A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows - Page 13 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14870123
Potemkin wrote:You are deceiving yourself, TtP.

No. I am the one who is identifying the deceptions practiced by capitalists and socialists.
Of course human labour-power can be owned.

No, of course it cannot. "Labor-power" is a Marxist fabrication, an anti-concept Marx concocted to prevent use of the valid economic concept of labor.
It gets bought and sold every time somebody signs a contract of employment.

<sigh> Like Goon, you are just refusing to know the fact that a contract of employment does not involve purchase or sale of any owned asset, but only payment for provision of a service. A service is not something that can be owned, as it does not exist except in the moment it is rendered.
The fact that this labour-power will only be expended in the future is irrelevant;

No, it is crucial because it DOES NOT EXIST except in the moment it is expended, and is therefore not an asset that can be owned.
you can think of the labour market as a 'futures' market if you like.

It's nothing like a futures market. In a futures market, you do not own the item or commodity in question, and no one else does, either; you only own a legal right to buy or sell it at a certain price. Owning a legal right to obtain something is not the same as owning that thing.
This is so fundamental to economics that it shouldn't even need to be stated;

It's a fundamental economic error to aggregate labor with assets like land and capital that can be traded at arm's length.
it should be obvious to any normal human being with a functioning brain.

It's obvious to any normal human being with a functioning brain (i.e., not socialists) that no one can own human effort.
#14870132
Truth To Power wrote:No. I am the one who is identifying the deceptions practiced by capitalists and socialists.

Are you trying to imply communists do not practice deception?

Civil rights is used as a tool in communist deception. As far back as 1928, the communists declared that the cultural, economic, and social differences between the races in America could be exploited to create animosity, fear, and hatred between large segments of the population.

Briefly, the three broad deceptive objectives are as follows:

Create Hatred
Trigger Violence
Overthrow Established Government

1. Create Hatred. Use any means to agitate blacks into hating whites and whites into hating blacks. Work both sides of the split. Play up and exaggerate real grievances. If necessary, don't hesitate to manufacture false stories and rumors about injustices and brutality. Create martyrs for both sides. Play upon mass emotions until they smolder with resentment and hatred.

2. Trigger Violence. Put the emotional masses into the streets in the form of large mobs, the larger the better. It makes no difference if the mob is told to demonstrate "peacefully" so long as it is brought into direct confrontation with the antagonist. Merely bringing the two emotionally charged groups together is like mixing oxygen and hydrogen. All that is needed is one tiny spark. If the spark is not forthcoming from purely spontaneous causes, create it.

3. Overthrow Established Government. Once mob violence becomes widespread and commonplace, condition those who are emotionally involved to accept violence as the only way to "settle the score" once and for all. Provide leadership and training for guerrilla warfare. Institute discipline and terrorism to insure at least passive support from the larger inactive segment of the population. Train and battle-harden leadership through sporadic riots and battles with police. Finally, at the appointed time, launch an all-out simultaneous offensive in every city.

The deceptive plan is as follows: Using unidentified communist agents and non-communist sympathizers in key positions in government, in communications media, and in mass organizations--such as labor unions and civil rights groups--demand more and more government power as the solution to all civil rights problems. Total government is the objective of communism. Without calling it by name, build communism piece by piece through mass pressures for presidential decrees, court orders, and legislation which appear to be aimed at improving civil rights and other social reforms. If there is social, economic, or educational discrimination, then advocate more government programs and control.

The two classic communist manuals explaining this diabolic plot are American Negro Problems, by John Pepper (1928) and Negroes in a Soviet America, by James Ford and James Allen (1935). Both originally were published by the Communist party and now may be obtained as photographic reprints from American Opinion, Belmont Mass. 02178 [Note: The American Opinion magazine has since been renamed, "The New American," and is published under authority of the John Birch Society, which also moved its headquarters to Appleton Wisconsin]
#14870138
Decky wrote:Just the left then.

You see in my book that would be a third of the political spectrum, a third of the voters or a half if you include the centre left. So looking at the last 2 elections in Britain the left is roughly the same as Labour voters plus a few people on the far left who won't vote Labour because its not left wing enough. Your definition of the left in Britain seems to be Arthur Scargill, 5 blokes and a whippet.

