"Libertarians usually base property claims on creation; I made it so it is mine. Land was not, with rare exceptions, created by human effort."
Some libertarians (and Georgists) believe that, but this position isn't valid and therefore isn't held by consistent libertarians.
Humans haven't figured out, at least yet, how to create anything from nothing, we can only rearrange existing matter. So in order to own my creation, I must first own the non-created raw materials my creation is made from.
Libertarians believe that the first user or firstcomer has the better claim to a rivalrous resource than the latecomer, and therefore has the right to exclude the latecomers - the firstcomer owns it. He owns it not because he created it, but because he was there first - he used it first.
So Georgist's position falls apart - he can't justify his tax on the land I cleaned and I've been using before he came into picture and declared he want his cut. While if he believes he only owns the things he created and the things produced by nature can't be owned, then he owns nothing at all.
I regard any claim that starts "Libertarians believe" as dubious, and this one as especially dubious. Your "firstcomer can claim" raises the obvious problem of how much he can claim. Can the first person to discover Antarctica (no inconvenient Amerinds with a prior claim) claim the whole continent? If I discover a gold vein do I only own as much as I have seen? All of the vein, which may run through the rock for twenty miles? If I discover one end of the vein and you discover the other end, which of us owns what?
Locke's approach to the problem at least limited the claim to the amount of land you could mix your labor with.
Most cases are clear - if I cleaned a piece of land, fenced it, and built a house on it and planted a garden, there's no ambiguity, because I can clearly provide evidence to any reasonable person where are the borders of the land where I was first. If I walked across a forest once, or found a continent, and shouted into the wind "it's all mine", there's no ambiguity either - I don't have any link to the land on the other side of the continent, while someone who actually came there later and started using it does. While edge cases in between have to be resolved by negotiation irrespective of what rule one uses to determine legitimate ownership.
The problem with Locke's approach is that mixing resources with your labor isn't necessary, nor sufficient to establish ownership. This Locke's mistake applied correctly and consistently led to creation of Marxist labor theory of value, their idea of stolen value by employers from employees, and to flawed justification of intellectual property (I own the idea, because I created it).
In order for the product of my work to be owned by me, I have to own the raw materials in the first place before the work even starts. If I don't own the raw materials and work at a Ford factory for example, Ford owns what I create (even if Marxists disagree) because Ford owned the raw materials I was working with. If I create a sculpture from a rock someone else owns without his consent, I'm not only not the owner of it, I owe damages to the owner. So one has to have some theory of property to determine who and why is an owner of raw rivalrous things that more than one person wants to use in incompatible ways before the mixing of labor even starts. If A wants to use the same stick to make a spear, and B wants to use it to make a bow, in order to avoid fighting they have to come up with a rule how to decide who has the right to exclude the other. And the only universalizable rule I can think of - the rule that can become a universal norm - is "whoever got it first has the right to exclude the one who got it later".
A consistent position is that *if* society/government allows you to exclusively use some resources indefinitely, it ought to also allow you to make them into a more valuable form, and use it in that form indefinitely, and keep the extra value. So if you turn $10 worth of raw materials into a tool worth $1000, you can keep the extra $990 of value. But it's consistent with this to argue that the government should require you to first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials, in order to possess (and, optionally, transform) them, rather than let you take them for free on account of being the firstcomer. And if you've paid $10 for the raw materials, you do fully own whatever you turn them into.
Now, some natural resources are so abundant that their market value is 0; for example, air, carbon-dioxide and moisture in air (which plants turn into valuable forms) and, in some locations, water. In these cases, there is a good reason, even for a Georgist, to declare you to indefinitely own whatever you turn them into. This is also the reason that, even under Georgism, you would only have to pay tax on land itself, but you'd fully own the plants you grow on it. Even when the value of the natural resources going into a product is non-zero but negligible compared to the value of the product, there may be a good reason to neglect them for simplicity and declare you to own the product without charging you for them. But that doesn't mean there is a good justification to let people take highly valuable, rivalrious natural resources for free.
