- 24 Apr 2020 17:49
#15086688
Right: the crux of our disagreement is that you refuse to know facts, while I refuse to accept lies.
That's just indisputably false as a matter of objective, physical fact. Without the factory owner, the worker would be left with less -- or no -- means to earn a living, because the factory would not be there without its owner; by contrast, without the landowner, the worker would be at liberty to use the land to earn a living, because the land WOULD still be there without its owner.
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.
GARBAGE. People have always had to work for a living, because food, clothing and shelter do not present themselves to us for consumption and use without any effort on our part. That is the condition of every animal -- such as those with which our remote ancestors were in competition for the available food. The human's advantage over the animals is that by producing tools, from the very first sharpened sticks and stones to the modern factory, we can make our subsequent work more productive of the things we need and want. Without the factory owner, the worker would simply have fewer and less attractive options for earning a living; but without the landowner, he would have more and better options.
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know the difference -- which in economics is equivalent to refusing to know the difference between air and water in plumbing.
More absurd and disingenuous garbage. What happens to the worker if the factory owner does not exist, if there are no employers offering him economic opportunity, hmmmm? It's self-evident: he starves to death, or must accept less attractive terms of employment from the landowner. By contrast, if the landowner does not exist, the worker is at liberty to use the land to earn a living, to make tools using what nature provided and produce capital for himself. It is indisputable that the factory owner has NO POWER to do anything but make the worker better off -- which you absurdly and disingenuously call "exploitation" -- while the landowner has no power to do anything but make the worker WORSE off, by depriving him of his liberty to earn a living on the land.
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.
What "surplus labor value"?? What value would the worker's labor have had if the employer did not exist? Your whole absurd, dishonest, and evil Marxist belief system rests on your resolute evasion of such questions.
What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage.
No. You were disingenuously pretending that my statements about workers' access to land only referred to access for agricultural use rather than economic opportunity generally.
No. You disingenuously pretended that my statements about land were only relevant to agricultural use, and irrelevant to modern industrial economies, even though you knew that urban land values vastly exceed rural ones.
Then why did you disingenuously pretend that land is only relevant to agriculture?
<yawn> I have actually conducted empirical social science research. You self-evidently have not.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, if anything, which I doubt.
Free will is a pseudo-issue that has nothing to do with free markets.
But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.
But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.
It ignores the fact of production: that the entrepreneur is adding to total goods and services available for consumption in return for the commensurate increase in his funds. It also falsely assumes the entrepreneur is guaranteed a profit, when in fact he will often suffer a loss.
They are not necessarily non-productive, just not necessarily productive.
No, land is different because it exists unconditionally. Owning land therefore deprives others of their liberty to use it. Owning an ounce of gold does not, because the gold had to be produced; it would not have been available if the producers had not mined and refined it, so owning it does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have.
No. In the case of land, its value is mainly based on the expected FUTURE relationship between its rental value, the tax on its value, the discount rate, and the rent growth rate -- i.e., the future net subsidy to the owner.
Art and gold are not rentier assets. Their owners take nothing from anyone else.
You have described three different cases.
1. The entrepreneur has added to the total of goods and services available for consumption.
2. The owner of art, gold, etc. has neither added to nor subtracted from the available goods and services, so his participation is effectively zero-sum: he might just as easily have lost money, and many speculators do.
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services.
No. The increase simply records an expectation.
Because he is legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide at that location.
If that meant anything (it doesn't), it would be wrong.
Gibberish.
You obviously don't understand the first thing about it. Public debt is undertaken to provide the private sector with secure interest income, not because the government is short of money.
Value increase does not depend on economic growth, just the supply and demand for that item.
It means the high bidder gets secure, exclusive tenure (like a leasehold tenure) by paying the market rental value to the community (i.e., the public treasury, through the land administration office) for depriving everyone else of the land; in addition, each resident citizen, whether direct landholder or tenant, would get a modest equal exemption for the land parcel they live on sufficient to ensure they can access economic opportunity for free.
