Re: Nailing an Atheist Down

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
Mark M. wrote:


Appropriating in perpetuity natural resources is
hardly economic justice.


Really? Most people consider that when they buy and
pay for something, it is _theirs_, full stop. Only
you socialist idiots think that merely being born
gives you the right to confiscate with government
connivance property someone else bought with their
money, not yours. Clue: being born earns you
_nothing_. Get your property the way the rest of us
did, earn it.

Argument: If you pay for something, it's yours.

Rebuttal: People paid for slaves and were rightfully dispossessed.



More than that, "economic justice" is a meaningless
noise; it merely implies "I want what you earned".

You deny your own assertion.

The concept of "earnings" implies economic justice.




Bootstrap myth claptrap.


Calling it names doesn't mean you have provided any
argument to contradict the obvious evidence of
history.

Calling an assertion obvious proves nothing.

Where is _your_ "obvious evidence of
history" that land redistribution foments wealth
unassailable by burgeoning population growth?


My assertion is that low taxes on land create unproductive investment
opportunities that in turn have undesirable consequences for production
and distribution of wealth.

My assertion is that within a rentier free system, population growth
allows more minute division of labor which has the effect of increasing
production per labor unit input.



The
countries where it's been tried are today poorer
than ever.

False statement. First, full LVT has never been applied. Second,
everywhere it has been implemented in even a limited way, it has tended to increase general prosperity.




Malthus was debunked a hundred years ago.


Well, no, Mr. Innumerate, he wasn't then, and isn't
today. The math of power law growth of population
versus logistic curve growth of "available
renewable" / "total unrenewable harvested" resources
hasn't changed a bit.


Malthus' argument: Output per worker decreases with population growth
because resources become scarce.

This is total hogwash.

History has amply demonstrated the tendency for population growth to:

1. Reduce necessary footprint per capita.

2. Increase output per capital.


None of the technological improvements that have
increased resource harvesting efficiency or
renewable resource renewal rates have come close to
converting those numbers to power law growth rates,
the curves still intersect the population growth
curve.


The price of resources continues an upward spiral
independent of inflation, to demonstrate that the
population-growth-driven scarcity is very, very
real, right now today. Or haven't you tried to buy
gasoline recently?

Apparent shortages are symptoms of systemic failure, not nature's limits.


Once again, history, and now current events, prove
you very, very wrong, but you just call names
instead of facing facts.


There is in nature no reason for chronic poverty.


Really? Talk to the former iron ore, then taconite
ore miners of Duluth Minnesota. When a resource is
exhausted, it's exhausted. If that resource is all
the economy had for fueling its prosperity, it's out
of gas, no wishful handwaving by land tax idiots is
going to change the reality.

But people are not trees. They can move to where opportunity is
greater. Nothing is forcing people to hang around exhausted mineshafts
lamenting the good old days. In a system free of monopoly, workers more
to more lucrative occupations or locations. This kind of thing happens
all the time. Unless you want to blame present day poverty on the
demise of the woolly mammoth.




The problem is systemic and man-made.


You think humankind determined the amount of oil
under Saudi Arabia, or worldwide recoverable for
less energy than it provides? You are truly an
idiot.

I think the humans who "own" oil in the ground have tried to make their
assets as valuable as possible.


Wrong. Land is already taxed. Every present land
title was purchased on condition of payment of
taxes (which are subject to change). Increasing
the land portion of property tax or decreasing the
improvement portion of tax does not change the
fact that all land holding titles are conditional
rights, not absolute property.


Right, and land taxes are as iniquitous a tax as is
possible to impose, because such a tax has no
relation to income, thus no relation to ability to
pay.

A tax on land is merely a change in the final destination of land rent.
If what you say was true and rent has nothing to do with ability to pay,
than private land owners are working miracles by getting tenants to
pay rent.


Present land "owners" are legally defined as
tenants in fee simple.


Which _means_ "land owners".


"Fee simple" is a term
meaning "one time payment", used in contrast to "for
ongoing rental paid" or "subject to an existing
mortgage". Moreover, in that phrase "tenants" does
_not_ mean "renters" it means "property holders".

But you said fee simple means land owners first. Now you say property
holders. Which is it?

Here's the general definition of "tenant":

|- Tenant
|- One who holds or possesses property by any kind of
|- right.

http://www.agreementsetc.com/lease-glossary.php

That you don't even know what the words you use
_mean_ is very typical of True Believer
faux-economics fanatics.

Emphasize "any kind of right"; nothing to do with
promising to pay taxes, nothing to do with being
really there on sufference with rent-as-taxes owed
to some form of government.

Promises will get your trash packed by the sheriff. You must pay taxes
or you lose the title. The land is not really yours in the sense of
absolute property.

Without some form of government, land titles would not exist. What you
buy is a limited bundle of right to use a particular plot of land.
Unlike ownership of man-made things, land "ownership" is conditional.
The conditions include escheat, police power, eminent domain, and
taxation. You are not allowed as title holder to destroy the land.
Therefore it is not absolutely yours, is it?



You try to define the _accidents of history_ as if
THEY were laws of nature or of economics. _Those_
are the "problems which are systematic and man
made", not, say, the energy cost of accessing oil
versus its energy content as a fuel.

If land tax had happened never to been conceived by
humankind, where would your arguments derive that a
land tax is the only viable tax under the laws of
economics?

I said the best scheme yet devised. There have been others in different
periods of history that served better for that time. In our time the
best is LVT. When a superior idea comes up, so much the better.



From idiocy, is from where. You cannot
use accidents of history to justify your version of
how LAWS of economics _should_ work, you must do the
math to show it really _would_ work better as you
propose, and, lo and behold, California passes Prop
13, because land tax is fatally flawed by its
disconnect with income. And why? Because land, in
general, does _not_ produce income, merely rent.
Only human labor produces income.

What do you imagine rent is based on if not economic advantage from
location?
Rent for commercial locations is indeed driven by productive
differential. That is, a better location's rent approximates the
difference in income compared to a less advantageous location.


EVERY type of work is done on land and of course
the most expensive land is urban.


Totally false. Tell that to the folks working on the
International Space Station.

The economic definition of land is the entire physical universe
exclusive of man and man made things.

Land is not any kind of
_inevitable_ prerequisite for earning money,

Land is the necessary material and location for any labor.

and the
coincidence that most people happen to be sitting on
some solid part of a planet when they earn a living
doesn't make that coincidence, or the ground
underneath them, the source of their income.

All wealth (actual physical stuff made by labor) is the result of labor
action on land.
Their
own labor is the source of their income. That "all
income derives from land"

All income does not derive from land, but all wealth does.

idiocy is the bozoid
thinking of land tax fanatics, done in a complete
disconnect from reality.

Most people also happen to be sitting on top of a
pile of earthworm dung when they earn their living.
That doesn't make earthworms the source of all
wealth.

Most people also happen to be sitting on top of a
molten core of iron when they earn a living; that
doesn't make risking a *** flashed to steam the
source of all income.

Get a grip. "Being there" doesn't mean "derives all
income from there."

Labor is the active factor in wealth creation. Rent is the charge for
occupying land, but land is the passive factor.

You're talking, moron, to a retired sailor who
earned his living with no land in sight, much of his
life. Was the land slipping past 4000 meters below
the hull "the source of our income"? Only to a mind
trapped in a total disconnect from reality.

See economic definition of land above.

MM
.

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