Re: Relative Appropriation of Economic Rents

On 1 Feb 2007 10:43:20 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitslayer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jan 28, 9:08 pm, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 25 Jan 2007 16:50:09 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jan 25, 3:02 am, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 24 Jan 2007 16:04:13 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jan 24, 4:10 pm, r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 23 Jan 2007 22:26:46 -0800, "Beal" <bealrabbitsla...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jan 23, 6:17 pm, "Mark M." <m...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Beal wrote:

On Jan 23, 5:08 pm, "Mark M." <m...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Beal wrote:

r...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:31:55 -0500, S. Doo <n...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What do you think "public domain" means, genius?

It means not privately owned. As I said above, you are obviously
claiming that anything not privately owned is communally owned.

No, it means publically owned.

No, it does not. You are just lying again. Anything that is in the
public domain is not owned by anyone.

If, (gasp) someone happens to disagree on this point, then to
them, the Georgists are the thieves, not the land owners.

Right. Just as those who believed in slavery considered those who
freed slaves to be thieves.

Exactly. It is a matter of opinion...just as those who owned farms in
Russia considered Stalin to be a thief. See how that works?

People who _didn't_ own farms in Russia _also_ considered Stalin to be
a thief.

See how _that_ works?

Er, ok. Anyway, the point is that it all depends on whether you
believe in private ownership or public ownership of the asset in
question.

You again confirm that you consider everything either privately or
publicly owned.

For certain assets, yes. Not all.

All assets are owned, by definition. What is not owned is not an
asset, by definition. You are again trying to divert attention from
the fact that you have been comprehensively refuted.

Or would you care to specify exactly what you think the right to life
consists of?

Is there something about "the right not to be kill" that confused
you? How the hell else can I answer that question, ya big fat moron?

Perhaps by relying heavily on the more informative insights of your
moral and intellectual betters?

For some people, the right to life means outlawing abortions. For
environmentalists it might mean the right to ban industrial activity
that creates toxic pollution. For me, it means "the fucking right to
not be fucking killed."

OK, then did the release of poisonous gas by a chemical factory at
Bhopal violate anyone's right to life?

Suppose you have claimed ownership of a spring in the desert. A man
stumbles into "your" oasis dying of thirst. You do not let him drink
any of "your" water unless he agrees to be your servant for life in
return for it. Two scenarios might follow:

1. He tries to drink without agreeing to your terms, you assert your
omnipotent property rights, and in the ensuing struggle he quickly
overheats and dies of heat stroke.

2. He declines your offer of "voluntary" trade to mutual advantage and
waits for nightfall to go look for water elsewhere, but soon dies of
thirst.

Was his right to life violated in either case? Why or why not?

What would that right mean, if it did not include a right to
access and use the natural resources needed to sustain one's life,
such as air to breathe, water to drink, and land from which to obtain
one's food?

So because good is a necessity of life, we have a right to own land so
that we can grow food on it?

You already know I do not claim there is any right to own land. Only
to use it.

Own, access, the sentiment is the same.

No, it is not. Ownership includes not only the right to use but the
right to deprive others of use, the right to benefit from others' use,
and the right permanently to transfer. You have a right to use a
public beach. You don't have a right to exclude others from using it.
That is the difference between a public beach and a private beach.

_GET_IT_?

We have a right to access
land so that we can grow food on it, even though 98% of the population
doesn't grow a damned thing? That makes no sense.

It makes as much sense as having a right to breathe any part of the
atmosphere, even though one will only breathe far less than 1% of it
in a lifetime.

What about clothing? Do I have the
right, by virtue of my birth, to walk out to a racher's field and sheer
a few of his sheep so that I can make my clothing so that I don't
freeze?

His sheep are not natural resources.

So they are made out of clay or something?

No. They are the result of many people's labor of domesticating wild
sheep, feeding them, protecting them from predators, selectively
breeding them, etc. over many centuries.

His sheep represent a
mixture of gifts from nature as well as labor and capital. But in
either case, if your right to eat does not override his right to the
product of his labor, then why does it override my right to own land?

Because the land is not a product of your or anyone else's labor; if
you had never existed, the land would still be there, available to
use. If the sheep owner and all the previous sheep owners had not
existed, OTOH, those sheep would not be there. Owning natural
resources deprives others of what they would otherwise have been at
liberty to use. Ownership of products of labor does not deprive
anyone of anything they would otherwise have been at liberty to use,
because the products would not have existed without their producers'
efforts.

But of course, you already knew all that. You just have to find a way
to make yourself not know it, in order to preserve your false beliefs.
Good luck!

The answer? Land, according to you, should be communally owned.

No. You are simply lying again. The community does not rightly own
it, but only administers its possession and use to secure and
reconcile everyone's equal, competing rights to use it.

I disagree and in the end, it all comes down to a big, fat value
judgement.

