ckaihatsu wrote:
By 'privilege' you mean the constrained definition of 'land-owners'.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, privilege is any legal entitlement to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation. The most important privilege is landowning, but other important ones include bank licenses, IP monopolies, oil and mineral rights, broadcast spectrum allocations, etc.
You've been critical of rentier-capital-type property rights, but you still haven't proposed your own *alternative* for such -- how *should* privileged assets like land be divvied-up, if not through the real estate markets?
I've already shown that your status-quo-supporting, nationalist type is *dependent* on the bourgeois government apparatus for 'refereeing' among the private-ownership players, through my use of the immigration issue (capital is allowed to seek-out better markets around the globe, but *people* are not allowed to cross national borders to seek out better opportunities in the *job* markets).
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ckaihatsu wrote:
You haven't addressed what you mean by 'injustice', specifically if this would apply to government enforcement of people's *civil rights* (especially when such conflicts with ownership's *property rights*).
Truth To Power wrote:
Justice means rewards commensurate with contributions and penalties commensurate with deprivations. I don't accept that there can be genuine conflict between genuine rights because we only have genuine rights to what we would have had if others did not deprive us of it -- mainly life, liberty, and property in the fruits of our labor. What capitalists call property rights are often privileges, not rights.
And yet you've admitted that capitalism is dependent on the privatization and commodification of *land* (etc.), plus I don't hear any concrete proposals from you about any specific *land reforms*. You're more status-quo than anything else, your flashes of contrariness notwithstanding.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
If you're not against aristocracy, are you against monarchy?
Truth To Power wrote:
"Aristocracy" means, "rule by the best." Monarchy is just rule by one person who either took power by force or inherited it.
So you'd be perfectly content with the *opposite* of land reform, which is the *consolidation* of estates within a nobility-type class. It would be a reaction that would overturn the populist gains of the French Revolution.
As I said before, say goodbye to the gains of the American Revolution, to the use of equity capital for industrialized manufactures, and to 'liberty', since you're edging backwards towards feudalism and slavery.
ckaihatsu wrote:
If you're not against *either*, then say bye-bye to your precious equity capital as a societal economic feature, because virtually all economics would be controlled by the nation-state, in a *feudalistic*-type economy. Trump would love to take us there.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Land is generally overvalued because it's used as a place to park capital,
Truth To Power wrote:
It's often overvalued because it is a source of unearned wealth.
Do you mean that you're critical of the non-productive financial gains made from rents and interest, as distinct from the commodity-producing gains made by equity capital, by exploiting labor power?
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ckaihatsu wrote:
along with other rentier-type assets like valuable art, gold, Bitcoin, offshore accounts, etc.
Truth To Power wrote:
None of those are rentier assets because their value does not come from depriving others of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible.
Of course they do -- a plot of land is discrete, just as a painting is. Gold is finite / limited in quantity, and in no case can two different owners own the exact same asset. (Think of the claims to the *returns* from such an asset -- rent / interest, and/or capital gains or profits can only go to one owner, for each discrete portion of asset-value, whatever that may happen to be.
You're just throwing out a dogmatic line without thinking it through.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Land, as you've noted, is *non-productive* because it doesn't produce *commodities*,
Truth To Power wrote:
Land is necessary for production, but it is the passive, non-human element. It's not informative to call it non-productive, especially given that it is often described as productive.
Hmmmm, you're continuing to be mostly *opaque* with your meanings -- do you agree, or not, that rentier-type assets like land are *non-productive* because they do not directly produce commodities (which are then bought-and-sold) ?
*Factories* are also non-human, yet they're considered to be *productive* capital since they / the machinery is directly used in the manufacture of goods-type commodities, through the exploitation of human labor power.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
which is what capitalism is all about, combined with production technology and mass production techniques.
Truth To Power wrote:
Capitalism is all about ownership. Technology and mass production are incidental to it, just artifacts of a particular moment in history.
Hmmmm, I don't think that this is the case. Consider the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, with the nascent use of water wheels in England -- tapping 'external' sources of power, beyond that of people and animals, is what *technologically* brought us out of feudalism, and made capital's total size much larger than it was within constrained, monarchical, gold-based nation-states in Europe.
