This might have made the grade as a Samizdata quote of the day, but we already have a superb one today. However, I wanted to post this by the regular commentator, IanB, as it was too good to leave at the bottom of a very long thread about the flawed idea that land, qua land, is special, and must be singled out for tax because of its supposed uniqueness, as distinct from say, income or consumption:
“Liberty is based on a different presumption which has the virtue of making sense, which is that people should own property and do with it as they wish, because it is their property. And, honestly, if I save up and buy some land and plant a big garden on it for my retirement, I don’t care whether you think it would be better used for a glue factory because that would return you some externality that you can double charge for via your tax.”
“This is why liberty and georgism are incompatible; you keep making claims on behalf of the community. Screw this “community” of yours. It has no rights or claims on me beyond the right to freely interact with me. The LVT is a crude social engineering plan. It attempts to maximise productivity of land. Liberty is not about maximising any statistical value- it is simply the principle that the person may do with themself and what is theirs what they wish. So long as they produce enough by whatever means to survive, there are no other demands upon their economic activity.”
Exactly. Suffice to say, I doubt the LVT enthusiasts will give up (they are persistent, a bit like cockroaches that can apparently survive a nuclear blast). Question: why does this issue come up a lot on this site? Are we masochists? Well, libertarians obviously are against taxation, period, but there are grounds for debate on the least-worst form of tax; for what it is worth, some form of consumption tax is probably best in my view, not least because they tend to be fairly easy to collect, although there are still issues here. But in debating the pros and cons, let’s not lose sight of the fact that it is tax, per se, that we want to grind down as far as possible (that leaves open debate between anarcho-capitalists and minarchists on how to fund “core” functions of law and defence). There is no such thing as a perfect tax, and use of tax to re-arrange some alleged fault in the economic order of things by punishing some presumed “unearned” surplus is not just morally wrong, it is almost always doomed to failure. So however tedious some readers might find the LVT debate, I make no apologies for giving it the occasional good kicking on this site, along with other taxes.
The debate has certainly encouraged me to read a bit more about Henry George, the thinker associated most often wiith the land tax idea. He was an interesting thinker in many ways. He was a good guy in many respects: a passionate defender of free trade, for example. And he hated other taxes besides LVT. He’d be far too free market for most of our current politicians. Here’s a nice entry on him, which has some good but I think very fair criticisms.
Update: as part of our slugfest with these Georgists – they embrace a range of ideological stances, BTW – I thought to add some further points, having read a bit about their views. I don’t know why Georgists should, for some reason, not give more weight to foolish central bank policy in causing asset price bubbles, or assume that property bubbles are bad, but other bubbles – like say, the dotcom one of the 1990s, are less so. One Georgist likes to raise the example of Hong Kong, which has a LVT. But that example won’t fly as there have been big gyrations in the price of accomodation, which hardly suggests LVT did much to alleviate the situation, or by much. In fact I would say that proves pretty conclusively that LVT, on its own, cannot fix this sort of problem if monetary policy is deranged by Keynesian demand-management or other economic quackery.
There is another, even more fundamental problem with the Georgist position about land. The problem is that it does not distinguish between the fact that while land is, by definition, fixed, available land is not. This is why the likes of John Bates Clark, an economist of the late 19th Century, demolished the land value tax movement’s arguments as did Murray Rothbard half a century later. Both men pointed out that the LVT argument ignores the fact that the price of land is driven by its marginal productivity, and in that sense is no different from labour or physical or human capital. To single out land for special tax treatment will lead to a misallocation of resources, encouraging more building density than is rational, etc. The total amount of land is fixed – obviously – but the total amount of sellable land is determined by the amount of marginal buyers and sellers, a very different thing. If demand is heavy enough, new land comes onstream. Just ask the Dutch.
Update: one commentator on the other long thread – it is so far down that I’d rather address it here – claims that Rothbard’s critique has been “thoroughly demolished”. Has it hell. Perhaps someone could explain to me why his point is mistaken. Consider this paragraph by the fellow:
“The selling-price of an asset on the market will be the capitalized value of its expected future rents: the capitalization to take place at the going rate of interest. The rate of interest is the price of “time,” and hence future earnings are discounted back to the present at this rate. A piece of land sells now at the discounted sum of its future rents. Similarly, any asset will sell at the capitalized value of its future earnings; and where these earnings accrue from hiring out, the rent selling-price relation will be the same. If Rembrandts are habitually rented out to museums, they will earn, say, per monthly rents; tuxedos will earn nightly rents, and so on. Admittedly, land differs from improvable capital because land is not replaceable, and therefore land earns ultimate rents.”
And then this:
“The Georgist has a curious conception of the market; he considers that the market is independent of the actions of an important part of its constituent individuals: the suppliers. On the contrary, there is no entity “market” which will take care of finding correct rents. If the shell of ownership is left and its contents confiscated by the State, there will be no incentive for owners (whether of land or Rembrandts) to allocate the assets to the highest bidders and most productive uses. There is no inconsistency when I point out that everyone will rush to grab the best locations if land were free; it would be the same if Rembrandts were suddenly declared free by the government (or if there were a 100 percent tax on their value).”
Here is also a very detailed, and to my mind, devastating take on Georgism in its various forms, by the writer Paul Birch. It is pretty technical, but worth studying. He concludes that the “libertarian” Georgists are the least-bad, but also notes, as many Samizdata commenters have done, that Georgists tend to flick around between a sort of hatred of landlordism per se on the one hand, and a more pragmatic concern with efficiency, on the other. One commenter has referred to landowners as “parasites”. That should tell us something about where these guys are coming from.
In boxing terms, the referee would have to stop the fight at this point to save Mr George’s hide. And I am done here.
There is no such thing as a good tax. Generally attributed to Churchill, though the sentiment must have echoed through the ages since Man discovered language, closely followed by politics.
If so, that’s odd, because Churchill was a supporter of LVT.
Anyway, can someone explain to me the difference between a landlord and a state, and the difference between LVT and ground rent? A landlord is someone who has the right to determine what goes on on his property, and to impose conditions on the people who occupy it. A state is likewise an entity with a geographical monopoly over dispute resolution.
Similarly, LVT is a payment for the use of land, as is ground rent. Landlords obviously don’t pay ground rent (except in the form of opportunity cost), but then states don’t pay taxes either. The differences from the landless citizen’s point of view are that LVT will hopefully come back to him via public services, that he may have some say in the use of rents if the state is a democratic one, and that there is more likely to be unappropriated land that he can appropriate for temporary use under LVT than there will be under ground rent, where all land is habitually appropriated permanently and left idle until it becomes useful.
Louis XIV would have said much the same: “L’Etat, c’est moi.” And indeed he was the supreme owner of all the land in France. Didn’t he therefore have supreme rights over all the French peasants? It’s a curious sort of “libertarianism” that would defend this kind of monarchical statism; but then I’ve heard Hans-Herman Hoppe advocate it, suggesting he understands this issue better than most.
If you don’t defend it, then you have to argue that Leroy got his land illegitimately, and that it should have been redistributed by force (as indeed it was, from his great-great-great-grandson), but that makes your objections to my calling for the same thing look rather silly. Of course, my way would be a lot more gradual than that of the Jacobins, to protect any residual rights the landowners may have in allowing them to liquidate their landed positions gradually.
In his younger days, Churchill championed the early incarnation of the welfare state and was certainly not a consistent champion of small government. So praying Winnie in aid for LVT is not quite the knock-out blow that you think. No cigar (‘scuse the pun!).
What are on about? Ian was saying that he owns property, period, and that the wider community has no apriori claim on the value of what he owns; the only claim others have against Ian, me, you or Uncle Tom Cobbley is that we refrain from aggressing against others and their property. End of. This is not exactly an abstruse point.
In the other thread, you mentioned immigration a couple of times. That is also an issue that troubles me when it is used to justify LVT in order to force existing landowners to break up their estates or sell it to others for supposedly higher-value uses. If existing owners of land who feel they have acquired it justly believe that immigrants will create pressure on them to sell or leave, or fork out more tax, then that is hardly going to encourage support for open borders, quite the reverse.
No tax, no army, no state: that’s the logic.
I had not heard that Winston Churchill supported the “single tax” – but it would not astonish me if he did.
Winston Churchill supported all sorts of “interesting” things in his youth – from nationalizing the railways to eugenics. Of course as a youthful minister he also supported the introduction of the various “National Insurance” taxes as well – how does that fit with LVT?
As for the “single tax” itself. Again I am not going to repeat the Murry Rothbard attack on Henry George ism (see “Man, Economy and State” and “Power and Market”).
However, there is also a modern political angle that J.P. is pointing at.
The idea that property does not “really” belong to its private owner at least if that owner is not using the property for most the “efficient” use.
Say a landowner prefers to leave a forest standing – rather than turning the woodland into a housing estate, then he is not really the owner and the land can be either taken from him by open force or it can be taken from him by TAX DEMANDS that he can not pay without “developing” the land.
This is not just a French Revolution thing – this is a modern thing an “eminant domain” thing. With the Kelso judgement meaning that property may be taken from one person (or private group) and given to another person (or private group) if the government expresses the pius hope that more tax revenue will be gained by doing this (and guess who is going on the Supreme Court next).
If someone has no problem with this, then further moral conversation with them is pointless.
I’m saying that if Leroy decided to execute a few peasants, that doesn’t constitute aggression under your theory of property rights; rather the peasants are aggressing against him by living on his property. Is anyone going to address this point? I can’t see the difference.
But landowners have the right to tax people on their land as much as they like; they have the right to raise private armies out of the proceeds; they in fact have all the powers of the state upon their own land. So what’s the difference?
Even before the Edict of Quierzy in the year 877 it was the mainsteam doctrine in France that a King could NOT just hand a fief from one person to another.
In short the ownership of all the land by the King was not a real thing – in reality private land ownership was better protected (although NOT perfectly protected) in “feudal” France than it had been under the Roman Empire (when land was in theory privately owned – but there was no way of preventing an Emperor taking land).
It is true that Kings like Louis XIV thought of themselves like Roman Emperors (above the law) – but even Louis XIV did not have the power that Roman Emperors had. Almost needless to say Louis XVI did not try to exercise any of the powers that Louis XIV had many decades before (clue – tyrants are very rarely overthrown, well meaning weaklings tend to be overthrown).
A point about “the peasants” is made. The amount of land directly held by farmers (as opposed to rented) in France is disputed – but it was very great long before the Revolution.
Still at least we did not have the standard BS about the serfs – in reality only about 5 million French people (out of 35 million) were “serfs”. And as the courts did not enforce serfdom (i.e. did not send people back to estates they left) “serfdom” was a dead letter.
By the way Hans Herman Hoppe does NOT favour everything being owned by a King. His history contains terrible errors (based on his a priori assumption that a King MUST be more concerned with a long term and must know what policies will produce long term increases in value for the Kingdom) but actually Hoppe is an anarchist – as he has said many times.
Hoppe believes that monarchy is superior to democracy – but he also believes that anarchy (in the private property “anarcho capitalist” sense) is superior to monarchy.
Paul, the Kelo reference is a good one to make. It nicely highlights how the little guy gets trampled when there are tax dollar signs in the eyes of politicians.
The difference, Richard Allan, is that the state is not the rightful owner of the land that it claims dominion over.
I’m with Richard Allan.
So you own the land do you. Who says? Who is the ultimate independent arbiter about that? Would that perhaps be a (minimal) State? And if so, how is that State to be paid for?
And if not, well then, you are arguing for “Might is Right”. Not openly of course, as a good Libertarian you object to the initiation of force. But unfortunately, gangsters aren’t good libertarians.
And please don’t suggest that a private security force will suffice. Gangsters are all about “protection”. Yes, Government may be the biggest gangsters of all, but if you put them under the strict control of everybody then at least you might stand a chance of keeping them under control. Unlike the modern day equivalent of William the Bastard and his psychopathic Norman thugs just riding rough-shod over the local security forces and seizing everything.
So whether you like it or not, we are going to need some kind of taxes, and preferably the least harmful. To me, that means a Land Tax.
Ooh, very kind Johnathan, I don’t think I’ve been SQOTD since the infamous gay hobbit porn incident 🙂
I think the point I was making besides the direct issue of LVT is that of free markets. As libertarians, we often get into arguments with other types regarding what is the “best” economic system, and that free markets are the best in terms of economic output, productivity, la de da. As such we tend to fall into something of a trap of treating everyone as perfect economic machines maximising their productivity.
But the moral and practical justification for free markets IMHO isn’t that. It so happens that free markets do best on a wide range of “economic indicators”, tend to create wealth and so on. They do this because most people tend to, on balance, try to benefit in their various dealings in life- looking for higher profits, more sales, higher wages, cheaper prices, better value and so on. But the reason for supporting them is that they allow freedom of activity, not because of efficiency.
