I started writing this in Uppsala, Sweden, on the sixth of eight stops of a two week European speaking trip after a conversation with a Swedish graduate student who is both an anarcho-capitalist and a Georgist, a combination that raises interesting problems.
I have always like a property valuation for tax purposes calculation that I heard attributed to Robert Heinlein, the American SF author. He suggested (or so I have heard) that you can declare your property to be worth X, at your complete discretion. But. If someone is willing to pay X, you must sell it. If you do not want to, you must re-value it to Y until the purchaser does not want to buy it. Then you must pay taxes on Y for this year and the taxes on the last 2 years of tax on (Y-X). There are obviously lots of ins and outs with this method. But I think it is an interesting alternative to government assessments, which are obviously inaccurate and subject to arbitrary government actions.
That's the self-assessed property tax, an old idea which I think I mentioned, with Heinlein's addition of the re-valuing option. But it doesn't solve the Georgist problem because the single tax is supposed to be on the uncreated site value, not the additional value produced by human effort on the land.
> He suggested (or so I have heard) that you can declare your property to be worth X, at your complete discretion. But. If someone is willing to pay X, you must sell it. If you do not want to, you must re-value it to Y until the purchaser does not want to buy it. Then you must pay taxes on Y for this year and the taxes on the last 2 years of tax on (Y-X).
This is exploitable. It's basically "let's make all real estate prices both legible and forceable." What's the vulnerability?
Deep-pocketed organizations with better value modeling than individual consumers, and with value-at-scale mechanisms unavailable to same, can sweep in and buy up even more vast swathes of urban housing / land.
Yes, I'm talking about Cornerstone and Blackstone and other "landlords at scale" companies, with the ability to coordinate rent hikes for large swathes of any given geography.
Any legislation passing that ensures legible and forceable prices is a gigantic subsidy to them, I'd expect something like a 10% market cap bump. Right now, illegibility and needing to individually negotiate per property is probably literally the only thing slowing them down. They can afford to pay 10-50% more per property than any individual due to better analytics, cost of capital, value models, time horizons, and coordinated rent increases.
That hits the problem where there are improvements you can’t take with you. It could ve improvements that are really hard to undo, like digging a mine to an ore vein. Either the buyer forces you to lose out in your investment in digging the mine by making you pay taxes on that improvement or they get to take the mine from you as if it were always part of that land.
You do benefit either way but you presumably wanted land with a mine, not to get paid to dig a mine for someone else.
Maybe it’s not a problem in practice since an attacker is forced to pay you market rate.
I don't really understand Ricardo's objection. Assuming land is the only thing taxed, it would likely be taxed at a higher rate than it is today. Gambling or Speculating when the cost of holding such an asset is maybe 5-10% of its value per year seems like a bad plan.
The follow up about those with political ties best using the land applies to all taxation and regulation schemes, so I don't see why it is particular to Georgism. I would argue that malfeasance in this realm would be easy to sniff out (the value and tax paid on land would presumably be public as it is in most places now).
To both you and malloc: you can use land, or rent it out, while holding it speculatively. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
It's another question whether it's bad if people speculate on it. The main problem I see is the uncertainty and risk to landowners; risk is generally bad and unwanted.
I don’t either. Taxing land at the rate of rent, or more commonly proposed at 85% the rate of rent, should reduce speculation because you can’t just sit on land to make money. You need to actually use it.
Why do you want to reduce speculation? The obvious reason to hold land out of use is that you think it will be more valuable in a different use in the future — no point in building a house and renting it out if the house will have to be torn down when the land becomes part of a shopping mall. If all you are doing is buying land because you think the price will go up you might as well rent if for some use in the meantime.
Renting things isn't as easy as just waving you hands. A quick drive around most cities would show numerous plots of land that have sat completely unused for years. The incentive structure seems to encourage this behavior since improving the land increases your taxes while inviting a host of regulation and interference from government and that's on top of completely out of control problems with evictions and squatting.
Another problem with Georgism is that the taxes depend regressively on ownership. If I own a factory and you own a neighbouring apartment building that houses the workers, my factory makes your property more valuable and vice versa, and we both both get taxed for that externality. If instead I own both the factory and the apartment building, the positive externalities have been internalized, and the added value thus does not get taxed. The equilibrium is that whole cities become owned by the same entity, who then pays very low taxes.
Yes, in the version where land is taxed based on market value. Another alternative would be to tax it based on what value it would have in the absence of nearby infrastructure, practically its agricultural value as based only on factors like the local climate. I find the arguments for the latter version somewhat stronger. But it doesn't seem to be what self-proclaimed Georgists advocate for these days, and it would yield little revenue in a modern economy.
Note: There are two significantly different variants of Georgism (along a particular dimension; there are also two or more significantly different variants along some other dimensions).
One variant would tax land, including city land, according to the agricultural value it would have, or rather some sort of "natural" value that depends as little as possible on human activity, especially local human activity such as nearby city infrastructure. IMO this variant is more compatible with libertarianism, more clearly non-distortionary, and perhaps it's also easier to determine land value in this sense; however, it would yield relatively little revenue in a modern economy. Perhaps is this the variant Henry George intended, at a time when agricultural land was more valuable in a relative sense?
Another variant, which was promoted by Lars Doucet on Astral Codex Ten, and also this Swedish fellow, would tax land according to its local market value. This would tax city land much more heavily than the other variant.
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The latter variant has sub-variants along various dimensions, each with different issues:
- If a property developer buys a large plot of agricultural land, and builds a city on it, would it pay less tax in total than residents of an existing city, since the value of the land under the new city is determined as if the whole city didn't exist, while the value of a small plot in an existing city is determined as if the house on it didn't exist, but the rest of the city did? How about if the developer divides its city into small plots and sells them individually?
- Would the extra tax on city land, beyond the tax on its agricultural value, go to the city, or to a higher (e.g. national) level of government? If the former, would a new city be required to implement it? If the tax would go to a higher level of government, it would disincentivize building new cities; if it would go to the city, it would cause spiralling rents and taxes, as I discussed here:
As a minarchist, I don't agree there is a moral problem with (the first variant of) Georgism: I don't treat the government, the ostensible representative of the people, as equivalent to private actors. In some ways, I hold it to stronger expectations: for example, it's wrong for the government to deny you access to land it owns because you've criticized it, while it's acceptable for a private actor to do so. In other ways, I hold it to weaker expectations: for example, I consider it acceptable for the government to decide (within some limits) who is allowed to use what land, while a private actor may only do so with respect to land the government has previously agreed that it owns.
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Is VPI the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, as I guess it? The other, initially promising search result was The Vibraphone Project Inc., which has awarded a vibraphonist called David Friedman. https://www.thevibraphoneproject.org/legacyawards.html
VPI is Virginia Polytechnic Institute, specifically, in my case, the Public Choice Center where I started my career as an economics professor.
The argument for your second version is that the value of my land due to it being in the city was not created by me. On the other hand it was created by other people choosing to live nearby, which is an argument for not applying the higher rate to a city created by a single actor. We are left with the problem of how to give people the right incentive to do things that raise the value of other people's property, which I believe Nic Tideman has written on, and probably others.
Once you accept the state's claim to special rights the moral problem vanishes, but I don't.
Re the choice between your two variants, I think it depends on why land tax is justified in the first place. If you think—as I do—that it represents compensation to others for excluding them from something (land) that is not "really" yours (since you did not make it), then the appropriate level of tax will be determined by how worse off you made others by excluding them, which will be influence by how much they demand use of that land—thus the second, market-based, alternative. By contrast, on the first, agrarian, alternative, I want to ask why farmers have more right to the land than miners? You have some questions of your own:
Re the developer with their (private?) city, and homeowners in a pre-existing (public?) city—I take it the objection here is that they may end up paying different amounts of tax, and they shouldn't since it is the same land (and so should have the same value), but why would that be an objection to a market-based approach, since there are different market conditions in the two cases you describe?
Re "Would the extra tax on city land, beyond the tax on its agricultural value, go to the city, or to a higher (e.g. national) level of government?"—in my view, it would properly be owed to those who are made worse off by being excluded from the land. The government, any government, would be entitled to the money only as an agent for these people.
Is your "worse off due to being excluded from the land" how much worse off they are from not being permitted to trespass or how much worse off they are for not being able to treat the land as theirs, which would include excluding others? The latter is likely to be much larger.
Well, being excluded from land implies that one can neither use nor appropriate it, both of which might benefit one, so I guess the second. Yes, the latter is likely to be larger, but since I think that appropriation of un-owned land requires compensation to those excluded, the cost of no longer being able to appropriate the land may be lower than you are thinking.
When I appropriate land I don't just keep you from appropriating it I keep everyone else from appropriating it. Do I owe each of them the full value to him of being able to appropriate it?
Thinking about it, no, I do not owe each of them the full value to them of being able to appropriate it. There are three points.
First, a minor point. If it turns out you would /not/ appropriate the land even if I left it, then my taking it would represent the "loss" to you of an opportunity to do something you don't actually want to do, and that deserves zero compensation, in my view. So I prefer to talk about the value to the others of their actually appropriating it.
Second, supposing there are only two of us, then I do not owe the /full/ value to you of appropriating the land, where I understand this as the /gross/ value. For, if I were not to appropriate it, then you would (we shall suppose, taking account of the first point), but in that case you would owe me compensation for my no longer be able to appropriate as I wanted, and so the net benefit you would receive is actually the full value /less the compensation you would have to pay me/. [Actually, I reckon it is less than half of the value to you of the difference between your owning the land and my doing so.] I don't see a problem here. There is rich farming land atop hordes of minerals. The would-be miner can easily compensate the would-be farmer for not be able to engage in her (less profitable) activity, and so will be justified in appropriating. The farmer will not be able to compensate the miner, and so will not be justified in appropriating the land—which, in my view, is the right answer. And, when things are more equal, it will be easy for me to secure ownership of my plot in the state of nature by (eg) renouncing all claims over an equal plot elsewhere, for you to take.
Third, supposing there are many more of us, I do not owe /each/ of other the amount indicated under the second point. Rather everyone else has to split that amount amongst themselves. I have argued that elsewhere in these comments.
Yes, good question, to which I do not currently have an answer. I need to think about it, and maybe it has to so with my claim that "the cost of no longer being able to appropriate the land may be lower than you are thinking".
When discussing who is made worse off, and how much, we have to specify "compared to what?" IMO the relevant comparison is if they didn't interact with anyone in any way, and didn't use whatever natural resources they are using; and/or any other choice on their part that would be legal. Moreover, IMO it's wrong to punish a set of people (not just a single person), or tax them higher, for behavior that doesn't leave anyone worse off than if they took a different course of action that would be legal.