Serfs were able to escape feudal estates, to towns (later cities), and the economic influence of traveling *merchants* grew tremendously, even rivalling kings and queens.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Those who make money from farming under capitalism are *profiteers* since food is a necessary resource for all those who do wage-work within capitalism, to produce commodities.
Truth To Power wrote:
No. The fact that food is necessary to life does not make it a resource, nor alter the fact that it is a product of labor, and thus rightly the property of its producers (less the rent of the land).
You're not understanding -- human society does *not require* capital for mere food-production -- that could be done with just serfdom / slavery, and *feudal* relations, as has already happened historically.
With equity capital, though, and industrialization, and food (etc.) for wage workers, all kinds of goods-and-services *commodities* can be produced, but to increase a workers' own costs -- for food, housing, etc. -- for making their / our labor available, is *profiteering*.
This is an excellent illustration of the existence of *class* relations under capitalism since the absence of a standard minimum wage, or 'living wage', again highlights this socially-backward 'profiteering' in addition to the regular, hour-by-hour *exploitation* of workers' labor power, in the commodity-production process.
Let me put it *this* way -- your repeatedly expressed concern has been with the economic costs of *rentier*-based assets, like that of land, to capital. Now think of the same *rentier*-based costs, but to the *worker* -- rent for human housing for those laborers, and interest payments made to *non-commodity-producing* wealth that just sits in banks, often covered by the nation-state by increased taxation and/or its increasing of the country's money supply.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Now you're flip-flopping --
Truth To Power wrote:
Don't be ridiculous.
ckaihatsu wrote:
which *is* it, TTP: Is land value and function *overrated* and a yoke on liberty,
Truth To Power wrote:
It is UNDER-rated, and being DEPRIVED of it without just compensation is a yoke on liberty.
ckaihatsu wrote:
or is it a valid 'multiple' on industrial production value?
Truth To Power wrote:
Its advantages definitely enhance industrial production.
Yes, you *are* flip-flopping, because just above, in this same post, you said:
Truth To Power wrote:
No, privilege is any legal entitlement to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation. The most important privilege is landowning,
So you consider landowning to be a 'privilege', which is the 'legal entitlement to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation'.
You still haven't addressed my prior 'First Cause' argument, which is: Who is entitled to make the first claim of ownership over a previously unclaimed parcel of land, and for what reasons?
So your position on land ownership is *contradictory* -- either it's [1] a non-commodity-productive 'privilege', initially a land-grab, that deprives others of usage of the same land, or else [2] it is a capitalism-necessary 'enhancement' to industrial production that *deserves* rent-accumulating payments for its private usage.
Are you pro-land-capital, or anti-land-capital?
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Your line *has* been to laud *equity* value while denouncing *rentier* asset values, but now you're saying that land asset values somehow *contribute* to the capitalist commodity productive process.
Truth To Power wrote:
It's not the asset value of the ownership privilege that contributes to production, it's the productive advantages land confers on its user, OWNERSHIP of which is capitalized as asset value. Try to understand the difference.
You're again being contradictory -- is land / asset ownership to be defined in terms of asset value (exchange value), or isn't it?
Yes, I understand that there's *use value* that goes with land ownership, namely for hosting productive machinery (a factory), but if all that matters is this land-use-value (for hosting equity-type-capital-based values, productive goods) then why are you content to allow land to both be a 'privilege', *and* to also value it in terms of *exchange* value (asset value), like any other commodity?
I think you're actually running-up against the inherent contradiction between exchange values, and use values -- if land becomes a commodity sheerly for *speculation*, as it often does, then its counterpart *use value* is eclipsed, and the cost of hosting the factory (rent payments) becomes much greater, with no accompanying increase in actual productivity of the commodity goods and services that the factory produces.
Economically this is a *reactionary*, *backward* dynamic, on the trajectory towards feudalism, since the bourgeois politics of the day then defends this rentier faction of capital even though rentier capital / land is *non-commodity-productive*. Why should the commodity-productive portion of the economy have to endure greater productive costs to its *equity* capital, passed along to the consumer (for possibly life-necessary goods and services), when such costs are based on an asset, land, that doesn't directly add-into / increase / enhance the commodity-productive process?
