Re: A Question about LVT
- From: royls@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 15:03:06 GMT
On Sun, 14 May 2006 22:46:27 GMT, Michael Scheltgen
<mjs818@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I was discussing these issues with a friend and it seems to me
that any system like this would be killed by the wasteful slobs
living in the sprawl because it would make their mortgage X
times or more the actual property value at the stroke of a pen.
Dr. Michael Hudson has explored this problem in some depth. See his
article in the current issue of Harper's magazine. That the US
financial system has essentially been built on private appropriation
of publicly created land rent is definitely a major obstacle to public
recovery of that rent.
In the last analysis, though, there is little difference between
lenders exposing themselves to a risk that justice will be done by
lending to land buyers and by lending to blood-soaked Third World
dictators. In both cases, those lenders deserve to lose all their
money, and it is not up to society -- much less their victims -- to
rescue them from their folly and the consequences of their own evil
actions.
Meanwhile, the solution for those mortgage debtors is very simple:
stop counting on being able to pocket unearned wealth, and sell that
land before the LVT is implemented. By the time LVT is implemented,
only those who consciously choose to try to profit from the violation
of others' rights will own any land; and they will simply deserve to
lose their investments for being so evil.
In the U.S.A., they would probably call it "unamerican". Those
stakeholders with vast quantities of valuable idle land would
give the same answer Bill Gates likes to give when competitors
want to get a clean description of how to interface with Windows
over the network: "That would be a massive and unfair transfer
of wealth which amounts to an expropriation of private property".
And the answer is the same one that should be given to Gates: "What
you call 'private property' is in fact nothing more than a massive and
unfair transfer of wealth to _you_, which amounts to private
appropriation of publicly created value."
How do you sell something like this -- the same way they sold
slavery abolishment in the southern United States?
Now as then: only if the beneficiaries of evil refuse to give it up.
Or is there
a way to implement some of these ideas slowly and nonviolently?
It has been done, but not very often. In the contemporary USA, the
low standard of public education makes it almost impossible for most
people even to understand the issue accurately. Of those few who are
intellectually capable of understanding it, very few have the courage
to abandon the comfortable beliefs of a lifetime. They simply choose
not to know any facts that threaten their belief systems. And of the
tiny minority that is both able and willing to understand the massive,
systematic, insitutionalized injustice of private appropriation of
land rent, most are doing all they can to profit by it, have made
themselves financially dependent on it, and don't want anything to
interfere with its continuation.
-- Roy L
.
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- A Question about LVT
- From: Michael Scheltgen
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