Re: von Mises Institute on Henry George
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Date: 08/23/04
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Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 20:42:17 GMT
On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 09:47:35 GMT, Peter Lawrence
<peterl@netlink.com.au> wrote:
>sinister wrote:
>.
>> You're also avoiding one Georgist point: you'd leave intact a large,
>> burdensome form of taxation: Ricardian rent paid to landlords for value
>> they didn't create. Sure, the funds aren't remitted directly to the
>> government, but they *are* remitted to an agent whose (unjust) power to levy
>> a toll is granted by the government.
>
>That formulation is building in precisely two of the points that are disputed
>(not always explicitly):-
>
>- that there was no "creation" of rent, at least in some understandings of
>the word "create";
But what "understandings"? A long time ago, there was no economic
rent. Now there is. Something must have created it, and we can see
pretty clearly, if we are willing, what that something was, at least
in the case of the economic rents of natural resources: development of
the physical, intellectual, political, legal, social, financial,
commercial, industrial and technological infrastructure that makes
people willing to pay for the opportunity to use those natural
resources. These infrastructures are collective products of
government and society, including the whole heritage of human culture,
from which individual contributions cannot possibly be separated.
Rents arising from other mechanisms, such as government restrictions
on trade, are even more clearly the creations of government and the
community, not the private rent collectors.
>- property rights proceed from the government, that allowing them is actually
>the government conferring them rather than confirming them (i.e., that the
>government is acting identically by not restraining them as it would be by
>actively conferring them - that land ownership needs government intervention
>as much as, say, intellectual property does, that it is not just a
>convenience and customary practice).
Correction: the point potentially in dispute is that property rights
_in_land_and_other_natural_resources_ proceed from the government.
Property rights in the physical products of labor are clearly founded
on the material fact of their origin in their creators' hands, which
are entirely different from the material facts underlying property
rights in what never was and never can be produced by labor.
Although property rights are all secured by government, that does not
mean they all proceed from the same source, or are morally or
economically equivalent. To attempt to treat them as such in moral or
economic discourse is no more defensible than for a geologist to treat
all minerals as equivalent just because they all come from the earth.
-- Roy L
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