Nobody is obligated in a free market to maximise anything. Nobody is forced to take the better paying job if a less remunerative job will better satisfy their soul. And if you’ve got a bit of money stashed away and would prefer not to work at all, but instead sit on the sofa watching Richard And Judy, that is fine too. There is no “goal” of economic freedom, beyond the freedom itself. Sometimes libertarians wrongly sound like we demand everyone be whipped through the factory gates and produce as much as they can for the lowest possible wage for the good of “the economy”. That’s an unfortunate image to be saddled with, and it’s untrue. Economic freedom is exactly that; the freedom to do as you damned well please within the practical constraints of maintaining one’s existence- whch isn’t a constraint designed into the system by anyboyd, it’s a practical matter that devolves ultimately to thermodynamics (humans need a constant energy input which must be acquired from somewhere).
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Richard above again uses his LVT straw man that everybody is an oppressed tenant. Yes, tenants are subject to landlords. But not everybody is a tenant. A person may buy a plot of land and be their own master. Also, practically, as I pointed out in the other place, many ground rents in the UK have been rendered down to triviality by inflation. Property rents are a far greater “private sector oppression” (that is, rents on land developments) but LVT does not attempt to address this, concentrating instead on an antiquated “tenant farmer” paradigm.
Neither does Georgism solve this problem by either in actuality or de facto nationalisation of land. Just as nationalised industry does not make “the workers” the boss, but rather makes the State the boss, while removing their chance to find a better boss, likewise nationalised land does not mean you have no landlord, it makes the State the landlord, with no opportunity to find a better landlord. It is the same fallacy, except with land rather than industry.
Whatever property is awarded to the State, we know from broad experience that it does not belong to “the people”, but specifically to the State. You may enter a “public” park under (increasingly) strict regulations, you may walk the street if the authorities let you (see Old Holborn’s attempt to stroll past parliament). If you’re a hippy and you want to go to Stonehenge, which is owned by “the public” well, tough titties, they’ll deploy massed armed force to stop you.
So, it’s down to the choice of whether you want a choice of landlords and the option of owning your land inviolably and outright, or the thugs of the State apparat being your landlord. Not a hard choice, is it?
“LAND, n. A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.” – Ambrose Bierce
Asks Mr Wildgoose. Under customary law – for which a state is not necessarily required, BTW – such matters are decided by agreements between the original appropriators of land, via various “homesteading” agreements, “finders-keepers” principles, etc. The advantage to “finders-keepers”, as I have already said, is that it encourages discovery-making, expeditions, even things like land reclamation projects, etc. (In decades to come I expect such principles might have application for spacefaring).
The origins of property rights can be murky, and often have been, but that does not invalidate the ownership principle as a principle that is valuable for civil peace, prosperity and freedom, which is what Georgists and others try to do, and hence try to turn us all into tenants of the state (that being the logical outcome of their argument, even if they insist that is not their intention).
As for whether LVT is the most efficient tax, it is debatable; all taxes have their drawbacks. People keep citing the case of places like Hong Kong but tend to ignore how that jurisdiction can, and does have, big shifts in its property prices from time to time, like during the 1997-98 Asian financial gyrations.
Because it’s irresolvable, given the way the debate tends to develop. A substantial proportion of the anti-LVT arguments tend to come from a religious rather than rational angle, on the basis that a certain approach to property rights should be treated as divinely correct and therefore beyond contestation. If both sides were to acknowledge that the correct trade-off between liberty and property is purely a matter of subjective opinion on which they differ, I imagine both sides would shuffle off in their own direction, but as soon as you get people claiming that their own opinion is objectively correct, it becomes like rutting stags where neither is willing to concede an inch.
In the discussion between ourselves, I think we’ve reached a position with regard to property rights over ideas where we’ve tacitly acknowledged that the trade-off is a matter of opinion. If the same acknowledgement permeated the general debate around property rights over locations, I imagine the debate would die down.
Of course, it’s a given, but on the flip side, surely state granted privilege should be ground down as far as possible too.
That’s certainly worth doing, but given that George tended to take a consequentialist tone, I doubt his arguments will hold much appeal to you. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics presents an argument for equal rights to land which is more deontological.
Firstly, I’ve never claimed that “everybody is an oppressed tenant”, just that as long as some people are tenants then you have a two-tier society where some have more rights than others.
Secondly, you claim that ground rents are “trivial”; then why are we hearing so many complaints from first-time buyers? “Ground rents” as an accounting expense may be trivial, but I gather this is for legal/accounting reasons, with the “true” ground rent being capitalised into the land price. Also how does inflation reduce ground rents? One would expect inflation to increase ground rents.
Thirdly, what do you mean by “property rents”? If it’s a rent on buildings rather than land, then these do not constitute “oppression” because the houses would not exist without the owner’s labour, and he is therefore absolutely entitled to do as he wishes with them, including renting them out at as high a price as he can get. You’ve argued for a 10% tax on the products of labour; if that’s not “oppression” of labourers then I don’t know what is (if the tax is uniform then it can’t be passed on in higher prices, but will still oppress consumers to the extent that it reduces supply).
As I’ve said before, no, it isn’t. Even though I’m rich enough to afford land outright in the UK, I’d prefer to live in Hong Kong, because LVT allows that state to reduce welfare expenditure and distortive taxation, making me better off (in terms of economic freedom and income) in HK than I would be in the UK.
If I weren’t rich enough to own land, it would be no contest. Also you’re still drawing a distinction between “landlord” and “state” which you haven’t explained to me. If the “state” is the wrongful owner of land, then by your standards most landlords are wrongful owners anyway. By my standards all “owners” of land are wrongful, but “inclusive” ones are better than “exclusive” ones.
Perhaps the Ottoman Sultan would have been a better example than Leroy. That would have the benefit of allowing some of you to indulge your disgusting Islamophobia.
Paul, support for the notion of property rights, or indeed the idea that people require freedom to survive and thrive, is hardly a “religion”, requiring faith in a creator or afterlife. Sorry, but the political tradition of liberalism, support for several property and the rest cannot be rejected in such a high-handed fashion.
There is no reason to start behaving like a petulant teenager, Richard. We disagree with your views, so kindly have the grace to deal with it or take yourself someplace else. If you have any manners you should withdraw that remark, which was totally gratuitous.
Richard writes: “Even though I’m rich enough to afford land outright in the UK, I’d prefer to live in Hong Kong, because LVT allows that state to reduce welfare expenditure and distortive taxation, making me better off (in terms of economic freedom and income) in HK than I would be in the UK.”
Which again begs the issue of how a tax allows a state to cut welfare and other spending. Er, someone explain that to me. Surely the reason HK has low spending is because that is what the governments, such as the recent British colonial one, decided to have. I don’t see how taxing land rather than income has any bearing on the size of the government, other than a slight difference in the size of the revenue departments, or whatever. LVT will not prevent voters from supporting massive spending rises if that is what they want.
First-time buyers will complain about anything if they think they can get something for less; hardly very surprising nor something that requires some great tax change. The more fundamental problem is that first-time buyers in countries such as the UK have been priced out of the market by inflated prices, caused largely by deranged monetary policy, and artificial restrictions on land building, also a function largely of local and national government policy, which is a whole separate issue.
Your arguments constantly imply a state of private or public tenancy as the only choice, ignoring the owner occupier. Any society with economic freedom will have different “tiers” depending on wealth. I can’t afford a car- I live in a “two tier” car ownership society. That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Because the ground rents on long leases were set at prices appropriate to rental (say) a hundred years ago, before the inflationary era. A hundred pounds was a considerable sum of money a century ago, now it isn’t. It is easy to forget that the inflationary era is a twentieth century artifact; in the nineteenth century prices were stable or falling (as would naturally happen in any free market without money expansion by the state). Nowadays we expect prices to rise; back then, they didn’t.
I can’t remember ever doing so specifically. I do think the one advantage of a flat rate income tax is that everyone is faced with a tax bill and thus has an incentive to seek lower taxes. But I’d prefer a yearly tax demand and the ending of deduction at source, largely because it is likely to upset people more when they have to write the cheque for that chunk of their hard earned income, rather than it disappearing before they ever see it. But that’s another issue.
In that case all a LVT need cover is (in the UK for example) the cost of operating the Land Registry. Yet that is never what is proposed. It is about social engineering – the State deciding what use to put land to and skewing the property market to get it.
Ian – I’m interested in the idea of ‘owning your land inviolably and outright’. What makes it inviolable? If I have more money to hire more security staff than you, then surely it’s very violable, isn’t it? Sure, I might be censured by those around me, but what do I care, I’ve got all this extra land to keep your censuring away from my ears.
Jonathan, I’m sure you’re well aware that I support the concepts of freedom and property, just as you do. The religious aspect arises when people start to believe that the balance they want to strike between freedom and property transcends mere opinion and has become a divine truth.
By allowing the production of public goods that make efficient market exchange possible using funds raised in a non-distortive manner. By allowing labour to get onto the land and use it productively without having to accede to the demands of speculative landowners, thus increasing wages and reducing unemployment, and thereby reducing the demands for social welfare spending.
A state of entirely owner-occupiers is nigh-on impossible, and would be untenable even if it did exist, because of population growth and immigration/emigration. The difference between land and cars is that cars are the product of labour, and people are therefore entitled to them; their distribution is therefore not a concern of society.
Wouldn’t it also need to cover the cost of enforcing these claims? If you’re arguing that someone taking possession of land that isn’t theirs according to the Land Registry should be dealt with entirely by voluntary means like boycotts, that’s fine. But if you want police to enforce land rights, then it doesn’t seem unfair to have the LVT pay for them as well.
Paul, I’m a small government libertarian not an anarcho-capitalist. As such land rights are inviolable in the same sense as my other personal and property rights, that is secured by law and, yes, the police etc. A burglar may violate my property rights or a rapist my personal rights; they are secured to the same (partial) degree as my land rights. The role as such of the State should be to dumbly assist as much as it practicably can in securing those rights or- more accurately- securing my primary right of consent; that is to pursue and punish any other individual or group who violate my right of consent in my interactions with them.
Since the maintenance of their right of consent is the primary desire and self interest of every individual[1], that I think is a good deontological basis from which to proceed.
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[1] Even statists. They seek to violate the right of consent of others, not their own. I have seen the argument that those proposing that the state should override those suffering false consciousness, such as the author of the book Nudge, are willingly giving up their right of consent. However, in real terms, they only wish the state to override their consent in matters which they believe will benefit them- for instance, to be “forced” to recycle, which they want to do anyway, or to “eat healthily”, which they want to do anyway. If a state arose which banned recycling or discouraged salad, they would immediately reassert their right of consent.
So you’d want the ‘thugs of the State apparat’ deciding whose right to a piece of land should take precedence? And you’d force me to pay (indirectly) for them to do that?
I’m not automatically disagreeing with you, I just think this is another one of those “can’t get there from here” problems. The theory of land ownership rights is fine, but given that most of the land in the UK has been allocated through conquest at some point, why should the current allocation be considered privileged over what it might be in 6 months time once I’ve done some conquesting of my own?
No, private contract decides that. All the thugs get to do is get involved if the contract is not honoured. If they get to be my landlord, they become my masters (as Richard keeps pointing out), and we can be sure they’ll be far more intrusive masters than a private landlord who is generally, and luckily for us, just interested in the money.
“some form of consumption tax is probably best in my view”?
That doesn’t accord with any free-market principles (whereby people maximise their wealth and happiness by free exchange of goods and services). If, every time you exchange goods and services, The State collects X%, that has huge deadweight costs. And how you square that with any sort of Libertarian philosophy also escapes me.
Yes, the idea of scrapping the entire state and having no taxes at all is worthy of consideration, those who don’t happen to own a house or property could just cut their losses and escape the anarchy that will ensue by going abroad.
So in whose interests is it to reinstate (or retain) a minimal state with at least defence, immigration control, legal system, law and order, and so on?
Every now and then ,somebody does a survey saying that although there is quite a disparity in average incomes in different regions of the UK, incomes AFTER housing costs are pretty much the same (because of the mobility of labour), i.e. house prices and rents just move up to absorb the bulk of higher incomes.
So, to put it another way, by all means, scrap all taxes save a bare minimum to cover law and order and so on, but at least be honest about who would benefit and who wouldn’t.
Richard Allan, let’s have a look at how you think taxing property will make government cheaper:
You talk about the demands of “speculative landowners”, but how do you define a “speculative landowner” from what you assume to be the nice kind? Like Ian, I have noticed a sort of puritanism here in the idea that land is not really the proper thing for vulgar entrepreneurs to be making bets about. But these bets will always occur if there is a perceived rise in demand for something, and that demand ultimately is driven by income growth, and can be fuelled, as we have seen in the West in recent years, by years of cheap credit, lax lending, and the rest of it.
