/libertypol/ - Libertarian General

>>129
A polite response. While I'm not going to debate the economic efficiency of private ownership of nature vs. common ownership & private usage, I believe Henry George laid out the problem with the idea that property can be produced by "mixing labor".

- If production give to the producer the right to exclusive possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything not the production of labor, and the recognition of private property in land is a wrong. For the right to produce of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free use of the opportunities offered by nature, and to admit the right of property in these is to deny the right of property in the produce of labor. When non-proudcers can claim as rent as portion of the wealth created by producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their labor is to that extent denied.

Progress and Property

<< Please remember that the majority of light in that picture is just unoccupied land. Street lights mostly, not houses or even businesses.

>>131
I think there's a false dilemma in that man's assertion.

Whether by private or public court, it would make no sense for a court to respect the long term quartering off of massive swathes of unused land, such that there would be insufficient land for everyone that desires it. In fact, this is an issue already addressed by "adverse possession" in common law. Use it or lose it.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adverse_possession

>When non-proudcers can claim as rent as portion of the wealth created by producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their labor is to that extent denied.
I was thinking about this just yesterday though… The guy, he definitely has a point there.

See, I was thinking the other day, why is it that such a huge portion of US society is currently unemployed? Why are so many males in particular drawn to video games? Why are so many males, again in particular, attracted to the idea of starting their own business?

That's when it hit me: back in the olden days, you could hunt, gather, work the land, build, etc.

You can't do that anymore. It's against the law now to go out and mix your labor with whatever nature produces, even if no one is using the land. Yet that's exactly what humans are instinctively drawn to do! Especially men, hence the disproportionate representation in video games and business. Men are driven to become providers.

Just think about it for a second:
MMORPGs, which alone account for millions upon millions of men. Step 1 is always, "go out and gather something." Step 2 is, "build something with it." Step 3 maybe be to sell it, but you get the point.
FPS games, which account for millions more. The entirety of these games revolve around hunting.

Ironically, as Marx pointed out, the means of production, land in this case, is again owned by elites. It's not the fault of capitalists though. Normal businesses aren't the ones sucking up all the land and preventing people from using it, government is.

"Public" ownership at its finest.

>>136
>>137

I like these responses. What Henry George's assertions lend themselves towards, however, is not even the matter of unused land or pollution…even land being actively used AND claimed as property is a problem. Henry George's problem was with homesteading.

This was something that was already brought up by Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice. He used the example of a farmer, his crops and a wanderer. The farmer, having private property over the land he farms, can exclude the wanderer from entering that land, even if it is only to pass through to the other side. This is because the wanderer might, at best, get in the way of the farming, or at worst, damage or steal crops.

However, while the farmer can rightfully claim his crops as his own since he made them possible by his own creation, the earth his crops are rooted in is not the fruit of his labor. In a state of nature, the farmer and the wanderer could travel across and defecate on that land as they pleased. The farmer commits violence against the wanderer by excluding him from doing what he wants on his farmland, since it is not his farmland regardless of however much he improves it.

Obviously, this latter point does not obviate the former point, that the farmer has the right to exclude the wanderer from his crops. But at the same time, not his land. Whether it's agriculture or manufacturing or financial services, human commerce typically ends up cordoning off slices of nature because capital becomes inseparable from said nature.

This contradiction inherent to private property has only one solution, according to George. Using Paine's example, the farmer must reimburse the wanderer for the unimproved value of the farmland which the wanderer is being excluded from. The goal of geoists, and geolibertarians, is to redefine private property over nature as common property with private tenancy.

What is common to both statist and anarchist geoists is that access to nature (such as land, bodies of water, mineral deposits, frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum, satellite orbits, etc.) would be obtained via auctions (held by either the state or a community association, depending on statist or anarchist) giving out leases on said nature.

