- 21 Feb 2020 00:06
#15068694
Land should be allocated by competitive user bidding in the rental market, but the rent should go to the government and community that create its value, not to private owners who just take the money in return for nothing.
Nope. There is no private ownership of land in Hong Kong, so that exception to your rule refutes you: the refereeing between rival prospective private land users does not imply they are owners.
No, I refuted you by pointing out the fact that government is responsible for securing and reconciling the rights of its own citizens, not citizens of other nations.
It is defined as including private ownership of land.
Then you aren't paying attention. I propose to recover the publicly created rental value of land for public purposes and benefit, and justly to compensate people for the loss of their liberty rights that exclusive land tenure entails.
It may look status-quo, but it is radically different from both capitalism and socialism.
Only if they paid the full rent to the community -- which would make them very much the opposite of a nobility class, because holding the land would TAKE wealth from them rather than GIVING it to them.
The French revolution failed to liberate people because the revolutionaries were socialists, and refused to learn the lessons the physiocrats had taught.
That's just more garbage with no basis in fact.
No, I am critical of gains made by inflicting artificial scarcity on others, not gains made by RELIEVING scarcity for the BENEFIT of others.
GET IT???
More disingenuous garbage from you. Why do you refuse to know the fact that land was already there anyway, while a painting had to be produced by labor? Being "discrete" -- whatever you incorrectly imagine that might mean -- has nothing to do with it.
It must be extracted and refined by labor. Land is already there.
<sigh> Land is not merely finite but FIXED in supply, so by owning land, the landowner DEPRIVES OTHERS of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise have been accessible.
GET IT???
By contrast, if I mine and refine some gold, that has no effect whatever on any gold others have mined or may want to mine.
GET IT???
Why do you refuse to know WHERE THE VALUE COMES FROM?
I have thought all this through incomparably better than you or Karl Marx, as I prove every time I waste my valuable time trying to educate you.
No. I am very, very clear: clearer than anyone else you have ever encountered, and certainly orders of magnitude clearer than Karl Marx.
No. Land contributes to production; that is why it yields rent. Hello? It is the land OWNER who does not contribute to production because the land was already there, ready to use, with no help from him or any previous owner.
GET IT??
Land and factories both contribute to production. But unlike the landowner, the provider of a factory contributes to production because the factory would not otherwise have been there.
GET IT??
So you are wrong. Shocker.
It was advances in military technology that ended feudalism, not water wheels.
That completely misunderstands the development of industrial technology.
What nonsense. You think feudal food production doesn't require capital?? Capital has been a necessary part of food production since our remote, pre-human ancestors started using stone tools. Indeed, one of the differences between anatomically modern humans and our Neanderthal rivals was the greater complexity of the tool technology associated with the former. We cannot even survive winter outside the tropics without clothing and shelter technology that would be impossible without substantial capital.
"Profiteering" is meaningless Marxist gibberish. The increase in the worker's cost of housing -- actually, of land -- to have access to economic opportunity is rent seeking. It is rent -- returns obtained by depriving others of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible -- that is the source of worker exploitation, not profit. Try to get that through your head.
Again, that is nothing but meaningless Marxist gibberish. You will never have anything interesting to say on this topic until you can find a willingness to know the fact that it is the LANDOWNER'S PRIVILEGE that deprives the worker of his liberty, his options, and therefore his bargaining power, placing him in a disadvantageous position vis-a-vis employers and thus impoverishing him, NOT the employer's profit.
To everyone.
Yes, I understand those costs incomparably better than you. And your point would be....?
That does not contradict anything I said.
Bingo. Thank you for finally consenting to know a fact.
No one can ever rightly claim ownership of land. Exclusive tenure can only rightly be obtained by making just compensation to the community of those whom you deprive of it.
Nope. You should know right away that that is not the answer.
That is an indisputable fact of objective physical reality.
I see where you may be having trouble understanding. This is a little bit complicated.
Private landowning is necessary to capitalism by definition, which is why I oppose capitalism, not because it is an enhancement to industrial production. It actually harms industrial production by forcing producers to subsidize landowners. However, pre-private-landowning arrangements such as non-exclusive use, common ownership, customary clan landholding, etc. are even worse than private landowning, because at least the private landowner has a financial incentive to allocate the land to whoever is most productive, and can thus afford to pay him the most rent. The geoist system I advocate enjoys the best of both worlds: the productive efficiency of market allocation to the high-bidding private users, but without the parasitism and forced subsidization of paying private landowners rent for doing nothing.