And densely populated places with high land values will, even without LVT, put a premium on earning an income and making the most use of the land; landowners in a speculative mood, unless they are fuelled by stupidly low interest rates – which is the main cause of bubbles – will have to realise the value of their places somehow, and that means putting them to productive use.
As for policies to reduce unemployment and reduce state spending, for sure, I am all in favour of cutting taxes across the board, such as national insurance, as well as cutting regulations that deter firms from hiring folk in the first place. But I fail to see how one can, or should, calibrate the exact mix of one tax versus another to generate some sort of “optimum” outcome in terms of output, employment, or whatnot. I am not even sure that in the case of Hong Kong, for instance, that LVT has played that big a role in reducing unemployment; rather, I would suggest that it had more to do with it being a very free market generally.
About the most one can say, with reference to incentives, is that the flatter, lower, and simpler a tax code is, the better. As a libertarian, that’s what counts.
Ian B, that private contract comment sounds very much like my belief that exclusive possession of land is only legitimate when it is acquired by mutual agreement.
Paul, I’m not quite sure what your mutual agreement argument is trying to say. The same could be said of any property, or indeed my person- that is, I can only get exclusive rights to them by the full agreement of every other individual in society.
So in practice, we have a legal structure and laws defining those rights to save me the hassle of asking 60 million people to agree not to steal my washing machine or rape me. Land has no special status in this regard other than by your assumption that it has a special status because there is a limited supply of it. Well there’s a limited supply of my arsehole as well, and no more of it can be produced by labour, but that doesn’t give you any access rights to it.
The question that is being asked by the followers of Henry George (who, in turn, was a follower of some aspects of the teaching of David Ricardo and James Mill on land) is the following:
“If there has to be tax, do you accept that our tax is the least bad”.
My reply is “no, I do not not”.
I regard the “single tax” as poorly defined (and I have various other problems with it – some of which I have touched on in this and other places). Although, I freely admit, it is not as poorly defined as the demented “cometition rules” or “anti trust” that now seems to be sacred part of law.
The princples of “anti trust” (whether enforced by the state of by private tort actions) are as clear as mud (an excuse for arbitrary power by either the executive or the judicial branch) – the “Single Tax” is almost clear by comparison.
“But what tax would you rather have instead”.
Almost any tax in fact – whether it be a tax on income, a tax on sales, a tax on imports (or whatever).
All these taxes are bad – but at least they do not pretend to “not be real taxes at all”.
The claim of Henry George that (unlike taxes on income, sales, imports or whatever) his tax would not be harmful was an absurd claim – and it is a dangerious absurdity.
Paul, part of the problem I have with discussing Georgism is that the Georgist position skates around. Sometimes it’s just a proportionate tax, sometimes it’s the full ground rent. More significantly, Georgists seem to jump gaily back and forth between claiming that the tax is the least bad tax because it is neutral and will not affect anything, to declaring it will create all sorts of moral and public Good Effects, in which case it clearly isn’t neutral.
Ian – I agree that in both cases there is an assumption that people will leave you alone with your possessions, of whatever form. The difference between a washing machine and a parcel of land is that there’s no meaningful dispute about the legitimacy of my washing machine ownership – I worked to generate money to buy it, Bosch bought materials and labour to form it, and we exchanged one for the other.
In contrast, we know that much if not most of the land in the UK was taken from an earlier owner by force. I don’t support that as a model then or now, but why should I accept that the land you own today, which was won by force centuries ago, is yours, whereas if I take it from you today that’s not legitimate? I could entirely respect the role of ownership, contracts, etc., I’d just like to wait until I seize 10 acres of Richmond Park before we start.
The function of taxation is to provide for thye functions of governance (whatever the objectives of governence – monarchial, paternalistic, redistributionist, expropriative, etc. – may be).
To say there is no good tax is to say there is no good governance. The blockade of libertarian aspirations lies in the fact that the larger portions of the populaces aspire to a level of existence (standards of living) which their own individual efforts can not sustain, but which may be partially attained through common actions, including use of governmental powers through various political processes (not limited to the democratic).
It is the perversion of the functions of governments which underlie the ills of taxation.
Paul, I am not quite sure what is the point you are making here:
Well of course there is a balance, and therefore we have to think in terms of general principles; we can always find hard cases that violate the pristine ideal, such as that some property was originally stolen by the Normans, etc.
Actually, if there is a group taking a “religious”, ie, non-rational stance, it is those who argue that a tax, and an idea – land is different from any other asset – holds the key to an economic truth. The Georgists vary a great deal, I know, but at root, most of them seem to be arguing as if they have unlocked the keys to the world of economics. Sounds pretty religious to me.
The problem with such distinctions is that, presumably, the washing machine was made out of materials that were dug out of the ground, or obtained from property in some form, and then assembled in a factory built in, and on, property, and then taken to a shop, which is property……..oh dear.
There is, alas, no “immaculate conception” theory of how property rights arise; even the ideas I have given elsewhere of “finders keepers” etc are, I freely concede, not without their problems. For me, however, I tend to take the view that in the absence of some overwhelming proof to the contrary, and so long as property is fairly widely dispersed, the burden of proof should, lie on those who argue that property rights are illegitimate and should be infringed. And at an empirical level, never mind theoretical one, there are just too damn many benefits to having a system of accepted and respected property rights, given security of wealth formation, the idea of having one’s own bit of territory and privacy, etc. This is something that those of a technocratic frame of mind are too ready to ignore.
.
I’m already bored of this, so I’m not going to stop for long.
But on the question of where ownership originates, and whether you need a state to define/arbitrate it, I’ll remind those who have read it about Hernando DeSoto’s ‘barking dog’ definition of property. States are not required, and indeed, usually get in the way.
I don’t get how Georgists here are appealing to a “what’s the difference between a state and a ladlord line.” If we were to say “nothing, both are bad for similar reasons,” just for the sake of argument, then we don’t get to Georgism as an alternative, since under Georgism the entire state is effectively a landlord, collecting the rent even if it doesn’t tell us what to do with the land. No, we get to a stance similar to individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, in which private landowners still earn economic rent by owning land, but they are also the ones who use the land: There are no land lords, just owner-occupiers.
I’m not saying that is a good option, just that that seems to be what would follow if libertarians were to be persuaded that landlords are as bad as states.
Richard Allen said
Perhaps. Though the cost of enforcing those claims could just as easily be recovered from the person making a false claim of ownership. Why tax everyone to pay for costs wilfully incurred by a tiny minority of people.
Ian B:
Yes it could. The validity and hierarchy of different property rights is purely a matter of opinion and we all have our own take on what is the most just system. Mine is that your person and the physical products of your labour should be your private property and everything else should be subject to mutual agreement. You think that the right to control access to a location should also be enforced without mutual consent, some think that intellectual property rights should be enforced without mutual consent, there are probably some who think that property rights over slaves should still be enforced without mutual consent.
In truth, as much as we might hate to admit it, we are both statists. We both have our own opinion of the most just balance between different property rights and we both think that we are justified in encouraging the state to force our personal preferences on each other. Without the state, the only rights we have are the ones we can persuade others to voluntarily respect and the ones we can retain by force.
The reason I believe it has a special status is not simply that it is limited but that I consider that somebody else being able to tell me where I may or may not go is an excessive infringement of my liberty if done without my consent. It isn’t a special status for land either; there are plenty of things for which I think individual ownership should not be recognised, such as ideas, the atmosphere, the electromagnetic spectrum and the right to speak.
In the days before the abolition of slavery, you may well have found your arsehole being legally recognised as somebody else’s private property and I’m sure a good number of people viewed the abolition of slavery as an unacceptable violation of established property rights, but at that time the slave-holders’ rights of ownership were declared to be inferior to the slaves’ right of self-ownership, because that accorded with a shift in the general sense of what was just.
To me, that sums up enforceable property rights pretty well. There’s nothing magical, fixed or absolute about them, they merely tend to be the collective enforcement of those rights that the majority at the time would probably be prepared to acknowledge as being just and voluntarily honour.
I think my position is clear. I don’t think you can assume that people who support LVT all do so for the same reason.
“The Georgists vary a great deal, I know, but at root, most of them seem to be arguing as if they have unlocked the keys to the world of economics. Sounds pretty religious to me.”
Indeed. As I noted in that other thread (with which, by the way, I got quite bored, so thanks for posting Ian B’s SQOTD which I otherwise would have missed), this is a theological debate which will never be resolved because no one will ever be convinced.
Still, my hat’s off to Ian B for his perseverence in maintaining this debate. He has far more patience than I would!
Some say that LVT is more just (or less unjust) than other taxes. That is hard to settle, the reasons put forward for dispossessing Peter in favour of Paul being so multifarious, and so questionable.
But what does seem defensible is the claim that it is less economically damaging than raising the same amount of tax in other ways. Taxes, in addition to the damage done to the taxed, cause further deadweight losses by making some activities more taxed than others.
In taxing based on “the unimproved value of land”, the idea is that no economic activity is discouraged, not working or building, trading or saving.
That’s not counting the one-off hit to land values when the tax is introduced. Changes in government policy always affect different people disproportionately in a more-or-less random way. That is true whether the change is for the better or for the worse.
There may be a fear around here that if government can tax with less damage to the economy, then it will inevtiably tax more. That might be true.
The deadweight loss argument is not perfect, either: It becomes in the interest of a landowner to discourage development in his area that benefits others but not, for personal reasons, him, and to encourage the reverse. e.g. as I am not bothered by aircraft noise, it is in my financial interest for the nearby airport to become noisier.
I suspect that’s not significant when compared to the distortions caused by current methods of taxation.
The key difference between an economic theory and a religious belief is that the former is falsifiable.
If somebody says that land is different to most other assets because it is a broadly fixed quantity, you can put that claim to the test. If somebody says that levying a tax on it causes x, y or z, those claims can be put to the test.
On the other hand, if somebody says that property rights should be allocated in a certain way because it is the right thing to do, that is a subjective opinion. If somebody then claims that such a subjective opinion is an objective truth, it becomes, in effect, a religious belief.
In terms of land, that arguably isn’t the case. Most of the land in the UK is still in relatively few hands.
I think infringed is an inappropriate term in this case; it implies the breach of a right which is still being enforced. Extinguished would be closer to it. That said, I think it is a reasonably sound principle, but coming back to the previous point, these are issues of opinion, so its less about proof than putting forward a more generally accepted moral argument.
I agree there are benefits to most property rights, but, as with slavery, once a particular right stops being generally accepted or respected and is viewed as an excessive restriction of liberty, the state shouldn’t continue to enforce it just because previous generations decided to collectively create it.
Two LVT threads in one week! Have I died and went to heaven?
Really, JP and Ian, you are better
menpersons than I am.You are wrong!
There is one good tax!
I suggested this as a T-shirt slogan-
“The only good tax.. Is a dead one!”
As a minarchist, allow me to suggest an idea time-share government. If you or I chose to become a citizen, then we would do some Community service time in exchange for being the government for a few weeks. I.e., if I joined my local shire or county now, I might have a few days a month dedicated to fire-fighting, or road patrols, etc., and then have June next year as my ‘month of power’, when us June Citizens can make laws affecting public property for the whole shire. Time-share government- we share the basic tasks of government, as well as the executive privileges.
Entirely true, which is why it would have to be phased in gradually, ideally beginning at the “bottom” of the property price-cycle.
Firstly, surely democratic states are better than monarchical ones if either states or landlords are inevitable? And secondly, as I’ve said, the system of “just owner-occupiers” could never hold in reality without a massive one-off redistribution of land (which would almost certainly impose more costs than benefits even if it did end up with the desired outcome, which it wouldn’t), and in any case couldn’t long survive because of population growth.
Richard, if you know how to spot the bottom of a market cycle, whether it be in property, stocks, bonds, wheat futures or the price of 18th century antique furniture, share that secret with us and we’ll be stinking rich.
Seriously, the idea that a government – you know, those institutions run by folk like Gordon Brown who sold our gold reserves at a 1/4 of their current value – would have an idea of how to time the market in property is frankly bonkers. It is not possible. If you introduce LVT (of whatever rate), then there will always be a risk that it will come in at a level in the market that is “sub-optimal”; but then as we have repeated until blue in the face, the conceit of such a tax’s advocates is that it can be used to help micro-manage economic and other outcomes and remove things like “bad” speculation. It is a conceit that lies behind all attempts to plan economic activity.
Far better to focus on LVT’s supposed merits as a simple tax.
…which is why I used the word “ideally” and put the word “bottom” in scare quotes. I would imagine that some point within the next 12 months will constitute the bottom of the current price-cycle, but either way it doesn’t really matter. It’s just preferable to start when prices are low than when they’re high.
JP, should we also stop trying to promote liberty on ethical grounds and focus solely on its economic merits?
