Bitcoin Forum

how, under the FairTax, would jimbob paying derrick from down the road to mow his law pay taxes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRpWir4eDrs

or Ashikabob in Pakistanilandstan selling flutes for bitcoin get taxes from people buying them?

How are either of those black market? And what's your point anyway?

Those guys wouldn't pay income tax anyway.

At least under fair tax they pay tax when they spend the money, if they do so at a taxpaying business.

But I still think the best tax is land tax.  It requires no invasion of financial privacy, no control over currency, and there's no easy loophole.  Philosophically it's a little more justifiable for me, because the government defends your claim to your land.

explain land tax

my point was the commercial was being retarded saying its harder to avoid taxes, when is ome cases it's easier, if you work for big business, pay no income tax, but if you buy at household businesses without a name or license, pay no fairtax...haha maybe a libertarian's secret wet dream to defund the government slowly

Land Tax - If you own land, you pay a percentage of its value to the government every year, or you stop owning it.  It differs from property tax because improvements to the land are not counted as part of its value.  There are probably multiple ways of calculating value, but I don't know which one is best.  Basically, all land is leased from the government.  I believe Hong Kong has a system somewhat similar to this.

Unlike sales in income tax, it doesn't act as a disincentive to productive economic activity.  Instead, it acts as a disincentive to urban sprawl and the destruction of wilderness.

I think it's consistent with the principles of self ownership, because land is neither your self nor the result of your labor.

Income tax:
-Employees of registered businesses pay tax when they're paid.
-Black marketers pay no tax.

Sales tax:
-Employees of registered businesses pay tax when they buy stuff in stores.
-Black marketers pay tax when they buy stuff in stores.

It's no more difficult to prosecute a store for tax dodging than it is an individual.  Black market or not, I doubt there are many people who never go to supermarkets, pharmacies, clothing boutiques, and such.

EDIT:  Sorry, I didn't see the link to the commercial.  Watching now.

Ok, watched it, and I think I see your point.  Going back to your original post, no, the labor of "Derrick from down the road" would not be taxed, but he would pay taxes when he spends the money he earns.  "Ashikabob in Pakistanilandstan" is guilty of tax-dodging.  Even if he isn't prosecuted, he at least probably paid taxes on some of the materials for his flutes, and will pay more when he spends the money HE makes.

Interesting, I'm not fully onboard though

That's it?  No discussion or anything? :D

Ok, whatever you say.

if we dont own the land, at the least id want general widespread land designated as public for us landless (hint, homeless) people to be on legally without taxes.

and how does that jive with the notion, its not your land but your house is on it? unless its  a mobile home on wheels then you can't really MOVE your house if the land owners want you to move...so not owning the land doesn't really make sense to me

On the topic of land taxes, Thomas Paine wrote an interesting (Enlightenment/State of Nature style) argument for them in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice:

'The work is based on the contention that in the state of nature, "the earth, in its natural uncultivated state... was the common property of the human race"; the concept of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, since it was impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. Thus Paine views private property as necessary, but that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their "payment" to non-property holders for the right to hold private property.' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice

Some people think that some or all of the tax should be redistributed to the community.  The idea being, as grantbdev's post suggested, that the landholders must pay rent to those who don't hold land. 

I have one problem with that idea: It requires us to define who is and isn't a member of the community.  I'm against citizenship and restricting immigration.  That's why I would prefer it be spent on  defense and infrastructure, including the public spaces you mentioned, and if there's some left over, maybe even some (gasp) anti-poverty spending.

I'm not sure how well this fits in with what other geolibertarians would say, but my position is that you would still own your land in one sense: You get to decide who has first priority in leasing the land after you leave.  Thus, you can still sell your house when you move.  It's like domain names on the internet.  If you want to register a new one, you just have to pay a registration fee to an ICANN accredited registrar.  If you want to buy an existing domain name, say because someone built a popular site with it, you'll have to buy it from its current owner.

I'm not sure what you meant when you said "if the landowners want you to move".  You mean if you default on your taxes?  Then you would need to find a buyer within a certain period.  If you mean eminent domain, presumably there would be some kind of required compensation, as there is now.  If you mean being evicted because you broke some rule, well, that would probably be a matter for a civil case with your neighbors or in severe cases a criminal court to decide.

Why can't all the taxes just be incorporated into the purchase price and paid up front? (like normal bank can loan u money, they pay full up front to old owner, you pay bank the loan according to their terms)

The taxes are recurring, so if your stay is indefinite, then you won't know how much you'll eventually end up owing.  Even if you do know how many years you want to stay, the land value may change, and with it the amount of taxes you owe.

Still, if enough people demand this kind of stability, I'm sure the market can provide something.  Maybe if you want a place to retire to, you can sign a contract with someone saying they'll pay all the taxes on your house for the rest of your life, but upon your death they inherit your house.  There could be a whole industry of "tax insurance" where the company will pay your taxes for the next few decades in return for a large down payment now.

FYI, these answers are coming off the top of my head.  This is a concept I've only become interested recently, so I haven't read the existing literature in depth.

do you have a youtube channel with your type of thinking?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnznB2g_La0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnznB2g_La0)  Here is a good video describing land tax and how a lack of one causes housing bubbles. You also end up with empty houses while lots of people are homeless.

I don't know of any, but terms to search for would be "Georgism" and "geolibertarianism".

@bitcoin.me - Thanks, I'll check it out.

Land Value Tax is interesting but it definitely has issues of its own. The whole land ownership thing has a lot of depth and subtleties that many people don't even consider because they're used to the perspective they're in (consider nomadic people for example.) I think there may never actually be a good answer.

