarchogeolibertarian town, the rent money is as good as lost with all the free riders from other regions who draw from the pool without paying into it.  It'll be too finely diluted to do any good to anyone.

"Bullying" refers to the motivation, not the intrinsic nature of the act itself.  Like, "Marry me, or I'll force your fragile, bedridden mother to move to a new place every day until she dies."

In that case, the system breaks as soon as someone builds a immobile improvement.  Suddenly, you can't access their property without them agreeing to sell it to you.  You can no longer bid up the rent, so it stays where it is forever.

What happens if the owner stops paying the rent, and doesn't want to sell their improvements?

The poor aren't forced to live on someone else's land. They can bid for land just like everyone else. The poor will end up with land that has less utility to society, which is how it should be. It doesn't make sense to have a poor person sitting on top of a copper mine that they can't develop when society desires that copper.

Also, don't forget that the poor person directly derives rent from the person taking their land, and all the other land in the area if not the world. The concept of poverty is not anything like the concept of poverty now. Up to the point of over population, the poor will always be able to find somewhere to live.

I doesn't make sense that people happened to have ancestors who came here before anyone else and put a flag in the ground gives them some kind of overriding moral exclusionary right to land. You want to explain to me how that is fair? Empirically speaking, it has established a ruling class.

The most important point here is that the natural resources are not created by anyone so it makes no sense to say they are exclusively owned by anyone.


Yes a rich person could outbid a poor person off their property, but that rich person is now morally responsible to move the poor person to a place of equal rent. This costs the rich person money and thus acts as a disincentive. And the rich person needs to pay rent on the property and this is a net benefit to society including the poor person.

I take exception to the term bullying. If the rich person wants to have exclusive right to that land, then they should have it. They have as much claim as anyone.


I don't really care how you move it: the key part is that you have the moral responsibility to do so and in failing to do so you don't get exclusionary right to the land nor access to the improvement. As a result, if someone were bidding on, say the Empire State Building, they would really only do it if they were also going to purchase the improvements from the current tenant. People buy and sell buildings all the time, it's not a stretch.


That's the difference between Georgism and anarchogeolibertarianism. In your system, you have a community rule (a minimal government) that determines rent and enforces right of sale. In my voluntary system, the free market is used to determine the rent price point and there's no "right of sale" but a moral tie to temporary exclusionary rights to property and responsibility to maintain the product of another person's work.

No, don't you see? That's the point of requiring that you put labor into the land to acquire it. The land itself is not made by human labor, but the process of "mixing your labor with the land" makes the end product a product of human labor.



Well, I would say it's a case of good faith, in this instance. You bought the land in good faith, from someone who in all likelihood did not know his ancestor had committed murder for the house. Since there are no better claimants, you would be able to keep the land.

True, there are some parallels, but I think the fact that bitcoin is made by human labor, and the process of acquiring it, whether by mining, buying, or business, adds value to the whole thing, changes the dynamic somewhat.

As to the issue of old claims, let's say for example, it comes to light that my house is on land I bought from someone who's great-grandfather murdered someone for it.  The guy who was murdered had no descendents.  Can I keep the house?  If not, who do I give it to?

Ok, I have some problems with this interpretation.  While awarding the land to the highest bidder is a nice way to solve the problem of how to determine the rent rate, it offers no stability.  A rich person could bully a poor person by bidding them out of their house every so often.  

Moving improvements?  How are you going to move the Empire State Building, or the Hoover Dam, or the Taj Mahal visitor's center?  How are you going to move an orchard without causing considerable damage to the trees in the process?  How are you going to move a section of the tracks of a major railroad?

My interpretation was that by renting land at a rate (somehow) determined by the community, you gain the exclusive right of sale.  That's how you keep the value of your improvements, by selling the right to rent the land when you're done.  A highest bidder system robs you of that, and saying they'll move your improvements has some serious practical issues.

And so the poor are forced to live on someone else's land? A family who lived there for generations gets shoved off their land because some monied asshole payed someone else more than they can?

You want to explain how that is fair? How that prevents a ruling class? How that, in fact, does anything but establish a ruling class?

I'm an anarchogeolibertarian and I can answer this from that perspective.

Let's be clear about the deal here, there's no "homesteading" in the ancap sense. If you want exclusive right to a piece of land, then you need to bid the rent for it. If someone comes along later and outbids you, then they get the exclusive right to that land. You don't just get to keep land because you were there first, it goes to the highest bidder.

If you make improvements to the land, the improvements are morally yours. However, if you lose rights to the land then either the new rights holder will pay to move them to the closest area with the same previous rent, or more likely they will buy the improvements from you.

As an example, you bid for a piece of land and win it. Then you build a house. You decide to move, so you put the house up for sale, and enter into a contract with someone for them to buy it. They give you the money and take over the moral rights to the house, and start paying the same rent as you on the land.

Or, you bid for a piece of land and win it. then you build a house. A company knows there are natural gas reserves on your property, so they bid on the land. You try to bid higher, but they bid even more, so you lose rights to the land. They don't want the house, so they offer to move it. The land in the whole area is being bid up because of the natural gas, but one county over there is some land with a similar rent amount. You go through a few bid cycles and get a place for the same rent. The company moves your home there.

Now that this is clear, let's go to the question: what if you are both paying rent on the land through some mistake in the system? well, it goes to the last person who engaged in a bidding process properly and won with the highest rent. So if I had some land that I bid on previously and you came along and just started paying rent on it, this wouldn't count for anything because you didn't open up bidding process. As far as the money, I'm inclined to say that it's your fault for not bidding properly.

