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.
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?
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?