What do you think of Land Value Tax (LVT)

[Nathaniel1984]

All this talk about people 'lying' and such seems ridiculous. I have family members and friends who are interventionists and socialists in economics, or are interventionists in economics, etc, and when I make points and they have rebuttals, I don't go around saying, "YOU ARE A LIAR!" or "YOU ARE ALWAYS LYING!" I'm sure that's a good way to wake people up to my points, just saying they are liars, malevolent monsters, and are secretly plotting with the MIC, or AIPAC, or the Fed, to cover up the truth and promote lies, and they very well know they are lies!

A lie in common parlance is generally believed to be a statment that the speakers knows or believes to be untrue, and they still make the statement as if it is true. If I agreed with the Georgist position, or the LVT position (or which I have yet to finish reading all the works of Henry George from google books to make a definite pronouncement in my own limited judgment), I would still not go around telling my grandmother she is a liar when she says that my grandfather owned that land, no matter how feeble I may believe her arguments may be. I wouldn't call my father-confessor a liar because he believes in the income tax as a way of helping the poor (no matter how feeble the argument may be). This is the same mistake that Marxists, and other leftists, as well as too many libertarians and others make. When someone doesn't agree with their position, and when we believe their counter-arguments to our arguments are not good and wrong, they says, "You are just lying!" In the end that just turns more people off than it convinces.

The majority of people who hold views that I disagree with, are not being intentially disinegous ('lying'). They have just accepted a common view that is mistaken. If you could find out who invented this view thousands of years ago (assuming it was invented by one person, and not just a natural mistake due to historical circumstances), and then you could find out they were intentionally malevolent, that would be the liar.

Besides, most people I know, are people who believe, you can own land. And, even though one logically believes that land ownership is technically equivalent to slavery once all the deductions and conclusions are reached, doesn't not put the person who owns that land or believes you can own that land, on an equivalent moral status with some 18th century South Carolina slave master who likes to beat his slaves. If one disagreed with the concept of land ownership, fair minds would just see that you can see the direct harm caused to the slave by being beaten, by being sold, and families torn apart, because, frankly, it is so in your face an an injustice, but, would still see that the vast majority of educated people who believe in land ownership, are not the same as the slave-whipper. It is like when anarchists make the logical deduction (in their world view) that all taxation is a form of theft, but, the majority, I think, understand the ages of ingrained societal justifications, and realize that people who support taxation are not liars, but, just misinformed. Or people I know who are protectionists and make the same mistakes, and the same with other egregious errors.

When you can see the harm so directly (i.e., ante-bellom black slavery) it is alot easier to see the injustice, but, when the harm is very much dispersed (like that which is seen and that which is unseen, as Bastiat said), the injustice of the situation must be drawn out for people to see; and even then, many do not understand, but the key is not to loose patience with people, attack them with vitriol, and bash them over the head with a proverbial club because they do not, or have not yet, agree with your position. If my good friends in high school, and afterwards, years ago, had taken such a vitriolic and inflammatory approach, I would have immediately discounted all that they had said about taxation, military interventionism, and the rest, and so would the majority. For example, Ron Paul has won over millions because he hasn't taken such a personalitic attack on many people who are just plainly accepting a conventional view, and even people 4 years ago who didn't support him on military interventionism, the Fed, or the bailout, have, after just a few years of experience seen the light. Now imagine if he had said to all these people, "All of you out there, are just plain liars who don't agree with me. Or maybe you are just too stupid to really agree with me. But, mostly, you are just liars who lying always about your arguments." I doubt that constitutionalist and freedom movements would have grown to any substantial extent, if that were the rhetoric.

--Fr. Augustine

p.s. forgive me for any grammatical errors.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Nathaniel-that is a thoughtful post. However, to nitpick-I don't believe many (if any) argue that all taxation is theft-only direct taxation. (the LVT would be a type of direct taxation)

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Where did the State get its revenue? From taxing the people. Collecting it straight from the people simply eliminates the middle man of the states to have to collect it and forward the money to Washington. It doesn't change who pays the taxes.

Florida has zero state income tax. Same with Alaska, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas.

 

[Nathaniel1984]

I understand. I was just explaining various viewpoints that exist in the broad framework of the 'freedom movement' who can agree on attacking the fed, military interventionism, corporatism, etc (that is, broadly, Constitutionalists, traditionalists conservatives, conventional libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, Georgists, anti-NWO folks, etc). Some do argue that any coerced payment upon an individual or group of individuals (company) would be unjust and theft, assuming all things in fairness are equal (that is, assuming the party being coerced wasn't stealing and then being made to give back what he unjustly took); not many, but, some. I was just pointing out that it does no good to ones position to say that those who disagree with you, are necessarily liars, instead of misinformed, or just plain wrong about the point.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

Well, I am out of time for now. To be continued, perhaps.

OK, on we go. We were discussing whether land in the layman's sense could be considered unique and non-interchangeable -- that is, heterogenous. While it's not clear how productive this particular discussion is, or what economic conclusion would be drawn from whether "layman's" land is homogenous or heterogenous, we shall complete the discussion nonetheless, since someone is apparently under the impression that it is important, that the heterogeniety of "layman's" land is a keystone or lynchpin of the whole Georgist theory.

So, what about the proximity of the land (dry location on Earth's surface) to other natural resources, such as rivers, mineral deposits, and fertile soil? This proximity, or lack thereof, is a huge factor affecting the value of the land, as we all know. To the extent that land is said to be heterogenous, it is almost entirely because of this uneven distribution of other resources. A piece of land adjacent to navigable water is completely different than one 100 miles away from any navigable water, especially in the ancient world when that was the main way to ship stuff around.