The tenants of said nature would then pay a rent on the nature they are occupying, and what is done with the rent varies from statist to anarchist. The statist geoist would see natural rent as a single tax to fund the government, being the only tax that does not steal from individual acts of creation or contractual acts of trade. The anarchist geoist would see natural rent as being collected from all the tenants in a community, compiled into a sovereign wealth fund, to then be distributed in equal payments to all community members, whether "landed" or "landless".

The state or the community (again depending) would also retain the right to evict tenants from nature (say, for pollution or whatever) and put the "lot" back up for auction. The former tenant would have to take whatever improvements and capital he made to the nature, and in the case of improvements that could not be transported (maybe a building), he would be compensated for the market value of his improvements.

>>139
Me again, different IP.

>Using Paine's example, the farmer must reimburse the wanderer for the unimproved value of the farmland which the wanderer is being excluded from.
By what means shall this be enforced? The wanderer is passing through and the land's occupant is likely to form ties with nearby co-occupants so as to undermine any system put in place to enforce reimbursement.

Not to mention that requiring land owners to reimburse travelers acts as a sort of redistributive tax. Taxes necessarily discourage a behavior. This reimbursement ideal would therefore discourage the serious development of land. People would begin favoring land that is more remote. While I personally believe that people really should spread out more, I can hardly begin to imagine what sort of effects that would have economically or ecologically… Not to mention security-wise.

>What is common to both statist and anarchist geoists is that access to nature (such as land, bodies of water, mineral deposits, frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum, satellite orbits, etc.) would be obtained via auctions (held by either the state or a community association, depending on statist or anarchist) giving out leases on said nature.
This seems to me to be more greatly predisposed to corruption than would proper enforcement of land as private property. There's such a thing as collective intelligence, what we're doing now, and then there's group-think.

Humans are pack animals, much like dogs. Human pack structure is much more complex, but the principles remain the same. Dogs tend to have a single alpha that leads the small pack. Humans routinely form larger groups and tend to have a small clique of alphas that cluster together and do the decision making. If you make it a legal and moral imperative for a town to participate in a sort of communal decision-making process, you're going to end up with group-think. Group-think is a euphemism, of course. People pretty much stop thinking, except for the, "decision makers." In effect, you end up with a small group of self-interested people that might as well own all the land.

Private property makes each person a decision maker by focusing on the individual. We all understand what "mine" is. Private ownership is the only way to avoid devolution into rigid castes.

Another thing is the issue of misuse. I don't know about you, but I feel a powerful instinctive urge to protect my neighbor's property, including their land. That's because it's their land. If nobody owns the land, then I no longer have any rational justification for trying to protect it. It's no longer a concern of mine. It sounds absurd, but that's how I honestly feel about it.

I would not be opposed to testing such a system as an experiment in a large, but limited area. However it would need to be done in a voluntary manner, with the "community" acting as a corporate entity. This way competition of systems would be ensured and effectiveness could be estimated.

>>143
>this wouldn't be all too different than a homesteading market in land.
True enough. The real difference would probably be in the issue of a one time payment vs a continual land tax. I would note that in a true homesteading environment, land need not be purchased from anyone at all. The idea is that if no one is living on a piece of land, if it is unclaimed, one could set up boundaries and claim a lot. A deed is just a paper trail, optional depending upon where you live. You'd only need that if you were purchasing a property from a previous owner, so as to protect yourself from fraud.

>Do you mean to say people renting out their residence or place of business from landlords in a homesteading market is problematic as well?
I think it goes without saying that rental occupancy has security issues no matter what type of market we're talking about, ha ha ha.

The difference is that in a rental-oriented market, such as our current system or the one you're proposing, the common man is excluded from the potential self-sufficiency offered by land ownership. He's unable to truly possess anything of his own, completely dependent upon the land's true owner (or administration, whatever) to be able to cling to what little he has. Rent prohibits him from accumulating wealth to himself so as to raise his standard of living. He effectively becomes a serf, forever running as fast as he can just so he can stay in the same place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

I'm struggling to understand, why try to redefine property conventions in such a non intuitive way? Why institute a complex taxing and welfare structure to provide a living income for the poor, when you could instead just let them stake out their own piece of dirt somewhere and be done with it? Isn't it simpler and more cost effective to actually defend people's property rights, for a change, so that they're able to accumulate wealth to themselves in peace without being dependent upon someone else?

