What, exactly, is socialism? Again this discussion seems necessary.

No.

LOL!! Look who's talking about moving goalposts!

 

Without doubt. The idea that you can acquire $170 million plus without rent is just a tad childish.

I gave you a case study example demonstrating the nature of rent through labour exploitation. Perhaps you'd like to account for Green's outcomes through a Georgest perspective.

We have two extremes on here. Right wingers completing ignoring land; you blinkered by it.

It merely demonstrates how rent isnt land specific. You could have your land utopia, but still have outrageous inequalities from labour exploitation.

 

No content again. That's a jolly good idea. Cut the errors! We are making progress.

Back to the obvious: rent and coercion go hand in hand. Perhaps you'd like to refer to an economist suggesting otherwise?

 

This still make me laugh. Voluntary collectivism is on a part with worker cooperative in capitalism. It does not eliminate the inefficiency. Rent is still at the core of the outcome. You've of course also showed you're a great fan of coercion by celebrating the anti-commons, which necessarily destroys economic opportunity.

This made me chuckle too! Who is ignoring rent and its coercive nature? Have a think now

 

There is no bait and switch. CHOOSING, is the only word which matters. If you choose land ownership, you must pursue that choice for it be realised - obviously. If you choose something but act against the realisation of that choice, then you are not choosing it at all.

More importantly, you guys have consistently suggested we're prevented from choosing (ie, pursuing) land ownership. Yet neither of you have shown how we're prevented from making that choice. You never will, because you can't, because we aren't. This is a function of your inability to accept human nature, and the democracy-provided freedom to choose which underpins the inconsistency you can't tolerate.

 

1) Refugees are ordinary people, coming from very difficult circumstances. And it's these difficult circumstances which make them the very best evidence that THE CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESS exist, and are available to even the least favoured. People born to the enormous freedoms and wealth of the first world should have far less difficulty in making those conditions work for them .. yet they do. And that freedom to choose failure is a direct result of the aforementioned freedoms and wealth. You accept the former, you must accept the latter. Or just admit that you're authoritarian.

2) That's the point of collective. When our fellows are unable to carry another, we carry them. When we are unable to carry another, they will carry us. That's the very point of the exercise. You rabid individualists will not understand that, of course - I do realise that. Your preference is always to have 'someone else' do your carrying for you.

3) Creating cartoonish super-villains to take the blame for your own choices (not to share), and a cartoonish super-hero Govt you insist must do your dirty work for you, is the only evil I see.

 

I already proved there was. You will now confirm it by your disingenuous weaseling. Watch:

Weaseling. When Crusoe points his musket at Friday and tells him to either get to work or Crusoe's land or get back in the water, Friday's ability to "choose" is very different from Crusoe's.

More disingenuous weaseling. YOU KNOW you can't just "choose" it. You have to PAY a landowner for PERMISSION to own land.

It is the landowner -- and government acting in his behalf, of course -- who acts against others' "choices" to own land.

That is self-evident and indisputable.

I have shown you exactly how, and you know it.

I already have.

I did.

The price of land proves we are.

I don't accept that landowner greed is part of human nature, because until a few thousand years ago, no human being ever owned land.

Yes, well, that "democracy" was originally just for white male landowners...

 

No, it's nothing like it. There is no exchange of money for labour. No profit. There is only subsistence labour, voluntarily contributed, plus agreement to the conformities and loss of privacy necessary to collectivism.

Rent has nothing to do with it. We practice collectivism on land which is owned and inhabited by members. There is no 'rent' involved.

 

Please say you're not suggesting that the mere choosing of a condition is what realises that condition? Because if so, then I choose to be a billionaire philanthropist, and live to be 250 years old in good health. I also choose more snow at Xmas time (Christmas is in summer, where I live).

 

It would be very difficult in the current system where the productive are relentlessly robbed by rentiers, true. But it would be much easier in a system without rentiers.

