People believe fair to be a subjective term. However, I postulate than at least in the affairs of men, it is possible to define fair, and test that empirically. For something to be fair it must be optimally efficient.
Here already you've failed in proving your point. You cannot simply declare a definition of fairness without discussing why we should even accept this first premise. You've simply asserted this and then moved on with a faulty premise.
Fair already has a definition.
free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fairWhat it means for something to be just has been argued since the time of socrates. It is my philosophical opinion that when people say something is just or unjust they are essentially stating how they feel about a particular situation. Some may feel that it is unjust to fire someone because you can get a machine to do something more cheaply. Others may feel it's unjust to deny people the economic benefit. This is inherently subjective, which renders fairness subjective.
None of your argument follows then, even if I grant you all your other premises.
A fair distribution of the factors being, produced factors remain private and untaxed, and the value derived from unproduced factors, Land and other economic rents, shared equally.
This premise also need support to be taken seriously, you cannot just assert that private and untaxed economies are more efficient. They are not in fact. Monopolies are inherently inefficient because they have no free market control of their prices that force their product to approach it's actual economic value. The only limit on the price for a monopoly is peoples actual ability to pay, and the limits of their ability to manipulate the competition and the government to prevent competition. Without some level of regulation and government control, this is not optimally efficient. This is only one example among many of inefficiencies created by a completely "free" market. Another is something like power or water. How is it economically efficient to have dozens of separate power grids? That is incredibly wasteful.
Today's discourse that more wealth creation or more equality are mutually exclusive is therefore erroneous.
You mischaracterize the discourse. Wealth creation is not the same as wealth accumulation. The vast majority of the very wealthy do not create all that much wealth, they accumulate wealth by owning property. Unless you think simply owning stock inherently creates some sort of value I don't see how you can justify this as fair, or wealth creation. By simply having money and blindly throwing it into mutual funds the wealthy get ever more money with no actual effort. How is it that when a rich man watches TV he can make thousands of dollars, but when a poor person does they make nothing? What is the difference in the value these two people have created?
In a World where the value of Land is zero, a Poll Tax would be the only necessary form of paying for State services
The value of land is not, nor will it ever be, zero. Land has value. It also doesn't follow that a poll tax would pay for anything. Unless the intention is to set a very high poll tax so that only the wealthy may vote.
As all costs, including taxes and interest rates, lower rental incomes and selling prices, all taxes are "land taxes". They only differ in their distributional fairness thus their efficiency.
So an income tax lowers your rent? That doesn't even make sense. Especially when applied to the very wealthy. If you tax a million dollars extra off a billionaire, he wont downsize his 20 houses.
It is fair, thus efficient, to collect land rent directly from landowners, rather than indirectly by penalising wealth creation by taxing it.
Only if you accept your origional premise, which is completely baseless.
The main inefficiencies characterised by taxing land indirectly are a) deadweight loss of taxation b) deadweight loss from freeholders imputing rent c) deadweight loss from excessive inequality causing diseconomies of scale d) deadweight loss from rent seeking activities that produce no welfare ie landlords/bankers/idle rich/accountants/tax lawyers/excessive numbers of people employed in the real estate industry/government bureaucrats etc e) deadweight loss from conditionality of welfare/benefits.
Since you've done nothing to prove your origional premise, none of this matters. Even if this is all true.
Oks, can you give me an example for where something is fair but not efficient?
Trial by jury, extremely inefficient. Public defenders are costly and inefficient (wasting money to defend people who don't add much to the economy). Democracy. Giving to charity. Curing malaria. Treating the sick when they cant pay. These and a whole host of other things are fair but inefficient.
You have to remember efficiency relates to welfare just as much as it does to GDP.
Welfare itself is inefficient, you can argue about the relative efficiency of various welfare programs, but all welfare causes wages to go up and tax's these magical "wealth creators" to give money to people who don't add to the economy. The people on welfare are "deadweight" under a system that only values efficiency.
So, given that to say fair=efficient is rather platitudinous. However, we can take that and go a step further and apply it to public finance, inequality and economic policy. With things that can be measured empirically. Distribution and deadweight costs.
I repeat myself, you cannot assert the initial premise without evidence to support it. This premise is patently false.
Sure, the cost/benefit of caring for the disable is not so easy, but we do it. And that's quite correct.
This line didn't even make sense. What cost benefit? What benefit is there to the economy to spend money on people who cannot work? Why is it simply "correct"?
I'm attempting to show the main concerns of economics and politics are simple in concept and easy to solve. What is fair is efficient. Simple.
So simple one must wonder why so many would rebel against being reduced to nothing more than their ability to add to the economy. It's almost like people themselves are not simple, and complex systems of many multitudes of people are even less simple. Especially when different people value different things.
Forbidding something that favours the vast majority, measurable in terms of output, and welfare, over a tiny minority, is obviously unfair.
You cannot assert it as obvious, it isn't obvious that the measurements you have and use actually speak to a persons values. You cannot pick a metric because you value it and then assert that everyone must value it.
You could at least try difficult examples involving life support machines/terminally ill/disabled.
It's not necessary, even a straight forward example that everyone can agree on like banning cars is perfectly able to disprove your point. Values are subjective, what people consider fair is subjective. The people who lost their jobs no doubt would be liable to think banning cars would be wonderfully fair.
But that's really besides the point, as it involves the choices of how we spend efficiently the resources we own or we've pooled together. Quite interesting but no big deal IMO .
What we do with resources is a massively big deal, especially if your premise is that everything should be as efficient as possible. Spending resource on frivolities is inefficient. Everything should be saved and used to "create wealth" and only the basic necessities should be purchased. This is the optimally efficient outcome.
What is a big deal is how we distribute the factors needing to create wealth, and the incomes derived from them. Is there one way that is objectively efficient and fair?
No, private ownership of the means of production is inherently unfair because it gives the small group of people that own most if not all of the factors of production massive power over the lives of the people who do not.
If there is, it effectively puts to an end most of the arguments in politics and economics.
Politics is value laden, values are subjective, people will always disagree.
My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.