No. The similarity is only superficial. The actual economic relationships are profoundly different.
Yes, of course I have.
I have explained in detail why it isn't.
Garbage.
All private land titles are based on forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land. Usually government does that on behalf of private interests.
By government-issued and -enforced privilege. In the USA, these are called, "land patents."
Housing is not land and land is not housing. Housing is produced by labor. Land is not.
<sigh> The employer/factory owner leaves the worker better off than he would otherwise be if the employer did not exist. The landowner leaves the worker worse off. How do you prevent yourself from knowing such self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality?
But that's not the employer's fault! He's in the same boat as the worker: deprived by the landowner of his liberty to use the land unless he pays him for permission to do so! You are in effect arguing that a baker, by charging his customer the market price for a loaf of bread, is "exploiting" his customers -- despite the fact that he is feeding them -- because they have to have food to eat, and he has the food! Well, guess what? He created the food, just as the entrepreneur created the job opportunity for the worker. If the customer (or worker) doesn't like that opportunity, he can try to do better elsewhere.
Then it is nothing but dishonest propaganda.
It's not a fact, as I have proved to you repeatedly. It's a bald lie.
But who were incapable of doing any of that without the entrepreneur to employ them and obtain all the other factors needed for production.
Huh?? On what basis do you incorrectly imagine private entrepreneurs' production decisions are made, but to create the greatest possible increase in consumable value at the lowest input cost?? All they are thinking about is the "private interests" of all the consumers they hope will buy their products! Just who do you think consumers are if not the public, hmmmmmmm?
No, I'm saying the private owner owns the product because it is a product of labor: his labor.
Yes, he most certainly did. He made the decisions and arranged, coordinated, and paid for all the factors that were needed to bring the product into existence, including but certainly not limited to whatever workers' labor might have been involved.
Nature doesn't pick fruit and hand it to you. Duh.
No, that's objectively false, like all your other absurd and disingenuous Marxist nonsense. He paid workers wages, a landowner for land, probably a banker interest, and placed his own labor and resources at risk, all to bring the product into existence. The workers were only one factor; the owner brought together all the factors.
Class is based on ownership of privilege, not production. It is the privileged who organize according to their class interest, because they know the liberty and justice of the market are their enemy.
No. In the current system the appropriate party is not paid.
It's actually quite foolish -- typical Marxist idiocy, in fact -- for a worker to own shares in the firm he works for because it increases his risk: if the firm gets into difficulty, he loses his investment as well as his job.
Wrong.
So, you want production to be as ineffective and unresponsive to the people as politics is?? Socialism will certainly deliver that -- good and hard.
No, it does not, because economics is based on consent, not force.
Marxist tripe.
Go ahead: it's a perfect example of cheap but meaningless Marxist propaganda.
That's not remotely similar to what I said.
Morality is not subjective.
Depriving others of what they would otherwise have without making just compensation is wrongful. I don't know if there is any way to state that fact so clearly or simply that you would be able to find a willingness to know it.
That's what I said: class based on privilege.
<sigh> No, it only includes the citizens of the polity that administers possession and use of that land, OBVIOUSLY, because that's what the state is: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land.
No, the community would do it for him, by providing every resident citizen with an equal individual exemption from the land rent obligation, as I already explained. So everyone would already have free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity. So the only rival prospective users the landholder need concern himself with would be those willing to pay more for the land than he was.
Silliness with no basis in fact, logic, economics, or anything I said.
No, it's just some absurd nonsense you made up. And I am opposed to all forms of privilege, not just landowning.
No, improvements. The land would not be worth anything.
He would effectively be leasing the land, not owning it, and the prohibition on improvements when he no longer wants to pay the market rent would be imposed by the land administration office.
Puerile.
Democratically.
That's up to the democratically responsible authorities.
Only if the worker has been deprived of his rights without just compensation.