The problem of reconciling different ideas about land ownership isn't unique to a land tax system.  What problems would nomadic peoples encounter under a land tax system that they wouldn't encounter in the current system?  What solutions does the current system offer that a land tax system could not?

Oh, I was just going off on a tangent.

thanks a lot for that. a different perspective I have not heard in a documentary before!

My primary issue with switching to a land tax is that the valuation has to be set somehow... and some entity has control over how it's set, when and at what value. Unless is was based on the purchase price of the land when you bought it (which has it's own issues, fraud selling something for a dollar, etc) there's no way it wouldn't get out of control by constantly growing.

Property tax already does this... increasing by a percentage per year.

I'd much rather see a staged sales tax for a flat percentage at each stage.

Defends it by threatening to take it way if your don't pay the extortion money.

*cocks shotgun*

Who says I need the government to protect my property?

A land tax that replaces all or many of the other taxes would be much higher then property tax.  It would change all kinds of behaviors, some for the positive and some for the negative.  People would have trouble passing down large amounts of land within the family and many people would stop owning second homes.  Anyone who had a lot of land (non working farm or just a mountain lodge) and did nothing with it would have to consider how much it would cost them. 

Nobody wants to pay taxes but a good tax plan would be simpler and not discourage good activities or alter behavior that is not negative (such as having a moderate income and a large plot of land).

If not the government, who says your land is yours?  I really don't see how any individual can claim land ownership by natural right.  

Some people say your right to land comes from cultivating it.  Does that mean you can't own a hunting preserve or a campground?  Can I stop the construction of a hospital by throwing seeds on the planned site?

I've heard other people say you "create" land with your labor of discovering it.  However, land has changed hands by coercive force many times through history.  Who can prove, if challenged, that the land in their possession has been transferred to them from its original discoverer by an unbroken chain of voluntary transactions, no duress involved in any of them?  If coercion was involved at any stage, then the land is stolen property.  By what right, then, do you continue to possess it?  It may be too late to return it to its original owners, but how does that make it yours?

I consider land ownership to be a concept that does not exist in nature.  It is a convention that societies create and follow.  If you can show me how it can exist without anyone to decree it, I invite you to.

I think a much more logical and practical position is to say that while individuals have an inalienable right to own themselves and their labor, natural things rightfully belong to the commons.  Whenever something is taken from the commons for private use, compensation is owed to the commons.  That, I think, is the moral basis behind the land tax.

As to the issue of how land value is calculated, that's a source of doubt in this idea for me as well.  I'm reading Progress and Poverty now, so I'm hoping to see what Henry George proposed.  However, if all else fails, even if it was a flat rate per square meter regardless of location I think that wouldn't be too bad.  It would lose some of the advantages, but it would be better than sales or income tax.

The reason I don't like sales tax much better than income tax is that it implies a similar level of oversight and control.  In order to enforce it, the government has to know where the shops are, which means we need business registration.  The government needs to know the price of everything in the official currency (let's say USD), so you have to do all your accounting in USD.  The government needs to know you aren't cheating, so they need to be able to look at your records whenever they want to.  Garage sales and lemonade stands become technically illegal.

On the other hand, with a land tax, the only thing the government needs to know is what land you claim ownership over.  Land owners can keep a supply of USD for paying taxes, while society does business with bitcoin or whatever else they want.  There's no need to register businesses.  If you want to sell something or provide a service for money, you just do it.  There's no easy way to cheat, so there's no need for a huge bureaucracy to oversee everything.

One last thought: If you don't need the government to protect your land, prove it by protecting it from the governments of the world.  Then you won't have to pay any taxes.

@Littleshop - A tax that won't "discourage good activities or alter behavior that is not negative"? And what tax is that?

I think you just have a poor understanding of homesteading theory. It's not just "cultivating" land that makes it yours, it's putting some labor into it. That labor could be as simple as fencing it, or putting up some signs and breaking a trail through it. You can certainly own a hunting preserve or a campground.


The existence of other violent gangs does not necessitate kowtowing to a violent gang yourself. Security can be provided on the market, like any other service.

I'll freely admit that I don't know much about homesteading theory.  What acts constitute putting labor into land?  How much land does a given act of labor entitle you to?  Who decides?

Again, prove that it's possible by doing it.

Well, the simple answers are: "any sort of work," "as much as you alter with that work," and "nobody, unless there's a dispute." For a more detailed explanation, here's a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle

Working on it.

And if you have 500 acres and raise a couple of tomato plants in a patch next to your back porch? And again, what about nomads? Why shouldn't a free person be able to pick out a small strip of land and cultivate it and live freely? Because someone's ancestor gave some beads to some Indians and got half-a-state in a contract that wasn't really comprehended for what it was.

To be clear, I'm not advocating anything in particular. I'm just saying that anyone who has pat answers is probably ignoring a large part of the scenario. I think property taxes are pretty despicable at one end of the scale and at the other, it's not right for someone to hold sway over vast plots of land "just because".

And I just used the word "fair" above which irks me because "fairness" is the justification behind a whole lot of wrongs being committed.

You contradict yourself.  First you said that putting up signs or fencing some land makes it yours, but under the principle of "as much as you alter with that work", you would only be able to claim the holes into which you shoved the sign and fence posts.

Incidentally, I have read the wikipedia article, and it did not answer any of my questions.  In fact, this quote raises some of the very same questions.