>>144
>The idea is that if no one is living on a piece of land, if it is unclaimed, one could set up boundaries and claim a lot

Well for those of us who don't live in Alaska or the 19th century, hahaha….

The problem is that in 21st century America, unclaimed (not unused but unclaimed) land is not around like it used to be. Even if the response is that in your land market, the federal and state governments would not be sitting on as much land as they do today, eventually, you're still talking about market forces parceling out all that freshly available land and in two generations, creating the scenario Henry George originally responded to in the 1870's. That is, propertyless folks and smallholders having a tough time being self-sufficient/competitive because of the need to have land (most of it belonging to an elite waving around evidence of a paper trail of transactions stretching back to your pioneer).

>Rent prohibits him from accumulating wealth to himself so as to raise his standard of living

Remember that rent is different in a geoist market. In a homesteading market, the tenant is paying a landlord who owns not only the building, but the land beneath that building too (literally, a land-lord). The landlord is the one subject to land rent, not the tenant.

Now, with anarchist geoism, the tenant is also going to be receiving his share of the sovereign wealth fund provided for by the rent payments of all land renters in the community. Conceivably, he could rake in more from the land dividend than he pays out in building rent. With statist geoism (where the land rent is a tax), we would say that, abstractly, he would receive more value in the freely accessible state services paid for by the tax than he gives out in rent payments.

>Why institute a complex taxing and welfare structure to provide a living income for the poor, when you could instead just let them stake out their own piece of dirt somewhere and be done with it?

Precisely because of what I covered above. One does not simply stake out land anymore, and by the chance that you still can, market forces guarantee that unclaimed land (that anyone can literally walk on to and take) will be exhausted at some point. This is when you get people fantasizing about what it was like to be an Indian tribesman as they struggle to maintain a residence while in the meantime commercial empires exclude them from entry onto turf that predates human convention by billions of years.

What geoism does is offer a way out of this, without doing what communism in its statist or anarchist varieties does, which is deny people the ability to own that which truly their own creation, or someone else's contractually traded creation.

>>148
No, if the community nature association evicted him at any point during the planting or growing period, he would be entitled to dig up the seeds/seedlings/crops as they are at that point if he sees value in doing so.

And the community nature association would be either a townhall type assembly or (more likely) a sort of board of elected delegates subject to immediate recall at any point. The community is basically the consumer base for land and other nature at the local level. This already exists in a homesteading market, like with the markedly lower demand for land a rural town in Wyoming has vs. a borough in New York City. The dividend is the sum total of all rents collected (the unimproved value of land being excluded from others) within a community divided by the total number of residents in the community. Everyone receives an equal dividend, regardless of whether a person is renting land or not. And finally, the CNA would define abuse. It's the people's land, so the people (via the CNA) determine what constitutes abuse. Pollution is the most probable example.

>I could make the same claim that requiring a person to go through some community association is cordoning off what they would otherwise have access to.

A person would have to bid for leases from the CNA in order to rent a piece of land that he or she could then exclude other people from. In the state of nature, people are able to access all land freely. You do not need a lease from the CNA in order to access un-rented land or to receive your dividend payment from the communal rent collection. So your claim does not work.

>[citation needed]

Progress and Property, Henry George, 1879

>I think only people on your side would say that it's not theirs, which is the whole point of disagreement to begin with.

Yes, and the point is that a voluntary society, if that is your goal, cannot recognize the homesteading of nature, for reasons I've already given.

>>150
>So if I want to let my rightful property sit and become valuable, I have to pay other people to do so.

Yes, if you want your rightful property to sit on the general public's rightful property and fence the general public off from it, yes, you have to pay them to do so.

And it's all about context regarding how the associations are demarcated. Between population density and terrain characteristics, I can only imagine that one inflexible rule as to CNA jurisdictions.