"A consistent position is that *if* society/government allows you to exclusively use some resources indefinitely"
But that begs the question - you have to prove first that "society" and "government" (whoever they are) have a better claim to the land I'm already using. In order to do that, you have to articulate the principle you are using to determine legitimate ownership of unowned rivalrous resources, and you haven't done that.
At some point we reach irreducible, terminal principles we can't further justify.
We can also believe that only certain "ought"s are determined by hard-and-fast principles; in other areas we just do whatever feels fair, without trying to rely on unambiguous principles, or just do whatever is in our interests. Something like that is my position here: I have a strong belief that if the government doesn't punish someone for using some resources in some way, it ought to also not punish one for using them in a different way, and keeping the extra value (as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else relative to using them in the former, legal way). But I don't have a strong position on how natural resources ought to be allocated in the first place, I generally feel it's fairer if a representative government decides it than if a random guy does (albeit, as I discussed elsewhere in this thread, as a voter I personally mostly support leaving it in the hands of the people who've come to own it in the conventional ways).
So you believe the latecomer has a better claim to a rivalrous disputed resource than the firstcomer? It has to be one or the other. If it's the latecomer, the firstcomer who was robbed of the resource he was already using now becomes the latecomer and can do the same, and so on ad infinitum, so this option solves nothing.
I think there is serious question of how to still encourage the search for new land. It's not clear that classic Georgist rules allow for that, I could see a world where people might be granted reduced tax state for a period of time as a reward for the discovery, but similar to IP, economics doesn't really offer us a good answer to how long that time should be.
It's not one or the other. Another view is that both have equal claims, so the firstcomer must compensate the eventual future latecomers for excluding them.
In the case of just two potential users, it could mean the firstcomer paying *half* of the value of the natural resource to the latecomer, at which point they are even.
In practice, in a society with millions of members, it can typically mean that the firstcomer buys or leases the resource from the government based on its full value, which redistributes the proceeds to the people (including the firstcomer and the potential latecomers) in the form of services or, hypothetically, cash. And it can arguably mean that if the firstcomer initially got the resource without paying for it, its value should be clawed back via a tax, and once again distributed to the people (of which, again, a small part would go back to the firstcomer, but in a large society most would go to others).
It is not clear how what is described is different. If the firstcomer refuses to pay, the latecomers can exclude, so they are the owners. Or if they can't, the firstcomer is the owner.
The further description makes it sound like even if this works, that makes smaller societies advantageous, perhaps to the point where they have only one member who need pay no tax. Then the question of what different communities owe each other arises, but is not settled. The point for the Georgists is that tax would be owed to everyone. One could argue this might be better in some consequentialist sense, but why is it more just? How did everyone establish their just claim to be paid tribute?
If the firstcomer refuses to pay, the latecomers can exclude; but the firstcomer only has to pay the latecomers' share (albeit in practice that's almost the whole value in a large society). Or the firstcomer pays whatever the government tells him he has to pay in order to use the land, if he doesn't pay the government takes it away and sells/lends/hands-with-a-tax-expectation to someone else; and if he disapproves, he can vote for a different party in the next election.
Giedrius said "this option solves nothing". I guess because people would repeatedly take the property back from each other, and nothing would get done. I claim that wouldn't happen; the government would set a tax, people would pay, the government would (ideally, in one model) distribute the proceeds equally to the people.
As for why it's just (or, rather, why one may consider it just—I'm describing views I consider reasonable and self-consistent, not ones I fully endorse): again, at some point one has to rely on feelings, intuitions, terminal values one can't further justify perfectly logically from other values. Or, alternatively, we can follow our interests, and try to negotiate and advocate for a form of governance that's in our interests, and (in a democracy) vote for whichever party's policies are in our interests.
But if everyone owns everything and you take this claim seriously, doing anything is impossible - you can't use what's not yours without the permission of the owner. And it's impossible to get permission of 8 billion people. And even if I ignored this unsolvable practical problem, it still doesn't explain why someone who transformed something from the state of nature into something useful has equal claim to it as someone who has nothing to do with it.