Great, let me know when you're finished.  In the meantime, let's just agree that while functioning, enduring anCap would be great, if we have to have a state land tax is one of the better ways to fund it.

There's no reason a stateless society couldn't have land rent too:
http://www.anti-state.com/geo/foldvary1.html

I argued with Myrkul about it here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98890.0
It will be easier to...
1. Help the AnCaps "win"
2. Buy land
3. Rent it out efficiently
4. Repeat 2 & 3 until you have a huge mass of land
4.1. (By the way this is what the board game "Monopoly" was meant to illustrate)
5. Give up some control to tenants so they don't kill you
6. Don't call it a state with taxes, call it a private collective with rents/fees
...Than it will be to argue semantics with Myrkul. :P

That first step is going to be the hardest part.  :P

Well, then, you should read the book (http://freekeene.com/files/marketforliberty.pdf) that that quote comes from. They go into a pretty detailed explanation after that quote. If you don't have the time to sit and read a pdf, there's an audio book (http://) version as well.

Ok, I read that chapter.  The wikipedia quote was not misleadingly taken out of context.  The writers of that book do not defend the "mixing labor with land" idea.  Instead, they advocate the idea that people can claim land just by marking the boundaries.  I wonder if you may have misunderstood one or the other if you say they're the same.

I find their system almost as arbitrary.  Here's two other quotes from them:
So, the lazy man has a right to sell and receive payment for the land, just because he staked it out.  What value did he give for the value of land ownership?  What service did he provide to his buyers?  He got to the land before they could, but what good does that do them?  Why should they pay him for it?

I contend that boundary marking is sufficient labor to claim the land.

I would suggest reading the rest of the book, not just that chapter. I also suggest, to address our other discussion, The production of security, by Gustave de Molinari (http://library.mises.org/books/Gustave%20de%20Molinari/The%20Production%20of%20Security.pdf).

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.

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

Does the moon belong to the USA? Marked it.

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

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

:-)

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

Good point, stumped me.

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.

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?

I think the main issue is that the only real reason to own lots and lots of land is to control the people who wish to use it. I don't have solid answers and don't claim to be drawing lines but if you own more than "as far as the eye can see", you possibly have more than you should.

The only entities I know of that own that much land are governments. Possible exception: the Catholic Church (which counts as a government, in my book).

It may slightly slow down the rate at which land is claimed.  Less and less as people developed better 'marking technology' (I'm picturing jets carpetbombing a field with some brightly colored dye), but it would slow it down.  That still doesn't address the fundamental arbitrariness of it, nor provide any compensation for the people who have their options diminished by the act of claiming.  Besides, there's only so much land in the world, and no matter how long it takes eventually it will all be claimed, creating a landed class with a permanent advantage over the rest.



Put simply: they conquered the land.  They proved that they are able to defeat anyone who would challenge their power.  They reached an understanding with the foreign governments of the world that they alone are sovereign within its borders, and it's this understanding and fear of war that keeps their territory safe from those foreign governments.  It is by their fiat that you are named the owner of a piece of land, and they have the means to enforce it.  I'll freely admit it's more a matter of might than right.

I know you're going to find this objectionable, and I don't think I'll ever be able to convince you it isn't, so I leave you with this: If and when private security agencies start providing a genuine alternative to governments, I'll rethink my position.

I would perhaps change that to "as far as the ear can hear", because quiet solitude is a very valid reason for wanting large properties.

Let me see if I get this right:

You think "I own it because I was the first one there, and marked it" (however that marking gets done) is not legitimate, but "I own it because I killed the fuckers who lived there, and anyone else who tried to move in" is?

I believe in the future no Land Tax will be necessary.
It's funny but the solution might come from how Bitcoin ownership is protected.

Do you pay taxes to a central authority to protect your claim on bitcoins? No!
What you do is keep the secret key from a record in the distributed database protected by all the participants' computing power.

I'm not trying to pretend that it solves the initial distribution problem for the entirety of land, but once the initial distribution is settled (it can even be derived from the current setup) maintaining the ownership to a piece of land shouldn't incur any costs.
So in brief the solution is to create an open distributed database with pieces of land represented by coordinates of their boundaries (pieces mustn't overlap) and have unique addresses attached to them with private keys kept by the their respective land owners. The transfer of ownership would be as easy as signing and broadcasting the transaction [1].
LandCoin anyone? :) If there isn't any reasonable concept behind LandCoin mining then the land database in question should be protected by merge-mining it with monetary blockchain (whatever that ends up being).

Now if your land is under attack, then you can hire a defense agency to which you can easily prove to be a land owner and everybody can easily verify that. So you only pay when you're under attack and unable to defend yourself by your own means. It's much different from just paying for the ability to be defended even if you don't need it.

[1]: It would be even possible to sell part of the land in that way. For example if Alice has a private key from the address A which has piece of land defined by boundary L attached to it, then she can form a transaction which says that subset of L defined by L1 now belongs to address B (owned by Bob) while subset L2 (normally the remainder of L after subtracting L1) now belongs to address A1 owned by Alice.
The network only needs to validate that pieces of land in transaction don't violate a simple rules for transaction to be accepted.

Yes, exactly :D Though I think there are ranches in Texas and Monsanto is probably in there too. Though Texan ranches are probably (maybe) justifiable.

For definitions of "safe" which may mean "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". What governments are generally protecting is their ability to shake down the people who are living on the land. The allegiance of the people living on the land is often real but arbitrary.

Legitimate or not, it's the literal truth.