Some American Conservatives get upset because the Nazis were part of the German right in the early nineteen thirties. These special snow flakes similarly want the political spectrum to be for Weimar Germany to be redefined so as the Right amounted to about 10 people. Left and Right are not ideologies. Individual voters don't fit particularly well into the one dimensional political spectrum. Political parties and movements however seem to constantly align themselves into a left right spectrum, even though the left and right swap political positions over time and place.
#14870152
Image

Sorry, @Truth To Power, I’m going to have to stop helping you learn very basic economic concepts.

Maybe Potemkin can help.

But you’ll note the rest of the fail-train has arrived, and I simply do not have the time to make Rich go away by pointing out his conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories; or bother to read Hindsite’s constant blubbering about being a victim.

But you will note that none of them use sources, citations, or in any way want to help you understand.

Keep learning, and never be afraid of it!

And if nothing else, this thread started with seeing that the youth have a better understanding of basic economics than you, and you can leave it in their hands. As cited before the weeping professional victims arrived to cry about monsters under their bed, remember Lenin:

We are the party of the future, and the future belongs to the youth. We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle.

;)
#14870320
The Immortal Goon wrote:Image

Sorry, @Truth To Power, I’m going to have to stop helping you learn very basic economic concepts.

So you are aware that you have been comprehensively and conclusively refuted and your beliefs proved false and evil, yet you nevertheless decline, merely on that account, to reconsider those proved-false-and-evil beliefs.

That is the usual outcome in these discussions.

Fail indeed.
#14870400
I don't know if I had ever looked up Geoism prior to reading this thread. It has a logic to it, surely.

I think that TIG's criticism of TTP's approach is the lack of consideration of class, which is of course a key consideration of Marxist political economy.

I think that issues of class are even more significant in say the US (and I suspect West Europe), than it was just a couple decades ago.

I still think that class is likely an essential component of analysis of these times. But, Geoism does seem to have some interesting incites.

Hell, the condition of the real estate market in my home state of Oregon might bare some insights from Geoism. I have recently been suspecting that the land zoning laws in the state create artificial land shortages, which inflate land prices, leading to more tax revenue for the state, which is heavily reliant o property tax (thus there are mis-incentives built in and entrenched in the system). The way the system functions, landlords pass on the tax to renters, perhaps owing to the shortage of supply of housing. Homelessness is a matter of national news coverage in the state, including youth homelessness.

Real estate prices are additionally inflated by outsiders buying land, and they also generally track the California real estate prices, for similar reasons. It is a huge issue for workers in the state, who in the best case see their incomes eaten up. Yet, the existing establishment is vested in the prevailing system.

I don't know what Geoism might have to say about this, but perhaps it has some insights.
#14870962
Crantag wrote:I think that TIG's criticism of TTP's approach is the lack of consideration of class, which is of course a key consideration of Marxist political economy.

Class is primarily sociological, not economic, though it has an economic basis in privilege. Marxist class theory is simply an effort to eliminate the fact that the owner of capital goods such as factories and machinery is not privileged, and earns his income by commensurate contributions to production, while the landowner is privileged, and does not earn his income by any such contribution.
I think that issues of class are even more significant in say the US (and I suspect West Europe), than it was just a couple decades ago.

Yes, because privilege is far bigger factor in the economy than it was a few decades ago.
I still think that class is likely an essential component of analysis of these times.

Class is a red herring. Privilege is the actual crux of the matter.
Hell, the condition of the real estate market in my home state of Oregon might bare some insights from Geoism.

All real estate markets function in accordance with geoist analysis; none has ever functioned in accordance with neoclassical analysis.
I have recently been suspecting that the land zoning laws in the state create artificial land shortages, which inflate land prices, leading to more tax revenue for the state, which is heavily reliant o property tax (thus there are mis-incentives built in and entrenched in the system).

It doesn't lead to more tax revenue for the state. It leads to enhanced profits for politically connected landowners.
The way the system functions, landlords pass on the tax to renters, perhaps owing to the shortage of supply of housing.

No, they don't. Landlords can only pass on a fraction of the improvement value portion of property taxes. What they are passing on to tenants is the increased residential land rents caused by a shortage of building permits.
Homelessness is a matter of national news coverage in the state, including youth homelessness.

Homelessness is landlessness.
Real estate prices are additionally inflated by outsiders buying land, and they also generally track the California real estate prices, for similar reasons.

Land value is always the market's estimate of the net future subsidy to the landowner: how much more the landowner will be able to take from the community by owning the land than he will pay in taxes on it. Outsider buying just indicates a lack of local credit to finance purchases, or a different market estimate of the future subsidy.
It is a huge issue for workers in the state, who in the best case see their incomes eaten up. Yet, the existing establishment is vested in the prevailing system.