It begged the question with an invalid definition of rent.

My definitions are incompatible with Green's. No way even to talk about the same things.

No, I'm just fully aware of it. Even among economists, few are able to understand how pervasive the Law of Rent and the Henry George Theorem are.

I never said it was. But the value of land alone should tell you its overwhelming importance.

I agree that in the absence of landowner privilege, other privileges would become more important, and would likely be expanded to occupy much of the territory currently occupied by landowner privilege if people were not vigilant. We already see it with banksters and IP rentiers.

 

I'm not. Think about the "choice" Crusoe gives Friday. If you can address that, you will have some possibility of not just engaging in disingenuous rationalization of privilege, injustice and evil.

 

They start out ordinary. But their ordeals winnow out all but the extraordinary.

Already refuted.

Some do. You never know when the genetic dice are going to come up snake-eyes.

Having your right to liberty forcibly stripped from you without just compensation and given to the privileged as their private property is not "choosing failure," sorry.

Nope. I don't do package deals in liberty, justice or truth.

Look who's talking!

Nope.

I don't agree that we should have to carry people who have been granted legal entitlements to commandeer our efforts.

What happened to people being free not to bear others' burdens?

Darwin says no.

LOL! Only someone who understands the individual can understand the community.

You are just makin' $#!+ up again.

Privilege is just a law, not a super-power. I might be more inclined to choose to share if the privileged were less inclined to choose to take.

Politics is dirty because violence is dirty. But someone must exercise violence against the violent, or they would rule:

"Anarchy is the rule of a thousand tyrants." -- variously attributed

 

Who owns the land upon which you live? You? Or a landlord? If a landlord, how did he acquire the land upon which you live?

 

Assuming that a true free market would compete the "over and above" amount to 0, one could safely assume that whatever is currently gotten that is over and above that amount must ultimately be the result of coercion, whether the benefiting party is directly responsible for those market conditions or merely in a position to take advantage of them, unless you believe that free markets don't work.

When the local dealer (not the drug lord) can charge higher prices because of artificially restricted supply, then that makes a chunk of his "earnings" the fruits of coercion, even if he himself is not the one directly responsible for the drug laws. He may just be some pot dealer trying to make a living with no intend to harm anyone.

With land and natural resources, such artificial supply restrictions aren't even necessary, because they are naturally fixed in supply. No more can be made. The title itself is the exclusivity privilege, and everyone else is automatically crowded out. If you want turf your own turf, you have to use violence or do some "business". It's not a free market.

 

Just like LVT, you've allowed yourself to become increasingly redundant. The idea that you can spend $170 mill on a yacht and not be benefiting the effects of rent is quite silly. Consider how things have changed. Neoliberal countries have inequality levels that often surpass their Victorian history. The idea that we can just refer to land to understand that outcome today is not credible. The focus of rentier capitalism is necessarily on labour exploitation. Perhaps that why you whinge about Marxism? Its akin to shining a light that bypasses the blinkers.

You can't redefine rent to suit your argument. That isn't credible either.

This is why your focus on justice is really just a sham. As soon as you refer to the obvious (and rent through labour exploitation), your argument becomes as childish as the right wingers that you argue against.

Bogus effort. You're trying to restrict economics to an outdated understanding that ignored economic pluralism. Its as cobblers as just relying on Malthus to understand growth.

Back in Henry George's day. Today? You're making bobbins up to justify a limited economic approach.

Bogus effort again. Land isn't as important as the other sources of rent. You are right that it has to be considered if someone is really interested in removal of coercion (and clearly the right wingers whining at you aren't really interested). You are not right that it dominates the discussion. Rent from labour exploitation, as shown by the rise of zero hour contracts, is ultimately the road to super yacht delivery.

 

You might want to get Marxist on me and refer to labour power. Good luck!