That's what it's going to come down to in the end.  Your hypothetical AnCap community can have homesteading, if and only if your security agencies are willing and able to impose it on everyone who has a different idea of land ownership.  Any philosophical justification you can give for taking land is bound to be questioned by people with different values.  Violence is just about the only thing that's beyond question.

We live in a world where the rewards of killing are great, and often the only practical way to stop a killer is to kill them.  I'm not saying the greatest killers SHOULD have the ability to impose their will on other people, I am stating the simple fact that they DO have it.

FairTax is mistaken in the whole "we can tax black markets thing". Compare two societies, one with income tax at 20% and one with sales tax at 20%. You have a person A buying a black market item from person B who then uses the profits to pay rent to a legitimate person C. Person C spends his money on legitimate sources. Person A then uses the rest of their money on legitimate sources.

In the income tax scenario. Person A makes $10,000 and pays $2,000 in taxes. They pay $100 for a black market item to person B. Person B pays no taxes and pays $100 rent to Person C. Person C pays $20 in taxes. Total taxes: $2020.

In the sales tax scenario. Person A makes $10,000. They spend $9900 on legal things and thus pay $1980 in taxes. They spend $100 with person B and pay no taxes. Person B spends $100 on rent to person C and pays $20 in taxes. Person C spends that $100 and pays $20 in taxes. Total taxes: $2020.

The thing is that everyone's spending in is another person's income. It doesn't matter which side you put the taxation on, it is equivalent. So the taxation you gain from black market dealers now buying legitimate items is lost from the income of customers who are buying black market items.

There is a world of difference, both philosophical and practical, between imposing that definition of ownership on someone and defending that definition of ownership from someone.

Let's posit two groups, one of which recognizes ownership of land, and one which does not. On the one side, we have a group of AnCaps, who recognize sticky ownership of property, and homesteading. On the other, we have a group of anarcho-communists, who do not recognize homesteading as a valid way to own land, or indeed owning land at all. they only recognize use. Let us further assume that the AnCaps have the best weapons and training, and can, if they choose, impose their order on anyone they come up against.

Our first scenario has the communists occupying a plot of land. Amongst themselves, they peaceably share the land, and all use it as needed. The group of AnCaps comes along, sees that they have already occupied and altered the land they are using, and moves along, looking for un-homesteaded land.

Our second scenario has the AnCaps occupying a plot of land. There is one plot which is owned, but kept pristine for reasons left to the owner. The communists come along, and seeing this unused plot of land, decide to set up shop. The owner of that land, assuming he didn't keep it unused for the purpose of dirty commies setting up a campground, will desire them off the land. So, off they go, by force if necessary.

Now, let's posit a third scenario, where a group of geo-libertarians come along and start telling the AnCaps that because they own land, they owe the geo-libertarians a land tax. They would correctly view this as an attempt to steal from them, and defend their property, with force if necessary.

While we're at it, Let's posit that a group of AnCaps come across a group of geo-libertarians who have already set up shop on a piece of land. They have all agreed that in order to fund their community, they should all pay a land tax to whatever agency they have deemed rightful to collect it. Since the situation is voluntary, the AnCaps shrug, and move along, looking for less crazy neighbors.

You don't impose it on anyone who has a different idea of land ownership, only on those who try to impose that different idea of land ownership upon you.

Wouldn't it be nice if we all lived in fully formed philosophically unified tribes isolated from each other, and there was always somewhere else to go when we encountered another tribe with an incompatible philosophy?  I live in a world of high population densities where ideologically, ethnically, and religiously fragmented peoples are forced into close proximity, personally.  There's still wilderness left out there, but not all of it is usable for every purpose.  When we need something, there isn't always somewhere else to get it.

What you've basically done there is restate the homestead/AnCap position.  Not really sure what your point is.  What you've written is what the AnCaps would believe, but the two other groups would be no less sincere in their beliefs, and in their eyes the AnCaps would be the aggressors for trying to drive them away from something that they're entitled to, and may need to live.

I guess you're basically saying that in the cases where the AnCap society is defending themselves from outside invasion, they're in the right?  But it's not that clean cut in the real world.  Ideological conflict can occur within a society, and societies are not homogenous in the first place.

Let us consider three more scenarios.

First there are anarcho-communists. They share resources, but do so in an inefficient manner by penalizing constructive activity.

Then there are geoists who share resources efficiently with natural resource taxes.

Finally we have "strong land rights" market anarchists, who privatize everyone else's land. Clearing forests and leaving trash all over the place isn't just tolerated, it's considered "leaving a mark" and grants monopoly ownership.

In the first two scenarios no one is stealing a shared resource for private gain, although the anarcho-communists are still wasting it somewhat. When group #3 leaves their desolate wasteland behind for a new one, everyone else is free to homestead it.

=============

I was actually surprised to hear that market anarchists believe in subjective property rights, considering how much they complain about "invading MY property!" As defined by a loose affiliation of sometimes-contradicting judges, but of course not the ones who actually exist in the real world.

I guess you'll just have to figure out a way to get the person who has it to give it peacefully, then, huh?

I won't be able to convince you. I definitely won't be able to convince Explodicle. It's like Ron White said, You can't fix stupid.

Oh, and Explodicle,


You should probably think about what the concept of "free market" means when applied to the justice and law industries.

Why do you want me to think about anything relating to private law if you're certain I can't be convinced? ;)

Thank you for the series of thought-provoking discussions, at least. As obnoxious as I am, it has still been very informative.

I am an eternal optimist. Perhaps, you will prove me wrong. That would be a refreshing change.