Does there need to be one logical number of people sitting on a company's board of directors, or do different companies potentially benefit from different schemes. Hell, /libertypol/ of all places should the board where things need to be spelled out the least.

>I wasn't referring to some person saying it would happen, I meant a citation showing that it really does happen.

Are there people who struggle to pay rent? Are there people who struggle to pay their home mortgage? Are there people who own vast industrial plants, towering residential complexes, prosperous mines, etc. and could honestly just hire someone to manage it all for them without having to work at all (even if there would be an element of risk to this)? If you answered yes to these three questions then there is your citation.

>The CNA is keeping me from accessing some land freely. How does it not work?

The CNA keeps you from dominating a tract of land and barring others from accessing it freely. If you really must have exclusive control over what is everybody's property, the CNA makes sure that the others are compensated for your privacy. Geoism is about regulating exclusion, not access.

>I've seen you say that other people have made that claim, but I don't see any reason to believe it.

Well, I presume that you identify as being ancap/libertarian. If I am wrong in this, then that's probably the point of divergence. Anyway, if you are, then you probably believe that the individual owns himself. From there, you probably believe that whatever the individual creates belongs to himself as well. So finally, does an individual create the land he stands on, the air he breathes, he coal he burns, the frequency his radio station broadcasts over, etc.?

The answer to this last one is no. And the fact is that human economic success is predicated on the ability to utilize nature (even if that simply means working inside a building situated on land). So when people have troube succeeding economically due to a difficulty or an inability to access nature (because others are excluding them from it in the name of "private property") , then that society cannot say that it holds the sovereignty of the individual as its highest principle.

>>146
I'm the anon you were replying to.
>Does this mean that wildlife preserves would be unable to exist?
That would be silly. I'm surrounded by huge nature preserves, it's not hard to tell the difference between that and actual wilderness. Signs, markings, trails, fences, advertisements, people keeping watch…

Conversely, in a rather ironic sort of way, I suspect that OP's system would make nature preserves more difficult to pull off, if not completely untenable. After all, if everyone owns the land, (and therefore all wild animals) then on what grounds could anyone forbid human passage or transient activity? And even if justification were found, could it be realistically enforced in a society where everyone is accustomed to people having the right to pass through most land? An auction winner could set up barriers and security (I think?) around land they're using, but who would do such a thing for an area as wide as a nature preserve? Especially when they have to pay taxes on it. I see no financial incentive, so I suspect it would be neglected.

>>147
>Many ancaps and free market enthusiasts love using the phrase "mixed with one's labor". But Paine and George pointed out that what this really amounts to is cordoning off what all people would otherwise have access to in a state of nature.
In all honesty, I see no difference in territorial behavior (cordoning off of used land area to protect your stuff) between the two systems. Are the land users not paying taxes for the purpose of exclusive usage rights? Or is there something I'm not understanding?

>Swing to the anarcho-capitalists (and allow ownership of nature), and you have people toiling away without end for the bare minimum of what is needed to live
That's a bit of a pessimistic attitude. Even the current system isn't quite that bad yet, and it has to be inferior to both anarchist-geoism and laissez-fair. Might I suggest a healthy dose of optimism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GawavH6Jtc

>>151
I'm the other anon.
>I presume that you identify as being ancap/libertarian
>if you are, then you probably believe that the individual owns himself.
Yes.
>From there, you probably believe that whatever the individual creates belongs to himself as well.
>does an individual create the land he stands on, the air he breathes, he coal he burns, the frequency his radio station broadcasts over, etc.?
You just made a catastrophic leap of logic. You know of our use of the phrase, "mix your labor with." That phrase is very important and I'll tell you why. If "creating" something, so to speak, were the only basis for ownership, then none of us could own anything. Not even ourselves. The concept of human ownership would unravel. The reality is, you did not make your body. Your parents might have put you together from stuff they could find, but they didn't ex-nihilo your quarks into existence. Everything that we know and use comes from ambient, already existing materials.