Landowner privilege is a massive wealth transfer system: from producers, consumers and taxpayers to landowners.
#14870978
Two points.

First, it is not true that owners of factories do not attain basic rents. The propensity of not just Marxist, but also mainstream, economics affirms this.

Marx demonstrated clearly how the capitalists reap surplus value from workers, and Marx was correct.

Second, landlords do indeed pass on land tax to renters. The reason is the inelasticity of demand for housing. An inelastic good is one for which a 1% increase in price is associated with a less than 1% decrease in consumption.

Housing is most obviously an inelastic good.

Lastly, the state taxes land on a percentage basis of its assessed value. Rising land prices therefore do indeed increase tax revenues to the state, and this is a perverse incentive.
#14870984
Crantag wrote:First, it is not true that owners of factories do not attain basic rents.

Yes, it is. All rents flow through to the landowner, because the supply of land is fixed. The only exception is when competition cannot reduce the rents of privileges such as patents and bank licenses. Factories have no such privilege attached, so their owners can never obtain rents.
The propensity of not just Marxist, but also mainstream, economics affirms this.

Mainstream neoclassical economics eagerly shares the Marxist error of equating land with capital, because its purpose is to provide plausible rationalizations for privilege. Capitalists pretend land is capital to justify stealing land; socialists pretend capital is land to justify stealing capital.
Marx demonstrated clearly how the capitalists reap surplus value from workers, and Marx was correct.

No he didn't, and he was wrong. The surplus value is all taken by landowners. Marx himself actually came to realize this late in life (it's in Vol III of "Capital"), but said it should be ignored, as it would remove the rationalization for violent seizure of the factories by the proletariat!
Second, landlords do indeed pass on land tax to renters.

No, they do not and cannot.
The reason is the inelasticity of demand for housing.

Nope. False. Housing is not land, and it doesn't matter if the demand for housing is inelastic: the supply of land is FIXED.
An inelastic good is one for which a 1% increase in price is associated with a less than 1% decrease in consumption.

What matters is the ratio of elasticities. As the elasticity of supply for land is ZERO, the ratio is always infinite, and NO part of a land value tax can be passed on to renters. It is all paid by the landowner.
Housing is most obviously an inelastic good.

But the supply of land is ALWAYS INFINITELY LESS ELASTIC, so no part of a land value tax can be passed on to renters.
Lastly, the state taxes land on a percentage basis of its assessed value. Rising land prices therefore do indeed increase tax revenues to the state, and this is a perverse incentive.

You are again wrong. The state does not maintain a constant ad valorem tax rate. If land values rise, the mill rate just falls correspondingly. This should be obvious when land values have risen by an order of magnitude, even faster than GDP, but property tax revenue has only quadrupled over the same period.
#14870986
Assessed land values for tax purposes are not determined by the market, but by the analysis of the county tax assessor.

Ownership of means of production place capitalists in a position in which laborers are dependent on selling their labor power to capitalists, for means of earning a livelihood. Although there might be room for more analysis in Marxism of the role of land in the economy, it is demonstrably not the case that all value originates from land, despite what the physiocrats thought. Capitalist profits are owing to the appropriation of surplus value from laborers. That laborers (a) do indeed produce a surplus, and (b) do not get to keep the entirety of their surplus, are both demonstrably the case.

It is the system of factory production which installs capitalists in this preeminent position over workers.

Your arguments seem contrived. Also, I do not feel that any of my points were successfully refuted with your last post.
#14871000
Millenials rejecting capitalism? Doubtful.

The Millennial Myth or How They Are Just Like Every Other Generation
This broad condemnation of Millennials’ ethos is incredibly shortsighted and can be attributed, I believe, to the fact that Millennials were born into an age of technology disruption where all others had to experience and adapt to it.

For Millennials, technology – both big “T” and small “T” – has been the only foundation they’ve known to learn, access information, develop relationships, manage relationships and manage their lives. The important point here is that technology has changed the “how” things get done– it hasn’t fundamentally changed the “what” gets done. Think of the “what” as aspirations – like previous generations the vast majority of Millennials aspire for a rewarding career, lasting relationships, a family, a home. That’s right the Millennials generation is just like everybody else – they just might go about getting what they want in a timeframe and manner that is different from other generations.