No, since I do not accept the dualism implicit in the idea that the moral and practical are distinct, which is one of the great wrong turns of philosophy. I do not buy into the idea of a “value free” economic realm where morality does not intrude. In truth, even those who claim they are amoral frequently smuggle in ethical presuppositions. Far better to be upfront about it.
I agree with what Ian B said about the Georgists.
As for religion and basic principle.
“The natural law is God’s law, but it would be exactly the same if God did not exist” (Fransisco Suarez – one of the last great Schoolmen).
This remains true even if someone does not like the term “natural law” – get rid of the term (if one wishes to), just do not get rid of the content.
To violate the body or goods of someone else is a crime (by definition a violation of justice – which is the nonaggression principle).
If God exists he holds this. And if God does not exist it remains true.
The basic principle (although NOT how it is applied in the specific situations of time and place) does not “depend on society” and those who deny that such things as rape, murder and robbery are crimes (whatever the statutes of government say) are liars.
If people commit such crimes they do not deserve “arugment” – they deserve punishement.
Period.
“Totally dogmatic Paul Marks” – I do not deny it.
Paul, I agree with the general principle you outline, but we clearly disagree about what people should be able to claim to be their goods. Everybody has a different take on what people should be able to monopolise and what they shouldn’t and that can never be anything more than subjective opinion.
Paul Lockett writes:
I think Paul Marks will want to respond, but I don’t quite think that we can say property rights – however one wants to define that – is an arbitrary, subjective thing, like a taste in wallpaper or choice of cheese. The notion of ownership is a bit more objective than that. I’ll readily grant that giving an absolute watertight justification of property rights from some sort of “blank slate” or “state of nature” – to use an Enlightenment turn of phrase – is a fraught exercise, but I am worried that any understand skepticism leads us to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. I am pretty sure that the house I live in is mine and that if someone wants to take it from me, I can insist on a price or tell that bidder to desist. That’s not just a subjective thing.
As an example, consider patents. some say that as inventions are a product of labour, they should be private property on the finders-keepers principle. others argue that as ideas are not scarce, they should not be treated as property. If property rights are not subjective, which of those viewpoints is invalid?
Paul, I’d like to give a longer reply but as I am in a hurry, let me just say that with intellectual property, unlike physical property, you do not necessarily lose by sharing it. I can exclude you and Paul Marks from my flat; if you insist on sleeping in my spare room, taking milk from the fridge and watch my tv, then that is obviously violating an important point about property: the right to exclusive use of it. With IP, however, it is very different. In fact, if you share my ideas, we both gain.
At least with homesteading and finders-keepers principles, however flawed they might be, there is some sort of justice to them, rather like the habit of queuing for tickets to see a theatre show. One does not have to like the outcome, but the process has a certain non-arbritrariness about it. A lot of rules are like that: there is a kind of fairness in the process.
In any event, if we are worried that say, land ownership centuries past got that way through violent conquest (as it did during the Norman episode, Henry VIII’s land-grab from the Church, etc), then the most that I would accept would be a one-off redistribution, such as allowing tenant farmers, for instance, to get the freehold ownership of the land, or somesuch process. But I don’t like the idea of endlessly redistributing the supposedly “unjust” ownership of land through constant taxation.
A problem with the Georgist idea of taking revenues and redistributing it on a say, per capita basis to all the citizens of a country is that it is a bit utopian: we are expecting that this process will not be subject to political favouritism, etc. Of course all idealistic economic programmes suffer from the same objection, but even so, this is not a trivial objection.
If that were universally accepted, there would be no demand for IP laws. Somebody who has ownership over an idea can generally profit more from it than if they don’t. The justification given by some is that, if I labour to invent something, I deserve to control the product of my labour and if you take that idea and use it without my consent, you are stealing the product of my labour.
Then why not apply the same principle to ideas? If it’s fair in one area, why not apply it across the board?
I get the impression that we have a similar viewpoint on IP; I view it is an excessive restriction of liberty. However, my intention here is not to debate the rights and wrongs of IP, but to highlight the fact that, as per my original comment to Paul, its validity is subjective and can’t be determined objectively by appealing to natural law.
That isn’t my fundamental reasoning. I view land ownership in much the same way I view IP; it is a right which some argue in favour of but I view as being an excessive restriction of liberty. I’m less concerned about the validity of the transfer of ownership than I am about the justification for the creation of those property rights at all.
That’s true, but it’s true of all state activity, including the recognition and enforcement of private property rights. Copyright provides an example of the intense lobbying that can occur when one group stands to gain from an increase in the strength of property rights or more severe enforcement of them.
The only way to avoid that problem would be to live in a completely stateless society, with property rights being limited to those which others are prepared to voluntarily respect or which can be asserted by force.
J.P. is right that I would like to respond.
Take the example of the Romans – a slave owning society if there ever was one.
However, Roman legal thinkers stated that slavery was against the natural law (again the term “natural law” need not detain us if people do no like it – what matters is that even they understood that one could not rightly “own” another sentiant – as “owning” is a the control of agent, a subject, over a nonagent, an object).
Of course the Roman legal thinkers were quick to add that slavery was upheld by the positive “law of all nations” so they were going to enforce it anyway (much like early 19th century British people sometimes argued “how can we abolish the slave trade or slavery intself – we will put ourselves at a disadvantage compared to all these other nations…..).
However, they did understand that it was objectively wrong – and if even the Romans understood that…….
You see there is nothing sujective about the legal writings of Salmon P. Chase (the “slaves lawyer” and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) – in pointing out that, whatever positive law (government statutes), say slavery is (at bottom) based on a series of crimes (is a series of crimes) he was saying what is logically correct.
As Ernst Cassirer (Germany 1920’s) and so many others have shown, the basic structure of the human mind does NOT vary with time and place (although, of course, the informatin the mind has and the circumstances it faces vary wildly) there is no “Jewish logic” or “capitalist reason” – there is only agency, the reasoning mind.
Nor is this confinded to slavery – for example, the arguments of Chase against the “Greenbacks” are just a logically compelling as his arguments against slavery – even though (as Treasury Secretary) Chase was the very man who introduced the Greenbacks.
So it goes on (step by step) to landownership and other things.
Although it is a bit much for me to rant on about in a comment – much though I do love ranting.
I don’t believe this! It was only two days ago that I put down my digital ping pong bat because Johnathan Pearce did n’t want to play LVT any more,and here he is at it again.This is precisely what Diane Chambers did in an episode of Cheers:took a shot when the more sportsmanlike Sam had backed off.
I am surprised he has left it so late to look up Henry George when he likes to mix it with Georgists.Only the
reference book (never heard of it BTW) he adduces as evidence of fair criticism repeats the most stupid: that you can’t easily separate the value of the building from the land it stands on.The building has an insurance re-build value does n’t it? And a market value? Subtract the smaller from the larger and what you’re left with this is the land value (This is called the residual method, so simple that people could self-assess their own lVT by consulting the ABI insurance re-build calculator on the Net.)
I am surprised that Johnathan Pearce continues with this debate,since he is a friend of the land developer Don Riley who showed that a Land tax could have paid for the Jubilee out of the property prices the presence of the line created.Extropolate from this and schools raising property come into focus.
Finally it becomes clear that though the land belongs to you, its value does n’t .The value is projected onto the bare earth by the efforts of the government and other people.To leave you in possession of the increased value (of merely increasing the money supply for instance) would be dysfunctional in the extreme. I call the tax a Land Value Repayment but not a single other land taxer has taken this term up.What me worry?
DBC, I decided to have a separate posting on LVT and the Georgists because the previous thread had become very long and I did not want my thoughts to be buried. I don’t know why you seem to adopt such a peevish tone; I have decided to have a good look at the Georgist position and find it seriously wanting, as have economists down the years such as Mark Blaug, Frank Knight, Alfred Marshall, Rothbard, Clark, and others.
This paragraph makes no sense whatever:
What is all this stuff about the “government” projecting value? WTF? There is no projection: if circumstances change to encourage market participants to change their willingness to buy or sell land, then its value will change, and this is no different from commodities like gold, wheat or for that matter, semiconductors.
Why would it be “dysfunctional” for the person who has legal title to something to profit from a rise in its value? If I buy a bushel of wheat on the expectation that its value will rise, I obtain a profit; if it continues to rise, more wheat gets planted, etc.
Because it is far more difficult and more nebulous. The trouble with IP is that, while I have not settled my views on that issue, it does seem to be far more problematic than land in getting definitions sorted out.
Peevish, moi? I was just joshing.
I notice that you have missed all the straightforward points ,about Don Riley,the residual method etc in order to concentrate on the more abstract notion of the extrinsic origin of land value.
The notion is only a fuller account of Don’s experiences with property prices during the building of the
Jubilee Line (I fear I am repeating myself).You buy a crap property; the Jubilee Line comes along: it suddenly goes up in value.
You and other hard-line Libertarians (ie not geo -Libertarians) say “Great I get to keep the money I’ve got from pure luck. Sod everyone else who has to pay (me) more to live or do business here.We’ve all got to pay a lot of income tax to pay for the Jubilee Line ,which could have paid for itself out of taxing the land value increases it produced.But heigh ho.”
I struggle to comprehend how you regard this as just.If the Gov were to distribute a Citizens Income or better a National Dividend in the Douglasite manner, in order to increase purchasing-power ,you would n’t expect it to be given just to property owners would you? But that is what unearned,untaxed inflationary increases in house prices do: pay a National Dividend to owner occupiers and other property owners only.
BTW your example of investing in wheat is erroneous: people may produce more wheat.They cannot produce more land.Evidence shows that during the last housing bubble ,developers were still keeping land off the market to put the price of available land up still further.
Investment in land is not in lock-step with increases in housebuilding.
I ignored it because I wanted to focus on the more fundamental point.
Well this is a legitimate point but not quite in the way you mean. If the government uses eminent domain powers to force some folk to sell their land and if that construction benefits some landowners and harms others, I can see the case for some sort of one-off levy – I won’t delay on the details – based on land values so that aggrieved people who lose value from a development are compensated by those who benefit from it. This is a bit like a sort of tort when a polluter makes a profit and the pollution victim incurs a loss. There ought to be some sort of transfer to ensure people are treated justly. So to the limited extent that there has been a government-caused wealth transfer from A to B, there ought to be an adjustment. Fair enough.
But (drums roll!) there is this point that I repeat again: it is true that land is fixed, but available, sellable land will vary depending on the balance of supply and demand. If we don’t allow people to capture the rises in the value of land, then there is less of an incentive for people to bid for unused land, derelict land, etc. We actually want to encourage land entrepreneurship. My fear about LVT, especially a 100% one, is that it would be very harmful in that regard.
If developers kept land off the market, it is presumably because they expected to get a higher price than what they thought they were likely to get, and one big driver of this was very low interest rates. But the price of something is no more or less than what a person is willing to pay for it; if I own something, be it my flat or a lump of gold, then I am not obliged to sell it to someone for a price they think is “fair”, but only if we can agree terms. That’s it. Your argument is the sort made by people who complain that oil companies “gouge” customers by charging high prices during a shortage, etc.
Vast parts of the world are not habited at all, because it is not – at present – economically viable to do so, but if the demand for land rose far enough, and prices rose sharply enough, then new supply comes along, new roads and buildings are constructed, swamps are drained, and so on. There is no sort of conspiracy of evil landowners preventing this from happening. If there is a villain here, it is government planning and zoning laws (Of course, like Don Riley, I would like to see a dramatic loosening of planning laws).
I hope that answers some of your points, although we can pick this up later if you want over the weekend. Time to fix supper and open some vino.
Paid 17 quid for a bottle of St Emilion( at Lidls!): feels morning after that it was probably worth it.Please do not infer a conversion to the Invisible Hand and the Invisible Hand gang.
Of course,the amount of land and property up for sale is, at any one time, quite small.Presumably if the entire stock was to come on the market at the same time,it would all be next to valueless.Landowners, as you admit yourself ,are best able to keep prices of land and property up by carefully regulating supply: rationing it .(It may be that part of the slump in commercial rents has been because changes in business rates have made it it very difficult to leave some property [offices?] mothballed.)
The problem with the free market is that its participants are free to trade but also free to do nothing.When the market turns down the owner of capital is free to place his money on deposit; the owner of a vacant town centre site can leave it for weeds to grow on; only the worker cannot sit the bad times out: he will starve. ( This is the analysis of Silvio Gesell,so admired by Keynes though some accuse the Englishman of plagiarising him) .
Where I live,the town-centre site of Randall’s old factory has been undeveloped for 50 years!