In the case of the existing city, an individual landowner then can't complain about the high land tax, but the landowners in the city can band together—and, if the tax isn't left with the city, have an interest to do so—, and have a legitimate claim against being forced to pay more tax than if they all used the land they own for agricultural purposes.
In the case of the private city, the market conditions are different from public cities as long as the city is owned by a single proprietor, but not once the developer partitions it into plots and sells them individually. And it would be highly distortionary if the owner(s) of the city paid widely different taxes depending on whether it's owned by one entity or many. It would also be unjustified: even in the latter case, the developer and the new homeowners aren't leaving the rest of the country worse off in a way that would justify the high tax than if the land had remained in agricultural use.
Re: the extra tax going to whoever is left worse off: again, the question is "compared to what". No one is being left significantly worse off than if the city didn't exist.
Yes, I agree it is important to specify the baseline. In my view, the relevant baseline is given by imagining away the exclusion, so that the degree to which A's exclusion of others from a certain plot of land makes others worse off is determined relative to how others would have fared had A not excluded them. I sense that this is a lot narrower than yours, which would refer to A's not interacting with others in any way and their not using any natural resources. But why suppose that /that/ is an appropriate baseline for a specific act of exclusion? It does not even seem possible.
Re private vs public cities. I take it the key point relates to if "the owner(s) of the city paid widely different taxes [compensation] depending on whether it's owned by one entity or many", the idea being that if it is the same land then the tax on it should be the same, no matter how many owners. Not sure my view implies any different, so long as one understands "taxes" as "compensation". Before the developer let anyone into her private city, she owed everyone compensation for excluding them. When some of them pay to own plots in the city, that compensation will be factored into the price (as will any compensation the new homeowners owe to everyone else who is now excluded from that plot, this latter compensation perhaps being channeled thru the developer), and compensation will still be owing to everyone else still excluded from the city. So the "taxes" payable by the developer for the land /will/ be lower (since there are fewer people now excluded from it), but the total "compensation" she owes everyone remains the same (and has partly been paid out to the new occupants of her city).
If the baseline is how well off others would be if no land was appropriated than almost everyone gets his compensation automatically, since a society where all land is unowned would be much poorer.
If there no appropriation at all, then, yes, things would be pretty dire. But I was thinking about single acts of (original) appropriation, and imagining how well others would fare if that single plot was not appropriated. If farmer Jones did not appropriate the mineral-rich land to breed llamas, it would be appropriated instead by miner Smith, and things would not be so dire after all.
If Jones does appropriate it Smith can still buy it from him, or buy the mineral rights while leaving Jones with the surface rights.
Following out the Lockian argument, there are two different effects on B of A's appropriation. One is that B can no longer use the land in ways that don't require appropriation, gather acorns and firewood, cut across the land on his way somewhere else. That is arguably an effect on multiple B's, all of whom could be doing that, although B5 might find that B1-4 had collected all the deadwood.
The other is that B can no longer appropriate the land. Locke's response is that B can appropriate some other land instead, but that breaks down once all the good land has been appropriated.
My preferred response, offered in the chapter I linked to, is that no land is ever appropriated. You achieve the equivalent by doing things with the land such that other people can't use it without violating your rights — not in the land but in wheat plants you planted or in the house and door that you built. It's a kludgy solution and I don't like it very much but it does solve the problem of "how did you get the right to exclude people."
You say the baseline is how others would fare if the owner did not exclude them. But that doesn't fully specify the baseline. We also have to specify what else, if anything, is different in the baseline from the real world. If the baseline is that the owner doesn't exclude others, but all else is equal, including what man-made buildings, products exist, that would justify not just taxing the market value of the city land, but also the full value of the house itself, and all other man-made goods. That's neither just, nor workable.
IMO the baseline has to be how others would fare if they were excluded from the land, but also they hadn't produced the man-made goods (buildings etc.) they did produce in the real world.
The remaining question is whether a group of people (such as the landowners of a city) are entitled to have the baseline, compared to which they are taxed, be determined based on how people outside the set would fare if the people in the set didn't exclude anyone from any natural resources, but also none of them had produced anything. IMO yes.
I don't fully follow your second paragraph, but are you saying that the total tax owed by the occupants of the city and the developer should be the same after it's divided into plots as when it's all owned by the developer, which is in turn the same as the tax on the land when it was a ranch? That's what I argue would be reasonable. The people who aren't in the city are excluded either way, but they are no better or worse off whether there is a ranch or a city on that land.
But that's not what would happen if the tax is based on market value. Chances are, after a city is built on the land, the value of plots in the city goes way up, per area, compared to when it was agricultural land. If you tax on the basis of market value, the tax the owners of the land collectively pay would go up (either when the city is built, or when it's subdivided into plots, depending on how the tax is assessed).
Well, in a libertarian world, where anyone can build on what was previously agricultural land, and regulations don't artificially limit the supply of residential buildings, perhaps city land wouldn't be much more valuable than agricultural land, at least after there is time for the supply to expand to the demand. Though I guess it would still be somewhat more expensive, even if not as much as it's today in the NIMBYist areas. But then again, if it turns out that city land wouldn't be more expensive than agricultural land, then we're both right: taxing based on market value and agricultural value would be the same.
>"If the baseline is that the owner doesn't exclude others, but all else is equal, including what man-made buildings, products exist, that would justify not just taxing the market value of the city land, but also the full value of the house itself, and all other man-made goods"
There may well be more detail in the baseline, but I want it to follow from my definition, for otherwise the extra details are ad hoc. But I do have a problem. I take it your point is that, if a homeowner were to NOT to exclude others from the land on which their house stands, then, houses being immovable, it would because they no longer exclude others from the house itself. In sum, if others were not excluded, then they would have access to land /and house/, and so need to be compensated for being excluded from that larger package, and so "also the full value of the house itself". Which, as you say, is the wrong answer.
Tricky, but maybe there is a simple fix. True, others need to be compensated for being excluded from house-land package. But how much is that? Now, even if he were not /actually/ to exclude others from the house, it would remain that he /may/ do so (since he built the house), so that others are never owed compensation for being excluded /from the house/. So the compensation for the house-land package actually relates only to the land component, and to determine that, yes, you need to imagine away the house. And that's the right answer.
>are you saying that the total tax owed by the occupants of the city and the developer should be the same after it's divided into plots as when it's all owned by the developer, which is in turn the same as the tax on the land when it was a ranch
Re first equality, I think I want to say that the net /compensation/ should be the same, if the same numbers of people are being excluded to the same amount of land. Re the second equality, I certainly want to deny that land values are to be determined independently of demand, eg by some agrarian measure.
>Chances are, after a city is built on the land, the value of plots in the city goes way up, per area, compared to when it was agricultural land.
Yes, that seems plausible. But why do you care so much about the comparative value of city and agricultural land? Why should they be equal? IS it because you think that the value of land has to relate to some intrinsic property of the land, and so cannot vary with varying demand for that land? And even if so, why is agricultural land the standard?
I care about the question of land value as city land vs. agricultural land because if there is a difference, that implies that there are two significantly different variants of Georgism, which would tax city land differently and, at least in some situations, have different consequences w.r.t. incentives.
One of the selling points of Georgism, more specifically the version where, as much as possible, the tax doesn't depend on human actions, it's non-distortionary, unlike most other taxes. If the tax on any given land doesn't depend on what people do, then it can't disincentivize otherwise useful human activity. But this is less clear if the tax does depend on human actions (such building nearby city infrastructure, which drives up the market value of the land).
For the moral case, the government has a right to the proceeds of unimproved land value because it maintains the monopoly on force across the covered territory. That is, at bottom, what a government is, as distinct from other organizations - a group that declares a certain territory as its own and prohibits the use of force by others within it.
I don't agree. My government doesn't prohibit the use of force within its territory — force is legitimate in self-defense. It doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force even aside from that, since people sometimes use illegal force.
My account of what a government is in Chapter 52 of _The Machinery of Freedom_:
When we talk about a "failed state", what we mean, though there is some nuance, is a state which has lost control of the use of force within its borders. This has other symptoms, like inability to collect taxes, but those can happen without the core failure and not make the state failed. If it has the core failure, failure of the monopoly on force, that is universally judged to make the state a failure. By contrast, though functioning states differ on various spectrums in terms of what varieties of third-party force they permit and how successfully they restrict disallowed use of force, they succeed to a vastly greater degree than any ungoverned area (even the success stories like Kowloon). Preventing other states from invading and preventing warlords and crime bosses from subjecting their citizens to roving pockets of violence is the primary responsibility we judge states on, and the one expense of a state which is never done without. When a state begins to fail severely on this criterion (or at least a plurality is convinced it's failing), the citizens start to toss out other sacred values in service of fixing the failure (see: Duterte)
Regardless of the philosophical underpinnings, then, this is the principal service a state provides; everything else is commentary, from the perspective of the residents of the state. And this particularly stakes out a claim to an area of space, which is then theirs to justly collect rent on by virtue of excluding other claimants and providing the service to their residents of excluding other claimants.
(And then, generally, to take further state actions to try to make that space more valuable to current residents and potential immigrants, and thus increase their own revenue - the government (or several, in the case of a federalized system) that claims the territory is the one whose incentives most align with increasing the unimproved land value of their territory by making it a more attractive place to live. So this matches the economic cost-benefit view as well.)
Prevention of violence is also provided by institutions we would not call states. There are lots of historical examples of stateless or semi-stateless societies, where there was nothing we would recognize as a state preventing people from using violence against each other and yet most people, most of the time, did not find doing so a practical option. My old example is saga period Iceland, but the traditional Somali system would be another, and some of the Amerind societies such as the Commanche. I discuss some of them, and how private, decentralized law enforcement works, in my _Legal Systems Very Different from Ours_, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm.
And, of course, states do lots of things other than control of violence. So I don't think the definition you support works very well, prefer the one I offer.
Consider that in a modern western state, control of private violence, police and criminal courts, represent a tiny fraction of total expenditure. Defense against foreign states is larger, but still pretty small, especially in western Europe — something like 2% of GNP, 4% of government expenditure.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Spencer Heath. Fred Foldvary has a great article on Heath as an "Estranged Georgist" outlining the role of Georgism in Heath's development of proprietary communities:
"Heath advocated that private communities,
under united proprietary governance, would provide public services
resulting in "the creation of rent" that would "support this and further
public services."42 This is nothing but an application of Georgist public
finance by contractual means rather than imposed government, with
all the benefits that George proclaimed!"