Involving the government doesn't help either - the bureaucrat who is demanding money from me is also a latecomer.
I didn't say everything was co-owned by everyone in a way that you needed everyone's individual permission. I said that (in one view) natural resources are considered to be initially owned by society, as represented by an (ideally popularly elected) government, meaning that you can use it with the permission of the government.
Also, I *can*, in some circumstances, use things without the permission of the owner. You can argue that I morally *may* not use them—but, again, I don't use this sort of hard-and-fast, principled, independent-of-society's-decisions moral reasoning to ownership of natural resources. It could be said that I have sort of a might-makes-right view when it comes to natural resources; but not really, as I have a preference for having the decisions made by a representative government that takes people's interests into account roughly equally over having them made by a tyrant, or by a shootout between the people who want the land.
While I agree with your comment above that "the firstcomer must compensate the eventual future latecomers for excluding them", this has different implications depending on what, exactly, this compensation consists in. I can think of three possibilities: (1) an amount that just leaves latecomers no worse off than if they had not been excluded—my preference; (2) the amount that would convince the latecomers not to trespass—the market price, typically higher than the first; (3) the amount that would be determined by a hypothetical democratic government—which may differ from the first two, and your preference, if I understand you correctly. My point right now is that only the third is consistent with (some sort of) ownership by society. But, to repeat one of the original problems, if society did not make the land (and more than any individual did), then why suppose that society owns it in any sense? Does humanity already own Mars?
The Georgist position is consistent: you don’t own land but you can lease it from the rest of humanity. Then you have a claim to the wealth resulting from that land.
You're presupposing, without evidence or argument, that "the rest of humanity" (whoever they are) have a better claim to the land I'm using than I - that they and not I own it. You have to provide an argument why do you believe that's true.
The libertarian argument is “finder’s keepers”. My argument is that what no one made, everyone owns.
It really doesn’t matter because morality is praxis. The praxis for finders keepers is immense inequality forever. The praxis for ownership deriving from consent is a world both richer and more equal.
>My argument is that what no one made, everyone owns. ... The praxis for ownership deriving from consent is a world both richer and more equal.
I presume the second part here is meant to be a justification for the first part. But /how/ did everyone get to own what was not made? Does everyone already own Mars? And, to paraphrase Locke, I have to get the consent of /everyone/ before I can use some plot of land? Seems a tad impractical.
Those are conclusions, not arguments. Why should anyone accept either? Consequentialism? Is there evidence that the Georgist approach would actually be superior? Is everyone entitled to make social changes they hope would improve society, including ones that contradict someone else's reforms?
1. Give me an example of anything you made that wasn't rearrangement of raw materials.
2. Explain how does "everyone owns everything" work in practice and provide a reason why it is true. Here's an example - if I cleaned an unused piece of land and now are using it, and 20 years later you come into picture and declare that you're a partial owner of it and I owe you money, what evidence do you have that your claims are true?
By this argument, you should have been paying him long before this, and your arguments carry even less weight.
In other words, this isn't a good argument. Why don't you try engaging the points? They don't go away just because you've concluded the person saying them is unpleasant to you.
One way occurs to me to assess whatever explanations are produced: imagine an entrepreneur spends a great deal of resources constructing the means to travel to the moon.
1. Suppose this is the only means of getting there for a very long time. Does the entrepreneur effectively own the moon? If not, under what principle would a Georgist justify ownership of millions of square miles of land that no one can get to except via that entrepreneur's efforts?
2. Suppose other means are assembled for reaching the moon, but by that time, a large part of it is occupied by people using the first entrepreneur's travel system (including possibly himself).
2a. By Georgist standards, they at least own whatever they built there. But do they now owe back taxes?
2b. What if the later systems are built only through information won by studying the first system? What do the later travellers owe the first entrepreneur? What does Georgism define as owed to first movers?
2c. What if the later travel entrepreneurs restrict usage of their systems in some way similar to the first (whether by scarcity, favoritism, or other motives)? What does Georgism do in general about land that is only accessible via great effort?