The issue isn't whether or not someone created something in a literal sense. It's about figuring out how we're going to decide who gets authority over a given resource. In other words, who is most closely associated with that resource? That's another way of saying, "who has most mixed their labor with [a resource]?"

This is the point of contention that EU-anarchists and communists hold with capitalists. They say, "We work the land, we work the mill, therefore the land and the mill are ours!" But we say, "The one who built the mill and prepared that land originally had made a deal with you, which you agreed to. That you should tend to his mill and land in exchange for pay. The pay is your labor, not the land or the mill." After all, why would the owner have let them on his land if he'd known they would demand possession of it from him in the first place? Why would the owner have ever bothered preparing the land or building the mill at all if he knew he'd inevitably be robbed of them by locals? Indeed, that's one of the major problems that humanity has faced for most of history. Who do we prefer to rob us of our labor? Unpredictable bandits or a local warlord that we pay (hopefully) steady tribute to at regular intervals? (The latter being government.)

>>154
>Which of these are necessary for one to claim that they own such a piece of land?
>wouldn't that go against the claim that courts wouldn't respect the long term quartering off of massive swathes of "unused" land?
No. I see no reason to set a strict, arbitrary definition for how to legally qualify a piece of land as a nature preserve. I think you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist in reality with a one-size-fits-all definition. That's what legislators do, hence why I defer to private courts. Let the wiser men decide each case when an actual dispute arises.

>video unrelated

>>164
>How could it even be possible to figure something like that out?
That's the thing, it would be semi-subjective and dependent upon the area, as was the case in Europe back in the days when private courts were the rule, rather than the exception. You have common law, which is of course common, and then you have local culture and customs. By both parties consenting to arbitration and the terms of a court, involving a limited number of appeals to other courts, these disputes can be solved in a peaceful manner that best suits the society of a given area. This is, I think, a greatly superior approach to trying to force an inflexible blanket of legislation across many areas to which that particular law may not be suitable.

As for how they would make that determination in each case? Probably by hearing the reasoning of both sides, then actually going out to the land in question and seeing whether or not the claimant is bullshitting. I don't accept the idea that, for example, a piece of forest with trash all along it that the defendant hasn't been trying to actually preserve, evidenced by the fact that his "fence" is just chicken wire, constitutes a nature preserve. In reality there is a difference between a nature preserve and an unused lot, but I don't think it can be meaningfully defined by a checklist.

>That's true for any disputes over anything.
Bingo.

>I get it, I just don't like it.
DO YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE WITH ANYONE WHEN EVER YOU FEEL LIKE IT? Because you can and that's fine.

>>170
>society
I don't like that. If I can't find a justification from individual rights, I don't consider it as 100% free. Sure, individual rights are just as much of a spook as society, but they're my spook and I love them.

>I don't accept the idea that, for example, a piece of forest with trash all along it that the defendant hasn't been trying to actually preserve, evidenced by the fact that his "fence" is just chicken wire, constitutes a nature preserve.
You're interfering with my right to own a garbage dump :^)
A key issue I have with this is that it implies a positive obligation that needs to be met in order to have property.

Also, do we ignore the history behind the property? What if the property was once being used, but due to economic situations the owner stopped using the property? If the owner is awaiting better economic times or a sufficiently desirable offer to sell the property, should someone else be allowed to squat on the property and take it from him? The owner had put time and effort into the land, and may have significant value that an unclaimed property wouldn't have. The threat of squatting acts as a pressure to sell for lower than he otherwise would. That might be considered socially desirable, but it is a negative effect on the owner who has the right to the property.

I took the (extreme) view a while ago that if it's difficult to draw a line, then maybe no line should be drawn at all. So I end up "believing" in pretty strong and absolute property rights. But, probably like many other anarchists, I also believe that nobody has a duty to enact justice on behalf of others. Private courts with different standards is a probably inescapable part of anarcho-capitalism, and if two people agree to arbitration before a court which has a reputation for acknowledging squatter's rights, I won't be upset. But I don't approve of squatter's rights because it's a line I'm not willing to draw.