It would,therefore, as Edmund Conway has said this week in the Telegraph, be worth an experiment with land tax,( most easily achieved to my mind by converting UBR and Council tax to a tax on the land value only using the residual method) to try and get these sites in productive use again and free up some market activity.(i.e.free-up from the dead[invisible]
hand. )
The mistake some libertarian free marketeers make is to cast entrepreneurs in a wholly virtuous light as go-getters wanting to spend money in developing businesses and property,bringing prices down by cut-throat competition (yok,yok) in a wholly dynamic & expansive scenario suffused with the glamour that is associated with spending money.Also they can appear like rebels against stuffy financial authorities aiming to restrict their life enhancing behaviour -a bit like Fast Days at Ridgemont High.
On the contrary a lot of the participants in the free market just sit there,leading very risk free lives making one-way bets on property. People like Major Douglas,Gesell ,Keynes and George realised that there are structural economic reasons why capitalists,investors and landowners can retreat from the market and hoard their assets. Gesell explicitly stated that his anti -hoarding proposals on money (to tax holding onto it) and land (ditto) were meant to put capitalists and landowners on the same footing as the workers: having their working assets deteriorate in value while unused.
I am sorry that this argument is not proceeding in a thesis ,antithesis ,synthesis manner but is opening up wider differences.
This is getting long winded.
I suggest both sides (pro Henry George and anti Henry George) read through Murry Rothbard’s attack upon the ideas of Henry George (to be found in Man Economy and State and Power and Market) and then proceed from there.
Although I am not saying that the supporter of the ideas of Henry George will be won over.
As for me – well I do not start from Lockian assumptionms (different interpreations of which can be found in both Rothbard and George) so the debate rather passes me by.
To me an owner does not have to “justify” his ownership and so on. And I see no moral content in “as much and as good” not being left for others.
So I do not even reach the point where the “Single Tax” becomes an issue.
“You stink of Roman law (at least its first principles on this matter – which are also to be found in Common Law) and the Romeish smelling Edmund Burke”.
I do not deny it .
Dunno why Paul Marks assumes I need to read Murray
Rothbard’s attack on George; already have , long ago.
If I was in any doubt about the details I need n’t worry as my impression is that Johnathan Pearce’s argument is almost entirely taken from Rothbard on a useful point-for-point paraphrase basis.
Perhaps you geezers need to get out more and read the previous generation of monetary reformers who were concerned not that there was too much money in circulation but too little reaching the real workers and entrepreneurs:Keynes,Gesell,Douglas &George.
Actually, DBC, Rothbard is by no means the only person to have figured George’s analysis as flawed; you say you have read him, but the logic seems to bounce right off you. Read him again, slowly.
Let’s go through some of your points. I don’t intend (famous last words) to come back to this because I suspect whatever I say won’t make a difference to your views. But to the open-minded who might be straying down here, I have some responses to your last comment but one. Here goes:
In developed nations, quite possibly true. So what?
Again, so what? That is what happens when people have stuff that is theirs and have choices; they can do things you or others might not like. That’s freedom: it is not a bug, it’s a feature. Not every landowner who has Georgists glaring at him across the fence is going to roll over and sell up. I consider that a good thing.
If the owner of a vacant piece of land wants to sit out a downturn in the hope, however vain, of an upturn, then sure, he may hold out for a while but other owners of property may undercut him or he will find that the ability to service his debt is getting harder and he sells eventually. Again, you haven’t proven that there is some sort of evil cartel of landowners denying us the land we would like to buy. The same sort of argument is one I hear used against evil oil companies refusing to sell their stocks at a price their consumers think is “fair”. It ignores the role that intermediaries play in equalising prices by buying land, commodities etc when prices are low, and so on.
I saw Conway’s article; some of it was quite insightful but if you are going to make the case that LVT is a good way to prevent land-price rises, then how come Hong Kong, for example, has had some quite sharp property price spikes in the past? Or is there something I am missing? (This gets me back to the point about low central bank interest rates).
A rather adolescent comment. It is not necessary to regard every speculative entrpreneur in a positive light to support the general principle that economies work best when the owners of productive resources are encouarged to seek the highest price for them to ensure the best possible allocation of resources to the most intensely demanded uses. This is economics 101. The implication of your remark, and other comments, is that you, or the Georgists, know better than the players in the market what the most “optimum” state of affairs is; and you regard LVT, etc, as part of the way to bring about the outcome you favour. That smacks of hubris.
But they cannot retreat for ever: consider the losses sustained in the property crashes in Japan of the early 90s, Britain in the mid-70s and early 90s, the property slumps of the US in the late ‘Noughties, etc. Not much of a “hiding place” for property owners then.
It is also quite clear now that you are not a very consistent supporter of market freedoms; in fact quite hostile at some points. Sooner or later, I find that Georgists, whatever their protestations to the contrary, betray a socialistic morality and a basic suspicion of free markets.
Interesting that the monetary cranks like Major Douglas and J.M. Keynes are mentioned with approval – i.e. the print money money and we will all be better off crowd.
It is logical to assume that people who support scum (such as Major Douglas and Lord Keynes) are scum themselves.
However, I am not claiming that Henry George would have supported degenerates like Lord Keynes – and a man (such as Henry George) is not responsble for people who claim to be his supporters a century after his death.
What Henry George is personally responsble for is the claim that most people would be better off over time if his tax was introduced.
An incorrect claim.
As for land – as an area gets more crowed so the value of land (both for rent and for sale) tends to go up.
There is nothing imoral in this – and no “problem” that the government needs to “solve” with a new tax or anything else.
But then when one is dealing with people who think in terms of “the workers not getting enough money” (“the German Historical School measure rooms, declare they are too small, demand government intervention – and pretend this is economics”) one has left reason behind.
I have no respect for such people, and see no reason to pretend that I have.
They know more deserve respect than I would if I had gone to Wicksteed Park managers yesterday and said the following:
“I took in X thousand Pounds in ticket sales for the car park today, yet you are only paying me Y Pounds an hour – I deserve more”.
They would quite rightly have replied – “if you think you deserve more go find someone who will pay it to you – now sling your hook”.
As for land – as an area gets more crowed so the value of land (both for rent and for sale) tends to go up.
There is nothing imoral in this – and no “problem” that the government needs to “solve” with a new tax or anything else.
However, I think there is something immoral about situations in which there are artificial restrictions on the availability of new land that can be built on and on what may be built on it, and the inevitable high prices and high rents as a consequence. I think this describes the vast majority of urban real estate markets and many non-urban ones in the developed world. Even a place like Hong Kong, which has exemplary free markets in many other ways, is absolutely terrible in this regard. And one reason why London is such an expensive city is simply the existence of the Green Belt around it (along with planning laws, heritage listings, and all kinds of other restrictions on land use within it).
These restrictions exist for a variety of reasons, but in reality all they do is aid a cartel of rent seekers, in the perjorative sense of that expression.
@Paul Marks
Funny you should work at Wicksteed Park.Its founder Charles Wicksteed was one of the great land nationalisers who wrote ,if memory serves,” Land for the People” ( a best-seller for the Land Nationalisation Society) and set up Wicksteed Park in part to compensate the working class for the loss of open-air amenity.Seeing as how the Land Nationalisers were more extreme then the Land Taxers,that makes them even greater scum,no doubt .
Jonathan Pearce: “Actually, DBC, Rothbard is by no means the only person to have figured George’s analysis as flawed; you say you have read him, but the logic seems to bounce right off you. Read him again, slowly”
There is very little logic in Rothbard’s argument, just as sequence of fallacies. Have you got anything better than Rothbard’s laughable “analysis” to offer?
JP: “Sooner or later, I find that Georgists, whatever their protestations to the contrary, betray a socialistic morality and a basic suspicion of free markets.”
Is it the same kind of socialistic morality that makes you unsupportive of intellectual property?
Paul Marks:
That’s a sweeping statement and one I disagree with. Herbert Spencer laid out a sound argument outlining why private land ownership is incompatible with natural law and doesn’t differ substantially to slavery.
I agree with some of your underlying sentiment that the human mind naturally has a sense of justice, but that doesn’t in any way imply that there is a system of property rights which is objectively correct.
@johnathan pearce
I am not sceptical of the efficiency of free markets; I just doubt whether they ever exist . ( I believe LVT and certain types of monetary reform would make them freer by preventing hoarding.)
I have read Rothbard’s work and I find your admonitions to read it slowly very patronising from somebody who confessed to having found out just recently how free trade George was .But not rude,like the unhousetrained Paul Marks.
I will sign off with the following admonition of my own ( I do not mean to continue on a site with such bad manners): Try reading David Heinrich’s comment on the von Mises web-site for Feb 27th 2004.Commenting that Rothbard had taken a wrong turn, he remarks ” I see no reason why the land value tax must necessarily be equal to the ground rent.” Well, right.
You may as well nationalise the land outright if you are going to take 100% of the rent. All I have proposed above and on the other samizdata set-to on LVT is that existing taxes on property ( UBR and Council Tax) be levied on land only ,not land and buildings which is ,of course very much less than100% confiscation ).
Rothbard’s argument does not so much go wrong as Heinrich suggests but collapse completely upon this gaffe.Rothbard’s comments about the essential role of speculators in bringing the land to market are plainly laughable .He also has no idea how easy it is to separate land value from the value of the buildings ( by establishing the insurance value of the latter).A lot of the time he uses the 19th century practice of valuing land by its fertility not its spatial utility.Most modern Georgists realise this is a waste of time when agricultural values are hundreds of times lower than urban land .
What is laughable about it, Paul? You cannot just keep regurgitating the old canard that the Austrian school of economists, like Rothbard, or indeed all the various others, have been “demolished” and that their points about the Georgists are wrong unless you can say what those errors are. (Nothing written by you or that character, Richard Allan, came close to doing so). And given how Rothbard pointed out the fairly common sense point that no asset’s value can be judged independently of the value assigned to it by a seller and a buyer, I’d rather stick with him than with a group – the Georgists – who seem to be keen to deny that owners of property have any title to the value that it might generate.
You seem to be a communitarian, arguing that the “community” has some sort of apriori claim to what value land can generate, without recognising that land, or anything else, takes its value from the values assigned to it by individuals. And that is why I buy into the Austrian/Rothbardian point of view, and not the view of those who would try to introduce a subtle, or not-so-subtle, form of economic planning via a tax. It is pretty damn close to land nationalisation.
Oh, and what Michael Jennings said.
DBC, I was not being patronising but for what it is worth I happen to find some of your analysis to be on the childish side, so touche!
And of course part of the absurdity of that position, which I am wearily reprising here, is that drawing a distinction between the land and the buildings that have been put on it will not work; there is no pristine, underdeveloped land value that stands apart from the uses, either actual or potential, to which it may be put.
And this paragraph contains a fallacy:
“Rothbard’s comments about the essential role of speculators in bringing the land to market are plainly laughable .He also has no idea how easy it is to separate land value from the value of the buildings ( by establishing the insurance value of the latter).A lot of the time he uses the 19th century practice of valuing land by its fertility not its spatial utility.Most modern Georgists realise this is a waste of time when agricultural values are hundreds of times lower than urban land.”
Using the insurance value of a building will help establish the replacement value of the building and its contents, but the value of the land upon which the building stands cannot be split off; when the land was bought by the developer, the land’s value was in part affected by its use (for buildings rather than farming, or whatever). So the distinction still does not quite work.
And I notice you stick to this idea that “hoarding” proves that markets don’t work efficiently but that is a basic error; the “hoarder” who buys land/commodities/cars when they are dirt cheap and holds them in the expectation they will rise is not, unless he is a monopolist, jamming up the system. If I refuse to sell you my flat at a price you think is “fair”, am I a hoarder? In any market, not all potential sellers will be looking to sell unless they can get a certain price for it; that is no guarantee that they will.
At least you accept that monetary reform is necessary; I would say that ouweighs LVT by several orders of magnitude. I keep raising the Hong Kong example of a place that has had big swings in land values, so LVT has not really had much of a smoothing effect.
Oh and Mr Lockett, you keep making this debating point about intellectual property rights, such as patents and copyrights. I have made it clear several times (sigh) that among the problems with IP is that it is hard to define and that, unlike physical property, cannot be just mapped out and measured.
But for what it is worth, just as there are practical benefits in terms of wealth creation to encouraging people to own things and have the freedom to retain that ownership, so I can see why some people think that patents and copyrights are useful in that sense, too. For that reason, there might be a case for some form of IP but there are problems with definitions, and that does not apply to physical property. So the burden of proof in establishing title should be much tougher for IP than the physical sort.
I haven’t said anything about Austrian economics in general, just Rothbard. Somebody else may have been able to offer a good argument on the subject, but Rothbard wasn’t. If you want to read a critique of his argument, point 6 here is reasonable:
http://homerweb.com/cache.html?a=cachedContent&id=868800&a2=web
If that’s a concern, it can be resolved very easily using self-assessment.
I never said that owners shouldn’t be entitled to the value; I questioned the validity of the state granting absolute ownership over land at all.