The COMMUNITY deserves the rent for private usage because it CREATES the land's value and secures the user's exclusive tenure.
Meaningless. Land and capital are non-overlapping.
NO I AM NOT, and I will thank you to remember it.
No, the land's exchange value is derived from the privilege of ownership: it is basically how much more the market expects the owner to take from the community by owning the land than he will pay in taxes on it.
No. The use value comes from secure, exclusive tenure, not ownership. See Hong Kong.
That's NOT all that matters, and it is OWNING land that is the privilege, not land. See the definition of privilege.
Its rental value is necessary to efficient allocation. Not its exchange value. See above. Land's exchange value is nothing but a measure of the injustice of private landowning.
I prefer to be accurate, and distinguish value -- what a thing would trade for -- from utility -- its capacity to satisfy human desires.
Right. That is what happens when the rent is available for private appropriation.
If I understand what you are asking here, it shouldn't. Land rent is a cost, but it does not ADD to production costs because it is the cost of obtaining an economic advantage -- i.e., the cost of equivalently reducing other costs. That is why the private landowner's claim to the rent is superficially plausible: the land user doesn't really lose anything by paying the rent -- indeed he pays it willingly. The problem is that
1. the user (and everyone else) has been deprived of their liberty to use the land without just compensation so that the private landowner can get something for nothing; and
2. the land's value comes mainly from desirable public services and infrastructure paid for with other people's taxes. I.e., the land user must pay for government twice so that the landowner can pocket one of the payments in return for nothing.
Land aids production. The private landowner does not. I'm not sure there is any clearer or simpler way to explain that to you.
Why else would the user be willing to pay rent for it??
It indisputably is, as the explanation of Ricardian rent makes clear. It's the rentier that is not materially productive.
That was utterly beside the point. The fact that people can speculate in the privilege of owning land doesn't affect land's necessary role in production. You don't seem able to comprehend that land is not landowning.
Yes, given the correct definition of rent.
THAT'S NOT THE REASON!!!
I have been very clear. It is the concept of something being "commodity-productive" or not that obscures the truth.
No, you have not.
I don't have a strong position either way on that, though I think democratically accountable sovereign governments have a right to restrict immigration. Free markets can only apply within national borders, because they are reliant on government to secure the relevant property, liberty, and contract rights.
It is not only a cost, because the user is only willing to pay the cost because it confers an equivalent advantage.
It is probably a good idea where the benefits of competition are available, but has been widely applied where they are not, such as natural resources and natural monopolies.
It is the natural resource that should not be privatized. The extraction machinery is neither a natural resource nor a natural monopoly. Benefits of competition are available via privatization.
That depends on the asset. We can see the horrible effects of nationalizing the oil industry in Venezuela, but the benefits of retaining natural resources in public ownership in Norway, Alaska, etc.
Where is the contradiction? You are still not understanding that land is not landowning.
ckaihatsu wrote: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?
Land should be allocated by competitive user bidding in the rental market, but the rent should go to the government and community that create its value, not to private owners who just take the money in return for nothing.
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,
Nope. There is no private ownership of land in Hong Kong, so that exception to your rule refutes you: the refereeing between rival prospective private land users does not imply they are owners.
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).
No, I refuted you by pointing out the fact that government is responsible for securing and reconciling the rights of its own citizens, not citizens of other nations.
And yet you've admitted that capitalism is dependent on the privatization and commodification of *land* (etc.),
It is defined as including private ownership of land.
plus I don't hear any concrete proposals from you about any specific *land reforms*.
Then you aren't paying attention. I propose to recover the publicly created rental value of land for public purposes and benefit, and justly to compensate people for the loss of their liberty rights that exclusive land tenure entails.
You're more status-quo than anything else, your flashes of contrariness notwithstanding.
It may look status-quo, but it is radically different from both capitalism and socialism.
So you'd be perfectly content with the *opposite* of land reform, which is the *consolidation* of estates within a nobility-type class.
Only if they paid the full rent to the community -- which would make them very much the opposite of a nobility class, because holding the land would TAKE wealth from them rather than GIVING it to them.
It would be a reaction that would overturn the populist gains of the French Revolution.