<sigh> Do bakers also "exploit" their customers, who must get something to eat "out of material necessity" or starve to death? Or are they the ones who actually save their customers from starving to death?
It's just as wrong again.
Like most Marxists, you apparently cannot tell the difference between describing a phenomenon and condoning or advocating it.
No, just realism. If we just vacate land titles without any compensation, the title owners are going to resist, probably violently. We saw it happen with slavery, and it wasn't pretty. IMO the most just and appropriate compensation, which would leave the least room for objection from either side, is the acquisition cost of the land.
False.
Whatever value labor on that location has added to the location is improvement value, not land value. Landscaping is a fixed improvement, not a natural resource.
I have certainly described my ideas clearly and simply enough for you and every competent English user over the age of 12 to understand. You just choose not to understand by refusing to know the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
You have made the logically equivalent economic claim that landowning and factory owning are the same thing.
No. I'm pointing out that land is not rightly considered "capital" -- or even private property -- at all, and describing and advocating a way to make equal access to the economic opportunity it offers for all citizens compatible with its optimal productive use. Which not coincidentally also establishes justice and efficiency in land tenure and public revenue arrangements.
Payment of agreed wages for labor is self-evidently not expropriation.
Right: repayment of the land subsidy to the government and community that provide it.
Only the one paying the market rent for exclusive tenure would get it. But everyone would get up to a certain uniform amount of rent exempted for the land they lived on. IOW, every resident citizen would get free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity, and those who wanted to exclude others from more than that would pay the community for the additional amount they deprived everyone else of.
Whatever the community decides through its democratically accountable institutions, same as now.
It's all the land under its jurisdiction. All that changes is how its exclusive private possession and use is administered.
Purchase is not necessary, just a change in the rules governing tenure. But if the land reform is undertaken without monetary reform, it might be advisable to buy some parcels at their acquisition price from owners who don't want them, to prevent deflation as bank lending for land purchases dried up.
That kind of arrangement is not contemplated because all the land under the local government's jurisdiction is automatically included.
The high bidder.
However much they pay for.
Bidding in the market.
Authority comes from democratic consent.
The enforcement is simply exclusivity of tenure: those who pay for it are legally entitled to exclude everyone else, by police intervention if necessary. Incarceration is not necessary unless transgressors offer violent resistance.
I'm not advocating capitalism.
ckaihatsu wrote:Yeah, we keep spiralling around this, so it must be the crux of our disagreement.
Right: the crux of our disagreement is that you refuse to know facts, while I refuse to accept lies.
Equity capital *exploits* the worker of his or her economic labor value, so it's no less culpable than non-commodity-productive, asset-based rentier capital is.
That's just indisputably false as a matter of objective, physical fact. Without the factory owner, the worker would be left with less -- or no -- means to earn a living, because the factory would not be there without its owner; by contrast, without the landowner, the worker would be at liberty to use the land to earn a living, because the land WOULD still be there without its owner.
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.
Your phrasing of 'economic opportunity' for the worker, with a job, is *disingenuous* because all workers, by definition not-having capital, *need* jobs so as to get wages, so as to get the necessities of life and living.
GARBAGE. People have always had to work for a living, because food, clothing and shelter do not present themselves to us for consumption and use without any effort on our part. That is the condition of every animal -- such as those with which our remote ancestors were in competition for the available food. The human's advantage over the animals is that by producing tools, from the very first sharpened sticks and stones to the modern factory, we can make our subsequent work more productive of the things we need and want. Without the factory owner, the worker would simply have fewer and less attractive options for earning a living; but without the landowner, he would have more and better options.
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know the difference -- which in economics is equivalent to refusing to know the difference between air and water in plumbing.
If it's not one job here then it has to be another job somewhere else, so finding one is not a vaunted 'opportunity' as much as it is a *necessity*.
