Fair Tax and black markets

[myrkul]

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.

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.

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.

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[Topazan]

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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? 

[myrkul]

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.

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.

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?

[Topazan]

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.

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.

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.

[myrkul]

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.

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.

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?

[Topazan]

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.

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.

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?

[myrkul]

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?

[Topazan]

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.

[myrkul]

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?

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?

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.

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?

[Fjordbit]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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? 

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."

[myrkul]

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.

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.

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.

[Fjordbit]

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.

[myrkul]

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.

[Explodicle]

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?

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


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

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

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

[Fjordbit]

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[Topazan]

@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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

[myrkul]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

[Explodicle]

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.

[myrkul]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Fjordbit]

@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.

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.

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.  

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.