Let us pretend Earth was instead a uniform sphere, with no topography or bodies of water and vegetation, minerals, and all other resources spread evenly throughout. Then the only factor creating any meaningful uniqueness between two pieces of land would be due to human intervention -- city-building, road-building, etc. As given by nature, then, one piece of land on this uniform sphere would be interchangeable with another and non-unique, just as one bushel of wheat is interchangeable for another (Oh, apart from latitude for climate).

Why is this realization about the uniform sphere relevant? Because land -- the dry site or location on Earth's surface -- is separate and apart from any other resources that may or may not be on, above, below, or near it. These resources are movable. A river can be diverted. Fertile soil can be brought in, or shipped out. Minerals can be mined. They are all separate from the land itself, which is just a dry location somewhere on the Earth's surface. The land itself is basically homogenous -- one dry site is essentially the same as another. It is the distribution of other resources and factors that is heterogenous. Land in the layman's sense of dry parts of the surface area of the Earth, is essentially homogenous. Further, as a side-note, we see that the only thing which can drastically affect the value of one piece of this land vs. another is human labor and choices, quite contrary to Georgist assertion.

Thus we see that whether one wishes to speak of land in the economic sense (natural resources) or land in a layman's sense (dry site on Earth's surface), it is largely homogenous -- non-unique and interchangeable. If uniqueness/non-interchangeability is a requirement for a good to be inherently monopolized whenever it is owned, then land, no matter which way you define it, fails this test.

As for the other alleged reason to consider natural resources as monopolized whenever they are owned, that of its supply being fixed, one need merely consider the world in which he lives to decide whether this is an accurate claim in any meaningful sense. Again, as we all know by now, "land" in economics is short-hand for "natural resources". In what sense are our natural resources fixed? Have they remained fixed for the last 25 years? The last hundred? Are they, in fact, quickly depleting as they should be if they were fixed, since we voraciously consume them in ever-greater amounts?

No, they are becoming more and more plentiful across-the-board. Commodity prices in constant dollars have been going inexorably down for as far back as we have statistics. Not steadily down -- in a given year a commodity might go up or down -- but inexorably; the long term trend is clear and never changes. More and more natural resources are becoming accessible to us. The old view of a static pool of natural resources has been proved wrong again and again since the Middle Ages and especially since the Industrial Revolution. The Malthusian Trap has never reared its ugly head. The amount of natural resources at our disposal has been absolutely exploding for multiple centuries now, and looks to continue to do so.

What if the claim is made that "the supply of land is fixed by definition"? I would ask: is land still the same thing as natural resources by definition? It surely is, if we are to use the venerable definition of land that the profession of economics has long used. Then if land is the supply of natural resources by definition, and land supply is fixed by definition, what then do we make of the fact that the supply of natural resources is in a super-long-term, apparently permanent, massively explosive growth curve? Which definition is the essential one? We may play games and define things away, but at some point economics is meant to tell us something real about the real world, something useful about how humans actually operate. While the absolute quantity of resources in all existence may, or may not, be fixed, and thus the theoretical supply may, or may not, be fixed, for practical purposes the supply is rapidly increasing, and has been for at least 200 years. I'm not sure why the amount of resources in all cosmic existence is relevant in the least way to economics, since we have yet to fill even a single galaxy, or to Dyson Sphere even a single star. I rather think it is not. That the amount of accessible, usable resources is rapidly increasing seems, on the other hand, incredibly valuable information. These resources become accessible and usable by, yes: the application of human labor and capital! The very thing claimed to have no possible effect on the supply of natural resources is precisely what has been increasing the supply of natural resources at an exponential rate for centuries. Human effort and intelligence has by now given us at least a hundred times (perhaps a thousand times) the quantity of natural resources than were available in Henry George's day. A hundred years from now, if human liberty is allowed to run untrammeled, our natural resources may increase yet another hundredfold. To say "natural resources are defined as having a fixed supply, just by definition" is to define your version of "natural resources" right out of practical reality and to remove yourself from any possibility of having anything useful or realistic to say about actual natural resources. It is to fly in the face of hundreds of years of real-life experience. It is to make your version of "natural resources" fictional.

Actual supplies of natural resources, with actual relevance to the lives of actual people, have been increasing rapidly. Human labor has been making those supplies increase. One can give any arbitrary definition to any set of letters, but if there is no phenomenon in the universe fitting this definition, or if it is self-contradictory, then really what is the point? One can define "natural resources" (land) as something being fixed in supply, which cannot be affected by labor, as unique and non-interchageable, as inherently monopolized whenever it is owned, and as something we all have a right to by virtue of being humans. That is what the poster above (Roy L.) does. What use or meaning or relevance this term and his multifaceted definition hold, I, for one, cannot tell.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

The majority of people who hold views that I disagree with, are not being intentially disinegous ('lying').

That may be so in most cases, but if they disbelieve the LVT, then they are lying. That's an immutable law of the Universe, and is true without exception. You can't argue with a Law of the Universe.

 

[Nathaniel1984]

I assume that's a tongue and cheek remark!

 

[heavenlyboy34]

That may be so in most cases, but if they disbelieve the LVT, then they are lying. That's an immutable law of the Universe, and is true without exception. You can't argue with a Law of the Universe.

Extraordinary claims such as yours demand extraordinary evidence. Present it.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

Extraordinary claims such as yours demand extraordinary evidence. Present it.