"Libertarians usually base property claims on creation; I made it so it is mine. Land was not, with rare exceptions, created by human effort."
Some libertarians (and Georgists) believe that, but this position isn't valid and therefore isn't held by consistent libertarians.
Humans haven't figured out, at least yet, how to create anything from nothing, we can only rearrange existing matter. So in order to own my creation, I must first own the non-created raw materials my creation is made from.
Libertarians believe that the first user or firstcomer has the better claim to a rivalrous resource than the latecomer, and therefore has the right to exclude the latecomers - the firstcomer owns it. He owns it not because he created it, but because he was there first - he used it first.
So Georgist's position falls apart - he can't justify his tax on the land I cleaned and I've been using before he came into picture and declared he want his cut. While if he believes he only owns the things he created and the things produced by nature can't be owned, then he owns nothing at all.
I regard any claim that starts "Libertarians believe" as dubious, and this one as especially dubious. Your "firstcomer can claim" raises the obvious problem of how much he can claim. Can the first person to discover Antarctica (no inconvenient Amerinds with a prior claim) claim the whole continent? If I discover a gold vein do I only own as much as I have seen? All of the vein, which may run through the rock for twenty miles? If I discover one end of the vein and you discover the other end, which of us owns what?
Locke's approach to the problem at least limited the claim to the amount of land you could mix your labor with.
Most cases are clear - if I cleaned a piece of land, fenced it, and built a house on it and planted a garden, there's no ambiguity, because I can clearly provide evidence to any reasonable person where are the borders of the land where I was first. If I walked across a forest once, or found a continent, and shouted into the wind "it's all mine", there's no ambiguity either - I don't have any link to the land on the other side of the continent, while someone who actually came there later and started using it does. While edge cases in between have to be resolved by negotiation irrespective of what rule one uses to determine legitimate ownership.
The problem with Locke's approach is that mixing resources with your labor isn't necessary, nor sufficient to establish ownership. This Locke's mistake applied correctly and consistently led to creation of Marxist labor theory of value, their idea of stolen value by employers from employees, and to flawed justification of intellectual property (I own the idea, because I created it).
In order for the product of my work to be owned by me, I have to own the raw materials in the first place before the work even starts. If I don't own the raw materials and work at a Ford factory for example, Ford owns what I create (even if Marxists disagree) because Ford owned the raw materials I was working with. If I create a sculpture from a rock someone else owns without his consent, I'm not only not the owner of it, I owe damages to the owner. So one has to have some theory of property to determine who and why is an owner of raw rivalrous things that more than one person wants to use in incompatible ways before the mixing of labor even starts. If A wants to use the same stick to make a spear, and B wants to use it to make a bow, in order to avoid fighting they have to come up with a rule how to decide who has the right to exclude the other. And the only universalizable rule I can think of - the rule that can become a universal norm - is "whoever got it first has the right to exclude the one who got it later".
A consistent position is that *if* society/government allows you to exclusively use some resources indefinitely, it ought to also allow you to make them into a more valuable form, and use it in that form indefinitely, and keep the extra value. So if you turn $10 worth of raw materials into a tool worth $1000, you can keep the extra $990 of value. But it's consistent with this to argue that the government should require you to first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials, in order to possess (and, optionally, transform) them, rather than let you take them for free on account of being the firstcomer. And if you've paid $10 for the raw materials, you do fully own whatever you turn them into.
Now, some natural resources are so abundant that their market value is 0; for example, air, carbon-dioxide and moisture in air (which plants turn into valuable forms) and, in some locations, water. In these cases, there is a good reason, even for a Georgist, to declare you to indefinitely own whatever you turn them into. This is also the reason that, even under Georgism, you would only have to pay tax on land itself, but you'd fully own the plants you grow on it. Even when the value of the natural resources going into a product is non-zero but negligible compared to the value of the product, there may be a good reason to neglect them for simplicity and declare you to own the product without charging you for them. But that doesn't mean there is a good justification to let people take highly valuable, rivalrious natural resources for free.