More absurd and disingenuous garbage. What happens to the worker if the factory owner does not exist, if there are no employers offering him economic opportunity, hmmmm? It's self-evident: he starves to death, or must accept less attractive terms of employment from the landowner. By contrast, if the landowner does not exist, the worker is at liberty to use the land to earn a living, to make tools using what nature provided and produce capital for himself. It is indisputable that the factory owner has NO POWER to do anything but make the worker better off -- which you absurdly and disingenuously call "exploitation" -- while the landowner has no power to do anything but make the worker WORSE off, by depriving him of his liberty to earn a living on the land.
Your whole belief system rests on your refusal to know that fact.
Your individual-centric scale of perspective (myopic) shows you to be favoring the side of the *employer* since the employer *does* take surplus labor value from the labor-power of the worker.
What "surplus labor value"?? What value would the worker's labor have had if the employer did not exist? Your whole absurd, dishonest, and evil Marxist belief system rests on your resolute evasion of such questions.
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & DividendsSpoiler: show
What an absurd and disingenuous load of garbage.
No, you're disingenuously *imputing* that on my behalf, which is incorrect.
No. You were disingenuously pretending that my statements about workers' access to land only referred to access for agricultural use rather than economic opportunity generally.
If you simply were referring to land values for the sake of empirical *measurement* then the rest of what you said was just you going off on a fantasy tangent.
No. You disingenuously pretended that my statements about land were only relevant to agricultural use, and irrelevant to modern industrial economies, even though you knew that urban land values vastly exceed rural ones.
Yes, I agree that land values have empirically increased from rural settings to urban settings.
Then why did you disingenuously pretend that land is only relevant to agriculture?
No, you're just mouthing-off without knowing what it is that you're talking about.
<yawn> I have actually conducted empirical social science research. You self-evidently have not.
Let me put it *this* way -- your adherence to the *geneticist* / eugenicist approach means that *you're* depersonalizing around this method that you subscribe to.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, if anything, which I doubt.
If people are *overwhelmingly* determined in their phenotypical composition by their genetics then there's really little or no free-will or individuality involved, much less free markets.
Free will is a pseudo-issue that has nothing to do with free markets.
On the converse we have fields like sociology which posit that, while the individual *does* have free will, such is significantly constrained due to pre-existing material and social-structure ('superstructural') factors.
But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.
So, from the *sociological* perspective, it doesn't matter *who* the individual is, because the overarching material and social environment is going to condition *everyone* roughly the same way, per historical period, except for the factor of class.
But the empirical evidence shows genetics is more important.
Okay -- go ahead and let me know what you object to about the M-C-M' cycle:
It ignores the fact of production: that the entrepreneur is adding to total goods and services available for consumption in return for the commensurate increase in his funds. It also falsely assumes the entrepreneur is guaranteed a profit, when in fact he will often suffer a loss.
You're acknowledging that some (necessarily non-productive) assets *appreciate* in value over time,
They are not necessarily non-productive, just not necessarily productive.
and so profits can be made in the form of capital gains due to market speculation, anticipating a market increase in value though no commodities have been produced from that asset, and no sales have been made (because no commodities have been made, to sell).
We can include *land* in this rentier-capital category, which can be treated like a 'collectible' and held onto, anticipating a market rise in valuation, though, again, nothing has necessarily been produced with that land asset.
No, land is different because it exists unconditionally. Owning land therefore deprives others of their liberty to use it. Owning an ounce of gold does not, because the gold had to be produced; it would not have been available if the producers had not mined and refined it, so owning it does not deprive anyone else of anything they would otherwise have.
If I buy a plot of land for $100,000 and over ten years it appreciates in value by 10%, then I could sell it after that decade for $110,000 -- where does that $10,000 in profit *come from*, then, assuming that the total amount of exchange values (including my $10,000 in profit) in the economy represents *real value*? Does each and every dollar in the economy represent some kind of real past economic value added-in, or doesn't it?
No. In the case of land, its value is mainly based on the expected FUTURE relationship between its rental value, the tax on its value, the discount rate, and the rent growth rate -- i.e., the future net subsidy to the owner.