LOL. Note the winking smiley.

Perhaps you meant this for Roy. Well, he can try, I guess. I'm pretty sure he'll just patiently explain to you that he has already repeatedly proved that it was a law of the universe. Probably he proved it by quoting a passage from Henry George or Adam Smith. Or perhaps simply by stating that he proved it. Or by typing "ROTFL".

 

[Roy L]

All this talk about people 'lying' and such seems ridiculous.

It is rather the lies that are ridiculous.

I have family members and friends who are interventionists and socialists in economics, or are interventionists in economics, etc, and when I make points and they have rebuttals, I don't go around saying, "YOU ARE A LIAR!" or "YOU ARE ALWAYS LYING!" I'm sure that's a good way to wake people up to my points, just saying they are liars, malevolent monsters, and are secretly plotting with the MIC, or AIPAC, or the Fed, to cover up the truth and promote lies, and they very well know they are lies!

They likely ARE lying. Evil must always be justified on some level, and it cannot be justified other than by lies.

A lie in common parlance is generally believed to be a statment that the speakers knows or believes to be untrue, and they still make the statement as if it is true.

Another necessary characteristic: the falsehood must be uttered with intent to deceive.

If I agreed with the Georgist position, or the LVT position (or which I have yet to finish reading all the works of Henry George from google books to make a definite pronouncement in my own limited judgment), I would still not go around telling my grandmother she is a liar when she says that my grandfather owned that land, no matter how feeble I may believe her arguments may be.

I haven't called anyone a liar for claiming they owned land, for opposing liberty and justice, etc. I have identified the fact that they were lying when they made specific false claims that they knew to be false, with intent to deceive.

When someone doesn't agree with their position, and when we believe their counter-arguments to our arguments are not good and wrong, they says, "You are just lying!" In the end that just turns more people off than it convinces.

IMO it is important to inform liars when you know they are lying. It typically doesn't stop them, but I think I owe it to them to be honest with them.

The majority of people who hold views that I disagree with, are not being intentially disinegous ('lying'). They have just accepted a common view that is mistaken.

No, it is more than that. They know their views require justification, however common they might be, and when people try to justify evil views, lying becomes inevitable.

Besides, most people I know, are people who believe, you can own land.

Do they also believe you can create land? That is one of the absurd justifications Hubener has been offering for landowner privilege.

And, even though one logically believes that land ownership is technically equivalent to slavery once all the deductions and conclusions are reached, doesn't not put the person who owns that land or believes you can own that land, on an equivalent moral status with some 18th century South Carolina slave master who likes to beat his slaves.

No, but it does put them on an equivalent moral status with some 18th century South Carolina slave master who believed his deeds of ownership to his slaves gave him a right to violate their rights without making just compensation.

If one disagreed with the concept of land ownership, fair minds would just see that you can see the direct harm caused to the slave by being beaten, by being sold, and families torn apart, because, frankly, it is so in your face an an injustice, but, would still see that the vast majority of educated people who believe in land ownership, are not the same as the slave-whipper.

Right. The wrongfulness of slavery is easy to see because all the wrong is done by each master to each slave -- and yet, the people who were doing all those wrongs to slaves did not think it was wrong. They had clever lies to tell themselves -- and especially to tell abolitionists -- to rationalize and justify it.

The wrongfulness of landowning is harder to see because most landowners do only a tiny bit of wrong -- but they do it to everyone. It's like the difference between a thief stealing an elderly widow's pension money, and defrauding an insurance company of the same amount of money. The insurance company's loss is spread out over all its policy holders, employees and shareholders, none of whom notice any loss at all. It wouldn't matter, except that if a lot of people did it, the losses would become hard to bear. Does it matter if one person owns an acre of land? No, of course it doesn't. We can do without that acre. But when millions of people own ALL the useful land, it is a very different matter, because then we no longer have a meaningful right to liberty. It has been stealthily removed, one tiny sliver at a time, until the millions of slivers have added up to the whole pie.

It is like when anarchists make the logical deduction (in their world view) that all taxation is a form of theft, but, the majority, I think, understand the ages of ingrained societal justifications, and realize that people who support taxation are not liars, but, just misinformed.

It's not their evil beliefs that make them liars, but the lies they must inevitably tell to JUSTIFY their evil beliefs.

When you can see the harm so directly (i.e., ante-bellom black slavery) it is alot easier to see the injustice, but, when the harm is very much dispersed (like that which is seen and that which is unseen, as Bastiat said), the injustice of the situation must be drawn out for people to see; and even then, many do not understand,

Not understanding is blameless. Lying in order to prevent others from understanding, as apologists for landowner privilege like Hubener do, is despicable and unforgivable.

but the key is not to loose patience with people, attack them with vitriol, and bash them over the head with a proverbial club because they do not, or have not yet, agree with your position.

How much evil would have been prevented if those who saw it was evil had lost patience with the sheeple, had had the courage and integrity to stand up, to speak out, to attack those who advocated evil with vitriol, and to bash them over the head with a proverbial club for their vicious, evil lies?

What I see and you do not is that landowning is the greatest evil in the history of the world, an evil that has also caused most of the other great evils, such as war and poverty. The uncompensated violation of people's rights to liberty inherent in landowning inflicts a Holocaust worth of robbery, enslavement, oppression, starvation, suffering, despair and death on innocent human beings EVERY YEAR. How much patience should I have with those who seek to perpetuate it? How much vitriol and head bashing do you think would be justified in the struggle to end an ANNUAL HOLOCAUST? How many more millions must be laid as human sacrifices on the altar of the Great God Property while I tactfully refrain from informing the despicable, lying filth who rationalize and justify the slaughter of the exact nature of their service to evil?