The French revolution failed to liberate people because the revolutionaries were socialists, and refused to learn the lessons the physiocrats had taught.
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.
That's just more garbage with no basis in fact.
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?
No, I am critical of gains made by inflicting artificial scarcity on others, not gains made by RELIEVING scarcity for the BENEFIT of others.
GET IT???
Of course they do -- a plot of land is discrete, just as a painting is.
More disingenuous garbage from you. Why do you refuse to know the fact that land was already there anyway, while a painting had to be produced by labor? Being "discrete" -- whatever you incorrectly imagine that might mean -- has nothing to do with it.
Gold is finite / limited in quantity,
It must be extracted and refined by labor. Land is already there.
and in no case can two different owners own the exact same asset.
<sigh> Land is not merely finite but FIXED in supply, so by owning land, the landowner DEPRIVES OTHERS of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise have been accessible.
GET IT???
By contrast, if I mine and refine some gold, that has no effect whatever on any gold others have mined or may want to mine.
GET IT???
(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.
Why do you refuse to know WHERE THE VALUE COMES FROM?
You're just throwing out a dogmatic line without thinking it through.
I have thought all this through incomparably better than you or Karl Marx, as I prove every time I waste my valuable time trying to educate you.
Hmmmm, you're continuing to be mostly *opaque* with your meanings --
No. I am very, very clear: clearer than anyone else you have ever encountered, and certainly orders of magnitude clearer than Karl Marx.
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) ?
No. Land contributes to production; that is why it yields rent. Hello? It is the land OWNER who does not contribute to production because the land was already there, ready to use, with no help from him or any previous owner.
GET IT??
*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.
Land and factories both contribute to production. But unlike the landowner, the provider of a factory contributes to production because the factory would not otherwise have been there.
GET IT??
Hmmmm, I don't think that this is the case.
So you are wrong. Shocker.
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,
It was advances in military technology that ended feudalism, not water wheels.
and made capital's total size much larger than it was within constrained, monarchical, gold-based nation-states in Europe.
That completely misunderstands the development of industrial technology.
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.
What nonsense. You think feudal food production doesn't require capital?? Capital has been a necessary part of food production since our remote, pre-human ancestors started using stone tools. Indeed, one of the differences between anatomically modern humans and our Neanderthal rivals was the greater complexity of the tool technology associated with the former. We cannot even survive winter outside the tropics without clothing and shelter technology that would be impossible without substantial capital.
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*.
"Profiteering" is meaningless Marxist gibberish. The increase in the worker's cost of housing -- actually, of land -- to have access to economic opportunity is rent seeking. It is rent -- returns obtained by depriving others of access to economic opportunity that would otherwise be accessible -- that is the source of worker exploitation, not profit. Try to get that through your head.
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.
Again, that is nothing but meaningless Marxist gibberish. You will never have anything interesting to say on this topic until you can find a willingness to know the fact that it is the LANDOWNER'S PRIVILEGE that deprives the worker of his liberty, his options, and therefore his bargaining power, placing him in a disadvantageous position vis-a-vis employers and thus impoverishing him, NOT the employer's profit.
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.
To everyone.
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.
Yes, I understand those costs incomparably better than you. And your point would be....?
Yes, you *are* flip-flopping, because just above, in this same post, you said:
That does not contradict anything I said.
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'.
Bingo. Thank you for finally consenting to know a fact.
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?
No one can ever rightly claim ownership of land. Exclusive tenure can only rightly be obtained by making just compensation to the community of those whom you deprive of it.
So your position on land ownership is *contradictory*
Nope. You should know right away that that is not the answer.
-- either it's [1] a non-commodity-productive 'privilege', initially a land-grab, that deprives others of usage of the same land,
That is an indisputable fact of objective physical reality.
or else [2] it is a capitalism-necessary 'enhancement' to industrial production
I see where you may be having trouble understanding. This is a little bit complicated.
Private landowning is necessary to capitalism by definition, which is why I oppose capitalism, not because it is an enhancement to industrial production. It actually harms industrial production by forcing producers to subsidize landowners. However, pre-private-landowning arrangements such as non-exclusive use, common ownership, customary clan landholding, etc. are even worse than private landowning, because at least the private landowner has a financial incentive to allocate the land to whoever is most productive, and can thus afford to pay him the most rent. The geoist system I advocate enjoys the best of both worlds: the productive efficiency of market allocation to the high-bidding private users, but without the parasitism and forced subsidization of paying private landowners rent for doing nothing.
that *deserves* rent-accumulating payments for its private usage.
