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

Please don't fib. Its ugly. I've referred to the well known concept of land barons. I used that to show that the US has land inequalities that rival the class ridden limeys. You responded with the spectacularly silly idea that trailer park folk are free to own a million acres.

You don't seem to have any understanding of choice; a rather right wing trait. We already have seen the Georgist contribution and how injustices develop, with land ownership automatically creating economic rent opportunity. Of course I added to that by referring to more standard neoclassical concepts (which an orthodox type like you should be happier with). The anti-commons is, by definition, a denial of choice. It also forces negative externalities on others. Such extreme wealth inequalities also reduce positive externalities, as housing services suffer (e.g. land banking generates speculation and house price bubbles).

But your approach does have the fun factor. I have, for example, the freedom of choice to become an astronaut and have a massive ranch of Mars! Its that ludicrous in its immaturity.

 

Crikey, you haven't even understood the basics of the Georgist comment have you? That's impressive.

Let's simplify it to right wing economic terms, which I know you're much more comfortable with. We are necessarily creating economic rent, which relies on monopoly power. Any land inequalities (which you pretended didn't exist, tut tut) will necessarily be creating rent. Rent, by definition, is anti-competition. Anti-competition is the destruction of economic opportunity. The destruction of economic opportunity is the elimination of choice.

Of course I already summed this up with the anti-commons!

 

You can keep talking about the vaguaries of the weather after the fact (of choosing), but it doesn't help your argument in any way. This is about the freedom to choose. When people are free to choose, you will always see a wide variety of outcomes - how could you possibly not? If you want guaranteed outcomes you'll have to go full North Korea. There is literally no other way to ensure people always 'win' (and in so doing, everyone loses).

PS: SO WHAT if someone chooses to pursue a career as an astronaut, but has no chance of ever becoming one? So what if someone dreams of a million acres, but then realises it's too much work to become that rich and settles instead for a trailer garden? Your issues with the 'failure' of others is actually an issue you have with the vagaries of human nature. You are effectively saying that all people are the same, in suggesting that the reason for the VARIED OUTCOMES is external.

 

None of which amounts to a hill of beans in a democracy, where everyone is free to choose land ownership. Or to put it in terms more useful to your argument ... we're all free to NOT RENT.

You are literally arguing against something which is OPTIONAL.

 

A right winger ignoring how economic rent destroys economic opportunity and therefore eliminates choice? Crikey, what a cliche!

 

OPTIONAL. You are fighting against something which is optional.

Your argument is the equivalent of choosing the optional leather seats in your new car, then regretting it and claiming the dealer forced you to buy them. It's absurd.

 

I'm not fighting against anything. You are merely a victim of right wing celebration of economic rent. Rent is coercion, by definition. In simple terms it's a zero sum game. Such outcome is effectively no different to crime.

 

Rent cannot be 'coercion' when it's a freely made choice/purchase. We are DEMOCRACIES, remember.

If you can't grasp the fundamentals, step back through a few lives (those resulting in lifetime renting). It shouldn't take you very long at all to see exactly the choices, freely made, which produced the end result. EG, an example from my own - thankfully fairly distant - extended family as follows: She chose to leave the family home very early, resulting in interruption to education and therefore income. Her poverty as a young adult was compounded further via bad habits voluntarily adopted - cigs, alcohol, drugs, travel, fashion, restaurants, etc. She then indulged the vanity that she was an artist, and would not accept 'demeaning' work. She refused to a) seek vocational training, b) suck up her vanity and work in any job she could find, or b) live in less hip but more affordable areas. After decades of living that way, she's reached her 50's with literally NOTHING to show for it. No money, no property, no partner (she made terrible choices in that regard, also), no skills, and a minimum wage part-time job hanging by a thread. How she'll survive retirement is anyone's guess. She may well end up homeless, or living in a caravan park if she's lucky.

Compare that to my own status at the same age as her. I was born to the same economic status, but chose to stay in the family home until I'd worked a basic full-time job and saved money for a few years. I didn't take up too many bad habits (only travel, really), and didn't have prejudices about where I lived. I was happy to live in the wrong areas, because they were cheaper. I studied at night and educated my way out of that basic job. I stayed married. My husband and I both worked like trojans and lived as frugally as possible (and we lived in an old one bedroom shack, off grid, way out in the boonies). We didn't have kids until we could afford to live on one salary. We never developed expensive habits or vices - with the exception of cheese - etc etc.

 

A defence through knowledge deficiency? More right wing cliche!

Rent is, by definition, coercion. We just have different forms. From company town monopsony to power created by land ownership. By ignoring that rent you are tacitly supporting coercion that destroys economic opportunity. Isn't that the right wing norm mind you?

Hahahahaha! You think economic rent is just freedom of choice over home ownership? Renting versus owning? As I said, your whole position is based on celebrating right wing guff through economic knowledge deficiency.