If my good friends in high school, and afterwards, years ago, had taken such a vitriolic and inflammatory approach, I would have immediately discounted all that they had said about taxation, military interventionism, and the rest, and so would the majority.

The majority close their ears, minds and hearts to any truth that threatens their comfortable beliefs. I am not speaking to the majority. I am speaking only to those who are willing to know the truth.

For example, Ron Paul has won over millions because he hasn't taken such a personalitic attack on many people who are just plainly accepting a conventional view, and even people 4 years ago who didn't support him on military interventionism, the Fed, or the bailout, have, after just a few years of experience seen the light. Now imagine if he had said to all these people, "All of you out there, are just plain liars who don't agree with me. Or maybe you are just too stupid to really agree with me. But, mostly, you are just liars who lying always about your arguments." I doubt that constitutionalist and freedom movements would have grown to any substantial extent, if that were the rhetoric.

Maybe. But some years ago, I received a message from a supporter thanking me for telling the truth. He had opposed my views ferociously in a discussion on the Net, and I had informed him of the facts, including telling him exactly when he was lying. He became so enraged by my brutal and uncompromising dissection of his claims that he vowed to refute and expose me if it was the last thing he ever did.

So he checked every statement I had made; he researched all the facts of history and economics that I had used in my arguments; he looked up sources to find counter-arguments; and suddenly, like a bolt from the sky, it hit him: I was just right. Every single statement I had made was objectively, verifiably correct. Most of it was self-evident and indisputable. The rest was established facts of economics and history. Then, fearing what he would find, he went back over our discussion, and re-examined all the statements he had made that I had said were lies. And he realized that in fact they WERE lies. He had known full well they were not true when he said them. In most cases they were absurd claims that no one over the age of nine could possibly believe. He had simply felt that he ought to say them and ought to believe them, because the alternative was to admit he had no arguments at all on his side, and thus to be compelled to abandon his whole belief system.

If you go over this thread in the same spirit of uncompromising integrity, you will find the exact same thing he did.

 

[Roy L]

Extraordinary claims such as yours demand extraordinary evidence. Present it.

I don't find it especially extraordinary, and there is ample evidence for it in this thread.

 

[Roy L]

However, to nitpick-I don't believe many (if any) argue that all taxation is theft-only direct taxation.

Evidence for such an absurd claim?

"Taxation is theft" will get you lots of Google hits.

(the LVT would be a type of direct taxation)

A direct tax is considered one that is borne by the nominal payer. LVT is by that definition indeed a direct tax: the landowner cannot, repeat, CANNOT shift it onto anyone else. That is an advantage of direct taxes.

 

[Roy L]

We were discussing whether land in the layman's sense could be considered unique and non-interchangeable -- that is, heterogenous.

More accurately, you were frantically trying to contrive some rationalization for refusing to know what "location, location, location" means.

While it's not clear how productive this particular discussion is, or what economic conclusion would be drawn from whether "layman's" land is homogenous or heterogenous, we shall complete the discussion nonetheless, since someone is apparently under the impression that it is important, that the heterogeniety of "layman's" land is a keystone or lynchpin of the whole Georgist theory.

No, no one is under the impression that it is important; but as you mistakenly believe you can attack it, you have to pretend it is crucial to arguments for LVT.

So, what about the proximity of the land (dry location on Earth's surface) to other natural resources, such as rivers, mineral deposits, and fertile soil? This proximity, or lack thereof, is a huge factor affecting the value of the land, as we all know. To the extent that land is said to be heterogenous, it is almost entirely because of this uneven distribution of other resources.

No. A plot of land on the East River in NYC is worth quite a bit, but a similar plot just 20 meters out into the river is worth little or nothing.

Let us pretend Earth was instead a uniform sphere, with no topography or bodies of water and vegetation, minerals, and all other resources spread evenly throughout. Then the only factor creating any meaningful uniqueness between two pieces of land would be due to human intervention -- city-building, road-building, etc. As given by nature, then, one piece of land on this uniform sphere would be interchangeable with another and non-unique, just as one bushel of wheat is interchangeable for another (Oh, apart from latitude for climate).

Why is this realization about the uniform sphere relevant?

It isn't.

Because land -- the dry site or location on Earth's surface -- is separate and apart from any other resources that may or may not be on, above, below, or near it.

No, that is just another stupid lie from you, stop lying. A dry site is dry specifically BECAUSE OF the resources it sits on: the elevation, soil type, slope, drainage, etc.

These resources are movable.

Some may be. But in fact, they are where they are because nature put them there.

A river can be diverted. Fertile soil can be brought in, or shipped out. Minerals can be mined. They are all separate from the land itself, which is just a dry location somewhere on the Earth's surface.

No, that is just another stupid, absurd lie from you, stop lying. Try telling a farmer that the land he is farming does not include any fertile soil, minerals, rainfall, etc. and he will quite rightly laugh in your silly, lying face.

The land itself is basically homogenous -- one dry site is essentially the same as another.

Everyone reading this knows that is a stupid lie, including you, so stop lying.

It is the distribution of other resources and factors that is heterogenous. Land in the layman's sense of dry parts of the surface area of the Earth, is essentially homogenous.

You are repeating your stupid lie in the hopes that some weak-minded ninny (maybe you?) will forget that it is a stupid lie. That is the Big Lie technique. Stop lying.