If anything, I’m an individualist. I think that each individual, by default, should have the freedom to access the whole surface of the Earth and I don’t believe a state should be allowed to unilaterally infringe that liberty in an uncompensated fashion. As I’ve said previously, ideally, all exclusive rights to land would be obtained by direct negotiation between individuals, but given the transaction costs of doing that with a large population, LVT seems a reasonable compromise to me.
Yes you have, but then you go on to call anybody who doesn’t offer support for a particular state granted property right a socialist. I keep making the IP point in an attempt to draw your attention to the fact that you’re stood in a glass house.
Land titles do not grant rights over physical property. They grant a right to exclude others from a particular location. They don’t grant ownership of tangible items. Land as a term can create confusion in this context; we’re talking location, not soil.
The problems may not exist with physical property, but they do with location rights. I’ve yet to hear anybody say how far above and below the surface a land title should allow an individual to control, with solid reasoning.
This is completely reframing the debate. Your previous points centred around ownership being a fundamental right to which people were naturally entitled. This comment is purely utilitarian, which takes it into a whole different realm.
Yes, allowing the state to grant ownership over anything will create some benefit, whether that thing is an idea, a physical good, a location, the atmosphere, the electromagnetic spectrum, the right to speak, or any other thing you can think of. The flip side is that in the process it will also infringe liberty and the question which has to be asked is, does the benefit warrant the infringement?
Jonathan Pearce wrote:
That depends on what you mean by “wealth creation.” If government were to grant ownership of letters of the alphabet as it does areas of the earth’s surface, that would create an asset value that did not formerly exist. But it would not add to aggregate well-being any more than granting ownership of land does.
If a thing is produced by labor, then recognizing the producer’s valid right to own it does indeed encourage more production — i.e., REAL wealth creation. But as land is not produced by labor, granting titles to own it does not and cannot encourage anyone to produce any more of it. All it does is create a privilege for some to demand that others pay them for access to what they would otherwise be at liberty to access.
No opponent of recovering publicly created land rent for the purposes and benefit of the public that creates it has ever been able to answer this simple question, nor will they ever be able to:
How is production of goods and services aided by the landowner’s demand that others pay him for what government, the community and nature provide?
The point I was making is that land values are the result of the sum total of all the revealed preferences of individuals in a market and that in the absence of some evidence that landowner rights are illegitimate, the owners are entitled to capture the values that might accrue.
Now you mention it! If you say they are entitled to the value, including any rise in it, then why try and take all or part of it away via an LVT? Or maybe I am being unfair in that you are different from other LVT supporters in wanting it for purely revenue purposes, not in order to suppress supposedly wicked land speculation or whatever. It is certainly true that the LVT supporters are in a wide spectrum, from the fairly free market to the communitarian, or worse. But let’s be clear: most Georgists I encounter seem to view LVT as a sort of sin tax, like taxes on booze and fags.
The whole HGeorge position, I thought, is predicated on the idea that because we do not create land – a true but trivial point – we are not entitled to increases in its value, only from the income that our own labour creates. That is why HG and his supporters make such a big deal about it, surely.
This may be partly true as far as land titles actually operate in some, if not all all countries: I am not an expert and would not contest that point. But it seems to me that in addition to the right to exclusive use, it also means the right to exploit land as an owner sees fit, so long as he does not damage the land of others, which would be a tort. Yes, in reality, states impose all manner of restrictions, such as controlling mining rights, etc, but I am talking about general principles here.
Assuming that a process can be agreed among folk as to things like auctions of certain land rights or electronic spectra or whatever, then it cannot be claimed that the successful purchasers of said are depriving the unsuccessful ones of their liberty, or depriving them of the right to live a prosperous life. Not everyone gets a ticket to centre court at Wimbledon; have the non-spectators been cheated of their liberty? No.
Part of the problem is if we start off with the assumption that there is only a fixed amount of things that can be owned, or if those who don’t own land and other bits of the Earth’s surface have been somehow shut out of civil society in a way that implies some sort of injustice has been done. But they haven’t. Property rights have helped create a structure that has seen the biggest surge in wealth the world has seen.
That is why I was so taken aback by the attack – by another commenter, called Roy – on speculators in land and his contention that only labour creates value. The assumption is that speculators or those who buy property from others are parasites, they perform no useful function (according to whom?).
This attitude ignores their price-making and arbitrage functions of speculators; it also plays to the hoary old myth that wealth creation is only real if it involves making stuff you can hit with a hammer or something like mowing a lawn; it ignores the discovery role that entrepreneurs perform in a market where people have imperfect information.
If we want to maximise the general economic welfare, it is a safe assumption, backed up by centuries of history and the catastrophes of socialism, that it tends to happen if we let the owners of stuff benefit from the rises in its value, so they are encouraged to own even more.
I have read the counter-blast to Rothbard, and here is a good summation of both sides, which concedes that Rothbard makes an error, but so do the Georgists of an even more severe kind:
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001610.asp
Anyway, that’s me done for now.
What I said was: “I never said that owners shouldn’t be entitled to the value; I questioned the validity of the state granting absolute ownership over land at all.” I said the owners of a thing should be entitled to the rise in value, but that I don’t thing people who hold land should be viewed as its owners. I don’t want LVT to be used for revenue. Ideally, the state would spend none of it and it would be paid out entirely as a dividend.
My position is probably closer to the Herbert Spencer position, which is that private land ownership is an excessive and unjustifiable infringement of liberty and just land tenure can only be fully achieved by frequent auctioning. However, given that is likely to prove impractical, some form of LVT seems to be a reasonable compromise.
I think this might be a bit of a eureka moment. That is absolutely true. When we auction off electromagnetic spectrum or oil drilling rights for a limited time, everybody can bid and those who don’t bid the highest amount receive (in theory) the benefit of the payment into the public purse in exchange for ceding a portion of their freedom to broadcast or mine. The difference with land is that none of us get to bid for it in that way, so we don’t get compensated for losing our liberty. The land was enclosed generations ago, so, even if it had been auctioned, none of us would have been around to bid for it, so we can’t be viewed as having consented to the arrangement.
The fundamental question is, are we morally obliged to accept that we aren’t entitled to a portion of our liberty purely because our ancestors may have consented to the situation? It would be incredibly conservative to say yes, but not unheard of; a conservative position would have said that abolishing slavery was unjust, because it violated existing property rights, whereas a libertarian position would have said that it was just as it increased liberty.
That’s a brute utilitarian argument which may or may not hold up, but it’s not I would support in any case. The idea of sacrificing the liberty of some in order to serve the “greater good” doesn’t appeal to me.
But you’re missing the prior step, which is to decide what we consider to be ownable. Some things, such as the air, we’ve never considered ownable. Physical goods have almost universally been considered ownable. People were once considered ownable, but then one generation decided to over-rule the decisions of previous generations and declare them unownable.
Johnathan Pearce wrote:
No. The market merely measures value. It does not create it. In the case of land, its value has nothing to do with “revealed preferences.” It is simply equal to the economic advantage obtainable by using it.
Of course they are legally entitled to such values as accrue, just as slave owners were legally entitled to compel the labor of their slaves by force, and then take the resulting value for themselves. What the law says is irrelevant to a discussion of what the law should say.
LVT rights an egregious injustice, not just land speculation. Landowners’ privilege of demanding payment from others for what government, the community and nature provide is the greatest evil in the history of the world.
I doubt that you have accurately understood the geoist position.
It is not a trivial point. It is crucial, because it means that the landowner is violating everyone else’s rights without making just compensation.
Nonsense. What benefit would be created by granting ownership of the letters of the alphabet? All it would do is create another parasitic overclass.
Yes, it can, and accurately. Which is why no such process has ever been agreed.
??? Don’t be absurd. Center court at Wimbledon is not a natural resource.
All “arguments” against land rent recovery are founded on such absurdities, without exception.
That is not the assumption. The “assumption” — actually a self-evident and indisputable fact of objective physical reality — is that natural resources are not produced by labor, and that as labor earns its product, land can never have been earned by labor.
An injustice has indisputably been done: people have been deprived of their liberty without just compensation.
As the exact same “logic” would have supported slavery, it is known in advance to be fallacious, with no further argument required.
That the landowner’s role in economic activity is entirely parasitic is not an assumption; it is fact.
The landowner performs no such role. He just demands that others pay him for what government, the community and nature provide.
And you cannot explain how that demand aids production, nor will you ever be able to.
Like slaves?
See above. The fact that the exact same argument would have justified slavery proves it is fallacious.
Heinrich makes a lot of errors of his own, and offers not one valid criticism of geoist analysis.
Roy, I have had enough of this. You are plainly dumb as a stump in your remark that the “market” – which is a shorthand term for all the individuals who make up an economy – “create” value. If the value of my labour goes up because there is more demand for my skills – some of which I may have inherited by the luck of birth – does that mean the state is entitled to steal, sorry, tax them? No.
The rest of your comments betray a total ignorance of economics. Conflating tenancy with slavery is absurd. As is this piece of quasi-Marxian nonsense:
Wrong. A landlord who has acquired land legitimately – then he is entitled to the value that that land gives him. A person who chooses to own land as opposed to spending money on some other line of business is making a choice about how to earn a return, and those choices imply a risk, as I said.
Whenever I see the word “parasite” used about someone who acquires something like land legitimately, then I smell a rat. (And of course you guys deny that ownership is ever really legitimate, don’t you?).
Ugh.
Mr Lockett writes:
Since I don’t accept the distinction between a “thing” and land, and don’t regard the “community” or whatever as having an apriori claim to land value, the distinction is pointless, and we are back to where we began. So you do regard LVT as a sort of redistributive tax. Why not take the values of land in the West and give them to poorer countries, for example? The idea is absurd.
Sorry Paul, but you are wrong, the other Georgists are wrong and there is no further point in debating this further. There is only so much that flesh and blood can stand.
Roy does an excellent job of laying out how the Georgists are just collectivists with no meaningful conception of severalty or, therefore, liberty. Any ‘libertarian’ or classical liberal who thinks we have any common cause to make with them is a fool.
Jonathan Pearce:
It is a “thing”, but what you seem unwilling to acknowledge is that no system, however propertarian it may be, treats every “thing” as being the subject of legitimate private property claims. The air around us, people and the English language are all “things,” but we don’t recognise private property rights over them. Some things we treat as ownable, some things we treat as unownable and as civilisation has advanced, some things have been moved from one category to the other.
So, because your subjective opinion of what constitutes the most just system of property rights differs to my subjective opinion, I must be wrong? It doesn’t work that way.
Roy Langston:
It would ensure that all conversations are conducted in an orderly fashion, a bit like the way broadcasting licences prevent people broadcasting simultaneously on the same frequency. Of course, that would be a relatively minor benefit, which was my point; you can find some benefit that comes from granting private property rights over anything, but the flip side is that when you grant property rights, you restrict liberty (and often other property rights too), so the decision which has to be made with each proposed property right is “does the benefit outweigh the restriction of liberty?” The answer to that will depend on what you think we should be trying to achieve with property rights. For me, property rights should be used to ensure that people are able to enjoy the fruits of their labour, whilst restricting liberty as little as possible in the process. The best way I can see of doing that is to acknowledge property rights only with regard to tangible items which have had some kind of labour applied to them.
Perry de Havilland:
Many of the orginal classical liberals expressed the view that absolute private property rights over land were incompatible with liberty, so you’re in effect denying that many of the classical liberals were classical liberals.
We seem to have a problem of terminology, in that there are people who define themselves as libertarian, when in reality, they are propertarians. There is a trade-off between liberty and property and there is a whole continuum of opinions about how much liberty we should trade in return for the benefits which come from property rights. I would expect people who describe themselves as libertarian to generally favour liberty over property, but there are a number of people who describe themselves as libertarian, while generally favouring property over liberty.
Perry, quite. The mask really slipped with Roy, that’s for sure. I don’t know how such hostility to landlords can sit easily with a respect for several property.
Paul: in the main, while some libertarians may have talked about property in a negative way, those that did were mostly exercised by land monopolies that were granted, enforced, or created, by governments in the forms of compulsory purchase, subsidies, favours for political friends, and which involved kicking other people out of land that was considered to be theirs (such as native peoples in North America, the Norman Conquest, the Scottish Highland clearances, etc).
I certainly do not know if any serious classical liberal denounced the idea a person being free to capture the value of property in the way the LVT crowd would do. For me, the understanding that dispersed, several property is necessarily a part of a liberal order is a core definition of what a libertarian is. Classical liberals who are disdainful of property are like socialists who dislike equality.
It is true that JS Mill and some of the liberals of the late 19th century, under the influence of socialist/utilitarian ideas, may have done so. In the main, though, the classical liberal tradition is distinguished by its understanding that several property is a key ingredient of freedom, not the opposite.