It's going to take more than shoving a few stakes in the ground to convince me that a person "has" a piece of land.  If that person says "If you work here without paying me, I'll kill you." I'll consider it extortion, nothing more.

I do understand your point of view and I think you raised a number of very good points that really made me think.  I think our philosophies are more similar than different.  Echoing Explodicle's sentiment, while you may not have convinced me, it was a good discussion regardless.

One point in particular you raised that was fairly thought-provoking is that I am, in fact, implying that governments/communities should have the power that I say landlords have not earned.  Leaving this power in the hands of landlords is not an acceptable solution to me either, but I do acknowledge the dissonance and will keep my mind open to a solution that solves both problems.

Well, let's suppose you stake out, in winter, the site of your future home. you leave, intending to build that home after the thaw. It is, after all, difficult to build a foundation in frozen soil. Before you can return, I come in and plow about half of those markers under, and plant a field. Just as the first shoots break the surface, You show up with the construction crew, ready to build your house.

Who is in the right, here? Is the land rightfully my farm, or your house?

Um, recall that I'm advancing the geoist perspective.  I'm still developing my ideas, so I'm not quite a fanatical geoist, but that's kind of been my role in the thread so far.

As such, my answer would be, "Whichever one of us has been paying the tax."

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Ok, so what was your question again?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

The moral basis for land ownership and property in general:

http://www.zombieagency.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/shotgun-pictures1.jpeg

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? 

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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?

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."

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 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.

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.

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).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/69/Perfectly_inelastic_supply.svg/250px-Perfectly_inelastic_supply.svg.png

With monopoly land pricing, we introduce the same inefficiency as any other monopoly. It incurs a deadweight loss.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Monopoly-surpluses.svg/250px-Monopoly-surpluses.svg.png
(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.

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.

@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.  :D  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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/johannsen-oscar_essence-of-georgism-1967.html).


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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=111837.0).  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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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"?

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.

That could cause some confusion, but as long as it's well known that that registrar is used in that area, It would probably be OK (smart AnCaps check registries, too). If there were some confusion, and the AnCap moved in on the geo, the geo would be compensated once it was brought to light.

See, an AnCap who has marked out land as owned expects exclusive use, and the right to use force to defend that exclusive use. In order for the AnCap to get that, the geo would demand rent. Worse, if someone completely unrelated to either party came along and paid that geo more for the use of that land, the AnCap would lose the exclusive use, and the right to defend it, at least in the geo's eyes.

Bullshit it doesn't. If the geo demands payment for something that he had nothing to do with the creation of, that is to say, the "rent" on unimproved land, then they are clearly expecting something for nothing. That places them solidly in the wrong. Your own philosophy states that you cannot create, and therefore cannot derive profit from, the land itself. So how do you reconcile that with demanding unearned profit (pretty much the definition of "rent") from unimproved land, which you acknowledge you did not create?

Let me repeat: They (the providers of goods, services and conveniences) are compensated for the provision of those goods, services, and conveniences. Since those goods, services, and conveniences are part (aside from demand) of what increases value of land in a city, the people providing them have already been compensated for the increase in land value (which they also benefit from).

So no actual improvement to the land is necessary. In an ancap world, just some kind of simple registration is needed. Why wouldn't all the land be taken up in an instant with a computer program?


See, the ancap is the one who uses force to keep people off the land he doesn't own. It's the equivalent of establishing a small state. I understand that people like free things and so taking land that doesn't belong to anyone has it's appeal, but "I want free stuff" isn't a moral argument for the use of force.


Geo's don't demand rent. I covered that in my last comment. If you want to get something (e.g. the exclusive right to some land), then yeah, it ain't free. Why would I give you the exclusive right to that land without some compensation? By your exclusion, you are depriving me of something.


They get some benefit, but it's not in proportion to their effort. A guy with a 5 acre empty lot is going to get a lot more benefit than the guy with the .1 acre coffee shop. You used the word "fair" with regard to the compensation in your initial post, and there's nothing fair about it.

Again, if I required "improvement" to land, we'd get parking lots instead of forests. I don't view that as an optimal solution. As I said, claiming land without at least marking it out will probably cause some confusion. Sort of like paying someone for the Brooklyn Bridge... How are you sure they can even give you the exclusive use of that land? The AnCap would likely pass on the "claimed" land out of courtesy, likewise with the compensation, but if he pushed it, paying some random stranger and putting numbers into a computer don't grant you ownership.

No, it's not. And if the argument were "I want free stuff," I would concede the point. But it's not. The argument is "this stuff is mine, because I made it." Taking land that doesn't belong to someone is fine. Trying to take land that does belong to someone is not. That's when the force comes in.

You have to have it in order for me to deprive you of it. Since it's not your land, my claiming it deprives you of nothing.

They think it's fair. Otherwise they would increase their prices. If they think it's fair, then who am I (or you) to say otherwise?

I've mostly stopped posting in this thread because I felt like I've said most of what I have to say, but a few thoughts.

First, myrkul is right that a geoist system could exist within a private property system, if for no other reason than a land owner can impose any rules he wants on his tenants.  The issue is that the geoist would believe that the AnCaps are claiming ownership over something no one has the right to own.  Imagine if the AnCaps encountered a group that practiced slavery.  The slavers might say, "Well, you can give your slaves freedom and fair compensation for labor if you want, but what gives you the right to tell us what to do with our slaves?"  I'm not comparing land ownership to slavery, I'm simply pointing out that a values dissonance issue exists.