As far as who "the commons" are, in minarchist systems, this is a small government, but in geoanarchism this is paid in equal parts to whomever asks for it. Potentially this could be paid to every person on earth, and this would really be my preference, but for practical reasons, this is simply whoever says "I want a slice of that" gets their slice. I can see something like Bitcoin excelling here, but Bitcoin itself has protocol limits that make it unusable for large distribution micropayments.

This last part is important because for me to respect your exclusive right to your land, I need to get some portion of your rent. By accepting your rent, I'm also accepting your exclusive right to that land. By paying your rent, you are compensating me for the loss of use of your land. By bidding the rent, it assures that the land is being used to the highest utility for society instead of being sat on by "homesteaders."

It can be equated to the early adopter "problem" with Bitcoin. There are people, who simply by virtue of being early to the party, have a large supply of a suddenly very valuable commodity. Is this necessarily a bad thing? They recognized a sound investment, and bought in early. Yet, there are people from that group, who now have little or no bitcoins. What happened? They managed their investment poorly, and now someone else, who can better manage that investment, has it. Some of those people who have those bitcoins now are new to the community. If they manage that investment poorly, it will go to someone else, as well.

As to how to recognize a false claim made centuries ago, that will require significant amounts of investigation, and what to do with it will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Too many people think that you can make a law that will fit every case. That's simply not possible. In one instance, it might be best to give the land to the new claimant. In another, the centuries-old claim might be the one you should honor, regardless of it's legitimacy. If someone tells you they have the answer to everything, they're either very stupid, or think you are.

What you say re: the commons is a fair criticism, which I acknowledged in the previous post.  I don't have an answer for that at this time.

The question is, why should being first be important at all?  Another problem is similar to one I brought up very early in the thread.  How do you know whether or not a claim made centuries ago is legitimate, and what do you do if it's not?

You have to answer one very important question: To whom is the compensation being paid? "The commons" is not a thing. Someone will be entrusted with the the responsibility of holding, and more importantly, dispensing, that money. Who that person is is a very important decision, and it opens a huge can of worms, which you need to deal with before you support a method of ensuring "fairness" in land ownership.

Your characterization of first and second generation of settlers is over-generalized, and fails to take into account a lot of factors. The skill or wisdom (or lack thereof) in the first generation's management of the land, the ability of the second generation, or indeed any subsequent generation, to purchase land, and environmental factors, among many other things.

Being first is important, but it is not sufficient, in itself, to ensure that the land owner is rich and prosperous, or even better off than a later arrival.

Homesteading is a better deal for the first generation of people to settle in an area.  After that, they'll snatch up all the land, and the next generation will have to pay them rent.  The first generation will grow richer and richer, both from rent and from rising land value from whatever the second generation does to improve the community.  The first generation will be a permanent upperclass, and every generation after will be denied the same opportunities they had, and can only hope to get good jobs working their land.

Even though this country is so much richer than it used to be, the opportunity it offers for new arrivals has shrunk considerably.  This is because the first generation has taken everything from the commons, and left future arrivals with nothing.

With geoism, the first generation won't take anything from the commons without compensation.  This means they won't take as much in the first place, so by the time the next generation comes around, there will still be some left to take without artificial scarcity.  Wealth will be in the hands of people who earned it through production, not simply for being first.  New arrivals have the potential to benefit from public spending*.  They would have about as much opportunity as the first generation did.  I'd say most people would find the conditions more "fair" here, since you ask.

*I know that the idea of paying into the commons is a concept that begs further scrutiny.  Like I said, I'm still developing my ideas, so I don't really have a solid idea of how the public purse could fairly compensate everyone for the lost opportunities.

Wait, so the stakes, the physical effort, don't matter, but the paperwork, that's what really matters? Well, I could just claim land willy-nilly, if all I had to do was fill out the paperwork. That's just like running that script to claim all the domain names.

You would require a financial commitment, plus that paperwork, to claim land.

I would require a physical effort, plus maybe that paperwork, to claim land.

Now, which of those would be more fair to the poor and homeless looking to get a home?

Ok, so what was your question again?

What makes you think that land registries would not be used in a libertarian, homesteading supporting society?

If it's simply a matter of who put in an official claim first, a wise man would, along with the stakes, place a land claim with a registry. The stakes are just a visible, on-site border marking. To let people know that this land is already claimed.

I would say "Whoever filed the claim first."  I do not believe in homesteading.  To me, the question of who marked the land first or who built on it first is irrelevant to establishing ownership.

If the arbitrator and the community recognizes homestead rights, then their answer might be different from mine.

OK, but how do you decide which one gets the land?

I know which way the arbitrator will decide, and I know why. Can you say the same for your reasoning?

The only thing you forgot to account for is the 'illegal migrant worker' who currently must be earning under the table, since he has no legal social security number that an employer can take income tax toward. In this case you're brining a huge population into the tax base... take it with a grain of salt since most illegals are sending money to some other country.

Which makes me think we need to start championing bitcoin as THE way to pay illegals... and also as the best way for them to ship money back home.

Then whoever doesn't get the land sues the registrar for compensation.  If we both want the land more than the money, maybe one of those "arbitrators" can help us work things out.*

By the way, Fjordbit, that was a very good point about fairtax.

EDIT: * And I know that's a cop-out, but it's one that I've heard AnCaps use many, many times.

What if, through some paperwork snafu, we both had been paying the tax on that particular plot of land?