Re: Economic `Armageddon' predicted

From: Jan Holland (txp2_at_wanadoo.nl)
Date: 12/18/04 

Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:59:32 +0100

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:40:08 GMT, royls@telus.net wrote:

>On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 18:30:21 +0100, Jan Holland <txp2@wanadoo.nl>
>wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 23:14:30 GMT, royls@telus.net wrote:
>>
>>>On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 02:03:45 GMT, "Chas" <chasna2@earthlink.net>
>>>wrote:
>>
>>>>If the
>>>>return were high enough or the incentive great enough, then in a practical
>>>>or empirical sense, new land could be "produced" and brought into
>>>>production, for example, Israel.
>>>
>>>No. Land can be improved. It can be drained, built up, irrigated,
>>>dried out, etc. But it cannot be produced by human labor, because any
>>>such alteration produced by human labor is an improvement to the
>>>pre-existing natural resource, not a new natural resource.
>>
>>But unusable land (unusable by present techniques) is worthless per
>>definition.
>
>Correct. In fact, even land that is usable but at most one person
>wants to use is worthless.

>>The moment you find a technique the land gets (some) value.
>
>Correct, _if_ more than one person then wants to use it.
Agree ...
allocation mechanism, money is a half-swap, etc ....

>>Is that value born from
>>the new technique with the labour,etc required or
>>from the nature of being "land" ?
>
>All land _value_ is the product of labor.

and/or of labor saved ?

>Just not the (private) owner's.
JEP

>Because we cannot say exactly who creates how much of land's value
>(and much was created by people long dead), and there is absolutely no
>doubt that the number of people who contribute is comparable to the
>total number of people in society, and likewise that much of the
>relevant labor is performed at government's behest and paid for by
>taxes, we say that the _value_ (i.e., capitalized rent) of land is
>"publicly," not "privately" created, while the land itself is of
>course not created either publicly or privately, but by natural
>processes.

I still have a problem with the term "public"

When I ask Google about "public finance" I get 24 million hits about
financing _government_ (and not financing national income/production)

So because we pay taxes and let government make the roads,
does not deny that the national power (?) let the roads be created
(otherwise big landowners/developers/corporations would let
them make to realize that landvalue)

Probably we agree basically ... 

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