Foldvary concludes:
"While Heath did not fully understand Henry George's economics and
social philosophy, he should be recognized as an important pioneer
of contractual governance ultimately based on a Georgian economic
foundation. Heath's misunderstandings and "vituperations" should not
detract from the importance of his vision and theory. The economic
aims of Georgist policy can be accomplished by proprietary public
finance based on site rentals.
Both the Georgist and libertarian movements would be wise to con-
sider the private-community concepts pioneered by Spencer Heath
and furthered by his grandson, Spencer MacCallum. Proprietary
governance offers an important alternative to current political gov-
ernment and can also enhance the libertarian vision of a voluntary
I'm a left-libertarian inspired by Heath and MacCallum - this is why I've spent decades working on Startup Cities/Charter Cities. Morazon in Honduras is explicitly based on this model,
I've written on distributing shares in such cities to citizens similar to the way in which the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes an annual payment to citizens of Alaska based on the returns from an oil fund (this idea came originally from Mark Frazier, who has been involved in creating free cities and special economic zones for many decades).
If one simply sees land value gains as the natural business model for a proprietary community, either with or without a citizen's dividend paid out, then key principles of ancap and Georgism fall together naturally. As proprietary government spreads by attracting capital and talent globally (see David Friedman's "The Advantage of Capitalist Trucks"), then we'll see if it is advantageous to provide dividends to citizens or not. But whether it is or not, proprietary communities funded by land value gains amounts to the "Georgist Libertarian Endgame,"
I'm quite sympathetic to the moral argument, up to the claim that the land is not naturally owned by anyone, but not to the claim—which, as pointed out, does not follow—that it is the "common heritage of mankind", meaning that it is naturally owned by mankind as a whole. Still, I think that land from the commons (morally) may be unilaterally appropriated in the state of nature, so long as the appropriator compensates those excluded sufficiently to make them no worse off for the exclusion, and continues to do so for the duration of the exclusion.
But how much compensation? Now, although my argument is not economic, the same (type of) objection will apply: "in order to [compensate others] you have to measure [how worse off you have made them]. The market value of land [one measure of this] includes the value of improvements so is not a measure of the site value." Here I scurry to Locke. Everyone in the state of nature has the right to punish infractions of the natural law, but that leads to a big mess, so it is sensible for (all?) people to agree to enforceable arbitration (protective agencies, or government, as you prefer). For a geogist like me, this includes the natural right to compensation for being excluded from land, which therefore also comes within the jurisdiction of the newly-formed arbitrator.
So one more objection: "a land tax with a realistically imagined [arbitrator] would make land most valuable not in the hands of those best able to use it but in the hands of those with the best political contacts". Well, I want to say, that would not be true of my /moral/ arbitrartor, and so this objection does not tell against my /moral/ argument for georgism. Of course, that does not address whether such an arbitrator can be realistically expected, and one might suppose that that is a necessary condition on any adequate moral theory.
It seems that discussions of unowned land are moot, since there is none.
While areas of land unclaimed by any government as part of their territory exist (Terra nullius), the liberland project demonstrates that de-facto ownership is well established, as the two governments nearby, while not claiming the land as their territory, excluded them from it either by preventing access or arresting persons who gained access. The arrests seem odd, since they occurred outside of the governments' claimed jurisdiction, but the bottom line seems pretty clear - exclusion implies de facto ownership.
Maybe there is some sort of opportunity to maneuver between de jure and de facto ownership, but it doesn’t seem obvious or very relevant.
So it is more relevant, though perhaps less puzzling, to pursue the idea of how to resolve competing claims. Arbitrators have been doing so for all of history. This doesn’t lend itself so well to the sort of first-principle reflection/revision desired by the Georgists, though I suppose they could try to persuade everyone to switch over to their way of thinking even so.
Perhaps their response would be that all previous land claims have been unjust and illegitimate, and so are subject to confiscation or at least taxation. I am not yet persuaded.
The idea that creation is relevant merits discussion. If I make something from materials owned by someone else, I do not own the product. (Philosophers have contended over this a bit, but only one of the possibilities makes sense - one cannot legitimize a theft by modifying the loot.) So if I own my product but no one owned the materials, it seems that by using unowned things I made them mine. If no one owns them, no one has the right to exclude my use. If there is some way to exclude my use as illegitimate, they are not unowned. So by this logic, the Georgists must claim that everybody always owned everything, and there never was any unowned land. Perhaps they would be satisfied with this. It seems to require a new category of ownership, beyond de jure and de facto. Ab initio? What established that?
The alternative is to say that no one can legitimately own anything. But can we use things legitimately without someone owning them? Legitimacy implies some social norms governing use. But if there are legitimate uses and illegitimate uses, someone must decide which is which. This is the owner, perhaps. If we say it is a principle, and an arbitrator must interpret it, who established the principle? Is that the owner?
Social norms are pretty flexible, people can use a wide variety of norms and rules. Does justice uniquely and transparently determine what ought to be done? Or do people have to use some judgement to decide what is just? And might they learn something that indicates their decision was wrong? The Georgists must assume this is possible, else we should reject their proposal, as it claims prior decisions were mistaken. But why should we think that their proposal is immune to the same flaw?
>So if I own my product but no one owned the materials, it seems that by using unowned things I made them mine. If no one owns them, no one has the right to exclude my use. If there is some way to exclude my use as illegitimate, they are not unowned. So by this logic, the Georgists must claim ...
We need to distinguish between the originally unowned material and the qualities you imparted into that material. You created the qualities, so you own the qualities, and may legitimately exclude others from benefiting from them. But, of course, they are inseparable from the material in which they inhere. What to say? You say that, in that case, since you own the qualities, you have come to own the material as well. Other people say that, since you did not own the material, you do not now own the product (just as if you labored on someone else's material).
But we can also say something in between. After all, I might have no interest in the qualities you have imparted, and might have a much better use for the material—so why can you stop me from taking your material, and re-fashioning it into something more useful? (The conflict between miners and farmers is like this.) Why not say—as 10240 above suggests—that, in order to continue to own your product, you need to have others for excluding them from the material? If you really have improved the material so much, then there will be no problem paying.
The value of the materials is 1, the value of your improved form of your materials is 10. But there are a hundred people who have another use for the materials. If you have to compensate each of them you will have a problem paying.
Yes, I had better not imply that I owe each of the 100 excluded others (let's say) $1. Now, if only one person (A) is excluded from the materials, then I would clearly owe them $1, since—A's complaint—how she would fare were I to exclude others is $1 worse than how she would fare were I not to do so, this being the "value" of the materials.
But what if there were someone else (B) as well, then how much do I owe her? In this case, A's complaint may or may not be true, since that depends on what B would do were I not to take the materials. On the one hand, it might be that B would appropriate the material instead of me, so A still misses out, in which case she fares no differently whether I exclude her or not, so that, if that's what would happen, I owe her nothing. On the other hand, it might be that B would NOT appropriate the material, and leave them for A to use, in which case her complaint would be true, so that if /that's/ what would happen, I owe her $1.
Of course, B may or may not appropriate it instead. Suppose there is a 50% chance. It follows that I owe A 50% x $1 in compensation, and, of course, the same for B, making for a total compensation cost to me of $1. No problem paying that, if my improved form of the materials is $10. [Something like this might work for your objection to compensating for loss of ability to appropriate.]
The question is not whether I have a problem paying or not, but the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things. If you can’t exclude this use, you can't dictate terms for use. You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case? What principle distinguishes our claims? Or can I just call myself the government and tax myself and spend it however I like?
The practical consequences have been discussed. Sure, the government *can* do lots of things, including things they have no excuse to do. I need an excuse to exclude, they do not. Why?
>the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things
I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. So, sure, take the stick and make a spear from it. Further, I can't use the stick /as a spear/ without your consent, since /you/ made it a spear. But, without further argument, you still don't own the material. And you can't exclude me from using unowned things, like the material out of which the spear is made, which, frankly, I would find more useful as firewood. Why does your use prevail over my proposed use, if the material really is originally unowned?
So we need the further argument. They may not endorse it, but 10240 expresses well an idea I am inclined to agree with, so I am just going to quote them (with some word changes): "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 [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], 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". . . . including the stick you took, since there are so many others lying around for me to use as firewood instead (IF that is really true, which it isn't, sometimes).
First Try is closer to what I am thinking. But consider: "The surface of the earth was not created by any human being, so nobody starts with a right to exclude any other human from any part of it. It follows that such exclusion is a rights violation". Agree with first inference, not with the second, /if it is unqualified/. Suppose—motivated by Locke's proviso—our only obligation in the state of nature is never to better our own position by worsening that of others (so I agree that we are not just talking about past exclusions). Excluding others from land benefits me and worsens the situation of others, and this is no accident, so, nothing else considered, I benefit myself /by/ worsening others, which is prohibited. Unless I provide compensation so that they are NOT made worse of by the exclusion. So, strictly speaking, all that follows is that exclusion /without sufficient compensation/ is a rights violation. This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you.
I agree that quasi-Lockean principle does not have kind things to say for someone who is blind or crippled. FWIW, libertarian though I am, I still think there is an (enforceable) duty of easy rescue, and I presume they will fall under this additional principle. (Even Locke thought that the destitute required support).
Second Try I think is less plausible. I agree that you have the (temporary) right to the land upon which you are standing (on the basis, as you say, of self-ownership), and ultimately on the same basis a right to the land upon which your wheat is growing (though people can still walk gingerly between the plants, no?). But not this bit: "I build a fence around my wheat field. ... You have a right to be on the land but not a right to damage my fence—mine because my labor produced it". Suppose you build a really good fence, that keeps everyone out. This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. You cannot use your fist (which you own) to violate anyone's rights (and if you try others can do unfriendly things to it), and nor can you use your fence (ditto). You need to provide compensation, but, in that case, it is the compensation that justifies your exclusion, not the labor you put into the fence.
"This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you. "
You have a house which is worth $100,000 to you, $150,000 to me. A bargained sale will end up with a price somewhere between those numbers. Instead, following out your logic, I seize the house by force and give you $100,000. According to what you wrote I haven't violated your rights since I compensated you.
Is that your position?
"This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. "
My standing where you would like to shoot is an act of exclusion too. If I don't compensate you are you entitled to shoot in my direction?