Can we compare a dollar made through the investment of equity capital and the exploitation of labor value (commodity-production), to a dollar "made" from an appreciation in value of a rentier-type asset like a plot of land, or art, or gold?
Art and gold are not rentier assets. Their owners take nothing from anyone else.
You have described three different cases.
1. The entrepreneur has added to the total of goods and services available for consumption.
2. The owner of art, gold, etc. has neither added to nor subtracted from the available goods and services, so his participation is effectively zero-sum: he might just as easily have lost money, and many speculators do.
3. The landowner deprived everyone else of the economic advantage of the land, which would otherwise have been available for productive use: i.e., he has profited by subtracting from the total available goods and services.
Where does my 'extra' $10,000 in profit *come from*, if not from the existing exchange-values in the overall economy? Doesn't the economy have to 'grow' somehow by at least $10,000 in those ten years in order to provide me with that increase in value when I sell the land for a profit?
No. The increase simply records an expectation.
Why is the market *rewarding* the owner of the appreciating rentier asset, by *legitimizing* that rise in market value, enabling the cashing-out of that asset for a profit, when that asset has *done nothing* / *produced no commodities* during that time period?
Because he is legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide at that location.
It's my standing position that capitalist currency is *overextended* in function, by having to represent the *dual* / distinct economic variables of commodity exchange-values, *and* the pool of relative supply-and-demand (fluctuating market pricing), for any given item.
If that meant anything (it doesn't), it would be wrong.
Rent and interest payments on (necessarily) rentier-type capital / assets mean that productive activity has to *increase* elsewhere, to grow the total value of the economy by the amount called-for by the amount of rent or interest payment, or called-for by the appreciation of an asset price, since the asset itself *does not add* any value to the economy and only *withdraws* value from the economy, in cash, when it's cashed-out at a net gain in market price.
Gibberish.
I'll readily point to the ever-growing national debts of the major advanced (Western) national governments, to point-out that something is seriously *wrong* with capitalism if it can only survive going-forward by the increasing *indebtedness* of its host governments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ite_note-1
You obviously don't understand the first thing about it. Public debt is undertaken to provide the private sector with secure interest income, not because the government is short of money.
Okay, as I just noted, the capitalist variable of 'market price' has to account for *both* value-increase (economic *growth*), *and* for relative supply-and-demand / market *speculation* as well.
Value increase does not depend on economic growth, just the supply and demand for that item.
TTP: [I propose] payment of the market rent (the high bid) by whoever gets secure, exclusive tenure to the community of those thus excluded, with a universal individual exemption to ensure everyone has free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity.
CK: Can you *rephrase* this? I've seen it before from you, and it's incomprehensible because you're not providing definitions or explanations for these parties involved.
It means the high bidder gets secure, exclusive tenure (like a leasehold tenure) by paying the market rental value to the community (i.e., the public treasury, through the land administration office) for depriving everyone else of the land; in addition, each resident citizen, whether direct landholder or tenant, would get a modest equal exemption for the land parcel they live on sufficient to ensure they can access economic opportunity for free.
From what I can see you're just upholding existing status quo conditions,
No. The similarity is only superficial. The actual economic relationships are profoundly different.
and you haven't denied such.
Yes, of course I have.
Your entire politics is a sham.
I have explained in detail why it isn't.
You just keep repeating your subjective idiosyncratic line that upholds status quo conditions.
Garbage.
At some point in history land *was not* a commodity -- it was *not* bought and sold.
So you may want to address *that* point in history -- who would someone 'pay' to own land when it wasn't previously owned?
All private land titles are based on forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land. Usually government does that on behalf of private interests.
How did the *initial* owner obtain the land?
By government-issued and -enforced privilege. In the USA, these are called, "land patents."
Well *I* blame *both* factions of capital, both rentier and equity, because *both* factions lay claim to the worker's labor value, through leasing land (housing),
Housing is not land and land is not housing. Housing is produced by labor. Land is not.
for rent payments from wages (rentier capital), *and* through the economic *exploitation* of the worker's labor power, by the employer (equity capital).