Right. Do you value freedom, justice and truth, or slavery, privilege
and lies?

Oh, and btw, when you were born, did your family by any chance already
happen to own quite a bit of land....?

No.

Then you are in the category of slaves who kiss their fetters and
admire their welts.

And judging by the fact that you post 18 hours a day, you are in the
category of losers who cannot hold down a job but has the time to
bitch about social injusticed on message boards and Usenet all day.

See Shaw's quote about the unreasonable man.

In fact, I am self-employed, and make a high enough hourly income to
be able to do this whenever I feel I can stomach the unending proofs
of human greed and dishonesty that it invariably brings to my notice.

And isn't it a neat trick that the victims of injustice are kept too
busy slaving for the unearned profit of its beneficiaries ever to have
the time or energy to understand how they have been enslaved, let
alone to bitch about it?

_You_
certainly have not challenged the Georgist assumptions about human
rights. You have simply bleated that you don't like the implications
of those assumptions in combination with certain self-evident and
indisputable facts of objective reality.

That we have an inalienable right to communal ownership of land is not
self-evident.

Indeed. Which is why Georgists do not claim we do

That is exactly what Georgists claim. They just try to pretend
differently.

No, you just lie about what Georgists say. You have never offered any
evidence that Georgists advocate communal ownership of land, other
than your redefinition of "communal ownership" to cover anything other
than pure private ownership with no government regulation.

I have never defined communal ownership as the absence of
private-ownership. You have made that up on your own. If the
government does not act as an owner, determining who gets what rights
to it, getting paid for it, etc.. then the government (thus community)
does not really own it.

But government does that _now_, so your claim that Georgism is any
more communal ownership than the current system is just so much hot
air.

Some things are just unownable.

Land isn't one of them.

Why not?

Blank out.

Blank stare. Why is it not unownable? Because it is owned right
now. You know, objective facts and ***?

Mostly the latter when you are involved....

If someone claims that
something is unownable, that means it is impossible for it to be
owned. The fact is that it is indeed owned. Quite a lot of it is
owned by quite a lot of people. Therefore, it is ownable.

??? You are mistaking the fact of ownability for its justification.
By that "logic," people were ownable when slavery was legal, and the
alphabet would be ownable if some fool at the patent office issued a
patent on it. You can't justify ownership of land, slaves, or
anything else merely by pointing out that they are in fact owned.

Try again. It might help you to think about why governments have
issued private land titles (though historically, they have by no means
existed in all societies), but not private titles to the atmosphere,
the alphabet, or the oceans.

"Could you cite his exact words to that effect, please?"

I did in my last post, but here is his full post:
"No, I don't believe in communal or collective ownership rights to all
land. I believe in individual right to USE all land, bounded by
others' right to USE all land. Each person born on this planet has an
inalienable right to USE the earth. This is not a right to own the
earth. Ownership is the right of exclusion. You can own something and
never use it. The right to the earth is the right of USE. There are
many examples of natural resource USE without OWNERSHIP. Each of us
has the right to breath the atmosphere. Nobody has the right, either
individually or collectively, to exclusive ownership of the atmosphere.
Should somebody operate a machine that consumes oxygen on a such scale
that global levels of oxygen drop dangerously, the crime would not be
theft of collective property but theft of natural opportunity to
individually USE air."

"No, you also know it is true, because there is no way land can become
private property in the first place except by being forcibly
appropriated from all who would otherwise be at liberty to use it."

How can it be appropriated from them if they didn't own it in the first
place?

By forcibly depriving them of their rights to use it.

We weren't discussing whether their rights were appropriated.

I know. That might be why I didn't claim they were. I stated the
fact that the _land_ was appropriated from all who would otherwise
have been at liberty to use it by forcibly depriving them of their
_rights_ to use it. What part of that was too subtle and complex for
you to understand?

We were
discussing whether the LAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNND was appropriated. Did
you see that?

Yes, and that is why I just explained it to you. And you predictably
refused to understand it, and pretended I said soemthing else.

The tennis ball just sailed past your head.

Yes, and landed out of bounds.

I explained exactly what appropriation of land that was never before
owned meant: depriving those who would otherwise have been at liberty
to use it of their rights to use it.

Now you can either address that, or be known for just another lying
anti-LVT moron.

Game.

Set.

Match.

It's over. You lose.

?? ROTFL!!!

No, stupid. You do. Your clumsy volley went wild, just like all your
previous efforts. You have lost game, set and match 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.

Now you are going to try and redefine "appropriation."

No, stupid, lying filth, I am going to quote you the relevant
definitions from Webster's New Universal Unabridged:

"v.t.: 4. to take to or for oneself; to take possession of. 5. to
take without consent; seize; expropriate."

You will notice that nowhere in those definitions is there anything
about only being able to appropriate things that are already owned by
someone else, and that both of them clearly describe the act of taking
unowned land as private property.

-- Roy L
.

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