Topic: Fair Tax and black markets - page 6. (Read 9019 times)

No, that's what the required amount of labor to claim the land does. Even if you only have to put up a fence, or post signs every five yards, that still enough work to add that stumbling block to prevent the sort of scripting attack you mentioned with domain names. Land tax would just funnel funds from both "rightful owners" and these sorts of "land-grabbers" to a monolithic entity with nobody's best interests at heart.

If there must be taxation (and I do not believe there must), then land tax is one of the more fair ways to go about it. But what gives the taxing body the right to claim original ownership over that piece of land, and charge you for it's use? You'll note that this is essentially the same question you asked me. They've done nothing, except lay claim to it (and didn't even bother to mark it out), why should I pay them? What differentiates them from the guy who ran a script and claimed all the domain names?

All of those things are merely possibilities.  I could have recognized its potential and preserved it in its pristine state when others wanted to develop it, or I could have grabbed it 15 minutes before you would have after overhearing you say you were going to claim it.

Bottom line is, you had access to something.  I decreased your access to that something.  Now, I want you to pay me simply to restore the level of access you had before I entered the picture.

You say that if I hadn't decreased your access, someone else might have decreased it more.  Well, that makes me like one of those armed gangs: forcing on you a protection service that you didn't ask for.  If instead of paying me you choose to go with your second choice of land or domain, I have destroyed for you the difference in value between your first and second choice.  I should be paying you for that, not the other way around.

Let's talk about domains.  If there was no fee for domain name registrations, and they were permanent, I'll bet someone would have written a script to register every single domain name anyone would ever want.  People who wanted to start a new website would either have to do everything he says and pay whatever he wants or be stuck using 30+ character long strings of random letters and numbers.  That doesn't seem like an ideal situation for free market competition.

Instead, there's still a little bit of artificial scarcity of domain names, but even the small yearly fee keeps it from getting that out of hand.  That's what the land tax would do for land.  Claiming land for future sale would still be possible, just not free.

hate em. we need to all sleep on the hard asphalt of the street.

Good point, stumped me.

I assume you don't approve of landlords, either, then? Or hotels?

the only problem is that landowners have an unfair advantage over gaining the resources (funds, money, moola, dinero) from their labor to justify their reward of property
for instance the owning ex. native american land of vast size

Well, in the domain name instance, you recognized the value of that domain, and paid the minimal fees to register it. If you ask more than I value the domain, I'll just go get sex.cc, sex.org, or sex.xxx instead, either paying the minimal fee or paying a fair market value, depending on if it's been claimed yet or not.

Likewise, recognizing and claiming valuable land does not require much effort, but what if someone had come along and built a hotel atop an oil field? By recognizing and claiming that oil field, before it gets turned into a hotel, you save me the effort of demolishing the hotel, to say nothing of the expense of convincing the owners that it would be better served as an oil field than a hotel.

By claiming and retaining the land (or website) it it's original state, You save me the trouble of buying out owners who have invested in the site, and then re-developing it to my own taste. The Suffolk Energy Exchange might object to my building a porn site on its old domain, after all.

So, it has to be a certain level of alteration?  And a certain type?  What level, what type?

Saying that I got lucky doesn't answer the question of what value I provided.  You're right, domain name grabbing is the same, it produces no value.  Investing in a company is different, because you provided $22 of value when you bought that share, and in doing so helped build the company.

What good have I done you by grabbing land or a domain name you want before you have a chance?  If I hadn't done that, and no one else did, you would get those things for free, so by doing them I didn't help you in any way.  Why should you have to pay me when all I did was inconvenience you?

But less than that I have fenced in, and in a different manner. Suffice it to say I consider a boundary marking of some sort sufficient effort put into land, in itself sufficient alteration of the land thus enclosed, to claim it.

Well, if you staked out land at random, and it happened to have some value to someone, you got lucky, just as if you had registered sex.com in the very early days of the internet. By the same logic, you could ask how a single $22 share of Apple in 1980 entitles you to almost $3900 of Apple stocks today. It's called wise (or lucky) investment.