Further, as a side-note, we see that the only thing which can drastically affect the value of one piece of this land vs. another is human labor and choices, quite contrary to Georgist assertion.

Utter stupidity and dishonesty. Everyone reading this knows that is absolute, idiotic garbage. No Georgist has ever, EVER claimed that value is independent of human labor or choices. Value can only EXIST as a consequence of human choices.

You just lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie.

If you are not just lying, please quote, directly, verbatim and in-context, a Georgist asserting that human labor and choices do not affect -- indeed determine -- land value.

Either that, or admit that you are nothing but a lying sack of $#!+.

Failure to do the former will constitute doing the latter.

And you will not be doing the former.

Thus we see that whether one wishes to speak of land in the economic sense (natural resources) or land in a layman's sense (dry site on Earth's surface), it is largely homogenous -- non-unique and interchangeable.

<yawn> You have presented no facts or logic to support such a claim, just bald, absurd lies.

If uniqueness/non-interchangeability is a requirement for a good to be inherently monopolized whenever it is owned, then land, no matter which way you define it, fails this test.

Or, more accurately, it would if all your lies somehow became true.

As for the other alleged reason to consider natural resources as monopolized whenever they are owned, that of its supply being fixed, one need merely consider the world in which he lives to decide whether this is an accurate claim in any meaningful sense.

The sense is economic: fixity of supply means the quantity cannot be increased by labor and does not respond to price.

Again, as we all know by now, "land" in economics is short-hand for "natural resources". In what sense are our natural resources fixed?

The economic sense.

Have they remained fixed for the last 25 years? The last hundred?

Their supply has always been fixed.

Are they, in fact, quickly depleting as they should be if they were fixed, since we voraciously consume them in ever-greater amounts?

They are definitely being depleted.

No, they are becoming more and more plentiful across-the-board.

No, they are not, stop lying.

Commodity prices in constant dollars have been going inexorably down for as far back as we have statistics.

Commodities are products of labor, not natural resources, stop lying. Products of labor are in general becoming more plentiful, and their prices are going down. But products of labor are not natural resources, stop lying.

More and more natural resources are becoming accessible to us. The old view of a static pool of natural resources has been proved wrong again and again since the Middle Ages and especially since the Industrial Revolution.

No, it has not. All that has been proved wrong are claims about how much people can DO with the static pool of natural resources.

The Malthusian Trap has never reared its ugly head.

It most certainly has, in specific places like Easter Island. But Henry George demolished Malthusian analysis, so there's no need to belabor it.

The amount of natural resources at our disposal has been absolutely exploding for multiple centuries now, and looks to continue to do so.

But the earth is no larger, and the depletable resources are indeed being depleted, stop lying.

What if the claim is made that "the supply of land is fixed by definition"? I would ask: is land still the same thing as natural resources by definition? It surely is, if we are to use the venerable definition of land that the profession of economics has long used. Then if land is the supply of natural resources by definition, and land supply is fixed by definition, what then do we make of the fact that the supply of natural resources is in a super-long-term, apparently permanent, massively explosive growth curve?

You mean, what do we make of your lie that it is?

Which definition is the essential one? We may play games and define things away, but at some point economics is meant to tell us something real about the real world, something useful about how humans acually operate. While the absolute quantity of resources in all existence may, or may not, be fixed, and thus the theoretical supply may, or may not, be fixed, for practical purposes the supply is rapidly increasing, and has been for at least 200 years.

No, it cannot be increased by labor, and does not respond to price. What you are lying is "increasing supply" is merely increasing value of the fixed supply. At the margin, formerly worthless resources are now worth something.

I'm not sure why the amount of resources in all cosmic existence is relevant in the least way to economics, since we have yet to fill even a single galaxy, or to Dyson Sphere even a single star. I rather think it is not.

You're right: it is not. But you have to ascribe some sort of silly nonsense to your opponents in order to have something to decry, and I guess it might as well be that.

That the amount of accessible, usable resources is rapidly increasing seems, on the other hand, incredibly valuable information.

Congratulations: you avoided lying that it was the amount of RESOURCES that was increasing.

These resources become accessible and usable by, yes: the application of human labor and capital!

Readers are invited to note carefully what is being said here: resources BECOME accessible and usable through application of labor and capital. But of course, they could not BECOME more accessible and usable if they did not already exist.

Now here comes the ol' switcheroo:

The very thing claimed to have no possible effect on the supply of natural resources is precisely what has been increasing the supply of natural resources at an exponential rate for centuries.

Presto change-o! Did you catch it? "More accessible and useful supply" was in a twinkling changed into, "increasing supply." The hand is quicker than the eye.

Of course, it's just another flat-out lie. Labor and capital have not increased the supply of natural resources, they have only made the fixed supply more useful and accessible. You know this, Hubener. Of course you do. You just decided you had better deliberately lie about it.

Human effort and intelligence has by now given us at least ten times (perhaps a hundred times) the quantity of natural resources than were available in Henry George's day.

But they were already there in Henry George's day.

A hundred years from now, if human liberty is allowed to run untrammeled, our natural resources may increase yet another tenfold.

No, their supply will remain fixed. Our ability to use them will likely increase, unless landowner privilege is allowed to destroy civilization again.

To say "natural resources are defined as having a fixed supply, just by definition" is to define your version of "natural resources" right out of practical reality

Wrong. It is to identify a central FACT of economic reality: the quantity of natural resources cannot be increased by labor and does not respond to price -- and there is consequently no social benefit in government enabling private interests to pocket their value.

and to remove yourself from any possibility of having anything useful or realistic to say about actual natural resources.