Second, under ideal conditions, if the property owners are numerous and diverse enough to always be in competition, the a private property system isn't that bad.  But, consider that today the world's tyrants claim little other authority other than ownership of their countries.  Why can't you have an AnCap society today?  Because you have no place to build it.  There are many impoverished countries in the world, but it's extremely rare for them to sell their sovereignty over any part of their land for any price.  You're stuck living under the rule of a government, because it has land and you don't.  What check would exist on a landlords power in an AnCap society?  What distinguishes a large landholder from a national government?

Someone mentioned about all the property currently being owned.  First, why would you respect current property ownership after a transition to AnCap, knowing that much of it was gained unjustly?  Second, as the book myrkul linked pointed out, you would need to distribute government property somehow.

Because there's really no way to do any better. You can't right past injustices because most of the victims are dead. A transition would be disruptive enough without such a massive change in ownership, and the vast majority of people who own property today acquired it at fair market value.

Right, that's one of the issues with transition to an AnCap society. Most likely, you'd need to auction most of it to cover the costs of transitioning. I don't think anyone can predict in advance how to transition to an AnCap society or what such a transition would be like. It will depend enormously on what technology is available at the time and how much people are willing to do and when. Land not substantially improved could be opened to homesteading. It's value would be very low anyway.

Indeed it does. The core problem is the idea on one side that land, in it's natural state, belongs to no one, and on the other, that it belongs to everyone. One is compatible with only owning the results of your labor, the other is not.

Well, for one, size. You'd need to own tremendous amounts of land to come anywhere near the level of control of a national government. No person has ever come close to owning that much land, and the only non-government entity that ever has is the Catholic church. Which, effectively, is a government. 

For another, the landlord his held to the same standards as the tenants. If the landlord pulled the kinds of things that governments do to their citizens, he'd be up to his neck in arbitration.

Well, most current property ownership was gained justly, by paying fair market value to a willing seller. Most of the unjustly gained land is in government hands, so the two questions are really just one.

And the answer to that question is that for already occupied government land (military bases, offices, etc) would pretty much just go to the people currently using it. Unoccupied land would be open for homesteading. I imagine park rangers would claim most of it.

This seems to be going in circles based on the argument in front of you. How do ancaps decide if they require improvement or not?


Nothing grants you ownership. all you can get is a temporary exclusionary right to the land.


But you didn't make the land. Period.


Which means there's no problem because land doesn't belong to anyone.


It deprives everyone of their use of it.


That doesn't make sense. They aren't selling their coffee shop, the guy with the empty lot is. They don't receive any fair compensation for that, or really any compensation.


Yeah, I'm getting there too. It's just repetition along the lines of:

As I've previously stated, I typically consider marking it out sufficient alteration of the land to claim ownership. "Improvement" is relative.

Then why are you complaining when I come in and set up shop? After all, your right was only temporary.

No, I didn't. But I altered the land into something man-made. It is that which I own, the altered, combined product of the land and my labor.

Then who are you paying to use it? You can't claim profit from something you don't own.

They weren't using it. If they were, it would have been their land already.

Well, if the guy was actually selling their coffee shop, you'd have a point. Of course, he's not. He's selling an empty lot which happens to be nearby a coffee shop.

Sorry for bumping this but I wanted to comment particularly on one post.


I think the comparison of land to Bitcoin can be a useful one, both in recognising similarities and differences.  But the way I'm seeing it doesn't support your argument.

Those who will have gained the most from being an 'early adopter' of Bitcoin are those who will have mined them then sat on them, keeping hold of them and doing nothing with them other than accumulating more as fast as they can.  If everyone had done likewise everyone's Bitcoin would still be worth nothing.  Fortunately for the rest of us some others, including those who you say 'managed their investment poorly' put their Bitcoin into play and sowed the seeds of it taking off as it has.  It is not an exact analogy with land because as you point out, in the age of homesteading, those who managed most efficiently in terms of maximum returns from crops from their land were able to buy out those who were not doing so well, maybe employing them and with the acquired plots with the better efficiency now producing more food, reducing the cost of everybody's living :)  There is no parallel with Bitcoin in this respect.

But what if the early adopters had another means of living and were not interested in doing anything with the land?  What if they also had the fortune of being in a location where a city would be built up around their plots? Then it's just like the early Bitcoin hoarder situation because the increase in the value of their land has nothing to do with 'managing the investment' and everything to do with benefiting without having lifted a finger from the creativity, the productivity, the efficiency and hard work of those who created the city around them.

With Bitcoin, the finite-number-of-Bitcoins feature is essential for it to work and whilst the inactive hoarder's massive gain does not sit comfortably with me it is as far as I can tell the inevitable other-side-of-the-coin of Bitcoin's built-in scarcity without which I can't see how it could succeed.  The primary difference to me between the Bitcoin and land situations is that however much Bitcoin is being hoarded, whilst it reduces the amount available and has an affect on price, it does not reduce in any way what can be done with the remaining Bitcoin for those who are using it.  Not so with land.  Having a very reduced land supply available to the same number of people means although the proportion of the available land is the same, as it is with Bitcoin, for land the square footage or acerage owned is a fraction of what it would otherwise be and you simply can't do with smaller area of land what you would with a bigger area.