And of course that begs the question of what is meant by “some kind of labour”; I assume this is not just physical labour, but also would capture things like entrepreneurial risk-taking, in which case, a landlord who takes the risk of sitting tight to earn money rather than sell up to do something else cannot be seen as a totally passive recipient.
And in reality most landlords are never entirely passive; they usually do something to affect the value of their land (if they don’t then usually the value of that land will deteriorate if other things remain equal). The idea of landlords as portrayed by the Roys of this world would only also apply if there were just one landlord, rather than a plethora of them competing for rental business, etc.
You write what I think is quite a nice paragraph:
“you can find some benefit that comes from granting private property rights over anything, but the flip side is that when you grant property rights, you restrict liberty (and often other property rights too), so the decision which has to be made with each proposed property right is “does the benefit outweigh the restriction of liberty?” The answer to that will depend on what you think we should be trying to achieve with property rights.
The mistake embedded in this paragraph is the idea that this is a zero-sum game; for sure, if I own a house, that means you cannot own it; so if you were desperate to buy my flat, you might feel a bit pissed off for my beating you in an auction. But this is nonsense to describe this as a loss of liberty. This is taking us far off the subject, but liberty is the absence of coercion, it is not, repeat not, the absence of getting what one wants. I want to own a big house, in fact would like a holiday home too, but economic circumstances being what they are, may find that a struggle. This is not an issue about my freedom, Paul. Even you have accepted that property is the right to exclusive use.
Another underlying assumption of the Georgists is that if people don’t own land, they are at the mercy of those who do. This is mistaken: in a modern economy under a complex division of labour, people can and do earn a high standard of living and rent rather than own, for example, or they can devote their spare cash on buying stocks and shares, rather than physical land, annd so on. The Georgist fallacy is like the Marxian one in which the owner of capital is regarded as the oppressor of the worker, even if a worker is on a big salary.
I feel the need to reiterate that property isn’t a single concept which someone is either for or against. There are a whole range of potential and extant property rights and almost everyone will be for some and against some.
Talking about property in land specifically, Herbert Spencer took a strong stance against the ownership of land in Social Statics (and interestingly, a fairly strong pro-intellectual property stance). I don’t think I’m being too controversial in describing Herbert Spencer as a classical liberal.
What other labour could you apply to raw materials? In order to extract an object from nature, it has to be done physically.
I can’t see how that would ever impact on ownership. For example, if I own some gold, I might hold on to it because I’ve predicted that it’ll have a higher value next year than it does today. If I’m correct, I might make more from selling it, but the fact that it is worth more doesn’t mean I own it more. I either own it or I don’t.
My intention was to imply the opposite. I thought that was fairly clear when I said that the question to be addressed is “does the benefit outweigh the restriction of liberty?”. It is probably never a zero sum game and the challenge is to work out whether the loss of liberty (and the reduction of other property rights) can somehow be justified by the benefit of a given property right.
But that ignores the fact that all codified property rights rely on coercion. We might decide that in some circumstances it is justifiable coercion, but it is coercion none the less. I think it’s intellectual self-deceit to tell yourself that it isn’t coercion to put up a fence and announce to the world that you’ll use force against anybody who crosses it, but it is coercion to cross the fence.
The only time property isn’t based on coercion is when individuals freely and explicitly agree to respect each other’s claims. If we both washed up on a desert island and we agreed to split the island down the middle and grant the other person exclusive rights over their half and whatever is grown or found on it, we would have created non-coercive property by contract. Other than that, property relies on coercion.
Yes, by definition, that is what property is, but that doesn’t imply that we should create or retain a certain set of property rights. Slavery was a property right. It was the right to exclusive use of a person’s labour. That doesn’t mean that it was either morally right to create that property right in the first place or morally wrong to stop enforcing it.
In essence, codified property rights are a system of dispute resolution. It’s a way to decide who gets to use something when more than one person wants to. The challenge is to work out the most just way of resolving those disputes. If you go down a mine, chip a piece of coal off the wall and come back up with it in your hand, I feel it is fairest that you get use that piece of coal as you see fit. However, if you decide you want to control a specific geographical area, I don’t think it is just to enforce that exclusive possession just because you’ve put a fence around it, or whatever else you claim justifies your exclusive possession. In that case, I think the loss of liberty that comes from preventing everybody else from walking from A to B through that area is too great to allow that to happen without consent from those being excluded. By the same token, I think the loss of liberty is too great to justify granting property rights over ideas, the air or anything else which isn’t a tangible good.
Johnathan Pearce wrote:
OK. Does that mean you are going to stop trying to rationalize privilege and justify injustice?
As you know, I said the exact opposite.
Right. Because YOU create the value of your labor, not the market or society.
But you do NOT create the value of your land.
You have merely realized that that fact proves your beliefs are false and evil, and so you have decided not to know it.
I have read millions of words on the subject, and have understood them. Your knowledge of economics, by contrast, appears to be limited to the absurd rants of feudal libertarian websites.
Oh, no it ain’t, sunshine:
“During the war I served in a Kentucky
regiment in the Federal army. When the war
broke out, my father owned sixty slaves.
I had not been back to my old Kentucky
home for years until a short time ago, when
I was met by one of my father’s old
negroes, who said to me: ‘Master George, you
say you set us free; but before God,
I’m worse off than when I belonged to your father.’
The planters, on the other hand, are contented
with the change. They say, ‘ How foolish it was in
us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper
now than when we owned the slaves.’ How do
they get it cheaper? Why, in the shape of rents
they take more of the labor of the negro than they
could under slavery, for then they were compelled
to return him sufficient food, clothing and medical
attendance to keep him well, and were
compelled by conscience and public opinion, as
well as by law, to keep him when he
could no longer work. Now their interest and
responsibility cease when they have
got all the work out of him they can.”
From a letter by George M. Jackson, St. Louis.
Dated August 15, 1885.
Reprinted in Social Problems, by Henry George.
Those who are deprived of the liberty to use what nature provided to all must labor for the benefit of landowners merely to have a space in which to exist.
Oh? Then why have you not answered the simple question: how is production aided by the landowner’s demand that others pay him for access to what government, the community and nature provide?
I’m waiting.
The same could have been — and was — claimed about ownership of slaves. But being legally entitled to be a parasite is not the same as not being a parasite.
Consider a bandit who controls the mountain pass between two countries. He charges tolls of — i.e., robs — the caravans that use the pass. A parasite, right?
So, how is the fundamental character of his “business” altered if he happens to have a legitimately acquired government-issued license to charge tolls of the caravans that use the pass? How can that piece of paper convert his toll-collection racket into a contribution to production?
And if instead of a license to charge tolls, what if he simply has a legitimately acquired deed to the land where the pass is located? How is he any less a parasite than when he was a simple bandit?
And now, of course, the H-bomb delivered to the foundations of your whole belief system: how is he any different from any other landowner charging others for use of what nature provided?
It is time for you to stop typing and start thinking, sunshine.
As owning land is entirely unproductive, it cannot honestly be called a line of business. It is simply idle exercise of a privilege of demanding something for nothing. As proved above.
How is the bandit “earning” the tolls he charges the caravans?
ROTFL!! The bandit also takes a risk, sunshine…
I see. So, in what you are no doubt pleased to call your “mind,” someone who acquires a taxi medallion or a sugar quota or a royal patent monopoly on the cinnamon trade or a license to charge tolls of caravans “legitimately” is thereby not a parasite?
Good luck squaring that circle.
No. But all apologists for privilege and injustice lie about what the champions of liberty and justice have plainly written. There has never been an exception to that law, and there never will be.
Perry de HAvilland wrote:
Perry does an excellent job of laying out how anti-geoists are just apologists for privilege and injustice with no meaningful facts or logic to offer, and who therefore resort to just makin’ $#!+ up about what geoists have plainly written.
Johnathan Pearce wrote:
Right. Whether they are Marxists or capitalists, anti-geoists refuse to know the fact that there is a fundamental difference between things that are produced by human labor and things that are already there, ready to use, with no help from anyone.
Right. Anti-geoists refuse to know the fact that those who create value have an a priori claim to it.
No, it eliminates the current system’s redistribution of wealth from the productive to idle landowners.
Because the poorer countries don’t create the value of land in the west. The governments and communities of Western countries do.
Right. All anti-geoist “arguments” are absurd. And fallacious. And dishonest. And your point would be….?
ROTFL!! You have stood nothing. In “1984,” George Orwell famously envisioned a future that consisted of “a boot stamping on a human face, forever.” Imagine it. The hard, heavy boot crashes down, crushes the nose; the face screams in agony as the blood sprays out. The eyes are smashed, the lips reduced to bloody pulp. Still the boot smashes into the face, over and over. It breaks the orbits of the eyes, the cheekbones, the jaw. The teeth are crushed and scattered, the flesh gradually reduced to tatters, and still the boot stamps, and the hideous torment just goes on and on and on, forever.
Those of us who understand land, privilege and injustice are condemned to witness something far worse than Orwell’s vision: the stupid, ignorant, lying defenders of privilege and injustice, smashing their own faces into the heel of the boot they seek to lick, forever.
Just imagine it. That is what I am condemned to watch all day, every day. I have no way to avoid knowing what apologists for injustice are doing to themselves, any more than you can avoid knowing what road-killed animals have done to themselves.
Making stuff up? I was quoting you, mate. You did an excellent job of laying out the Georgist position and you even gave us some insight into the meta-context of the people it is likely to appeal to.
If you think private property that is not held in fief from the state (and that actually is your position when you clip away the verbiage) is ‘injustice’, then you are the enemy of those who see liberty and severalty as inextricable.
I just pulled out the ‘money quote’ from what you wrote that best demonstrates that the Georgist are just another ilk of statist collectivists like all the rest. Any libertarian who gives you guys the time of day because he thinks the Georgist approach advances liberty, rather than state power, is a fool.
Perry, I would not worry about Roy; I think even Paul Lockett, by far the most intelligent and courteous of the Georgists on this board, finds him embarrassing.
Roy would not be able to understand the Paul Birch article, which crushes Georgism, and would no doubt claim that anyone who defends the rights of property is a lackey of evil privilege. I have said it before and I repeat it: these people are no better than Marxists, and in some ways, worse.
I mean, what is the point of trying to reason with a character who writes a passage like this:
Nurse!
Right, back to Mr Lockett:
Well indeed. Some people will always dispute the justice or otherwise of a particular bundle of property rights; and in a society one needs usually to have some kind of agreement about what is and what is not property, if only for the purposes of peace. I mean, if I do have exclusive use of property, and want to keep trespassers off, then I need to know what the boundaries are. That’s hardly very controversial.
Indeed.
That is a bit of a daft debating tactic; slavery is wicked because the thing owned is not a thing, it is a person with free will, etc. A defender of property rights obviously cannot defend the ownership of a person.
Here’s another contorted piece of reasoning:
You are playing a bit fast and loose with the use of the word coercion, just as you did in a previous comment with the word freedom; if I homestead a piece of land in a way that the customary laws – not necessarily state laws, remember – allow, then it is not an act of coercion of me to defend that land from invasion, any more than it is an act of coercion to prevent someone robbing me of my wallet if I can prove the wallet is mine.
One of the things that Roy will not let go of, probably because he’s too thick, is in this line:
But he ignores the point that has been endlessly repeated, that a speculator, for example, in land, or indeed anything else, can be accused of exactly the same sin for not “producing” anything tangible but ignores the fact that if owners of a resource, be it land, buildings or gold, cannot profit from rises in its price, then the price mechanism embedded in a market will not work to encourage the most productive use of scarce resources which have competing uses.
If land values skyrocket for genuine reasons (not because of a credit bubble), that may be caused, for example, by a flood of new people into an area. The rise in price will encourage landlords to sell that land to developers building news houses, or encourage buyers to buy land they hope to develop at a profit, etc. As I said – but Roy will no doubt brush it aside – while the supply of land is, in a trivial but obvious sense, fixed, the supply of sellable, available land is not. It is not totally inelastic, although the land market, even without the distortions created by governments, is not as quick-moving as some other markets.
And again, as Roy will no doubt ignore, some human attributes that can lead to someone earning a huge fortune can be said to be “undeserved” in the sense that they were inborn; also, some skills become valuable or become totally useless due to reasons not totally within the control of a person, so it seems arbitrary, from a moral point of view, not to tax such human abilities for the same reasons that Georgists give for the allegedly “undeserved” fruits of land. They should also remember that at some points in human society, land has been plentiful but humans have been scarce, relatively speaking. So an LVT would bend an economy out of shape.
For what it is worth, the Georgist position has not a chance of getting much traction in a country like the UK; the public, once they rumble it, won’t put up with it.