ROTFL!! I'm not the one trying to tell farmers that land has no fertile soil, bub. You are.

It is to fly in the face of hundreds of years of real-life experience. It is to make your version of "natural resources" fictional.

<yawn> For fictional views of natural resources, see your own false and absurd claims, above.

Actual supplies of natural resources, with actual relevance to the lives of actual people, have been increasingly rapidly.

What you claim are "actual" and "relevant" supplies are not what economists mean by "supply." What you call "relevance" would appear to have much to do with price, which does not affect the supply of things in fixed supply. So you are just equivocating.

Human labor has been making those supplies increase.

No, it has not. It has been making the pre-existing supply more useable. You know this. Of course you do. You have merely decided you had better deliberately lie about it.

One can give any arbitrary definition to any set of letters, but if there is no phenomenon in the universe fitting this definition, or if it is self-contradictory, then really what is the point? One can define "natural resources" (land) as something being fixed in supply, which cannot be affected by labor,

INCREASED. Labor can deplete depletable natural resources, but cannot increase the supply by definition.

as unique and non-interchageable,

That was land sites and some other resources, not all natural resources.

as inherently monopolized whenever it is owned,

Again, that is not the case for all natural resources, though it is the case for land sites.

and as something we all have a right to by virtue of being humans. That is what the poster above (Roy L.) does.

No, that is just another lie from you. At no point have I claimed the human right to liberty is part of the definition of land, stop lying.

What use or meaning or relevance this term and his multifaceted definition hold, I, for one, cannot tell.

Well, as you made up most of those facets, maybe you should ask yourself what meaning or relevance it has, other than to serve your purpose of deceit.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

More accurately, you were frantically trying to contrive some rationalization for refusing to know what "location, location, location" means.

Actually, I was writing to redbluepill about one topic and you decided to take one sentence from that discussion and hijack it into proving that I had cornered myself about something unrelated which you wished to discuss.

No. A plot of land on the East River in NYC is worth quite a bit, but a similar plot just 20 meters out into the river is worth little or nothing.

This is, as I said, just a factor of the location of other resources relative to the Platonic layman's land. If a man so chooses, due to, yes, price, and using, yes, his labor, he can change that situation and make that plot extremely valuable.

A dry site is dry specifically BECAUSE OF the resources it sits on: the elevation, soil type, slope, drainage, etc.

Really only one: lack of water on top of it. And that describes a lack of a proximate resource, not possession of any additional resource. Dry land we define simply as land which is dry. Its existence depends not upon any other resource.

Utter stupidity and dishonesty. Everyone reading this knows that is absolute, idiotic garbage. No Georgist has ever, EVER claimed that value is independent of human labor or choices...
If you are not just lying, please quote, directly, verbatim and in-context, a Georgist asserting that human labor and choices do not affect -- indeed determine -- land value.

Either that, or admit that you are nothing but a lying sack of $#!+..

To save time, I will just quote from this latest post from Roy L.: "No, it cannot be increased by labor, and does not respond to price."

OK, one more: "So of course, laws should be crafted to enable the increased land value created by the whole community to be appropriated and pocketed by greedy, idle parasites who did nothing to contribute to it...?"

Value is indeed totally subjective, and if I confused you by phrasing my statement in term of value, I apologize. But I had no reason to believe that you even subscribe to subjective value theory, a theory developed by Austrian Economics, a school which you have given me some reasons to believe you think to be a worthless pile of garbage. Anyway, your position does, indeed seem to be that the owners of the land did nothing to make their land valuable, but rather are mere parasites on a value that happened without any contribution from him. That is, umm, what you have written -- repeatedly. (Feel free to call me a liar and explain what you really meant, because this position seems wholly indefensible to me and with no hard feelings I will welcome you to come closer to (what I see as) the truth by disavowing it.) To the contrary, every landowner in Manhattan, bit by bit over the centuries done his part to increase the value of Manhattan to what it is today, through mental and physical labor, or he has reduced its value somewhat through poor decisions or neglect. The labor of himself and his fellow landowners overwhelmingly dominates the value of the land today -- not just the improvements, the land -- dwarfing any other factors.

No, it cannot be increased by labor, and does not respond to price. What you are lying [about being] "increasing supply" is merely increasing value of the fixed supply. At the margin, formerly worthless resources are now worth something.

As a practical matter, it is increased by labor and does respond to price. As I said, one can look at natural resources as being what things in nature man can actually resort to, draw upon, or as some absolute, theoretical supply. Roy is choosing to define them in the absolute, theoretical way. I remain unsure as to why this definition is even remotely useful.

Incidently, Mr. L. uses the impractical theoretical definition but then attempt to add bounds to make it appear more practical. He writes: "But the earth is no larger". Actually, the Earth is larger. It's getting gradually larger all the time from meteoroid accretion, etc. Also, the energy supply which has reached us from the sun is a prime natural resource for us, and this supply is continually increasing. Our real (i.e. practical) supply of natural resources is in not fixed in the normal sense of the word "fixed". Roy knows this and so retreated to the position of it being fixed only in the sense of a special definition: "not affected by labor and not responsive to price". He needs to remember this retreat and not be tempted to accidentally wade into attempts to present the real supply as being really fixed in terms of the real definition of fixed by stating things like "the earth is no larger".