"A consistent position is that *if* society/government allows you to exclusively use some resources indefinitely"
But that begs the question - you have to prove first that "society" and "government" (whoever they are) have a better claim to the land I'm already using. In order to do that, you have to articulate the principle you are using to determine legitimate ownership of unowned rivalrous resources, and you haven't done that.
At some point we reach irreducible, terminal principles we can't further justify.
We can also believe that only certain "ought"s are determined by hard-and-fast principles; in other areas we just do whatever feels fair, without trying to rely on unambiguous principles, or just do whatever is in our interests. Something like that is my position here: I have a strong belief that if the government doesn't punish someone for using some resources in some way, it ought to also not punish one for using them in a different way, and keeping the extra value (as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else relative to using them in the former, legal way). But I don't have a strong position on how natural resources ought to be allocated in the first place, I generally feel it's fairer if a representative government decides it than if a random guy does (albeit, as I discussed elsewhere in this thread, as a voter I personally mostly support leaving it in the hands of the people who've come to own it in the conventional ways).
So you believe the latecomer has a better claim to a rivalrous disputed resource than the firstcomer? It has to be one or the other. If it's the latecomer, the firstcomer who was robbed of the resource he was already using now becomes the latecomer and can do the same, and so on ad infinitum, so this option solves nothing.
I think there is serious question of how to still encourage the search for new land. It's not clear that classic Georgist rules allow for that, I could see a world where people might be granted reduced tax state for a period of time as a reward for the discovery, but similar to IP, economics doesn't really offer us a good answer to how long that time should be.
It's not one or the other. Another view is that both have equal claims, so the firstcomer must compensate the eventual future latecomers for excluding them.
In the case of just two potential users, it could mean the firstcomer paying *half* of the value of the natural resource to the latecomer, at which point they are even.
In practice, in a society with millions of members, it can typically mean that the firstcomer buys or leases the resource from the government based on its full value, which redistributes the proceeds to the people (including the firstcomer and the potential latecomers) in the form of services or, hypothetically, cash. And it can arguably mean that if the firstcomer initially got the resource without paying for it, its value should be clawed back via a tax, and once again distributed to the people (of which, again, a small part would go back to the firstcomer, but in a large society most would go to others).
It is not clear how what is described is different. If the firstcomer refuses to pay, the latecomers can exclude, so they are the owners. Or if they can't, the firstcomer is the owner.
The further description makes it sound like even if this works, that makes smaller societies advantageous, perhaps to the point where they have only one member who need pay no tax. Then the question of what different communities owe each other arises, but is not settled. The point for the Georgists is that tax would be owed to everyone. One could argue this might be better in some consequentialist sense, but why is it more just? How did everyone establish their just claim to be paid tribute?
If the firstcomer refuses to pay, the latecomers can exclude; but the firstcomer only has to pay the latecomers' share (albeit in practice that's almost the whole value in a large society). Or the firstcomer pays whatever the government tells him he has to pay in order to use the land, if he doesn't pay the government takes it away and sells/lends/hands-with-a-tax-expectation to someone else; and if he disapproves, he can vote for a different party in the next election.
Giedrius said "this option solves nothing". I guess because people would repeatedly take the property back from each other, and nothing would get done. I claim that wouldn't happen; the government would set a tax, people would pay, the government would (ideally, in one model) distribute the proceeds equally to the people.
As for why it's just (or, rather, why one may consider it just—I'm describing views I consider reasonable and self-consistent, not ones I fully endorse): again, at some point one has to rely on feelings, intuitions, terminal values one can't further justify perfectly logically from other values. Or, alternatively, we can follow our interests, and try to negotiate and advocate for a form of governance that's in our interests, and (in a democracy) vote for whichever party's policies are in our interests.
But if everyone owns everything and you take this claim seriously, doing anything is impossible - you can't use what's not yours without the permission of the owner. And it's impossible to get permission of 8 billion people. And even if I ignored this unsolvable practical problem, it still doesn't explain why someone who transformed something from the state of nature into something useful has equal claim to it as someone who has nothing to do with it.
Involving the government doesn't help either - the bureaucrat who is demanding money from me is also a latecomer.