There are lots of cases in which A makes B worse off without violating any rights — bidding against B for the house B wants to buy or courting and marrying the woman B wanted to marry and would have if A didn't exist. My claim is that my fence is in the same category. You are worse off because I have arranged things such that you cannot do something you want to do without violating my rights. It doesn't follow that I owe you compensation.
>I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. <
This is a distinction without a difference. I can’t use things reliably if it violates social norms for me to exclude others from using them in incompatible ways.
>without further argument, you still don't own the material.<
I gave further argument elsewhere. Use is a claim. It can be used as evidence of ownership. It is a weak claim, but not as weak as non-use.
A consequentialist argument could also be made.
And there are various arguments against the alternatives. E.g., against Georgist, do I owe compensation to everyone or only to those who are actually excluded? I cannot pay compensation to everyone, and who is actually excluded depends on a counterfactual, so can’t be determined. We could fall back to heuristics or approximations, and say these are less unjust than the status quo. But this depends on establishing that Georgian is more just than the status quo, and that a rough approximation would be sufficient to improve things. This has not been shown.
I’m still waiting for the analogous argument from the Georgists.
That switched from land to spears. In most cases, one sort of land use will exclude most others. Did you answer the question about why my excluding others is a problem, but the Georgists' exclusion of me is not?
I take it this relates to your comment above "You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case?" Well, first, I want to say that the same principle re original appropriation applies to all actors, individuals and governments alike. And, second, my quote from 10240 explains how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned. I don't think the switch from land to sticks is a biggie, since one sort of stick use (eg, as a spear) will also exclude most others (eg, as firewood).
“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 [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], 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"
If so, where is the discussion of how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned? One cannot rent or buy something that is unowned. If it is to be rented or bought, this involves a transaction between the owner and the renter or buyer. How did the owner acquire it, if it truly was unowned previously?
That only makes sense if everything was always owned. If I can’t own it, why can “everybody”? When/how did they gain ownership so that their claim is better?
The line of argument I am exploring holds that uncreated property starts out as a commons. Nobody owns it — has the right to exclude others — but everyone has an equal right to use it. When someone appropriates some of it he is violating that right by forcibly keeping other from using the land.
Yes, I understand. Perhaps you found some clever argument that defeats the idea even after stipulating one-sided assumptions. I am challenging the assumptions. I want to explore a broader question. If this seems like an unwelcome digression, I apologize.
Why is it interesting to simply assume a framework, as opposed to comparing rivals? The objection is that ordinary property excludes those who have rights under the commons assumption. Why can’t the opposition simply assume ordinary property rights, and object to Georgist taxation? For the argument to reach common ground, we have to find common premises. One side can’t just beg the question and declare checkmate.
Perhaps the answer is that’s Georgists find their assumptions very intuitive, and do not,feel a need to argue for them. They seem confused by the idea that this might be necessary to persuade someone with different intuitions.
If I make a spear, and you admit I made it, and make no claim to have owned the materials I used, how can you claim it as firewood or spear? If we take this dispute to arbitration, my ownership claim based on use is pretty weak. But a weak claim is better than no claim. Why should the arbitrator rule in favor of your taking the spear for firewood?
There is a difference between sovereignty, and land ownership as defined by each country's domestic laws. There is practically no usable land not administered by any country, but there is plenty of land owned by governments. There is an interesting question what governments should do with it: let people homestead it, sell it for a one-time payment, rent it out, hand it out with the expectation of a land value tax payment (similar to renting it out under a perpetual contract)?
I'd perhaps support taxing away existing private land ownership (based on its value as unimproved, agricultural land) if it had been widely accepted for a long time that Georgism were right, or at least more generally that land ownership is less legitimate than ownership of man-made property. The main reasons I oppose it derive from the fact that, historically, in many places, land ownership has been considered as legitimate as any other property ownership, for centuries if not millennia. If Georgists managed to convince people to de facto expropriate land value, it would reduce people's confidence that people won't make up some excuse to confiscate some other asset classes as well, where such worry would be highly distortionary; at the same time, a Georgist land tax (if assessed on the agricultural value of land) would yield too little revenue to be worth that cost. And even from an angle of fairness, it doesn't feel fair to leave someone who invested his savings in land much worse off than someone who invested in other property, when in our existing societies he had no reason to expect that land was likely to be expropriated.
As for your points about initial ownership: one possible position is that natural resources are initially considered owned by society, as represented by the government. Government can, then, give, sell, or rent it out. Perhaps with an expectation that it must take everyone's interests into account equitably when doing so; so people who get them must properly compensate those who are excluded.
You seem to be asking “what is just?”, rather than “is it owned?”.
If one argues that natural resources are initially considered owned by society, one should explain how they gained ownership. If it is just by decree, why is my decree not as good as yours or anyone else's? It makes sense to say that a group could decide to treat things that way among themselves, but not that this would justify them confiscating or taxing someone who did not agree.
Somehow when I follow the link it boots me out to my browser and asks me to log in again. So I will respond here.
You said it's not one or the other. Then you described something indistinguishable from the other as if demonstrating your point.
For the government to own the land is no different from the latecomer owning it. The government is or represents the latecomer. Why is their claim more valid according to the Georgist?
The government represents both the firstcomer and the latecomers, and distributes the eventual tax revenue to all.
As for why it's more valid: likely many people's intuition is that it's more fair for everyone to benefit from the value of a natural resource equally than for the first user of any given resource to get all the benefit.
That is not what representation means. You are saying the others are justified in forcing the firstcomer to go along with the scheme. What is their justification? Why isn’t the firstcomer similarly justified in making them go along with his?
"It seems that discussions of unowned land are moot, since there is none."
What principle are you using to determine who legitimately owns what? Most governments aren't even claiming they own all land in the territories they operate, I'm not even talking about proving that.
"While areas of land unclaimed by any government as part of their territory exist (Terra nullius), the liberland project demonstrates that de-facto ownership is well established, as the two governments nearby, while not claiming the land as their territory, excluded them from it either by preventing access or arresting persons who gained access."
You're conflating normative with descriptive. Ownership is a normative concept. If I own a bicycle and a thief steals it and now he has control of it and doesn't allow me to use it, I still own it and he doesn't. Observing who controls it isn't enough to determine who owns it. For the latter you have to have a theory of property rights.
I’m using the principle that if you try to use something someone stops you, it is de facto owned. Whether that amounts to legitimacy or how those are related is a separate issue.
I do not think I am conflating normative and descriptive. I suppose we could conjecture that it is possible to establish de jure ownership of some kind without first having de facto ownership, but it seems like a problem. E.g. you and I could agree that I own the northern half of liberland, and you own the southern half, and the pat could settle disputes between us. It seems unlikely to have any significant other effect.
Liberland seems to still exist as a project, so maybe Croatia and Serbia have decided to stop harassing them. But that doesn’t establish the existence of unowned land, either de facto or de jure.
There's no difference between possession / control and ownership in your position, which is conflating normative (ownership) with descriptive (possession / control).
My basic point is that there may be bits of land where technically no person or organization is listed as the de jure owner, but if you go there and start using it, someone will show up and kick you off. So if some abstract principle of justice allows homesteading, in practice it is useless. There is no place to homestead any more.
Maybe Liberland will prove me wrong. Maybe they will allow homesteading. But if it requires permission from someone, isn't that the owner, giving it away?
There is. De facto ownership means someone is able to exclude others from using it. This is descriptive. De jure means that there are laws or property norms that establish someone as the owner, whose consent is required to use the land and so may exclude persons from using it legitimately. This is normative or prescriptive. It is also social rather than physical.
I don't think "I created it" has anything to do with it. For a start, if a woman gives birth to a child, she and a (possibly identifiable) man unquestionably created the child, but they are not its owners.
I don't think the point of property rights is to reach back in time to the very first claimant and achieve some Platonic ideal of justice. I think rather it's to minimize the present and future costs of uncertain titles.
So I think the origin of property rights is what it at least sometimes is in the common law: adverse possession. If you occupy a place, and work on it, and keep others off of it, and resist being driven off of it yourself, you establish ownership by doing so. Once you have a stable pattern of exclusive use, the business of the law is to help you continue in that exclusive use.
“The moral case starts with the problem of initial appropriation, the question of how a land owner gets the right to exclude others from ‘his’ land. Libertarians usually base property claims on creation; I made it so it is mine.”
Liberty, property, and morality are three completely different concepts (moreover, many different conceptions of each are possible). One of the most useful tools of philosophy is distinguishing different concepts that have been conflated, as they have here. Otherwise, such conflations can lead to unanswerable questions and paradoxes. This can often be circumvented by asking separate questions about the relevant concepts in a logical order. In this case, that would seem to be something like the following (some possible questions have been omitted). 1) What is the abstract (pre-propertarian and non-normative) theory of liberty that libertarianism implies, presupposes, or requires? (Presumably, this is analogous with the abstract theory of utility that utilitarianism also requires). 2) What does that theory show is entailed if it were to be applied to the world in a “state of nature”? 3) How does the legal concept of property relate to what is entailed by applying liberty? 4) Given that a general philosophical system of libertarianism has been derived, can it solve well-known problems? 5) Is it likely to promote human welfare? 6) Is it moral?
That's a pretty clever opt-in/out scheme, since the major annoyance of checking all the "paperz, pleaze" lies on the opt-outers with every parcel they trespass on, taking all the fun out of what is supposed to be freedom to trespass.
I still don't like the Georgist single tax. That site value assessment is just begging for corruption and every other malfeasance government is so good at. Every scheme I have tried to think of for self-assessment makes extortion too easy, and I don't like the idea of pensioners having to choose between more taxes or being evicted from their homes.
Somehow feel like the inelastic supply issue is just a rationalisation of the fact that land can flee and this can be taxed at ease. If so, juts tax the whole thing by self-assessment and be done.
I take the moral argument a different direction: private control of land is needed for wealth creation which benefits everyone so we want it even though it is theft of land from everyone else. The compromise is to pay everyone for the land they’re denied.
"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?
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.
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?
I have always like a property valuation for tax purposes calculation that I heard attributed to Robert Heinlein, the American SF author. He suggested (or so I have heard) that you can declare your property to be worth X, at your complete discretion. But. If someone is willing to pay X, you must sell it. If you do not want to, you must re-value it to Y until the purchaser does not want to buy it. Then you must pay taxes on Y for this year and the taxes on the last 2 years of tax on (Y-X). There are obviously lots of ins and outs with this method. But I think it is an interesting alternative to government assessments, which are obviously inaccurate and subject to arbitrary government actions.