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, flip-flopper --
Truth To Power wrote:
I in no way changed my position. You just persist in your erroneous Marxist misinterpretations of the facts.
ckaihatsu wrote:
now you're *touting* the capital function of land.
Truth To Power wrote:
What does "capital function" mean? Is it just more deceitful Marxist gibberish? The landowner's privilege of charging others for what land contributes to production is what gives the land value as an asset.
Here's the crux of it, in this segment -- is society to consider rentier capital / land as actually being commodity-productive, or not?
Yes, the landowner charges rent for the land's use-value, but can that land really be termed 'materially productive', or not?
This isn't a groupthink-political term -- this is an objective, impartial material analysis that's either right or wrong. Is rentier capital / land actually materially productive, in the same way that the machinery of a factory is, or isn't it -- ?
The Marxist definition, of course, is that it's *not*, that the land does not contribute to the production of commodities -- and I walked through the example of land *speculation* in the prior segment, which is an illustration of capitalism's inherent contradiction between *exchange values* and *use values*.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
For the record, is it still a yoke on liberty, or what?
Truth To Power wrote:
The privilege of privately owning it is.
So, to confirm, you're saying that, yes, the privilege of privately owning land / rentier-capital, is a yoke on liberty?
(Because liquid capital cannot go to *both* of two destinations at once -- it cannot both go to rentier capital / land as a rent payment, *and* also go into equity stocks in the interests of making a return on that investment.)
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Do you want to start a Twitter feed to keep us updated on your minute-by-minute changes in policy positions?
Truth To Power wrote:
I am not responsible for your errors in understanding the facts I identify.
Uh-huh. Fun. You still need to clarify whether rentier capital / land is commodity-productive, or not.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
I interpreted ingliz's statement as being parodical because you've been content to criticize land (rentier) ownership, presumably calling for land reform, while denying a similar, more-progressive 'factory reform' for the working class so that workers can actually *control* the machinery that they work on for the majority of their / our life-time.
Truth To Power wrote:
And both of you refuse to know the fact that the factory owner has no power to do anything but offer the worker access to economic opportunity that would not otherwise be accessible, while the landowner has only the power to DEPRIVE the worker of access to economic opportunity that WOULD otherwise be accessible.
I've already shown you to be *hypocritical* with this statement of yours, because you're content to allow *non*-free-markets when it comes to workers in the international job markets -- you favor your nationalist regulated *closed borders* over any 'free market' in the jobs market.
Sure, I already know that land rental itself does not confer any economic advantage to the worker -- you're making my argument *for* me that land / rentier capital is *not productive* because it is only a *cost* to either (equity) capital, to workers' inherent human needs for life and living, or both.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Care to comment on the historical Enclosure Movement, to firm up your position, maybe -- ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
Truth To Power wrote:
What's to comment on? The Enclosures removed people's liberty rights to use land, rights they had traditionally enjoyed, and gave those rights to landowners as their private property.
Okay, so then, given this, where do you stand on the economic process / dynamic of *privatization*?
If some asset, like an oil extraction facility, happens to be *state-owned*, then should it remain that way, or should it be *privatized*?
Should *many more* assets be 'de-privatized' and returned to general, common usage, as through nationalization?
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Yup, you've now backed into a decidedly *feudalist* politics,
Truth To Power wrote:
Nope, you are just makin' $#!+ up again.
ckaihatsu wrote:
where you're apologizing for *land ownership* --
Truth To Power wrote:
Where? Quote or retract.
Okay, from this same post:
Truth To Power wrote:
[Land value and function] is UNDER-rated, and being DEPRIVED of it without just compensation is a yoke on liberty.
Truth To Power wrote:
Its advantages definitely enhance industrial production.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
say goodbye to equity-capital-based 'liberty' and hello to slavery, feudalist.
Truth To Power wrote:
It's pointless to discuss anything with you if you are just going to make $#!+ up and falsely attribute it to me in order to avoid addressing what I have actually said.
Okay, just address the previous point, then.