Millennials still want their belly full – and use an app to order vegan Nepalese dumplings: they want to be clothed – and find the perfect outfit at a pop-up boutique: they want a roof over their head – and move into a micro-condo furnished with multipurpose furniture: they want financial security – and invest their savings in a clean-energy fund. I think you get the point – Millennials are consumers. That is not a bad thing – in fact it is a very good thing considering that in the near future Millennials will be the demographic segment with the most disposable income. I know what you are thinking – Millennials=consumers=most disposable income – it doesn’t compute. Well actually, it does.

Despite the lasting impact of recent economic events, the 83.1 million Millennials, representing more than one quarter of the nation’s population, will be shifting into their prime years for family formation, and earnings. To put it into perspective, the size of the Millennial generation exceeds that of the 75.4 million baby boomers.

So let us, as marketers, not fall into the trap of ceding the Millennial generation to media hyperbole. Let us look at Millennials for who they are – a vast, diverse, educated, technically advanced generation of consumers who are shaping how marketers engage with all consumer segments. And a consumer segment that, with winds now at their back, are set to be an economic dynamo that will in many industries determine the winners and losers.

https://www.rhythmone.com/news/2016/04/ ... qAijEDL.97
#14871011
It's also not been great for them.

HuffPo wrote:But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.

What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence—education, housing and health care—has inflated into the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life—the ones that boomers lucked into—are being lifted out of our reach. Add it all up and it’s no surprise that we’re the first generation in modern history to end up poorer than our parents.

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. “Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest,” says Jimmi Matsinger. “I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

It’s tempting to look at the recession as the cause of all this, the Great Fuckening from which we are still waiting to recover. But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decision, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America’s.

Once you start tracing these trends backward, the recession starts to look less like a temporary setback and more like a culmination. Over the last 40 years, as politicians and parents and perky magazine listicles have been telling us to study hard and build our personal brands, the entire economy has transformed beneath us.

For decades, most of the job growth in America has been in low-wage, low-skilled, temporary and short-term jobs. The United States simply produces fewer and fewer of the kinds of jobs our parents had. This explains why the rates of “under-employment” among high school and college grads were rising steadily long before the recession. “The way to think about it,” says Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist and author of The Great Risk Shift, “is that there are waves in the economy, but the tide has been going out for a long time.”

The decline of the job has its primary origins in the 1970s, with a million little changes the boomers barely noticed. The Federal Reserve cracked down on inflation. Companies started paying executives in stock options. Pension funds invested in riskier assets. The cumulative result was money pouring into the stock market like jet fuel. Between 1960 and 2013, the average time that investors held stocks before flipping them went from eight years to around four months. Over roughly the same period, the financial sector became a sarlacc pit encompassing around a quarter of all corporate profits and completely warping companies’ incentives.
The pressure to deliver immediate returns became relentless. When stocks were long-term investments, shareholders let CEOs spend money on things like worker benefits because they contributed to the company’s long-term health. Once investors lost the ability to look beyond the next earnings report, however, any move that didn’t boost short-term profits was tantamount to treason.
The new paradigm took over corporate America. Private equity firms and commercial banks took corporations off the market, laid off or outsourced workers, then sold the businesses back to investors. In the 1980s alone, a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500 were restructured. Companies were no longer single entities with responsibilities to their workers, retirees or communities.

They were Lego castles, clusters of distinct modules that could be separated, optimized, sold off, and put back together.

Businesses applied the same chop-shop logic to their own operations. Executives came to see themselves as first and foremost in the shareholder-pleasing game. Higher staff salaries became luxuries to be slashed. Unions, the great negotiators of wages and benefits and the guarantors of severance pay, became enemy combatants. And eventually, employees themselves became liabilities. “Corporations decided that the fastest way to a higher stock price was hiring part-time workers, lowering wages and turning their existing employees into contractors,” says Rosemary Batt, a Cornell University economist.

Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of “contingent” arrangement like this—from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is “temporary help services”—all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies.

The effect of all this “domestic outsourcing”—and, let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. One of Batt’s papers found that employees lose up to 40 percent of their salary when they’re “re-classified” as contractors. In 2013, the city of Memphis reportedly cut wages from $15 an hour to $10 after it fired its school bus drivers and forced them to reapply through a staffing agency. Some Walmart “lumpers,” the warehouse workers who carry boxes from trucks to shelves, have to show up every morning but only get paid if there’s enough work for them that day.