That's the self-assessed property tax, an old idea which I think I mentioned, with Heinlein's addition of the re-valuing option. But it doesn't solve the Georgist problem because the single tax is supposed to be on the uncreated site value, not the additional value produced by human effort on the land.
> He suggested (or so I have heard) that you can declare your property to be worth X, at your complete discretion. But. If someone is willing to pay X, you must sell it. If you do not want to, you must re-value it to Y until the purchaser does not want to buy it. Then you must pay taxes on Y for this year and the taxes on the last 2 years of tax on (Y-X).
This is exploitable. It's basically "let's make all real estate prices both legible and forceable." What's the vulnerability?
Deep-pocketed organizations with better value modeling than individual consumers, and with value-at-scale mechanisms unavailable to same, can sweep in and buy up even more vast swathes of urban housing / land.
Yes, I'm talking about Cornerstone and Blackstone and other "landlords at scale" companies, with the ability to coordinate rent hikes for large swathes of any given geography.
Any legislation passing that ensures legible and forceable prices is a gigantic subsidy to them, I'd expect something like a 10% market cap bump. Right now, illegibility and needing to individually negotiate per property is probably literally the only thing slowing them down. They can afford to pay 10-50% more per property than any individual due to better analytics, cost of capital, value models, time horizons, and coordinated rent increases.
That hits the problem where there are improvements you can’t take with you. It could ve improvements that are really hard to undo, like digging a mine to an ore vein. Either the buyer forces you to lose out in your investment in digging the mine by making you pay taxes on that improvement or they get to take the mine from you as if it were always part of that land.
You do benefit either way but you presumably wanted land with a mine, not to get paid to dig a mine for someone else.
Maybe it’s not a problem in practice since an attacker is forced to pay you market rate.
I don't really understand Ricardo's objection. Assuming land is the only thing taxed, it would likely be taxed at a higher rate than it is today. Gambling or Speculating when the cost of holding such an asset is maybe 5-10% of its value per year seems like a bad plan.
The follow up about those with political ties best using the land applies to all taxation and regulation schemes, so I don't see why it is particular to Georgism. I would argue that malfeasance in this realm would be easy to sniff out (the value and tax paid on land would presumably be public as it is in most places now).
To both you and malloc: you can use land, or rent it out, while holding it speculatively. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
It's another question whether it's bad if people speculate on it. The main problem I see is the uncertainty and risk to landowners; risk is generally bad and unwanted.
I don’t either. Taxing land at the rate of rent, or more commonly proposed at 85% the rate of rent, should reduce speculation because you can’t just sit on land to make money. You need to actually use it.
Why do you want to reduce speculation? The obvious reason to hold land out of use is that you think it will be more valuable in a different use in the future — no point in building a house and renting it out if the house will have to be torn down when the land becomes part of a shopping mall. If all you are doing is buying land because you think the price will go up you might as well rent if for some use in the meantime.
As, I just noticed, 10248 already pointed out.
Renting things isn't as easy as just waving you hands. A quick drive around most cities would show numerous plots of land that have sat completely unused for years. The incentive structure seems to encourage this behavior since improving the land increases your taxes while inviting a host of regulation and interference from government and that's on top of completely out of control problems with evictions and squatting.
Another problem with Georgism is that the taxes depend regressively on ownership. If I own a factory and you own a neighbouring apartment building that houses the workers, my factory makes your property more valuable and vice versa, and we both both get taxed for that externality. If instead I own both the factory and the apartment building, the positive externalities have been internalized, and the added value thus does not get taxed. The equilibrium is that whole cities become owned by the same entity, who then pays very low taxes.
Yes, in the version where land is taxed based on market value. Another alternative would be to tax it based on what value it would have in the absence of nearby infrastructure, practically its agricultural value as based only on factors like the local climate. I find the arguments for the latter version somewhat stronger. But it doesn't seem to be what self-proclaimed Georgists advocate for these days, and it would yield little revenue in a modern economy.
Note: There are two significantly different variants of Georgism (along a particular dimension; there are also two or more significantly different variants along some other dimensions).
One variant would tax land, including city land, according to the agricultural value it would have, or rather some sort of "natural" value that depends as little as possible on human activity, especially local human activity such as nearby city infrastructure. IMO this variant is more compatible with libertarianism, more clearly non-distortionary, and perhaps it's also easier to determine land value in this sense; however, it would yield relatively little revenue in a modern economy. Perhaps is this the variant Henry George intended, at a time when agricultural land was more valuable in a relative sense?
Another variant, which was promoted by Lars Doucet on Astral Codex Ten, and also this Swedish fellow, would tax land according to its local market value. This would tax city land much more heavily than the other variant.
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The latter variant has sub-variants along various dimensions, each with different issues:
- If a property developer buys a large plot of agricultural land, and builds a city on it, would it pay less tax in total than residents of an existing city, since the value of the land under the new city is determined as if the whole city didn't exist, while the value of a small plot in an existing city is determined as if the house on it didn't exist, but the rest of the city did? How about if the developer divides its city into small plots and sells them individually?
- Would the extra tax on city land, beyond the tax on its agricultural value, go to the city, or to a higher (e.g. national) level of government? If the former, would a new city be required to implement it? If the tax would go to a higher level of government, it would disincentivize building new cities; if it would go to the city, it would cause spiralling rents and taxes, as I discussed here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved/comment/3996594
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved/comment/3984715
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-landlords/comment/4010307
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As a minarchist, I don't agree there is a moral problem with (the first variant of) Georgism: I don't treat the government, the ostensible representative of the people, as equivalent to private actors. In some ways, I hold it to stronger expectations: for example, it's wrong for the government to deny you access to land it owns because you've criticized it, while it's acceptable for a private actor to do so. In other ways, I hold it to weaker expectations: for example, I consider it acceptable for the government to decide (within some limits) who is allowed to use what land, while a private actor may only do so with respect to land the government has previously agreed that it owns.
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Is VPI the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, as I guess it? The other, initially promising search result was The Vibraphone Project Inc., which has awarded a vibraphonist called David Friedman. https://www.thevibraphoneproject.org/legacyawards.html
VPI is Virginia Polytechnic Institute, specifically, in my case, the Public Choice Center where I started my career as an economics professor.
The argument for your second version is that the value of my land due to it being in the city was not created by me. On the other hand it was created by other people choosing to live nearby, which is an argument for not applying the higher rate to a city created by a single actor. We are left with the problem of how to give people the right incentive to do things that raise the value of other people's property, which I believe Nic Tideman has written on, and probably others.
Once you accept the state's claim to special rights the moral problem vanishes, but I don't.
Re the choice between your two variants, I think it depends on why land tax is justified in the first place. If you think—as I do—that it represents compensation to others for excluding them from something (land) that is not "really" yours (since you did not make it), then the appropriate level of tax will be determined by how worse off you made others by excluding them, which will be influence by how much they demand use of that land—thus the second, market-based, alternative. By contrast, on the first, agrarian, alternative, I want to ask why farmers have more right to the land than miners? You have some questions of your own:
Re the developer with their (private?) city, and homeowners in a pre-existing (public?) city—I take it the objection here is that they may end up paying different amounts of tax, and they shouldn't since it is the same land (and so should have the same value), but why would that be an objection to a market-based approach, since there are different market conditions in the two cases you describe?
Re "Would the extra tax on city land, beyond the tax on its agricultural value, go to the city, or to a higher (e.g. national) level of government?"—in my view, it would properly be owed to those who are made worse off by being excluded from the land. The government, any government, would be entitled to the money only as an agent for these people.
Is your "worse off due to being excluded from the land" how much worse off they are from not being permitted to trespass or how much worse off they are for not being able to treat the land as theirs, which would include excluding others? The latter is likely to be much larger.
Well, being excluded from land implies that one can neither use nor appropriate it, both of which might benefit one, so I guess the second. Yes, the latter is likely to be larger, but since I think that appropriation of un-owned land requires compensation to those excluded, the cost of no longer being able to appropriate the land may be lower than you are thinking.
When I appropriate land I don't just keep you from appropriating it I keep everyone else from appropriating it. Do I owe each of them the full value to him of being able to appropriate it?
Thinking about it, no, I do not owe each of them the full value to them of being able to appropriate it. There are three points.
First, a minor point. If it turns out you would /not/ appropriate the land even if I left it, then my taking it would represent the "loss" to you of an opportunity to do something you don't actually want to do, and that deserves zero compensation, in my view. So I prefer to talk about the value to the others of their actually appropriating it.
Second, supposing there are only two of us, then I do not owe the /full/ value to you of appropriating the land, where I understand this as the /gross/ value. For, if I were not to appropriate it, then you would (we shall suppose, taking account of the first point), but in that case you would owe me compensation for my no longer be able to appropriate as I wanted, and so the net benefit you would receive is actually the full value /less the compensation you would have to pay me/. [Actually, I reckon it is less than half of the value to you of the difference between your owning the land and my doing so.] I don't see a problem here. There is rich farming land atop hordes of minerals. The would-be miner can easily compensate the would-be farmer for not be able to engage in her (less profitable) activity, and so will be justified in appropriating. The farmer will not be able to compensate the miner, and so will not be justified in appropriating the land—which, in my view, is the right answer. And, when things are more equal, it will be easy for me to secure ownership of my plot in the state of nature by (eg) renouncing all claims over an equal plot elsewhere, for you to take.
Third, supposing there are many more of us, I do not owe /each/ of other the amount indicated under the second point. Rather everyone else has to split that amount amongst themselves. I have argued that elsewhere in these comments.
Yes, good question, to which I do not currently have an answer. I need to think about it, and maybe it has to so with my claim that "the cost of no longer being able to appropriate the land may be lower than you are thinking".
When discussing who is made worse off, and how much, we have to specify "compared to what?" IMO the relevant comparison is if they didn't interact with anyone in any way, and didn't use whatever natural resources they are using; and/or any other choice on their part that would be legal. Moreover, IMO it's wrong to punish a set of people (not just a single person), or tax them higher, for behavior that doesn't leave anyone worse off than if they took a different course of action that would be legal.
In the case of the existing city, an individual landowner then can't complain about the high land tax, but the landowners in the city can band together—and, if the tax isn't left with the city, have an interest to do so—, and have a legitimate claim against being forced to pay more tax than if they all used the land they own for agricultural purposes.
In the case of the private city, the market conditions are different from public cities as long as the city is owned by a single proprietor, but not once the developer partitions it into plots and sells them individually. And it would be highly distortionary if the owner(s) of the city paid widely different taxes depending on whether it's owned by one entity or many. It would also be unjustified: even in the latter case, the developer and the new homeowners aren't leaving the rest of the country worse off in a way that would justify the high tax than if the land had remained in agricultural use.