But I'm not ready quite yet to let go of the idea if I've bought a property it is mine.  Maybe it's something as simple as the similarity between the words 'common' and 'commune'?  The idea of someone telling me land I bought belongs to the 'commons' is unnerving.  Yet there seems to be a justice in recognising the difference between an increase in the value of property arising out of something the owner has done to it (which is rightfully his) and an increase in value arising out of things others have done, whether privately by neighbours or things like train stations built with public funding.  It seems crazy to me that the efficiency of commerce and employment should be severely hampered by taxation when there's a means of tapping the unearned wealth of increased land value at virtually no cost.*  I actually prefer the term 'Location Levy'** than land tax because tax to me is taking from me something I earned.  I'm finding it more difficult to remain persuaded that the increase in value of my land at the hands of others' efforts is mine by right.

But how attractive to Bitcoiners is the following potential gain to be had by switching from today's system, replacing all other forms of taxation with the Location Levy?  The only thing that the government would need to know in order ascertain the amount of the Levy due would be what my land is worth.  This means they no longer need to know how much I earn, how and on what I spend my money, how wealthy I am, whether my investment is in business, commodities or whatever I fancy - and they don't need to care what currency I choose to trade in INCLUDING BITCOIN - and in this situation, there's no reason that they shouldn't also accept the Levy in Bitcoin!  This truly has the potential to free us up economically providing we're prepared to take that leap of a paradigm shift and accept that the increase in the value of the land beneath us that was not as a direct consequence of something we did - IS NOT OURS BY RIGHT!  It is to me a high price to pay in terms of letting go of a formerly deeply entrenched principle of property ownership - but right now I'm thinking it might be worth it.

Tf

* myrkul, Please don't try and argue against this particular point again (land tax not having an affect rent and the sale price of the lands's produce).  I know the way you put it sounds plausible and seems self-evident to you and you say you don't understand the graphs Explodicle presented (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=116947.msg1283575#msg1283575) but if you did take the time to understand them or asked any economist, irrespective of their support of land tax or lack thereof, they will tell you that taxation of land has has next to zero effect on rent.  It's just the way it is.  Only those who don't understand argue that point.  There are plenty other arguments to be made on this issue but you won't win that one against anybody who understands.  I won't have that argument with you because i) a number here have tried to explain it to you already and you won't accept it and ii) you seem to me to be quite capable of doing the research and study required to understand it for yourself should you so choose.

** This is Tony Vickers's term (author of Location Matters:Recycling Britain's Wealth)

I think you sort of missed my point comparing Bitcoin to land.

Someone who put their bitcoins out there and invested wisely profited even more than those who just sat on it. Those who invested poorly - say, by trying and failing to play the exchange market - lost out, and those are the people I referred to who now have little or none of their coins.

In the land analogy, this becomes investing wisely (developing your land), sitting on it (keeping the land in an undeveloped state), or investing poorly (developing your land in such a way as the market does not want - say, a pig farm in the city).

Now, you have a fine point that you cannot do as much with a smaller tract of land - but this is already factored in in the price.

Now, as to land tax not affecting rent, It seems pretty self-evident that it would. I am willing to entertain the idea that I am wrong, however. I am not what you would call a "visual learner." I do much better understanding concepts when explained in text, rather than obscure graphs. I'd gladly research it myself, but a link to (at the very minimum) a Wiki page would be appreciated so that I have a starting point.

Land use prices (aka rents) are really much much more dependent on factors other than tax. Suppose you have some property that you decide to rent, how would you figure out how much you're going to charge in rents? I can tell you it isn't based on tax rate... it is entirely based on greed...

That is: you would rent it for the maximum amount you could get for it. Period. You aren't going to be able to increase that rate past what the market will bear. And you'll always increase the rents to get as close as possible to whatever the market will support. This is why underdeveloped rural locations grow very slowly, there just isn't a profit in 'investment realestate' unless you have very good support for the rental prices in that area.

This makes sense... And a higher tax as a percentage of land value wouldn't increase the rent you're able to pull from it. It would, however, decrease the utility of the land as rental property, possibly even forcing it to stay vacant. I think I'm beginning to see how the geoist system is designed to work. That's not to say it would, of course, and it would require a coercive State to enforce these taxes.

@ myrkul

Apologies for the tone of that footnote.  I read it again this morning and appreciate that you did not take it as condescending which you justifiably could have.

I will admit it does seem counterintuitive that it wouldn't and I did take the claim with a pinch of salt the first few times I came across it.  It was an economics teacher drawing those diagrams on the back of an envelope in the pub accompanied by his explanation that convinced me.  The downside of that is I can't hyperlink my resource ;)  I've done a quick search this morning to no avail and will look further when I have time (it would be good for me to go through it again too) but I am given to understand variations of those graphs form part of classic economics primer courses.

I don't think I did miss your point.  I understand, as illustrated by my homestead example, the positive benefit to all from productive investment.  But I remain convinced, unless you can show me otherwise, that the direct correlation you're trying to make undermines rather than supports your argument.  I might be more inclined to accept the claimed parallel if you could give me one example of how an early adopter using Bitcoin for investment could have done so phenomenally well that it would have given them a higher return than had they just sat on it and accumulated it without spend for the first 18 months or so.  Even if you count trading on the exchanges as 'investing' (which to me is speculation) someone would have needed to be both extremely smart and extremely lucky to have made money repeatedly selling bitcoin just prior to occasional downs AND buying it back again just as the price was returning to growth.

This is why the parallel with Bitcoin better illustrates the problem with land speculation for me.  Because (more so now than in homesteading days) the economic principles you're talking about which work so elegantly in the homesteading and early economy circumstance become virtually insignificant when the wisest thing for virtually anybody with capital to do in any city worldwide at virtually any time* is to invest a small proportion of it in productive economic activity whilst having the rest of it sitting in land driving up the price at which everybody else who would like to do anything (from having somewhere to live to setting up a factory to creating a trading floor) to contribute to the economy themselves.  Because there's nothing anybody can do - even just standing somewhere - that does not require land.