I agree with that. By codifying a system of property rights, we avoid the need to negotiate with every other person to agree limits, which saves everybody a lot of time and effort. However, just because we inherited a certain set of codified property rights, it doesn’t mean we have to retain all of those rights unaltered. There may be some, such as slavery, where we decide that the right is morally indefensible. There may be others (I believe copyright could fall into this category) where we decide that, although the right may have been defensible when it was introduced, advances in technology have increased the restriction of liberty it represents and rendered it unfit for the modern world.
But people did. They argued that, as they had obtained their property legitimately, they had a right to use it as they saw fit and the abolition of slavery was an unjust violation of those property rights.
I agree with you that refusing to recognise slavery was correct because it was wicked, but by the same token I think that refusing to recognise ownership of land would be correct, because I go along with Herbert Spencer’s belief that “to deprive others of their rights to the use of the earth, is to commit a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties.”
This is quite a high level point, but it’s one that I think is worth addressing.
In effect, what you’re saying is that an assumed social contract can render the initiation of force against somebody’s person non-coercive, even if the person who is being subjected to that force would not consent to the contract if given the choice. I don’t go along with that. The only time I can envisage the first use of force against another person being non-coercive is when there is an explicit contract between those two people, as per my desert island example.
Customary law is no less the will of the majority than state law and in effect what you are saying is that, if you believe a certain set of property rights is the most just and you can get enough people to agree with you, then using force against anybody who disagrees is non-coercive.
As another desert island example, imagine two people land on said island, so there is no established state law or custom for them to fall back on. Person A sees a nice banana tree and decides to put a fence around it, which, according to his value system, is enough to homestead the tree as his private property. Person B, with a different value system, might believe that merely putting up a fence around an item is not enough to allow someone to claim it as their private property and on that basis, he starts to climb over the fence to get a banana. Imagine at this point Person A sees Person B on the fence and forcibly pulls him back. Has B coerced A by trying to cross the fence, or has A coerced B by pulling him off the fence? I think a value-natural judgement would have to say that A coerced B because A used force against B’s person to make him comply with A’s values.
In any case, I think the homesteading argument with regard to location rights is little more than an academic exercise. I think homesteading with regard to physical objects has generally existed and been freely respected, but I don’t think permanent location rights have ever been created by any form of homesteading and certainly not in the UK.
I think that would depend on how it was done. If people saw it as yet another tax, I think you’re right. On the other hand, if it was operated along similar lines to the Alaska Permanent Fund, with the revenue ring-fenced and paid out as dividend, I think it could gain broad support.
Johnathan Pearce wrote:
ROTFL!! Of course, I have long ago demolished Birch’s cretinous anti-justice screed:
http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.econ/2007-02/msg00272.html
http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.econ/2007-02/msg00305.html
I have stated repeatedly that products of labor are rightly the property of their producers.
Which of us shares the Marxist view that land is no different from capital, hmmmm? The socialist pretends that capital is land in order to justify stealing capital; the capitalist pretends land is capital in order to justify stealing land.
Deleted: blogroach. banned. get lost
Roy, it is probably better that you stop embarrassing yourself or else you’ll discover what property really means when the editors decide to be rid of you.
Paul Lockett:
Well of course. In the past, wives were considered to be property, and for logical reasons, that changed. No argument on that from me at all. Logic and evidence shows that people have free will and therefore cannot and should not be owned. This is hardly a new doctrine, by the way. The emancipation of slavery was argued for by precisely the sort of individualist libertarians who argued for property rights. I am currently reading Brian Doherty’s excellent “Radicals For Capitalism” and he has interesting things to say on this (well worth getting a copy).
As a statement of fact, the point about the UK is correct, and of course this situation is getting steadily worse, due to planning laws, listing regulations and the like. Ownership, including the principle of exclusive use, the rights to privacy, is under constant assault. The existence of compulsory purchase, the fact that all UK land is ultimately owned by “The Crown”, proves that the UK in many ways is not a land where property rights, of the sort I favour, exists.
As a halfway house towards where I would like to go, I would like to see the use of compulsory purchase restricted; I would also like to see a rollback of planning and zoning laws.
The enduring problem I have with Georgism – at least in some of its forms – is that it presumes that because there are some ticklish issues such as initial appropriation of unowned land (which is true) – that the “community” (ie, a state or the whole Earth), has an apriori claim over these resources. This is just assumed.
One might as well say that if it can be shown that some of a person’s earning power is not down to his skill and effort, but luck, then state has an apriori claim over the “luck” element of that value. I think this is a fair point to make, not a debating tactic. Land is obviously necessary for life, but so are human skills in a modern economy with a complex division of labour.
The homesteading issue is too complex for me to go into now. Let’s have another go at this some other time.
By the way, I read Roy’s response to the Paul Birch critique, and it is not so much a reasoned argument as a tantrum that I would not expect from my 1-year godson.
I don’t think this aspect will ever be anything other than a matter of opinion. On the flip side, one of the major problems I have with landlordism (for want of a better term) is that it presumes that there should be some way to initially appropriate a location in order to create perpetual exclusive rights over it. That is also just assumed. There is no reason that the same assumption couldn’t be made about the atmosphere, but I’m not aware of too many people arguing that we should be paying somebody else to breathe.
In this respect, I consider value to be irrelevant, the only thing that matters is ownership. If you own yourself, then you own whatever value you can extract from yourself. The difference is simply that I think the concept of self-ownership is justified, but the concept of location ownership isn’t.
True, but the difference is that, whenever I use whatever skills I have, I don’t restrict your freedom to use your skills as you see fit. If I put up a fence, I restrict your freedom of movement. In the absence of an over-riding justification, I don’t think I should be able to do that without your consent.
Not really. I think I have made the point several times now that my conception of ownership relates only to physically measurable, containable and rationally enforceable boundaries. But for what it is worth, ownership of stuff that was once considered to be unownable is not so nutty as some think: pollution is, after all, in some ways a property rights violation issue (my lungs are my property, etc).
But I don’t think that distinction works, since ownership of one’s self without the ability to secure property rights in what one has produced and the territory in which one produces it are co-terminous.
This sort of argument that you just provided shows how the Georgists like to switch around; sometimes they argue as if this unearned value of the land is something that should be captured by the taxman, sometimes they just want to enforce what they think is a simple tax but don’t bother about the broader point, and sometimes, they seem to argue that the whole concept of landownership is wicked and that we should all be renters from the state (or some such other collective, which by definition, will be a monopolist, raising other issues of control and economic effiency).
You may support temporary landownership, I suppose, but it is clear that your version of it will be so hedged with restrictions that it is little more than a legal shell.
Sorry to sound grumpy, but this has gone on too long and I my patience is running out. I am not convinced of the Georgist position, even when it comes from more civilised folk like your good self.
Exactly right and the reverse is also true – some things which were previously considered ownable, such as people, are no longer considered ownable. That was one of my previous points; property rights aren’t an absolute, fixed set of rules and they can be changed from one generation to the next if they appear unjust.
It is worth noting that many of the approaches to pollution management are broadly Georgist. Atmospheric pollution pricing creates a market for the right to put waste products into the atmosphere, over which we have an equal right of use. It is a method for resolving the tragedy of the commons without depriving anybody of their equal right of use in the process, in much the same way that collecting the rental value of locations is.
I don’t see any reason why ownership of the goods one produces and ownership of the territory in which one produces them should be considered as one concept. Industrial and commercial activity often takes place in rented premises and there are plenty of tenant farmers, so in practice, the two are not inseparable.
I don’t think I have switched around; I’ve stuck to a consistent set of principles. You seem to be making that assertion based on the fact that there are other people who express similar opinions to mine, but hold them for different reasons. You could present the same argument about libertarians in general because some are deontological and some are consequentialist.
To be clear, I’m not speaking on behalf of a collective body, just myself.
Paul, I have thought a bit more about this issue, but I honestly don’t know if I have the energy to go through it all again, as several of my points are scattered about in different comments. It seems that we are either talking past each other, or repeating things, or both.
Just a couple of points: for sure, libertarians have different philosophical approaches: consequentialist, natural rights, etc. Some are religious, some agnostic, some atheistic; some take their economics from the classical liberals and the Austrians, some are more influenced the more mathematically-driven approach of Chicago, some do some combination of both. That’s all true and of course the sheer breadth of libertarian thought is well captured by Brian Doherty’s book, Radicals For Capitalism.
But I fear that this is cold comfort to a Georgist contemplating his own position. You see, in my book, the shifts that Georgists execute on the land issue are pretty serious, because their contradictions are serious, I say. On the one hand, some Georgists say that a LVT will have little impact on the economy and is not designed to radically reshape economic behaviour; others regard taxing land and not taxing anything else, like income, to be part of a broad economic reform process (such as the guy on this board who likes to bring up what he thinks has happened in Hong Kong). The two positions cannot both be right.
The other problem with your comments, and possibly some of my garbled attempts at response, is the idea of absolute property rights vs conditional ones. Some part of the argument seems to be that Georgists, and others, such as socialists, do not fundamentally accept that anyone can own anything without being hedged around by all kinds of collective rules and demands. One issue is that of establishing how property rights can arise from a state of nature: John Locke, Robert Nozick and others have wrestled with this issue. I think Nozick’s formulation works as well as any: that any act of appropriation is just and can be defended so long as it does not make anyone else worse off. So to take the extreme case of the man who claims ownership to all the water in a desert: he can, in theory, force anyone else to become his slaves unless they pay an extortionate sum for the water. In practice this is unlikely unless he can first find the water, then convince others to trade useful goods with him). But in most cases, appropriation of land/resources has not worsened the lives of others from what would, according to some parallel universe, be the case.
In any event, if property rights are tainted by their sometimes grubby origins (conquest, fraud, etc), at most, this would justify a sort of one-off LVT, levied on owners for only one year or two, to rectify the injustice caused by the taint, and then from that moment on the property rights are accepted as ok. To continuously tax land on the grounds that it is somehow, irredeemably tainted by its origins seems to be arbitrary.
I also stand by my argument that it is arbitrary to treat land as fundamentally different, as a resource, from human skills and abilities. For sure, there are obvious differences, but the supply of humans is not infinite; as Ian B said in a comment a few months ago, you cannot just grow humans in vats.
And if we can accept – for the sake of argument – that landownership has been acquired justly, then I fail to see how it is wrong for a legitimate owner to enjoy a rise in the value of what he is considered to be the just owner of. To say: “You are the rightful owner of this but the community demands that its increase in value is ours according to Formula X” strikes me as outrageous. As I said, if it is sometimes tricky to nail down individual property rights, it is also difficult to prove how a community (region, nation, etc) can do so, also.
I may have expressed myself poorly: what I would say, to back up Perry’s earlier point, is that several ownership of property is what counts, and landlords are a part of that.
This argument suffers from the same flaw as your previous one. You’re trying to imply that there is a problem with my position because somebody else has a different position and we can’t both be right! As I said previously, I’m speaking as an individual, not on behalf of a collective body.
That’s a ridiculous straw man, but it’s one I’ve already addressed.
I disagree with that. Excluding me from a location makes me demonstrably worse off.
I take more of a contractarian approach to political rights. I don’t think any restriction on the freedom to act can be fully justified unless you can say, with some confidence, that everybody would accept it if they knew that everybody else would be bound by the same restriction. I think you can do that for property rights in material objects, but I don’t think you can for exclusive rights over locations, unless they are accompanied by bilateral compensation.
I’m a little disappointed that you’ve decided to plough on with this straw man, when I’ve said on numerous occasions that as far as I’m concerned, the possibly tainted origins have nothing to do with it. Even if the origin weren’t tainted by conquest or fraud, it wouldn’t impact on the argument I’ve put forward.
If there are differences, then they are different.
But that would only be for the sake of argument, because in reality I don’t accept the legitimacy of absolute landownership in any circumstances. I responded to this point some time ago with the statement: “I said the owners of a thing should be entitled to the rise in value, but that I don’t think people who hold land should be viewed as its owners.”
I agree that we’ve probably reached the point where further discussion is likely to be pointless, as I seem to be responding to points I’ve already addressed at length numerous times.
Paul, there is no need to start irritable, since I thought I was being entirely civil. Oh well.
Well if a person is entitled to his property, he is entitled to enjoy a beneft in the rise in its value and not to have it stolen from him via an LVT or whatever. The idea that such value belongs to the community in some sense is, as far as I can tell, a rather major part of the Georgist position as I understand it. It may not be a part of yours, but the moral element – for want of a better term – that drives the Georgist animus against landlordism cannot be so easily swept aside by LVT’s defenders.
You say that there can never be an absolute right to property, which of course means that any ownership must either be constrained by agreed rules of fairness of some kind, or a utilitarian calculus of “greatest happiess for greatest number” variety. in which case, one needs to spell out what those principles are.
I am about as fed up with this as you seem to be. Leave it be.
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