Re: the extra tax going to whoever is left worse off: again, the question is "compared to what". No one is being left significantly worse off than if the city didn't exist.
Yes, I agree it is important to specify the baseline. In my view, the relevant baseline is given by imagining away the exclusion, so that the degree to which A's exclusion of others from a certain plot of land makes others worse off is determined relative to how others would have fared had A not excluded them. I sense that this is a lot narrower than yours, which would refer to A's not interacting with others in any way and their not using any natural resources. But why suppose that /that/ is an appropriate baseline for a specific act of exclusion? It does not even seem possible.
Re private vs public cities. I take it the key point relates to if "the owner(s) of the city paid widely different taxes [compensation] depending on whether it's owned by one entity or many", the idea being that if it is the same land then the tax on it should be the same, no matter how many owners. Not sure my view implies any different, so long as one understands "taxes" as "compensation". Before the developer let anyone into her private city, she owed everyone compensation for excluding them. When some of them pay to own plots in the city, that compensation will be factored into the price (as will any compensation the new homeowners owe to everyone else who is now excluded from that plot, this latter compensation perhaps being channeled thru the developer), and compensation will still be owing to everyone else still excluded from the city. So the "taxes" payable by the developer for the land /will/ be lower (since there are fewer people now excluded from it), but the total "compensation" she owes everyone remains the same (and has partly been paid out to the new occupants of her city).
If the baseline is how well off others would be if no land was appropriated than almost everyone gets his compensation automatically, since a society where all land is unowned would be much poorer.
If there no appropriation at all, then, yes, things would be pretty dire. But I was thinking about single acts of (original) appropriation, and imagining how well others would fare if that single plot was not appropriated. If farmer Jones did not appropriate the mineral-rich land to breed llamas, it would be appropriated instead by miner Smith, and things would not be so dire after all.
If Jones does appropriate it Smith can still buy it from him, or buy the mineral rights while leaving Jones with the surface rights.
Following out the Lockian argument, there are two different effects on B of A's appropriation. One is that B can no longer use the land in ways that don't require appropriation, gather acorns and firewood, cut across the land on his way somewhere else. That is arguably an effect on multiple B's, all of whom could be doing that, although B5 might find that B1-4 had collected all the deadwood.
The other is that B can no longer appropriate the land. Locke's response is that B can appropriate some other land instead, but that breaks down once all the good land has been appropriated.
My preferred response, offered in the chapter I linked to, is that no land is ever appropriated. You achieve the equivalent by doing things with the land such that other people can't use it without violating your rights — not in the land but in wheat plants you planted or in the house and door that you built. It's a kludgy solution and I don't like it very much but it does solve the problem of "how did you get the right to exclude people."
You say the baseline is how others would fare if the owner did not exclude them. But that doesn't fully specify the baseline. We also have to specify what else, if anything, is different in the baseline from the real world. If the baseline is that the owner doesn't exclude others, but all else is equal, including what man-made buildings, products exist, that would justify not just taxing the market value of the city land, but also the full value of the house itself, and all other man-made goods. That's neither just, nor workable.
IMO the baseline has to be how others would fare if they were excluded from the land, but also they hadn't produced the man-made goods (buildings etc.) they did produce in the real world.
The remaining question is whether a group of people (such as the landowners of a city) are entitled to have the baseline, compared to which they are taxed, be determined based on how people outside the set would fare if the people in the set didn't exclude anyone from any natural resources, but also none of them had produced anything. IMO yes.
I don't fully follow your second paragraph, but are you saying that the total tax owed by the occupants of the city and the developer should be the same after it's divided into plots as when it's all owned by the developer, which is in turn the same as the tax on the land when it was a ranch? That's what I argue would be reasonable. The people who aren't in the city are excluded either way, but they are no better or worse off whether there is a ranch or a city on that land.
But that's not what would happen if the tax is based on market value. Chances are, after a city is built on the land, the value of plots in the city goes way up, per area, compared to when it was agricultural land. If you tax on the basis of market value, the tax the owners of the land collectively pay would go up (either when the city is built, or when it's subdivided into plots, depending on how the tax is assessed).
Well, in a libertarian world, where anyone can build on what was previously agricultural land, and regulations don't artificially limit the supply of residential buildings, perhaps city land wouldn't be much more valuable than agricultural land, at least after there is time for the supply to expand to the demand. Though I guess it would still be somewhat more expensive, even if not as much as it's today in the NIMBYist areas. But then again, if it turns out that city land wouldn't be more expensive than agricultural land, then we're both right: taxing based on market value and agricultural value would be the same.
>"If the baseline is that the owner doesn't exclude others, but all else is equal, including what man-made buildings, products exist, that would justify not just taxing the market value of the city land, but also the full value of the house itself, and all other man-made goods"
There may well be more detail in the baseline, but I want it to follow from my definition, for otherwise the extra details are ad hoc. But I do have a problem. I take it your point is that, if a homeowner were to NOT to exclude others from the land on which their house stands, then, houses being immovable, it would because they no longer exclude others from the house itself. In sum, if others were not excluded, then they would have access to land /and house/, and so need to be compensated for being excluded from that larger package, and so "also the full value of the house itself". Which, as you say, is the wrong answer.
Tricky, but maybe there is a simple fix. True, others need to be compensated for being excluded from house-land package. But how much is that? Now, even if he were not /actually/ to exclude others from the house, it would remain that he /may/ do so (since he built the house), so that others are never owed compensation for being excluded /from the house/. So the compensation for the house-land package actually relates only to the land component, and to determine that, yes, you need to imagine away the house. And that's the right answer.
>are you saying that the total tax owed by the occupants of the city and the developer should be the same after it's divided into plots as when it's all owned by the developer, which is in turn the same as the tax on the land when it was a ranch
Re first equality, I think I want to say that the net /compensation/ should be the same, if the same numbers of people are being excluded to the same amount of land. Re the second equality, I certainly want to deny that land values are to be determined independently of demand, eg by some agrarian measure.
>Chances are, after a city is built on the land, the value of plots in the city goes way up, per area, compared to when it was agricultural land.
Yes, that seems plausible. But why do you care so much about the comparative value of city and agricultural land? Why should they be equal? IS it because you think that the value of land has to relate to some intrinsic property of the land, and so cannot vary with varying demand for that land? And even if so, why is agricultural land the standard?
I care about the question of land value as city land vs. agricultural land because if there is a difference, that implies that there are two significantly different variants of Georgism, which would tax city land differently and, at least in some situations, have different consequences w.r.t. incentives.
One of the selling points of Georgism, more specifically the version where, as much as possible, the tax doesn't depend on human actions, it's non-distortionary, unlike most other taxes. If the tax on any given land doesn't depend on what people do, then it can't disincentivize otherwise useful human activity. But this is less clear if the tax does depend on human actions (such building nearby city infrastructure, which drives up the market value of the land).
For the moral case, the government has a right to the proceeds of unimproved land value because it maintains the monopoly on force across the covered territory. That is, at bottom, what a government is, as distinct from other organizations - a group that declares a certain territory as its own and prohibits the use of force by others within it.
I don't agree. My government doesn't prohibit the use of force within its territory — force is legitimate in self-defense. It doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force even aside from that, since people sometimes use illegal force.
My account of what a government is in Chapter 52 of _The Machinery of Freedom_:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/A%20Positive%20Account%20of%20Rights.htm
When we talk about a "failed state", what we mean, though there is some nuance, is a state which has lost control of the use of force within its borders. This has other symptoms, like inability to collect taxes, but those can happen without the core failure and not make the state failed. If it has the core failure, failure of the monopoly on force, that is universally judged to make the state a failure. By contrast, though functioning states differ on various spectrums in terms of what varieties of third-party force they permit and how successfully they restrict disallowed use of force, they succeed to a vastly greater degree than any ungoverned area (even the success stories like Kowloon). Preventing other states from invading and preventing warlords and crime bosses from subjecting their citizens to roving pockets of violence is the primary responsibility we judge states on, and the one expense of a state which is never done without. When a state begins to fail severely on this criterion (or at least a plurality is convinced it's failing), the citizens start to toss out other sacred values in service of fixing the failure (see: Duterte)
Regardless of the philosophical underpinnings, then, this is the principal service a state provides; everything else is commentary, from the perspective of the residents of the state. And this particularly stakes out a claim to an area of space, which is then theirs to justly collect rent on by virtue of excluding other claimants and providing the service to their residents of excluding other claimants.
(And then, generally, to take further state actions to try to make that space more valuable to current residents and potential immigrants, and thus increase their own revenue - the government (or several, in the case of a federalized system) that claims the territory is the one whose incentives most align with increasing the unimproved land value of their territory by making it a more attractive place to live. So this matches the economic cost-benefit view as well.)
Prevention of violence is also provided by institutions we would not call states. There are lots of historical examples of stateless or semi-stateless societies, where there was nothing we would recognize as a state preventing people from using violence against each other and yet most people, most of the time, did not find doing so a practical option. My old example is saga period Iceland, but the traditional Somali system would be another, and some of the Amerind societies such as the Commanche. I discuss some of them, and how private, decentralized law enforcement works, in my _Legal Systems Very Different from Ours_, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm.
And, of course, states do lots of things other than control of violence. So I don't think the definition you support works very well, prefer the one I offer.
Consider that in a modern western state, control of private violence, police and criminal courts, represent a tiny fraction of total expenditure. Defense against foreign states is larger, but still pretty small, especially in western Europe — something like 2% of GNP, 4% of government expenditure.
Since we live in world of states those aren't relevant.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Spencer Heath. Fred Foldvary has a great article on Heath as an "Estranged Georgist" outlining the role of Georgism in Heath's development of proprietary communities:
"Heath advocated that private communities,
under united proprietary governance, would provide public services
resulting in "the creation of rent" that would "support this and further
public services."42 This is nothing but an application of Georgist public
finance by contractual means rather than imposed government, with
all the benefits that George proclaimed!"
Foldvary concludes:
"While Heath did not fully understand Henry George's economics and
social philosophy, he should be recognized as an important pioneer
of contractual governance ultimately based on a Georgian economic
foundation. Heath's misunderstandings and "vituperations" should not
detract from the importance of his vision and theory. The economic
aims of Georgist policy can be accomplished by proprietary public
finance based on site rentals.