I didn't say everything was co-owned by everyone in a way that you needed everyone's individual permission. I said that (in one view) natural resources are considered to be initially owned by society, as represented by an (ideally popularly elected) government, meaning that you can use it with the permission of the government.
Also, I *can*, in some circumstances, use things without the permission of the owner. You can argue that I morally *may* not use them—but, again, I don't use this sort of hard-and-fast, principled, independent-of-society's-decisions moral reasoning to ownership of natural resources. It could be said that I have sort of a might-makes-right view when it comes to natural resources; but not really, as I have a preference for having the decisions made by a representative government that takes people's interests into account roughly equally over having them made by a tyrant, or by a shootout between the people who want the land.
While I agree with your comment above that "the firstcomer must compensate the eventual future latecomers for excluding them", this has different implications depending on what, exactly, this compensation consists in. I can think of three possibilities: (1) an amount that just leaves latecomers no worse off than if they had not been excluded—my preference; (2) the amount that would convince the latecomers not to trespass—the market price, typically higher than the first; (3) the amount that would be determined by a hypothetical democratic government—which may differ from the first two, and your preference, if I understand you correctly. My point right now is that only the third is consistent with (some sort of) ownership by society. But, to repeat one of the original problems, if society did not make the land (and more than any individual did), then why suppose that society owns it in any sense? Does humanity already own Mars?
The Georgist position is consistent: you don’t own land but you can lease it from the rest of humanity. Then you have a claim to the wealth resulting from that land.
You're presupposing, without evidence or argument, that "the rest of humanity" (whoever they are) have a better claim to the land I'm using than I - that they and not I own it. You have to provide an argument why do you believe that's true.
The libertarian argument is “finder’s keepers”. My argument is that what no one made, everyone owns.
It really doesn’t matter because morality is praxis. The praxis for finders keepers is immense inequality forever. The praxis for ownership deriving from consent is a world both richer and more equal.
>My argument is that what no one made, everyone owns. ... The praxis for ownership deriving from consent is a world both richer and more equal.
I presume the second part here is meant to be a justification for the first part. But /how/ did everyone get to own what was not made? Does everyone already own Mars? And, to paraphrase Locke, I have to get the consent of /everyone/ before I can use some plot of land? Seems a tad impractical.
Those are conclusions, not arguments. Why should anyone accept either? Consequentialism? Is there evidence that the Georgist approach would actually be superior? Is everyone entitled to make social changes they hope would improve society, including ones that contradict someone else's reforms?
1. Give me an example of anything you made that wasn't rearrangement of raw materials.
2. Explain how does "everyone owns everything" work in practice and provide a reason why it is true. Here's an example - if I cleaned an unused piece of land and now are using it, and 20 years later you come into picture and declare that you're a partial owner of it and I owe you money, what evidence do you have that your claims are true?
Honestly man at this point you need to pay me. You aren't a pleasant enough person to talk to for your demands to carry any weight.
By this argument, you should have been paying him long before this, and your arguments carry even less weight.
In other words, this isn't a good argument. Why don't you try engaging the points? They don't go away just because you've concluded the person saying them is unpleasant to you.
One way occurs to me to assess whatever explanations are produced: imagine an entrepreneur spends a great deal of resources constructing the means to travel to the moon.
1. Suppose this is the only means of getting there for a very long time. Does the entrepreneur effectively own the moon? If not, under what principle would a Georgist justify ownership of millions of square miles of land that no one can get to except via that entrepreneur's efforts?
2. Suppose other means are assembled for reaching the moon, but by that time, a large part of it is occupied by people using the first entrepreneur's travel system (including possibly himself).
2a. By Georgist standards, they at least own whatever they built there. But do they now owe back taxes?
2b. What if the later systems are built only through information won by studying the first system? What do the later travellers owe the first entrepreneur? What does Georgism define as owed to first movers?
2c. What if the later travel entrepreneurs restrict usage of their systems in some way similar to the first (whether by scarcity, favoritism, or other motives)? What does Georgism do in general about land that is only accessible via great effort?