“This is what’s really driving wage inequality,” says David Weil, the former head of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor and the author of The Fissured Workplace. “By shifting tasks to contractors, companies pay a price for a service rather than wages for work. That means they don’t have to think about training, career advancement or benefit provision.”

This transformation is affecting the entire economy, but millennials are on its front lines. Where previous generations were able to amass years of solid experience and income in the old economy, many of us will spend our entire working lives intermittently employed in the new one. We’ll get less training and fewer opportunities to negotiate benefits through unions (which used to cover 1 in 3 workers and are now down to around 1 in 10). Plus, as Uber and its “gig economy” ilk perfect their algorithms, we’ll be increasingly at the mercy of companies that only want to pay us for the time we’re generating revenue and not a second more.

But the blame doesn’t only fall on companies. Trade groups have responded to the dwindling number of secure jobs by digging a moat around the few that are left. Over the last 30 years, they’ve successfully lobbied state governments to require occupational licenses for dozens of jobs that never used to need them. It makes sense: The harder it is to become a plumber, the fewer plumbers there will be and the more each of them can charge. Nearly a third of American workers now need some kind of state license to do their jobs, compared to less than 5 percent in 1950. In most other developed countries, you don’t need official permission to cut hair or pour drinks. Here, those jobs can require up to $20,000 in schooling and 2,100 hours of instruction and unpaid practice.
In sum, nearly every path to a stable income now demands tens of thousands of dollars before you get your first paycheck or have any idea whether you’ve chosen the right career path. “I was literally paying to work,” says Elena, a 29-year-old dietician in Texas. (I’ve changed the names of some of the people in this story because they don't want to get fired.) As part of her master’s degree, she was required to do a yearlong “internship” in a hospital. It was supposed to be training, but she says she worked the same hours and did the same tasks as paid staffers. “I took out an extra $20,000 in student loans to pay tuition for the year I was working for free,” she says.

All of these trends—the cost of education, the rise of contracting, the barriers to skilled occupations—add up to an economy that has deliberately shifted the risk of economic recession and industry disruption away from companies and onto individuals. For our parents, a job was a guarantee of a secure adulthood. For us, it is a gamble. And if we suffer a setback along the way, there’s so little to keep us from sliding into disaster.
#14871031
All of these trends—the cost of education, the rise of contracting, the barriers to skilled occupations—add up to an economy that has deliberately shifted the risk of economic recession and industry disruption away from companies and onto individuals. For our parents, a job was a guarantee of a secure adulthood. For us, it is a gamble. And if we suffer a setback along the way, there’s so little to keep us from sliding into disaster.

As the Russian revolutionaries of the 19th century used to say, "The worse, the better." :)

The fools' paradise of the post-War boom years has been revealed for what it always was - a temporary measure designed to damp down worker unrest during the Cold War. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the middle-class 'consumer society' of the West was no longer needed and has been dismantled, piece by piece....
#14871245
Crantag wrote:Assessed land values for tax purposes are not determined by the market, but by the analysis of the county tax assessor.

No, the assessor has little to say about it. There are rules he has to follow, and he has little leeway. It's the same in most US jurisdictions: quite arbitrary rules minimize the assessment of land, making it largely unrelated to market value, in order to REDUCE , not increase, the property taxes landowners pay on land value increases. I again refer you to the objectively observable relationship between the increase in true market value of land and ACTUAL PROPERTY TAXES PAID, which is the exact opposite of what you claimed.
Ownership of means of production place capitalists in a position in which laborers are dependent on selling their labor power to capitalists, for means of earning a livelihood.

No, that is factually false. Ownership of LAND places capitalists in a position in which laborers are dependent on selling their labor power to capitalists for means of earning a livelihood, and capitalists must pay landowners full market value for access to that supply of dependent labor. The capitalist does not get to keep any of the resulting production that he does not have to pay the laborer in wages. The landowner takes it all. That is why the capitalist risks losing money when he produces, but the landowner gets the rent in any case.

If the laborers had their rights to liberty, which landowners forcibly removed, they would be free to earn a livelihood by using the resources nature provided and the opportunities the community provides. It is the removal of their liberty to earn a living by using land that makes them dependent on capitalists for employment, not the capitalists' ownership of factories, etc. By owning a factory, the capitalist is only able to OFFER the laborer an economic opportunity he would not otherwise have enjoyed. But by owning the LAND, the LANDOWNER DEPRIVES the laborer of an economic opportunity he WOULD otherwise have enjoyed.