Hunting and fishing don't leave marks. At least, no more than would an animal doing the same thing. (killing an animal for meat, or pulling a fish up out of the water) Collecting wood may, or may not, depending on the means of collection. Can you find me a culture which made no boundary markings, cleared no trees, built no shelters, left no midden piles, or made no other lasting markings on the land they inhabited?

Really? You didn't peg a market anarchist for being one who would support common law? You must not know much about market anarchy, then.

You can certainly leave a mark upon land without some sort of clearly man-made signage. For example hunting and fishing, collecting wood, etc. If a hypothetical tribe came to depend upon those natural resources, a hypothetical group of judges might repeatedly rule against them for centuries, marginalizing them and forcing them into tiny worthless plots of land far from their origins.

And I certainly never pegged you as the type who would define ownership as what some judges say it is. Having a larger group of people decide on one consistent definition might be preferable.

By that logic, you've also altered the land on the other side of the fence, too.  Aside from that, I don't know where to start with all the further questions that statement raises.

How is that necessarily the case?  I could have just staked out land at random.  You could have determined the value yourself.  In fact, it might have been you who made it valuable in the first place, by developing the surrounding area.  It could be the only land available that fits your needs, so you can't go elsewhere.

As to the issue of security firms, my challenge stands, and there's no point in saying anything else.

But you are directly altering that plot of land that is fenced in. Just ask FirstAscent, by separating it from the rest of the land around it, you are changing (even if subtly) it's nature.


I would not necessarily be better off without you, for presumably you have determined why I should value that land over someone else's, yes? If not, then I can just as well go and stake my own claim elsewhere, or go to someone who has evaluated their land's value.


Rest assured, that one of the very first things that any competing security provider will do is prove its ability to sustain an attack from a government. Which is one of the main reasons why there aren't any (openly, that I know of) competing security providers. At least on the national level. I would point to the various armed and unarmed private security companies which supplement the local police force's ability to stop and deter crime on their clients' property.

Earlier I asked you how much land a given act of labor entitles you to.  You answered, "as much as you alter with that work,".  Marking boundaries does not alter the entire area enclosed by those boundaries, just the boundaries themselves.  So, if building a fence entitles you to the entire area enclosed by that fence, then some acts of labor entitle you to more land than you directly alter.  Which acts, how much, who decides?

Even if you can come up with a consistent policy, it's still rather arbitrary to determine ownership this way.  If I mark some land as my own you have to pay me to use it, why?  What value did I provide to you in exchange for the payment you give me to buy "my" land?  You would be better off if I didn't exist, and yet you're paying me.

Thanks for the recommendation, I may check it out sometime.  I didn't think there was another discussion.  I thought I laid out my terms simply enough:  Start your security company, show that you can protect your clients from governmental violence, and I may consider switching from my current provider.  I have a few complaints about my current service plan, but they have an exemplary record in one area which I prioritize highly: that of existence.

No, you stated, "neither marked its boundaries nor put work into it." So I asked if you knew of a culture that had managed to do so. Unless you know of some way I can mark land without thereby putting work into it?

To answer your question, I do not determine how much of a mark is required. That is something which must be determined via common law. If I were called to judge a case on a questionable boundary, I would say that it must be: clearly visible, and clearly man-made. For instance, a plowed field should need no boundary markers, since the field itself marks out a boundary. A forest's edge, however, does not make a good boundary, unless there are some sort of clearly man-made markers, such as signage.

Oh sorry, I thought you were asking that rhetorically to subtly change your requirement from "marked a boundary" to "left a mark of some kind".

There is no culture that has left no mark upon the land.

My turn: how do you determine how much of a mark is required? (Please no book recommendations as answers)

I think a land tax is fair and reasonable if you wish to fence off something that belongs to the whole community. It saves you simply "hoarding" the land.

If taxpayers build a road to his property he should pay them land tax because they improved its value. In the same way land developers benefit from taxpayers building infrastructure for their allotments. In the current system this doesnt happen and a few get to profit off the labors of many.


tl'dr use it or lose it.

Well Soviets are gone. Who's left to mark it?

:-)

Would you care to answer the question I posed, or are you conceding the argument?

Does the moon belong to the USA? Marked it.

Show me one such culture, that left no mark upon the land.

And of course if a culture neither marked its boundaries nor put work into it, then "their" land belongs to whoever first sailed over and marked it.