Re: Don't Forget Mises -- and Dump the Third Way!

royls_at_telus.net
Date: 08/31/04 

Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:17:28 GMT

On 31 Aug 2004 03:40:54 -0700, nini_pad@yahoo.com (michael price)
wrote:

>royls@telus.net wrote in message news:<412e3cca.9637554@news.telus.net>...
>> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:29:40 -0700, "Michael Price"
>> <nini_pad@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> >"Ron Allen" <rallen2@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
>> >news:eYOWc.18310$cx.15800@bignews4.bellsouth.net...
>> >> Brandon Berg wrote:
>> >> > In other words, I don't mind paying the
>> >> > associated costs. It's the disassociated costs
>> >> > that I find intolerable. Again, the fact that
>> >> > the government does provide some useful services
>> >> > does not give it license to seize and
>> >> > redistribute wealth as it sees fit.
>> >>
>> >> Albert wrote:
>> >> > Redistribution is unnecessary when the initial
>> >> > distribution is fair.
>> >>
>> >> Ron Allen answers:
>> >> In my opinion, the initial distribution of wealth
>> >> is itself a redistribution scheme, because those
>> >> who produce wealth are not the one's the wealth is
>> >> being distributed to.
>> >
>> > Then you should be able to show an instance of people actually taking the
>> >wealth away, and you can't.
>>
>> I certainly can: landowners demand wealth from producers in return for
>> access to what the producers would have had access to for free were it
>> not for the landowners.
>
> Absolute rot,

It is fact.

>nobody has the right to use whatever natural resources
>they want to without payment.

Access to is not the same as right to use.

People can obtain the _right_ to use natural resources by compensating
the community for the lost opportunity. But everyone naturally has
access to all natural resources, unless they are forcibly denied it.

>Even if you are a dedicated Georgist
>the user of natural resources still has to pay.

The community always controls access to local resources as a matter of
fact. In a Georgist community, that control is exercised in the
community's interest, making the community in effect the landowner
that exacts payment from resource users (producers and consumers
both). In the current system that control is exercised, at taxpayer
expense, for the unearned benefit of private landowners who exact the
payments. The user in a Georgist community has to pay the community
that gives the resource its value, not a parasite who contributes
nothing. But in both cases access would be free if not for the
landowner, public or private.

>> And then government takes wealth from the producers and spends it
>> in ways that make the land more desirable, so the productive have
>> to pay the landowners even more for doing nothing.
>
> That's not what the government generally does.

Yes, of course it is, at least the reasonably honest and competent
governments of democratic countries. There are exceptions, like the
War on Drugs and foreign military adventures, but they are few and
generally unimportant. However, you are correct in that extremely
corrupt and tyrannical governments may not make the land within their
borders more desirable than land where there is no government, but
that is a rare case indeed. Is land in North Korea, Myanmar or
Zimbabwe really worth less than land in the anarchic areas of Somalia,
Western Sahara, etc.? I don't know. It's certainly worth very little
in all those places.
 
>> >> Instead, the producers do all the producing, and the proprietors
>> >> do the all the appropriating.
>> >
>> > Proprietors are producers Ron, there is such a thing as indirect
>> >production.
>>
>> Some proprietors are producers. Some do nothing.
>
> All proprietors are producers

Like your other claims, that is just flat false.

>because contributing capital to production
>is prodcutive

Land and other natural resources are not capital in the economic
sense, and are not contributed by the proprietor because they would
have been there, just the same, even had neither the proprietor nor
any previous proprietor ever existed.

Claims such as money, stocks, and debt instruments are also not
capital; and in any case, owning capital is not the same as
contributing capital, especially if the capital is already
productively employed when the proprietor comes into ownership of it:
that capital has already been contributed, with no help from the new
owner.

>and to do that you need someone who owns capital.

Normally, that would be the capital's producer or someone who paid him
for producing it. Does a thief or landowner who got the capital in
return for no contribution also count as a "productive proprietor" in
your world?

-- Roy L