<sigh> The employer/factory owner leaves the worker better off than he would otherwise be if the employer did not exist. The landowner leaves the worker worse off. How do you prevent yourself from knowing such self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality?
On the latter part, the 'voluntariness' that you assume *isn't* voluntariness at all -- the sale of labor power to the employer is *not* a level playing field, as you've acknowledged with your land-dispossession argument. The worker, as we all are, is *compelled* to secure the necessities of life and living, and, under capitalism, that must be done by earning a wage, by selling one's labor power (capacity to work). This social *desperation* for a wage is an *externality* to the employer, who acts, like you, as though it *is* a level playing field and that the exchange of labor for a wage is a socially *equal* one.
But that's not the employer's fault! He's in the same boat as the worker: deprived by the landowner of his liberty to use the land unless he pays him for permission to do so! You are in effect arguing that a baker, by charging his customer the market price for a loaf of bread, is "exploiting" his customers -- despite the fact that he is feeding them -- because they have to have food to eat, and he has the food! Well, guess what? He created the food, just as the entrepreneur created the job opportunity for the worker. If the customer (or worker) doesn't like that opportunity, he can try to do better elsewhere.
The Marxist noting of the expropriation of the worker's labor product (goods and/or services) isn't an argument for the worker to keep both wages and product,
Then it is nothing but dishonest propaganda.
as some kind of alleged economic reform *within* capitalism -- it's a noting of fact
It's not a fact, as I have proved to you repeatedly. It's a bald lie.
to urge and agitate for workers to control *all* production that they do, since it's the workers who are an integral part of the actual production process, who work on the machines, who *know* how to work the machines, and who produce the final goods and services.
But who were incapable of doing any of that without the entrepreneur to employ them and obtain all the other factors needed for production.
Private ownership of social production has to first be *overthrown* so that private interests no longer dictate what gets produced, and for who.
Huh?? On what basis do you incorrectly imagine private entrepreneurs' production decisions are made, but to create the greatest possible increase in consumable value at the lowest input cost?? All they are thinking about is the "private interests" of all the consumers they hope will buy their products! Just who do you think consumers are if not the public, hmmmmmmm?
By 'producer' you mean 'private owner', and you're saying that the private owner *owns* the product even though it's a 'product of labor'.
No, I'm saying the private owner owns the product because it is a product of labor: his labor.
The owner did not do the work that procured the product,
Yes, he most certainly did. He made the decisions and arranged, coordinated, and paid for all the factors that were needed to bring the product into existence, including but certainly not limited to whatever workers' labor might have been involved.
like fruit, from nature,
Nature doesn't pick fruit and hand it to you. Duh.
yet it's the owner who gets to keep and sell the product of labor, for just the cost of a wage.
No, that's objectively false, like all your other absurd and disingenuous Marxist nonsense. He paid workers wages, a landowner for land, probably a banker interest, and placed his own labor and resources at risk, all to bring the product into existence. The workers were only one factor; the owner brought together all the factors.
Also, ownership is *not* individualized or atomized, as you're suggesting -- the bourgeoisie is mostly class-conscious and socially *organizes* according to its class interest, typified in the functioning of its state apparatus such as laws, enforcement, judgments, fines, proscriptions, incarceration, and death penalties. And military attacks and warfare against geostrategic rivals.
Class is based on ownership of privilege, not production. It is the privileged who organize according to their class interest, because they know the liberty and justice of the market are their enemy.
Then this is just more of the status-quo --
No. In the current system the appropriate party is not paid.
only those workers who *can afford* to buy ownership (of the firm they currently work for) can be the ones to enjoy fractional private ownership and partial control of a workers co-op. This isn't saying much -- it's like saying one can be an owner today if one has enough money for ownership.
It's actually quite foolish -- typical Marxist idiocy, in fact -- for a worker to own shares in the firm he works for because it increases his risk: if the firm gets into difficulty, he loses his investment as well as his job.