You really do not have an excuse for this. I told you precisely that rent is effectively a zero sum game; an inefficient redistribution of resource that is alien to concepts such as pareto efficiency. The monopolist derives it. The land baron derives it. Your desire to defend market power, and coercion that destroys economic opportunity, has led you up the garden path

As usual, we reach the standard conclusion. The right wing perspective is reliant on not understanding economic reality. Here, a little concept called rent...

 

You're still pretending rent is compulsory. Leads me to conclude that this stuff is very close to home for you Rievs, hence the emotive and illogical position.

Use that information to your advantage. Look at the decisions you (or your loved one) have made since age 18.

 

Rent is coercion, by definition. Please stop making a fool of yourself

 

Perhaps you could explain what you mean by the above.

 

I'm trying to work out when right wingers decided economic rent was voluntary, despite it being modelled in the exact way as a burglary. I'm struggling. Even the fake libertarians manage to avoid that basic error. Their simplistic ramble about government being the only source of monopoly power focuses on the source of rent. It doesn't ignore that rent is coercive and necessarily destructive.

 

Perhaps you could explain what you mean when you use the term economic rent, and maybe give an example of the sort of economic rent that "right wingers" advocate.

 

Why would this discussion seem necessary? It's a consistently failed model of collectivism. Never was anything but a Ponzi scheme. Not sure what's so hard to grasp, here?

 

Long term renting is always a choice, in a First World democracy. Your problem is with the many who choose it (via every little choice throughout life), then complain it wasn't really what they wanted. IOW, your problem is with human nature. You guys literally can't accept that in a democracy, people will make bad choices. There seems to be a wholly fantastical notion that everyone is exactly the same, so any anomaly must be a result of external forces.

 

Take that up with those who choose it. Evidently they don't agree with you. If they did, they wouldn't rent .. obviously.

 

Wow, you're still pretending that renting a house is the same as economic rent?

The head in the sand approach is quaint, but rather redundant. You've already been informed of the nature of economic rent. Unlike standard profit, it is necessarily a zero sum game (i.e. a redistribution from one to another). Unlike the invisible hand, it destroys economic activity. In simple economics, that's summed up by deadweight loss.

To suggest economic rent is a choice is akin to arguing that burglary doesn't exist as doors haven't been invented

 

Who do you think capitalism exists only through government interventionism and only survives through continued interventionism?

Answers may help us appreciate that the notion of a single feasible economic paradigm is terribly naive.

 

There's no other way to allocate exclusive tenure, except violence -- which all but the evil find even more abhorrent than accountable authority.

 

The original land patent and all the subsequent title deeds.

 

Who freely chose to have their rights to liberty forcibly stripped from them and given to landowners? Crusoe points his musket at Friday and tells him to either get to work or get back in the water. That's your despicable, evil, and disingenuous notion of "freedom to choose" landownership.

"Outcomes"? No, just the factual context into which we are born. It is the servant of privilege who shows his authoritarian bent.

That's just self-evidently false and absurd. We are forcibly deprived of our rights to liberty, which have been forcibly stripped from us and given to landowners as their private property. It's pay a landowner for permission to exist, or die.

"Free market capitalism" is an oxymoron. Proof:
1. Capitalism is by definition private ownership of the means of production: land and production goods;
2. Private ownership of land forces producers to subsidize landowners;
3. Forced subsidies cannot exist in a free market;
4. Therefore, a free market cannot exist under capitalism. QED.

Just as slaves can choose to "pursue" their liberty....

The owner's legal title stops us unless we pay him for permission.

Like the slave purchasing his right to liberty from his owner when/if (especially if) he reaches the financial position required...?

Somehow, I kinda figured it'd be something like that....

Couldn't you think of a sillier non sequitur? Oh, OK, maybe not.

 

Owning a super yacht doesn't make anyone else worse off than they would otherwise have been. Owning land does. I'm not entirely clear on just how capitalists and socialists prevent themselves from knowing such facts, but I know they manage it somehow.

 

This argument is about ownership of property vs rental of property (house, apartment, shop, farm, whatevs), isn't it ? If you need to move the goalposts from the field to keep playing, it means you've hit the wall.

 

1) Show us the law/s preventing private ownership of land. Until you can demonstrate that such a law exists, nothing you say means a thing. We are ALL free to choose to pursue ownership, or not.

2) The factual context of penniless, traumatised, persecuted refugees arriving in the West without education or language, and yet working their way towards land ownership and education out of poverty, is the only reality we need. THAT alone proves the conditions exist for anyone to make the same choices. If such people - so very far behind the 8 ball - can do it, anyone can. Choices.

3) Capitalism is enterprise for profit. It doesn't matter a good g-d damn who owns the enterprise - if it's profit driven, it's capitalist.

4) Yes, we must all pay for land. Shocker. Exactly the same as in your Grand Idea, though you call it something else.