Consider monopsony. Traditionally, bringiton would be on particularly strong territory. We can refer to the company town, with key resource owned by one person/company such that all suffer injustice. How has the monopsony analysis subsequently changed? Now it refers directly to labour market power, even in the circumstances of apparent competition. And what does monopsony guarantee? Economic rent.

 

People have bought land, just as they have bought taxi medallions, and once bought slaves. Slavery proved that C merely paying A for B's rights that were stripped from him by force without just compensation did not confer valid property in B's rights on C. If the government were issuing literal licenses to steal (a land title is only effectively a license to steal), people would presumably buy and sell them just as they do land titles. But having paid someone for a license to steal does not alter the fact that what one is doing with that license is in fact stealing. So what's your point?

 

<yawn> Your typical "contribution": a contentless smear.

No, it's just unlikely in the current rentier economy. It's typical envy-based Marxist ignorance to focus on WHAT the rich have rather than HOW they get it.

Those things wouldn't include your anti-liberty, anti-truth, anti-justice trash.

Wrong. It is not only possible, but inevitable given the Law of Rent and the Henry George Theorem. You have merely proved you don't understand either the Law of Rent or the Henry George Theorem.

Which is primarily enabled by landowner privilege, because it removes the landless worker's options, and thus his bargaining power.

Marxism, Marxists and socialists all refuse to know the fact that the factory owner has no power to do anything but offer the worker access to economic opportunity he would not otherwise have.

Marxism is not light but darkness because it erased one of the crucial facts that classical economics understood: that the factory owner is a contributor to production and thus earns a share of it, while the landowner is not and does not. Neoclassical economists gleefully seized on that basic error of Marx's and made it the foundation of their discipline (one cannot call it a science).

We need valid definitions to support a genuine empirical science of economics. The current mainstream neoclassical definition of rent is not valid because it is based on how much it is, rather than how it is obtained. I've done my best to provide an empirically valid definition of rent. If you don't like it, propose a better one. Invalid definitions can't be used to formulate valid, testable, worthwhile propositions in empirical science.

Honest and attentive readers (doesn't include capitalists or socialists, obviously) know that is false.

Labor exploitation is a consequence of rent, not its cause.

<yawn> There is a difference between an argument that is simple but too subtle for you to understand and an argument that is childish.

Truth that proves your beliefs are false and evil.

Pluralism is not a virtue. Ten wrong ideas is not better than one wrong idea, but one right idea is better than ten wrong ones.

Or on Marx to understand anything.

<yawn> Have you priced a SFD building lot in a major city recently?

Try to find a willingness to understand: land's astronomical value ALREADY PROVES ME RIGHT AND YOU WRONG with no further argumentation needed on my part.

Limited to fact and logic, that is.

The far greater value of land proves me right and you wrong.

It dominates the economy, not the discussion, because neoclassical economics erased it from the discussion.

Labor exploitation comes from rent, not the other way around.

 

If you are exclusively using land someone else would be willing to pay to use, there is rent involved.

 

Except purchasing something is not stealing.

 

In your plan to auction the tenure rights to land in lieu of land ownership doesn't overcome the injustice of economic rent. It also may cause other societal problems depending on the longevity of the tenure. For example, limiting capital investment in improvements to the land that would be of benefit to a larger segment of the population that does not occupy land.

Your theories don't appear to have a practical application.

 

And who is the filthy landowner who can put his land up for auction?

 

In this case, as @bringiton has outlined, it would be the government that held the auction for exclusive tenure rights to use the land.

Of course the wealthy would be able to control All the land which would lead to more rent seeking.

 

So that is the filthy landowner whom we must revile.

 

There's your problem son, you're confused. That isnt the definition of rent seeking.

Let's substitute the word "land" for other words.

If you are exclusively using a ball point pen someone else would be willing to pay to use, there is rent involved.

If you are exclusively using a couch someone else would be willing to pay to use, there is rent involved.

If you are exclusively using a penis someone else would be willing to pay to use, there is rent involved.

Well...you all get the idea...