In other words this isn't *political*
Wrong.
-- it's only through the world's workers *overthrowing* all private ownership that society's production can be made *political*, the way voting for presidential candidates is today.
So, you want production to be as ineffective and unresponsive to the people as politics is?? Socialism will certainly deliver that -- good and hard.
Today we vote for one representative of the bourgeoisie or another, when democracy needs to extend to *economic* matters as well, throughout.
No, it does not, because economics is based on consent, not force.
The bourgeois fetish with exchange values indicates its / your material-economic limits -- if it can't be quantified with exchange values / currency, then it's not deemed to be legitimate, regardless of the social facts of how production gets done under capitalism, namely the dispossession of the working class.
Marxist tripe.
Exchange-value fetishism -- those who can *afford* to buy, can buy. (I'll keep this sentence handy for copying-and-pasting, for further segments.)
Go ahead: it's a perfect example of cheap but meaningless Marxist propaganda.
You're just dramatizing and making it sound like humanity's social woes boil-down to the hierarchical gradient of commodity pricing, particularly for land.
That's not remotely similar to what I said.
You're proving that you have to resort to subjective *moralizing*
Morality is not subjective.
to confer a *qualitative* valuation over the initial capitalist procurement of natural resources, like land ('rightful' and 'wrongful').
Depriving others of what they would otherwise have without making just compensation is wrongful. I don't know if there is any way to state that fact so clearly or simply that you would be able to find a willingness to know it.
I'll counterpose that the social ills you list are in fact based in the *class division* of society:
That's what I said: class based on privilege.
This is a very ill-conceived notion, because 'the community of those whom he excludes from the land' could very well be the *entire world's population*, depending on whether or not they should want to access the land that the owner paid for and considers to be his or her 'private property'.
<sigh> No, it only includes the citizens of the polity that administers possession and use of that land, OBVIOUSLY, because that's what the state is: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land.
With this model of yours the landowner would have to pay for nominal ownership while also having to pay-off any random individual who makes any arbitrary claim to access that land for free but is denied.
No, the community would do it for him, by providing every resident citizen with an equal individual exemption from the land rent obligation, as I already explained. So everyone would already have free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity. So the only rival prospective users the landholder need concern himself with would be those willing to pay more for the land than he was.
Once word got out everyone would probably just willfully roam anywhere and everywhere, collecting compounding payments for a repeated legal maneuver and a little traveling.
Silliness with no basis in fact, logic, economics, or anything I said.
I suppose this is your own version of some kind of pre-industrial social "revolution" while upholding the legality of *equity* capital, and all non-land *rentier* capital, today, here in *industrial* society.
No, it's just some absurd nonsense you made up. And I am opposed to all forms of privilege, not just landowning.
In other words, 'Land for sale.'
No, improvements. The land would not be worth anything.
Why would a landowner be paying rent, and why would they limit themselves to not-making improvements on their own land, if they so wanted?
He would effectively be leasing the land, not owning it, and the prohibition on improvements when he no longer wants to pay the market rent would be imposed by the land administration office.
You're describing some kind of a TV *game show*, right? Is that it? When's the board game version coming out?
Puerile.
And, non-mockingly, how does the 'community' establish its 'authority'?
Democratically.
How is membership determined?
That's up to the democratically responsible authorities.
But being paid a wage is economically *exploitative* --
Only if the worker has been deprived of his rights without just compensation.
you're content to allow private land ownership to exploit workers who, out of material necessity, *must* find jobs and wages.
<sigh> Do bakers also "exploit" their customers, who must get something to eat "out of material necessity" or starve to death? Or are they the ones who actually save their customers from starving to death?
Here's this corroborating excerpt again:
It's just as wrong again.
You're not even upholding your own morality -- you're being a hypocrite -- because you're saying that land cannot rightly be anyone's property, yet you're clearly *condoning* the buying and selling of land as a commodity. Here's from earlier in your post:
Like most Marxists, you apparently cannot tell the difference between describing a phenomenon and condoning or advocating it.