This has been proved historically. When English workers had their liberty to use the village commons to earn a living, they lived decently, and could not be enslaved by capitalist factory owners. It was only when the Enclosures removed their rights to liberty and made those rights into the private property of landowners that the workers were forced into wage labor in the towns and cities on disadvantageous terms. It was landowning that made them into slaves, not factory owning.

The socialist has to destroy his own mind in order to make it incapable of knowing these self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality, because he has already realized that they prove his beliefs are false and evil.
Although there might be room for more analysis in Marxism of the role of land in the economy,

Yes, there might be room to change Marxism's false claims about the role of land in the economy into true claims. But then it would be geoism, not Marxism.
it is demonstrably not the case that all value originates from land, despite what the physiocrats thought.

What on earth do you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about? No one here has said anything remotely similar to that. Value originates from PRODUCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS by the worker and capital provider. The landowner is just legally entitled to TAKE a portion of that value -- rent -- without making any such contribution to production in return. The Law of Rent states that the landowner takes the difference in production between his land and marginal land, leaving the product on marginal land to be split between workers and capital providers. If you were willing to know obvious facts (you aren't), you would know that capital owners take a risk when they provide capital to the production process, and often lose money when they produce, while the landowner reliably pockets the lion's share of production without lifting a finger or making any contribution to production whatsoever.
Capitalist profits are owing to the appropriation of surplus value from laborers.

No, that is objectively false. Land rent is owing to the appropriation of surplus value from laborers, which is why the landowner always gets the rent without lifting a finger, while the capital provider often not only does not make a profit, but incurs losses. Everything you claim the capitalist takes from the worker is actually taken from the capitalist by the landowner.
That laborers (a) do indeed produce a surplus, and (b) do not get to keep the entirety of their surplus, are both demonstrably the case.

Right. And it is also demonstrably the case that the landowner takes that surplus, not the capital provider.
It is the system of factory production which installs capitalists in this preeminent position over workers.

No, it objectively is not. It is the system of LANDOWNING that makes workers dependent on capitalists, and forces capitalists to hand over the entire value of that dependency to landowners.
Your arguments seem contrived.

They consist of self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality and their indisputable logical implications. You just don't like the irrefutable conclusion: your beliefs are false and evil.
Also, I do not feel that any of my points were successfully refuted with your last post.

You are objectively incorrect on that score.
#14871250
I find you quite insufferable. Let me say this, we agree to disagree (on essentially all fronts).

Your brute force approach might make you feel good with respect to internets debates, but it doesn't do much beyond that.

Your obsession with land rents is pretty strange, but has nothing in common with actual economics.

But if you insist on pushing this contrarian approach of yours, let me make one request. Can you refer to some source material for the legitimate theorists on whom you are basing your pronouncements?

Not asking for a citation for each and every line, just a bit of a bibliographic statement perhaps.

Thanks.
#14871270
Crantag wrote:I find you quite insufferable.

No one wants to know that their beliefs are false and evil.
Let me say this, we agree to disagree (on essentially all fronts).

Translation: you are aware that your beliefs have been proved false and evil, but you decline, merely on that account, to reconsider them.
Your brute force approach might make you feel good with respect to internets debates, but it doesn't do much beyond that.

It does feel good to defeat the forces of evil in the intellectual arena, mainly because it is so hard to defeat them politically.
Your obsession with land rents is pretty strange, but has nothing in common with actual economics.

That is incorrect. Unlike what you mistakenly call "actual" economics, my analysis of the role of land, land rent and landownership in the economy is factually correct.
Can you refer to some source material for the legitimate theorists on whom you are basing your pronouncements?

In most cases, you are already aware that my statements are indisputably correct as a matter of objective physical fact. That is why you do not even bother trying to dispute them, but just try to change the subject, or make false claims about historical fact, what I have plainly written, etc.
Not asking for a citation for each and every line, just a bit of a bibliographic statement perhaps.

I have already given some, such as Vol III of "Capital" for Marx's grudging admission that it is in fact the landowner, not the capitalist, who pockets the proft from the workers' exploitation. For the basics, just Google "Law of Rent" and "Henry George Theorem." You can also look at the Land Value Tax article in Wikipedia, and keep in mind that Wikipedia does not permit the fallacious criticisms of land value taxation that have been provided for "balance" to be refuted.

If there is any specific statement of mine that you feel is inadequately supported, please identify it, and I will try to allay your concerns. But do not expect me to try to sugar-coat the proofs that capitalism and socialism are false and evil beliefs.
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