For all practical purposes -- and what other purposes could matter more in economics?! -- our natural resource supply is not fixed. It is bequethed to us by massive human labor and intelligence. The amount and quality of this supply is determined strongly by price (if the price of oil goes up, more people explore for it) and ultimately by human decisions and human labor. I do know the old dead economists who defined natural resources a certain way, and that my way does not line up with their way. I have made it clear that I understand this, but one poster continues to point it out every time, as if a new revelation. What I do not understand is any possible use for, or practical benefit to be gotten with, or correct conclusions to be derived from, a definition bearing no relationship to practical reality.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

I have yet to finish reading all the works of Henry George from google books to make a definite pronouncement in my own limited judgment

By the way, Fr. Augustine, allow me to warmly welcome you to the forum also, and thank you for your post. Be sure to read Mises and Rothbard in addition to George! They blow everything else out of the water, in my opinion.

 

[redbluepill]

The land itself is basically homogenous -- one dry site is essentially the same as another.

No way any economist would back up that claim. Evidence?

 

[Nathaniel1984]

By the way, Fr. Augustine, allow me to warmly welcome you to the forum also, and thank you for your post. Be sure to read Mises and Rothbard in addition to George! They blow everything else out of the water, in my opinion.

I have read "Human Action" twice, once in the 1957 format, and the other in the much later Scholars Edition put out by the Mises Institute; I've read Mises other works such as "The Anti-Capitalist Mentality", "Beauracracy", "Socialism", "Liberalism", and a few others that I can't remember. I was never able to make it through "Man, Economy, and the State" because it seemed a like a big deductive treatise (and it was), while Mises, as I remember, did the same, but gave numerous illustrative and historical examples throughout his works; so, even if you loose you point in the 100 part deductive chain logic, you still have some understanding when he talks about the French king doing this, or the German princes not doing this, etc.
A friend a few years ago gave me Professor Hoppe's book, "Democracy: The God That Failed", and I thought it was actually quite good, in the sense that it was a series of essays worked into chapters, and the fact that he quoted Nisbet the sociologist and others to back up his points. I've read other stuff by the Austrians, and such, so, I have a general grasp on the methodology and teachings. I was basically taught Keynesianism in school, and defacto throughout my life, along with Marxism, with only brief exposures to Chicago School economics as the 'gateway drug' to other free market schools.
I've just never read much about Henry George except for a few of his free trade materials. A brother of mine has read "Progress and Poverty" and a few other works, and thought they made some excellent points worth investigating, even if you may disagree with methods of implementation.
I believe there is always something one can learn from other schools, that can provide great insights to how we think. I remember also reading works by Russell Kirk whom I originally thought would be most disagreeable (that is,when I was a teenager, just because I was told of his disputes with the Austrians), but, I discovered through may of his works, that more often than not, many of these supposed disagreements were due in large part to miscommunications, and different people arguing from different starting points, and going along along different lines of argumentation, that while leading to a similar destination, used phrases and phraseology that seemed to be reprehensible to the other party (that is, when all was taken out of context).
Anyways, thanks for the welcome, Helmuth!

 

[Roy L]

If a man so chooses, due to, yes, price, and using, yes, his labor, he can change that situation and make that plot extremely valuable.

No; he can make improvements, but the unimproved value of the land -- which is what LVT taxes, haven't you even figured that out yet? -- will be determined by the economic advantage obtainable by using it.

Really only one: lack of water on top of it. And that describes a lack of a proximate resource, not possession of any additional resource.

Nope. The additional resources are the substrata that lift the surface above the local water table.

Dry land we define simply as land which is dry. Its existence depends not upon any other resource.

Wrong again. It depends on the geological resources I identified for you that make it dry.

To save time, I will just quote from this latest post from Roy L.: "No, it cannot be increased by labor, and does not respond to price."

Thank you for proving again that you are a lying sack of $#!+. You know that "it" referred to land SUPPLY not land VALUE. Of course you do. You just decided you had better deliberately lie again.

All apologists for landowner privilege lie. That is a natural law of the universe. There has never been an exception to that law, and there never will be.

OK, one more: "So of course, laws should be crafted to enable the increased land value created by the whole community to be appropriated and pocketed by greedy, idle parasites who did nothing to contribute to it...?"

You again lie that supply is value. You know very well it isn't. Of course you do. You are just lying, as usual.

Value is indeed totally subjective,

Value certainly is not subjective, and cannot be by definition. Value in this context -- land value -- is what something would trade for. As trade requires valuation by at least two agents, value cannot be subjective.

and if I confused you by phrasing my statement in term of value, I apologize.

No need to apologize. It takes a lot more than kindergarten-level lies to confuse me.

But I had no reason to believe that you even subscribe to subjective value theory, a theory developed by Austrian Economics, a school which you have given me some reasons to believe you think to be a worthless pile of garbage.

What are you blithering about?

Anyway, your position does, indeed seem to be that the owners of the land did nothing to make their land valuable, but rather are mere parasites on a value that happened without any contribution from him. That is, umm, what you have written -- repeatedly.

And it is certainly true.

(Feel free to call me a liar and explain what you really meant, because this position seems wholly indefensible to me and with no hard feelings I will welcome you to come closer to (what I see as) the truth by disavowing it.)

<yawn>

To the contrary, every landowner in Manhattan, bit by bit over the centuries done his part to increase the value of Manhattan to what it is today, through mental and physical labor, or he has reduced its value somewhat through poor decisions or neglect.

No, that is just another flat-out lie from you. The landowner qua landowner does not perform any mental or physical labor, and his only decision is to buy (or steal) the land. If SOME of the people who owned land in Manhattan also happened to work at productive jobs, or made decisions to make or maintain improvements thus adding to the value of nearby land, that is entirely separate from their role as landowners. You might as well claim that slave owners contribute to the development of democratic political institutions on the grounds that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. There is simply no implication to that effect whatsoever.