Moralizing.
No, just realism. If we just vacate land titles without any compensation, the title owners are going to resist, probably violently. We saw it happen with slavery, and it wasn't pretty. IMO the most just and appropriate compensation, which would leave the least room for objection from either side, is the acquisition cost of the land.
Status quo.
False.
You're leaving out the material value that *labor* has added to the land, as with landscaping.
Whatever value labor on that location has added to the location is improvement value, not land value. Landscaping is a fixed improvement, not a natural resource.
Well, here we are on a *political discussion board* so if you can't describe your vision so that others like myself can understand it, then what hope do you have left?
I have certainly described my ideas clearly and simply enough for you and every competent English user over the age of 12 to understand. You just choose not to understand by refusing to know the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
I never said that air and water are the same thing.
You have made the logically equivalent economic claim that landowning and factory owning are the same thing.
You're simply upholding the specific type of rentier capital known as 'land'.
No. I'm pointing out that land is not rightly considered "capital" -- or even private property -- at all, and describing and advocating a way to make equal access to the economic opportunity it offers for all citizens compatible with its optimal productive use. Which not coincidentally also establishes justice and efficiency in land tenure and public revenue arrangements.
Products of labor, like landscaping (to increase land asset value) or the installation of pipes (to increase the value of real estate, like housing), is *expropriated* by private ownership for the cost of a wage. That's the *commodification* of labor, by ownership.
Payment of agreed wages for labor is self-evidently not expropriation.
So this is a community-supported 'commons', correct? Locally-collective public administration of land, in exchange for fees / rent to this administration.
Right: repayment of the land subsidy to the government and community that provide it.
- If the payment of rent / fees to the local collective administration ('community') is voluntary, wouldn't there be some who would *not* do so, and yet still insist on leasing certain land(s) for free while others would be *paying* for the same benefit?
Only the one paying the market rent for exclusive tenure would get it. But everyone would get up to a certain uniform amount of rent exempted for the land they lived on. IOW, every resident citizen would get free, secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land of their choice to have access to economic opportunity, and those who wanted to exclude others from more than that would pay the community for the additional amount they deprived everyone else of.
- How is community membership determined? (What are the criteria for someone to be a 'member'?)
Whatever the community decides through its democratically accountable institutions, same as now.
- How does the 'community' initially procure land that is to be brought into the geoist / local-collectivist public administration?
It's all the land under its jurisdiction. All that changes is how its exclusive private possession and use is administered.
What if going market prices for land are too prohibitive for a community to purchase it in any significant quantities?
Purchase is not necessary, just a change in the rules governing tenure. But if the land reform is undertaken without monetary reform, it might be advisable to buy some parcels at their acquisition price from owners who don't want them, to prevent deflation as bank lending for land purchases dried up.
- What benefits / advantages / privileges would a monetary donor receive for being a partial funder of a land purchase that goes into this community's geoist collective public administration?
That kind of arrangement is not contemplated because all the land under the local government's jurisdiction is automatically included.
- How are leasees determined for the *most* advantageous pieces of land?
The high bidder.
- How *much* land can a leasee claim at one time?
However much they pay for.
- What if multiple parties all want the same parcel of land at the same time? How would a determination be made as to which party gains access to that land for the time of the lease, over all other prospective leasees?
Bidding in the market.
- How is *authority* conferred within this community, and what are the requirements for authority-level membership?
Authority comes from democratic consent.
- What kinds of *enforcement* is the authority prescribed to use? Would they be able to use physical violence against transgressors? Incarceration? Death penalties?
The enforcement is simply exclusivity of tenure: those who pay for it are legally entitled to exclude everyone else, by police intervention if necessary. Incarceration is not necessary unless transgressors offer violent resistance.
Anything that can be bought-and-sold is a *commodity* and has exchange-value, under capitalism.
I'm not advocating capitalism.