Re: The Foundation of Understanding

royls_at_telus.net
Date: 07/05/04 

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 17:20:07 GMT

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 12:36:04 -0400, Les Cargill
<lcargill@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>To review - George wishes to adjust definitions of property to
>create some means of recovery of Ricardian land rent by the
>"society" itself.
>
>This leads immediately to three rather profound problems:
>
>1) Present land rent systems seem to conform to values, preferences
>and expectation of the population as it is.

So did slavery. The present land rent system effectively gives
landowners part ownership of millions of part-time slaves called
"taxpayers."

>Changing this requires
>positing the sort of "property rents are slavery" equivalenences
>we've seen here. Even if it's true, the Georgists have a mighty job
>getting the message out and convincing people. And it's a difficult
>message.

Yes, we've seen here that very few people are intelligent enough to
understand the issue, even if they were willing to understand it. The
Catch-22 is that anyone smart enough to understand the issue is almost
certainly also smart enough to have already bought land, and thus have
a vested interest in continuing the injustice.

>2) The implementation implies some method of distributing the
>land rent taxes that does not encounter the sort of corruption
>we've seen with "redistributionist" schemes.

The current land rent system _is_ a corrupt redistributionist scheme.

>It would appear that examples exist where this has beeen done
>in non-European cultures. The problem there is convincing us that
>this'll work. Hong Kong and Singapore are hardly templates for
>the world. They might, however, be templates for New York City.

There are lots of examples other than Singapore and HK. It has worked
everywhere it's been tried.

>3) There has been no work done to establish analytically that
>some greater good is not served by this "lesser evil".

One is not required to prove a negative. Prove that the abolition of
slavery will not cause a giant asteroid to obliterate life on earth
100 years from now. Or 200 years. Or...

>IOW,
>humans being what they are, how can we assert confidently
>that land rents do not support *somehow* the better part
>of human nature.

All the evidence is to the contrary. Big landowners are archetypal
villains in most cultures for a reason.

>It is easy to assume production is somehow
>"better" than consumption, but with automation being what
>it is, production will be a vanishingly problematic thing.

Nope. To someone 100 years ago, it already is, but not to us. Human
desires are unlimited, and the problem of scarcity will never be
solved while human beings are as they are. The problem of production
will not be solved by technology increasing production, but by
technology changing human nature.

>This last one's kind of vague, and I haven't worded it very
>well. It's vaguely "things are as they are for a reason. What
>are the reasons?"

Same argument would have kept slavery.

-- Roy L

Relevant Pages

  • Re: von Mises Institute on Henry George
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  • Re: The Foundation of Understanding
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  • Re: Land, Labour and Capital Taxation....
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  • Re: Land, Labour and Capital Taxation....
    ... >> reduce incentives in these productive activities. ... > by uncaptured land rent, but I'm not really sure what ... > is not an argument which uses man's capacity for reason ... Didn't Austrian economist Murray Rothbard refute the LVT? ...
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  • Re: The Foundation of Understanding
    ... > 1) Present land rent systems seem to conform to values, ... > of human nature. ... production will be a vanishingly problematic thing. ... nothing to do with whether production is better than consumption. ...
    (sci.econ)
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