The COMMUNITY deserves the rent for private usage because it CREATES the land's value and secures the user's exclusive tenure.
Are you pro-land-capital, or anti-land-capital?
Meaningless. Land and capital are non-overlapping.
You're again being contradictory
NO I AM NOT, and I will thank you to remember it.
-- is land / asset ownership to be defined in terms of asset value (exchange value), or isn't it?
No, the land's exchange value is derived from the privilege of ownership: it is basically how much more the market expects the owner to take from the community by owning the land than he will pay in taxes on it.
Yes, I understand that there's *use value* that goes with land ownership,
No. The use value comes from secure, exclusive tenure, not ownership. See Hong Kong.
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',
That's NOT all that matters, and it is OWNING land that is the privilege, not land. See the definition of privilege.
*and* to also value it in terms of *exchange* value (asset value), like any other commodity?
Its rental value is necessary to efficient allocation. Not its exchange value. See above. Land's exchange value is nothing but a measure of the injustice of private landowning.
I think you're actually running-up against the inherent contradiction between exchange values, and use values
I prefer to be accurate, and distinguish value -- what a thing would trade for -- from utility -- its capacity to satisfy human desires.
-- 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.
Right. That is what happens when the rent is available for private appropriation.
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?
If I understand what you are asking here, it shouldn't. Land rent is a cost, but it does not ADD to production costs because it is the cost of obtaining an economic advantage -- i.e., the cost of equivalently reducing other costs. That is why the private landowner's claim to the rent is superficially plausible: the land user doesn't really lose anything by paying the rent -- indeed he pays it willingly. The problem is that
1. the user (and everyone else) has been deprived of their liberty to use the land without just compensation so that the private landowner can get something for nothing; and
2. the land's value comes mainly from desirable public services and infrastructure paid for with other people's taxes. I.e., the land user must pay for government twice so that the landowner can pocket one of the payments in return for nothing.
Here's the crux of it, in this segment -- is society to consider rentier capital / land as actually being commodity-productive, or not?
Land aids production. The private landowner does not. I'm not sure there is any clearer or simpler way to explain that to you.
Yes, the landowner charges rent for the land's use-value, but can that land really be termed 'materially productive', or not?
Why else would the user be willing to pay rent for it??
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 -- ?
It indisputably is, as the explanation of Ricardian rent makes clear. It's the rentier that is not materially productive.
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*.
That was utterly beside the point. The fact that people can speculate in the privilege of owning land doesn't affect land's necessary role in production. You don't seem able to comprehend that land is not landowning.
So, to confirm, you're saying that, yes, the privilege of privately owning land / rentier-capital, is a yoke on liberty?
Yes, given the correct definition of rent.
(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.)
THAT'S NOT THE REASON!!!
You still need to clarify whether rentier capital / land is commodity-productive, or not.
I have been very clear. It is the concept of something being "commodity-productive" or not that obscures the truth.
I've already shown you to be *hypocritical* with this statement of yours,
No, you have not.
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.
I don't have a strong position either way on that, though I think democratically accountable sovereign governments have a right to restrict immigration. Free markets can only apply within national borders, because they are reliant on government to secure the relevant property, liberty, and contract rights.
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.
It is not only a cost, because the user is only willing to pay the cost because it confers an equivalent advantage.
Okay, so then, given this, where do you stand on the economic process / dynamic of *privatization*?
It is probably a good idea where the benefits of competition are available, but has been widely applied where they are not, such as natural resources and natural monopolies.
If some asset, like an oil extraction facility, happens to be *state-owned*, then should it remain that way, or should it be *privatized*?
It is the natural resource that should not be privatized. The extraction machinery is neither a natural resource nor a natural monopoly. Benefits of competition are available via privatization.
Should *many more* assets be 'de-privatized' and returned to general, common usage, as through nationalization?
That depends on the asset. We can see the horrible effects of nationalizing the oil industry in Venezuela, but the benefits of retaining natural resources in public ownership in Norway, Alaska, etc.
Okay, from this same post:
Where is the contradiction? You are still not understanding that land is not landowning.