The labor of himself and his fellow landowners

Garbage. The landowner qua landowner performs no labor. The Duke of Westminster owns quite a bit of land in Manhattan. What labor has he ever performed there that increased land value?

overwhelmingly dominates the value of the land today -- not just the improvements, the land -- dwarfing any other factors.

Nope. Wrong again. To make such an argument, you would need to provide some sort of evidence that landowners inherently make such contributions. And you can't, because they don't. Many people who have owned land in Manhattan have never even been there. Some have been comatose. Not one of them has ever made any kind of contribution to land value AS A LANDOWNER. They may have done it as individual persons, in other capacities, such as laborer, entrepreneur, government employee or contractor, etc. But people who do those things add to land value WHETHER OR NOT they also own land. So your claim that it is landowners doing those things, and not laborers, etc., is nothing but another stupid lie.

As a practical matter, it is increased by labor and does respond to price.

As both a practical matter and by definition, it does not.

As I said, one can look at natural resources as being what things in nature man can actually resort to, draw upon, or as some absolute, theoretical supply. Roy is choosing to define them in the absolute, theoretical way. I remain unsure as to why this definition is even remotely useful.

It is especially useful for identifying the dishonest rationalizations of apologists for landowner privilege.

Incidently, Mr. L. uses the impractical theoretical definition but then attempt to add bounds to make it appear more practical. He writes: "But the earth is no larger". Actually, the Earth is larger. It's getting gradually larger all the time from meteoroid accretion, etc.

<sigh> Even if that's true, cosmic dust is not created by labor and is not the resources you were claiming had been created by labor.

Also, the energy supply which has reached us from the sun is a prime natural resource for us, and this supply is continually increasing.

As a result of someone's labor? Or rising price?

You are now resorting to absurd quibbles in order to evade the fact that you have been comprehensively and conclusively demolished.

Our real (i.e. practical) supply of natural resources is in not fixed in the normal sense of the word "fixed".

I have already explained what fixity of supply means in economics, and why it is more relevant than whatever nonsense you think you might be talking about.

Roy knows this and so retreated to the position of it being fixed only in the sense of a special definition: "not affected by labor and not responsive to price". He needs to remember this retreat and not be tempted to accidentally wade into attempts to present the real supply as being really fixed in terms of the real definition of fixed by stating things like "the earth is no larger".

OK, fine: it's no larger than it would have been without whatever labor or price change you claim has made it larger.

For all practical purposes -- and what other purposes could matter more in economics?! -- our natural resource supply is not fixed.

ROTFL!!! Wrong AGAIN, sunshine. The supply of natural resources is fixed for one supremely practical purpose in economics: taxation. No amount of taxation will make the resources nature put here on earth any scarcer. Taxation WILL, by contrast, make productive economic activity scarcer. That is very much the point. Society cannot be made poorer by taxing the economic rent of natural resources. It can be and IS made poorer by taxing income, sales, improvements to land, value added, imports, etc., etc.

It is bequethed to us by massive human labor and intelligence.

Lie. It existed just fine before any human being, and you know it. What on earth could the human labor and intelligence be applied to if the resources did not already exist, hmmmm?

See how easily I prove you are just talking idiotic nonsense?

The amount and quality of this supply is determined strongly by price (if the price of oil goes up, more people explore for it)

Seeking is not creating. You know this. Stop lying.

and ultimately by human decisions and human labor.

No, human decisions and labor have no effect whatever on the quantity or quality of natural resources, nor does price. You know this. Of course you do. Everyone over the age of six knows it. You are just lying about it.

I do know the old dead economists who defined natural resources a certain way, and that my way does not line up with their way. I have made it clear that I understand this, but one poster continues to point it out every time, as if a new revelation. What I do not understand is any possible use for, or practical benefit to be gotten with, or correct conclusions to be derived from, a definition bearing no relationship to practical reality.

Taxing land does not make it disappear. Taxing production or exchange DOES make it disappear. Are you really unable to grasp the relationship this has to practical reality?

 

[helmuth_hubener]

No way any economist would back up that claim. Evidence?

I find it disappointing you would respond to one sentence of a conversation I'm having with someone else, a conversation which has wandered far afield, rather than the post(s) I have directed specifically to you and which have not yet been replied to. If you read the entire context I'm confident in you that you will understand with ease the sense in which the properties of some matter and space in the universe which make it fall into the category of "dry (layman's) land" can be abstracted away and separated from any other characterictics like proximity to navigable water, mineral richness, and soil fertility, just as the Georgists abstract away from characteristics such as proximity to city centers and whether there is a skyscraper sitting on top of the land.

 

[Simple]

I love it. We may love to go straight to no taxes, but if you look at Congress, if you look at the Wall Street Occupation, if you poll the common man you can see pretty easily that it is not going to be easy to win people over to a tax free society. Clearly the LVT tax offers a lesser of evils and it would sell politically. The class warfare crowd would eat this up.

I also like the premise that while most libertarians see taxation as theft, the geolibertarian sees land ownership as theft. Owning land deprives others of their liberty thus the land owner owes a debt. The land owner benefits from roads, police, and firefighting so its the land owners who owe a debt. Instead of punishing productivity or commerce, the LVT tax levies tax on the only true source of wealth.

I'll admit it hard to get through all the debate in this thread, but do I have the concept down?