Both the Georgist and libertarian movements would be wise to con-
sider the private-community concepts pioneered by Spencer Heath
and furthered by his grandson, Spencer MacCallum. Proprietary
governance offers an important alternative to current political gov-
ernment and can also enhance the libertarian vision of a voluntary
society"
https://cooperative-individualism.org/foldvary-fred_heath-estranged-georgist-2004-apr.pdf
I'm a left-libertarian inspired by Heath and MacCallum - this is why I've spent decades working on Startup Cities/Charter Cities. Morazon in Honduras is explicitly based on this model,
https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog-posts/ciudad-morazan-a-libertarian-city-without-any-libertarians/
I've written on distributing shares in such cities to citizens similar to the way in which the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes an annual payment to citizens of Alaska based on the returns from an oil fund (this idea came originally from Mark Frazier, who has been involved in creating free cities and special economic zones for many decades).
If one simply sees land value gains as the natural business model for a proprietary community, either with or without a citizen's dividend paid out, then key principles of ancap and Georgism fall together naturally. As proprietary government spreads by attracting capital and talent globally (see David Friedman's "The Advantage of Capitalist Trucks"), then we'll see if it is advantageous to provide dividends to citizens or not. But whether it is or not, proprietary communities funded by land value gains amounts to the "Georgist Libertarian Endgame,"
https://explorersfoundation.org/archive/strongm-creating-libertopia.pdf
I'm quite sympathetic to the moral argument, up to the claim that the land is not naturally owned by anyone, but not to the claim—which, as pointed out, does not follow—that it is the "common heritage of mankind", meaning that it is naturally owned by mankind as a whole. Still, I think that land from the commons (morally) may be unilaterally appropriated in the state of nature, so long as the appropriator compensates those excluded sufficiently to make them no worse off for the exclusion, and continues to do so for the duration of the exclusion.
But how much compensation? Now, although my argument is not economic, the same (type of) objection will apply: "in order to [compensate others] you have to measure [how worse off you have made them]. The market value of land [one measure of this] includes the value of improvements so is not a measure of the site value." Here I scurry to Locke. Everyone in the state of nature has the right to punish infractions of the natural law, but that leads to a big mess, so it is sensible for (all?) people to agree to enforceable arbitration (protective agencies, or government, as you prefer). For a geogist like me, this includes the natural right to compensation for being excluded from land, which therefore also comes within the jurisdiction of the newly-formed arbitrator.
So one more objection: "a land tax with a realistically imagined [arbitrator] would make land most valuable not in the hands of those best able to use it but in the hands of those with the best political contacts". Well, I want to say, that would not be true of my /moral/ arbitrartor, and so this objection does not tell against my /moral/ argument for georgism. Of course, that does not address whether such an arbitrator can be realistically expected, and one might suppose that that is a necessary condition on any adequate moral theory.
It seems that discussions of unowned land are moot, since there is none.
While areas of land unclaimed by any government as part of their territory exist (Terra nullius), the liberland project demonstrates that de-facto ownership is well established, as the two governments nearby, while not claiming the land as their territory, excluded them from it either by preventing access or arresting persons who gained access. The arrests seem odd, since they occurred outside of the governments' claimed jurisdiction, but the bottom line seems pretty clear - exclusion implies de facto ownership.
Maybe there is some sort of opportunity to maneuver between de jure and de facto ownership, but it doesn’t seem obvious or very relevant.
So it is more relevant, though perhaps less puzzling, to pursue the idea of how to resolve competing claims. Arbitrators have been doing so for all of history. This doesn’t lend itself so well to the sort of first-principle reflection/revision desired by the Georgists, though I suppose they could try to persuade everyone to switch over to their way of thinking even so.
Perhaps their response would be that all previous land claims have been unjust and illegitimate, and so are subject to confiscation or at least taxation. I am not yet persuaded.
The idea that creation is relevant merits discussion. If I make something from materials owned by someone else, I do not own the product. (Philosophers have contended over this a bit, but only one of the possibilities makes sense - one cannot legitimize a theft by modifying the loot.) So if I own my product but no one owned the materials, it seems that by using unowned things I made them mine. If no one owns them, no one has the right to exclude my use. If there is some way to exclude my use as illegitimate, they are not unowned. So by this logic, the Georgists must claim that everybody always owned everything, and there never was any unowned land. Perhaps they would be satisfied with this. It seems to require a new category of ownership, beyond de jure and de facto. Ab initio? What established that?
The alternative is to say that no one can legitimately own anything. But can we use things legitimately without someone owning them? Legitimacy implies some social norms governing use. But if there are legitimate uses and illegitimate uses, someone must decide which is which. This is the owner, perhaps. If we say it is a principle, and an arbitrator must interpret it, who established the principle? Is that the owner?
Social norms are pretty flexible, people can use a wide variety of norms and rules. Does justice uniquely and transparently determine what ought to be done? Or do people have to use some judgement to decide what is just? And might they learn something that indicates their decision was wrong? The Georgists must assume this is possible, else we should reject their proposal, as it claims prior decisions were mistaken. But why should we think that their proposal is immune to the same flaw?
>So if I own my product but no one owned the materials, it seems that by using unowned things I made them mine. If no one owns them, no one has the right to exclude my use. If there is some way to exclude my use as illegitimate, they are not unowned. So by this logic, the Georgists must claim ...
We need to distinguish between the originally unowned material and the qualities you imparted into that material. You created the qualities, so you own the qualities, and may legitimately exclude others from benefiting from them. But, of course, they are inseparable from the material in which they inhere. What to say? You say that, in that case, since you own the qualities, you have come to own the material as well. Other people say that, since you did not own the material, you do not now own the product (just as if you labored on someone else's material).
But we can also say something in between. After all, I might have no interest in the qualities you have imparted, and might have a much better use for the material—so why can you stop me from taking your material, and re-fashioning it into something more useful? (The conflict between miners and farmers is like this.) Why not say—as 10240 above suggests—that, in order to continue to own your product, you need to have others for excluding them from the material? If you really have improved the material so much, then there will be no problem paying.
The value of the materials is 1, the value of your improved form of your materials is 10. But there are a hundred people who have another use for the materials. If you have to compensate each of them you will have a problem paying.
Yes, I had better not imply that I owe each of the 100 excluded others (let's say) $1. Now, if only one person (A) is excluded from the materials, then I would clearly owe them $1, since—A's complaint—how she would fare were I to exclude others is $1 worse than how she would fare were I not to do so, this being the "value" of the materials.
But what if there were someone else (B) as well, then how much do I owe her? In this case, A's complaint may or may not be true, since that depends on what B would do were I not to take the materials. On the one hand, it might be that B would appropriate the material instead of me, so A still misses out, in which case she fares no differently whether I exclude her or not, so that, if that's what would happen, I owe her nothing. On the other hand, it might be that B would NOT appropriate the material, and leave them for A to use, in which case her complaint would be true, so that if /that's/ what would happen, I owe her $1.
Of course, B may or may not appropriate it instead. Suppose there is a 50% chance. It follows that I owe A 50% x $1 in compensation, and, of course, the same for B, making for a total compensation cost to me of $1. No problem paying that, if my improved form of the materials is $10. [Something like this might work for your objection to compensating for loss of ability to appropriate.]
The question is not whether I have a problem paying or not, but the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things. If you can’t exclude this use, you can't dictate terms for use. You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case? What principle distinguishes our claims? Or can I just call myself the government and tax myself and spend it however I like?
The practical consequences have been discussed. Sure, the government *can* do lots of things, including things they have no excuse to do. I need an excuse to exclude, they do not. Why?
>the basis of your claim to be able to exclude my use of unowned things
I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. So, sure, take the stick and make a spear from it. Further, I can't use the stick /as a spear/ without your consent, since /you/ made it a spear. But, without further argument, you still don't own the material. And you can't exclude me from using unowned things, like the material out of which the spear is made, which, frankly, I would find more useful as firewood. Why does your use prevail over my proposed use, if the material really is originally unowned?
So we need the further argument. They may not endorse it, but 10240 expresses well an idea I am inclined to agree with, so I am just going to quote them (with some word changes): "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 [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], 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". . . . including the stick you took, since there are so many others lying around for me to use as firewood instead (IF that is really true, which it isn't, sometimes).
You might find the argument in Chapter 57 of _The Machinery of Freedom_, linked to in the article, relevant to some of this.
Yes, it is interesting.
First Try is closer to what I am thinking. But consider: "The surface of the earth was not created by any human being, so nobody starts with a right to exclude any other human from any part of it. It follows that such exclusion is a rights violation". Agree with first inference, not with the second, /if it is unqualified/. Suppose—motivated by Locke's proviso—our only obligation in the state of nature is never to better our own position by worsening that of others (so I agree that we are not just talking about past exclusions). Excluding others from land benefits me and worsens the situation of others, and this is no accident, so, nothing else considered, I benefit myself /by/ worsening others, which is prohibited. Unless I provide compensation so that they are NOT made worse of by the exclusion. So, strictly speaking, all that follows is that exclusion /without sufficient compensation/ is a rights violation. This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you.
I agree that quasi-Lockean principle does not have kind things to say for someone who is blind or crippled. FWIW, libertarian though I am, I still think there is an (enforceable) duty of easy rescue, and I presume they will fall under this additional principle. (Even Locke thought that the destitute required support).
Second Try I think is less plausible. I agree that you have the (temporary) right to the land upon which you are standing (on the basis, as you say, of self-ownership), and ultimately on the same basis a right to the land upon which your wheat is growing (though people can still walk gingerly between the plants, no?). But not this bit: "I build a fence around my wheat field. ... You have a right to be on the land but not a right to damage my fence—mine because my labor produced it". Suppose you build a really good fence, that keeps everyone out. This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. You cannot use your fist (which you own) to violate anyone's rights (and if you try others can do unfriendly things to it), and nor can you use your fence (ditto). You need to provide compensation, but, in that case, it is the compensation that justifies your exclusion, not the labor you put into the fence.
"This answers your question: "If I violate your rights in a way that gives me a very large gain, why should you be just barely compensated while I get all of the difference between benefit and cost?"—I simply don't violate your rights, if I compensate you. "
You have a house which is worth $100,000 to you, $150,000 to me. A bargained sale will end up with a price somewhere between those numbers. Instead, following out your logic, I seize the house by force and give you $100,000. According to what you wrote I haven't violated your rights since I compensated you.
Is that your position?
"This is clearly an act of exclusion, which, in my view, is unjustified without compensation. "
My standing where you would like to shoot is an act of exclusion too. If I don't compensate you are you entitled to shoot in my direction?