And what has surprised me the more I've looked into this is the number of names I know of from history who have recognised land as needing to be treated differently to labour and capital - including capitalist heroes such as Adam Smith and Thomas Payne, the latter for whom, as I recollect, was quite passionate about the rights of man ;)

I'm not saying I have all the answers nor, as I admitted, am I quite ready yet to let go of my deeply entrenched view that land I consider to be my (or my family's) property is owned by us and not subject to the whim of the majority.  But I'm having to acknowledge this is not a position that I can justify with argument.


Tf

* Occasional downward blips occur in any economy, exacerbated by occasional speculation bubbles when they eventually burst - but I am not counting cities here where the political situations such as war or extreme governmental fiscal irresponsibility takes them outside of the normal dynamic.

I tend to take everything on the internet with several grains of salt. Unless you make it abundantly clear you're treating me like dirt, I give you the benefit of the doubt.

Which my education as an Electronics technician skipped. Not much call for supply and demand curves when you're more concerned with voltages and resistance. As you can see above, though, I've had the concept explained in a reasonable manner, and it makes sense. I admit part of my reluctance earlier might have been the source.

I would consider selling bitcoins for cash and buying more mining hardware to be "investing," and you can't deny that that was a profitable strategy, and continued to be for some time. Now, though, the "land-grab" is starting to slow down, and if you want to grow your investment, you have to put it to work.

Land, like any resource (even air) is scarce. It's more scarce than some other resources, true. But that limited supply doesn't change the way you deal with it, just the relative value. Just like time. Everyone has an exceedingly limited supply of time, but it is bought and sold like any other commodity.

Appreciated :)

It was indeed profitable but I didn't mention it because it's where the analogy with land falls down.  You can't grow produce on Bitcoin and you can't mine more land!

I would again beg to differ.  Is it not someone's time that's for sale or time as a measure of how long something is hired you're talking about here?

It appears to me that in this respect there's an inverse relationship between bitcoin and land in that in the early days there would have been very little incentive to do nothing with land and the benefits of doing so have grown exponentially ever since.  In contrast, the best time to do nothing with Bitcoin (assuming somebody else would in order that it becomes popular) was right at the outset*.  As time passes and more can be done with it the incentive to use it productively will increase.

But unless the time comes when we treat land differently than capital I can't see that anything is going to change as the curve grows ever steeper (booms & busts accepted) and associated problems and wasted economic opportunity will get so exacerbated that they become more and more difficult to deny.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to be convincing you on the merits of the 'Location Levy' any time soon so if you don't mind we'll agree to disagree.  I am not saying I'm right and you're wrong but in enjoying reading through the earlier part of the thread when I saw your analogy between land and Bitcoin I wanted to add my take on it to the discussion and I appreciate your indulging me in so doing.

Best,

tf


*I acknowledge in some people's eyes we are still at 'the outset'.

Well, technically, you can mine more "land" if you view it simply as "space." The traditional view of "land" is measured in area. Perhaps a more "future proof" metric would be to use volume. Certainly would make more sense once we're off this ball of rock. Now, I know of no way to equitably distribute the current volume, and given that mineral rights and airspace rights typically come with land ownership, that would tend to imply ownership of a pyramidal "slice" of the earth's crust and atmosphere.

But I get your point, and my little exception aside, you're right. No analogy is perfect - else it wouldn't be an analogy.


Time ~= labor. You can use them interchangeably.


Land is capital, though. It can't be moved, and has some unique factors affecting it's market value, but it is capital, no more or less than, say, your automobile.

Surely not?  Time, unless it is in reference to someone's or something is worth nothing.  The sensible reply to the question 'How much would you charge me for an hour?' is 'An hour of what?'  I can't just buy an hour from you.

But that is exactly what you are doing when you hire me. There are several professions (mine included) where the proper response is an amount of currency. Prostitution is another one.

Take any phrase about labor, and replace the word "labor" with "time," and I can virtually guarantee that it will not only make sense, it will retain the original meaning. (excepting, of course, phrases regarding maternity - "she went into time" just does not make the same sense.)

Now clearly, you can't "trade" time in precisely the same sense as other commodities, for instance, as in the movie "In Time," since like land - or more accurately, "space," - time is not mobile. What you can do, however, is exchange your currency (bought with your time) for my time. If it took you 2 hours to earn the $25 it will cost you to have me repair your computer (which will take me one hour), but it would take you three hours to do it yourself, you can see this is a good deal.

I think we both understand what time is and the way it works with division of labour and specialisation.  My point is that what you are referring to is, as you used it here, 'your' time.  It just another way of saying is 'your'  labour.  Of course 'your (or anyone's) time' is interchangeable with the 'your (or anyone's) labour' because you are referring to the same thing.  And if we're are talking about labour it is one of the three classical economic classifications as previously mentioned: land, capital and labour, each of which have their own charecteristics withenough distinguishing features not to be able to use them indiscriminately interchangeably without losing meaning.

What I still really don't get I'm afraid is how your comparison of time with land gives us anything of use in this discussion.  But I'm happy to leave that one 'un-got' for now ;)

What I'm saying is that time (labor), space (land) and matter ("capital") are all types of capital in the economic sense. They are all three limited resources upon which we each draw.

I'm not sure exactly how this is relevant to this discussion either, save for the fact that it is this discussion which led me to that conclusion.