There are lots of cases in which A makes B worse off without violating any rights — bidding against B for the house B wants to buy or courting and marrying the woman B wanted to marry and would have if A didn't exist. My claim is that my fence is in the same category. You are worse off because I have arranged things such that you cannot do something you want to do without violating my rights. It doesn't follow that I owe you compensation.
>I don't claim that anyone can exclude you from the /use/ of unowned things, just that there are problems if you wish to /appropriate/ them. <
This is a distinction without a difference. I can’t use things reliably if it violates social norms for me to exclude others from using them in incompatible ways.
>without further argument, you still don't own the material.<
I gave further argument elsewhere. Use is a claim. It can be used as evidence of ownership. It is a weak claim, but not as weak as non-use.
A consequentialist argument could also be made.
And there are various arguments against the alternatives. E.g., against Georgist, do I owe compensation to everyone or only to those who are actually excluded? I cannot pay compensation to everyone, and who is actually excluded depends on a counterfactual, so can’t be determined. We could fall back to heuristics or approximations, and say these are less unjust than the status quo. But this depends on establishing that Georgian is more just than the status quo, and that a rough approximation would be sufficient to improve things. This has not been shown.
I’m still waiting for the analogous argument from the Georgists.
That switched from land to spears. In most cases, one sort of land use will exclude most others. Did you answer the question about why my excluding others is a problem, but the Georgists' exclusion of me is not?
I take it this relates to your comment above "You are saying I have no basis to exclude others, but you, or the government, or someone has a basis for excluding me. How is this the case?" Well, first, I want to say that the same principle re original appropriation applies to all actors, individuals and governments alike. And, second, my quote from 10240 explains how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned. I don't think the switch from land to sticks is a biggie, since one sort of stick use (eg, as a spear) will also exclude most others (eg, as firewood).
Is this the quote?
“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 [you] first buy or rent the $10 worth of raw materials [from everyone else, perhaps in the agent of the government], 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"
If so, where is the discussion of how one might justifiably appropriate something initially unowned? One cannot rent or buy something that is unowned. If it is to be rented or bought, this involves a transaction between the owner and the renter or buyer. How did the owner acquire it, if it truly was unowned previously?
That only makes sense if everything was always owned. If I can’t own it, why can “everybody”? When/how did they gain ownership so that their claim is better?
The line of argument I am exploring holds that uncreated property starts out as a commons. Nobody owns it — has the right to exclude others — but everyone has an equal right to use it. When someone appropriates some of it he is violating that right by forcibly keeping other from using the land.
Yes, I understand. Perhaps you found some clever argument that defeats the idea even after stipulating one-sided assumptions. I am challenging the assumptions. I want to explore a broader question. If this seems like an unwelcome digression, I apologize.
Why is it interesting to simply assume a framework, as opposed to comparing rivals? The objection is that ordinary property excludes those who have rights under the commons assumption. Why can’t the opposition simply assume ordinary property rights, and object to Georgist taxation? For the argument to reach common ground, we have to find common premises. One side can’t just beg the question and declare checkmate.
Perhaps the answer is that’s Georgists find their assumptions very intuitive, and do not,feel a need to argue for them. They seem confused by the idea that this might be necessary to persuade someone with different intuitions.
If I make a spear, and you admit I made it, and make no claim to have owned the materials I used, how can you claim it as firewood or spear? If we take this dispute to arbitration, my ownership claim based on use is pretty weak. But a weak claim is better than no claim. Why should the arbitrator rule in favor of your taking the spear for firewood?
There is a difference between sovereignty, and land ownership as defined by each country's domestic laws. There is practically no usable land not administered by any country, but there is plenty of land owned by governments. There is an interesting question what governments should do with it: let people homestead it, sell it for a one-time payment, rent it out, hand it out with the expectation of a land value tax payment (similar to renting it out under a perpetual contract)?
I'd perhaps support taxing away existing private land ownership (based on its value as unimproved, agricultural land) if it had been widely accepted for a long time that Georgism were right, or at least more generally that land ownership is less legitimate than ownership of man-made property. The main reasons I oppose it derive from the fact that, historically, in many places, land ownership has been considered as legitimate as any other property ownership, for centuries if not millennia. If Georgists managed to convince people to de facto expropriate land value, it would reduce people's confidence that people won't make up some excuse to confiscate some other asset classes as well, where such worry would be highly distortionary; at the same time, a Georgist land tax (if assessed on the agricultural value of land) would yield too little revenue to be worth that cost. And even from an angle of fairness, it doesn't feel fair to leave someone who invested his savings in land much worse off than someone who invested in other property, when in our existing societies he had no reason to expect that land was likely to be expropriated.
As for your points about initial ownership: one possible position is that natural resources are initially considered owned by society, as represented by the government. Government can, then, give, sell, or rent it out. Perhaps with an expectation that it must take everyone's interests into account equitably when doing so; so people who get them must properly compensate those who are excluded.
You seem to be asking “what is just?”, rather than “is it owned?”.
If one argues that natural resources are initially considered owned by society, one should explain how they gained ownership. If it is just by decree, why is my decree not as good as yours or anyone else's? It makes sense to say that a group could decide to treat things that way among themselves, but not that this would justify them confiscating or taxing someone who did not agree.
See my comment here: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/georgist-thoughts/comment/55132221
Somehow when I follow the link it boots me out to my browser and asks me to log in again. So I will respond here.
You said it's not one or the other. Then you described something indistinguishable from the other as if demonstrating your point.
For the government to own the land is no different from the latecomer owning it. The government is or represents the latecomer. Why is their claim more valid according to the Georgist?
The government represents both the firstcomer and the latecomers, and distributes the eventual tax revenue to all.
As for why it's more valid: likely many people's intuition is that it's more fair for everyone to benefit from the value of a natural resource equally than for the first user of any given resource to get all the benefit.
That is not what representation means. You are saying the others are justified in forcing the firstcomer to go along with the scheme. What is their justification? Why isn’t the firstcomer similarly justified in making them go along with his?
"It seems that discussions of unowned land are moot, since there is none."
What principle are you using to determine who legitimately owns what? Most governments aren't even claiming they own all land in the territories they operate, I'm not even talking about proving that.
"While areas of land unclaimed by any government as part of their territory exist (Terra nullius), the liberland project demonstrates that de-facto ownership is well established, as the two governments nearby, while not claiming the land as their territory, excluded them from it either by preventing access or arresting persons who gained access."
You're conflating normative with descriptive. Ownership is a normative concept. If I own a bicycle and a thief steals it and now he has control of it and doesn't allow me to use it, I still own it and he doesn't. Observing who controls it isn't enough to determine who owns it. For the latter you have to have a theory of property rights.
I’m using the principle that if you try to use something someone stops you, it is de facto owned. Whether that amounts to legitimacy or how those are related is a separate issue.
I do not think I am conflating normative and descriptive. I suppose we could conjecture that it is possible to establish de jure ownership of some kind without first having de facto ownership, but it seems like a problem. E.g. you and I could agree that I own the northern half of liberland, and you own the southern half, and the pat could settle disputes between us. It seems unlikely to have any significant other effect.
Liberland seems to still exist as a project, so maybe Croatia and Serbia have decided to stop harassing them. But that doesn’t establish the existence of unowned land, either de facto or de jure.
There's no difference between possession / control and ownership in your position, which is conflating normative (ownership) with descriptive (possession / control).
My basic point is that there may be bits of land where technically no person or organization is listed as the de jure owner, but if you go there and start using it, someone will show up and kick you off. So if some abstract principle of justice allows homesteading, in practice it is useless. There is no place to homestead any more.
Maybe Liberland will prove me wrong. Maybe they will allow homesteading. But if it requires permission from someone, isn't that the owner, giving it away?
There is. De facto ownership means someone is able to exclude others from using it. This is descriptive. De jure means that there are laws or property norms that establish someone as the owner, whose consent is required to use the land and so may exclude persons from using it legitimately. This is normative or prescriptive. It is also social rather than physical.
I don't think "I created it" has anything to do with it. For a start, if a woman gives birth to a child, she and a (possibly identifiable) man unquestionably created the child, but they are not its owners.
I don't think the point of property rights is to reach back in time to the very first claimant and achieve some Platonic ideal of justice. I think rather it's to minimize the present and future costs of uncertain titles.
So I think the origin of property rights is what it at least sometimes is in the common law: adverse possession. If you occupy a place, and work on it, and keep others off of it, and resist being driven off of it yourself, you establish ownership by doing so. Once you have a stable pattern of exclusive use, the business of the law is to help you continue in that exclusive use.
“The moral case starts with the problem of initial appropriation, the question of how a land owner gets the right to exclude others from ‘his’ land. Libertarians usually base property claims on creation; I made it so it is mine.”
Liberty, property, and morality are three completely different concepts (moreover, many different conceptions of each are possible). One of the most useful tools of philosophy is distinguishing different concepts that have been conflated, as they have here. Otherwise, such conflations can lead to unanswerable questions and paradoxes. This can often be circumvented by asking separate questions about the relevant concepts in a logical order. In this case, that would seem to be something like the following (some possible questions have been omitted). 1) What is the abstract (pre-propertarian and non-normative) theory of liberty that libertarianism implies, presupposes, or requires? (Presumably, this is analogous with the abstract theory of utility that utilitarianism also requires). 2) What does that theory show is entailed if it were to be applied to the world in a “state of nature”? 3) How does the legal concept of property relate to what is entailed by applying liberty? 4) Given that a general philosophical system of libertarianism has been derived, can it solve well-known problems? 5) Is it likely to promote human welfare? 6) Is it moral?
It is possible to outline answers to these questions in about 3,000 words: https://jclester.substack.com/p/eleutheric-conjectural-libertarianism?utm_source=publication-search
That's a pretty clever opt-in/out scheme, since the major annoyance of checking all the "paperz, pleaze" lies on the opt-outers with every parcel they trespass on, taking all the fun out of what is supposed to be freedom to trespass.
I still don't like the Georgist single tax. That site value assessment is just begging for corruption and every other malfeasance government is so good at. Every scheme I have tried to think of for self-assessment makes extortion too easy, and I don't like the idea of pensioners having to choose between more taxes or being evicted from their homes.
Somehow feel like the inelastic supply issue is just a rationalisation of the fact that land can flee and this can be taxed at ease. If so, juts tax the whole thing by self-assessment and be done.
I take the moral argument a different direction: private control of land is needed for wealth creation which benefits everyone so we want it even though it is theft of land from everyone else. The compromise is to pay everyone for the land they’re denied.
Have we established that it is theft?
"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?
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.
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?