You do not own anything if you are renting it. It is absurd to think otherwise.
It depends what is meant by 'own' of course. If you can dispose of something as you want and prevent others from using it you 'own' it even if those rights are conferred by a contract with the community rather than by a promise from God or the strength of your arm. You said yourself if you stop paying your tax they will take your land.
Everything you are trying to accomplish is already accounted for.
Some jurisdictions come close I suppose but what I am proposing (the idea comes primarily from Henry George if you missed it) is less a material change than a different way of thinking about it, which can lead to a better way of doing it.
I think you've drifted into confusion between the rental value and the sale value, also the unimproved value and the improved value. Property taxes are generally assessed on the sale value which includes improvements.
I am saying that a landowner should, in effect, rent the land from the community at its market rate as unimproved land. If he makes improvements that should not affect the 'ground rent'. If he sells it with improvements, for more than he bought it for, he can keep the profit. He earned it. If the community builds a city round it and rezones it as suitable for millionaires' mansions, that should affect the ground rent. That may mean it is no longer viable as cattle pasture (or whatever) in which case the owner can either build mansions or sell it to a mansion builder. If he sells, should he keep the profit? He didn't really earn it, it was created by the community. But the community is recovering the additional value through the increased ground rent, so perhaps we can consider the profit as compensation for having to move.
Property taxes were one of the first taxes in the U.S.
In the early days property was one of the few sources of wealth. Only property owners were worth taxing. Property taxes have several desirable characteristics: they are hard to evade, they cannot be shifted onto others, they are fairly easy to assess and they are fairly constant. If they are high enough they discourage speculation and hoarding. They keep land prices affordable and they encourage wide ownership and development.
over the years, even at lower values, more taxes than the current value of the land would have been paid. I'm not sure it is important to distinguish between the rental value in this regard.
The sale value largely depends on the rental value. The rental value depends not only on the land itself but on its surroundings. Improvements to the surroundings made by the community increase the rental value of the land through no effort of the landowner. That increment rightly belongs to the community.
Many people these days are trying to figure out exactly how the elite are screwing them over. The private monopolisation of land and natural resources is one of the ways. It makes no difference that today's landlords are not the original expropriators, they are still extracting unearned income from the nation.
Society already accounts for it via taxes and if you don't pay them, they take it from you.
It depends where you live. The landlords always try to use their considerable political clout to move taxation off land and onto labour. The entire rental value of the unimproved land should be taxed. Not many places do that.
then we're back to "where did those resources come from".
The point, which you are trying to blithely assume away, is that ultimately somebody took those resources for free and used them to live off the labour of those who didn't.
Gaffney doesn't really make this case but I suspect that JB Clark was commissioned by Rockefeller and Morgan to come up with neo-classical economics and they then persuaded their fellow robber-barons to found or endow a university each to ensure that it became the orthodoxy. Compare this list of robber-barons to famous universities. Not all of them are named after themselves. The Chicago School of Economics was Rockefeller's, Morgan funded Columbia, etc. Rockefeller was also instrumental in the creation of the American Economics Association.
2) US government bankruptcy (this destroys the fiat dollar and a generation's savings, but the gov't can no longer can run up debt that squeezes discretionary spending.)
a) You can't go bankrupt if you can fiat money into existence. b) The 'debt' is the money that people spend.
I'd take that over our current Golden Rule model every time.
From the context I take it by 'Golden Rule' you mean 'he who has the gold makes the rules' rather than this Golden Rule which does not seem to be our current guiding principle.
The best thing to do would pick up an economics textbook used by any entry-level Macro Econ 101 course.
And read it with extreme scepticism as they are chock full of nonsense. Even better would be to pick up something like The Anti-Textbook or Debunking Economics which will point out the nonsense for you.
We're paying interest on it. That makes it a liability. One doesn't pay interest on equity.
Only the portion that holders have swapped into treasuries has interest paid on it. The government can swap them back at any time to suit its monetary policy.
How do you explain the money people used before we had trillions in national debt?
That was part of the billions in national debt. As the economy grows it needs more money. And it needs more money to grow:-)
If it were payed off there would still be plenty of money left to transact with. Worst case, people come up with their own medium for indirect exchange, one based on assets rather than debts, as people have done for thousands of yearsâ"it's not as if money can only come from the government.
Most money comes from private banks. But they expect it to be paid back, with interest. With no government money being created the banks end up with it all eventually. Asset backed money has only ever been a small thing. It is barter by proxy and cannot sustain a growing economy. Credit based money has always been the big thing. Anyone can create it, the trick is getting people to accept it.
The National Debt is actually the (base) money in circulation. If the National Debt was ever to be paid off nobody would have any money to spend. It would be counted as equity not liability on the national accounts if it wasn't for History. In other words it is not a problem and people should stop getting their panties in a bunch over it.
Care to explain why the US market has recovered faster than the EU?
The US had more stimulus than the EU. Not enough perhaps, but more. The eurozone is locked into neoliberalism by treaty, its individual countries are prohibited from creating stimulus. Germany has a massive trade surplus and therefore has no need of stimulus, neoliberalism works just fine for them.
The only really defining attribute of Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production.
Not really; the means of production (capital) can be owned privately by the workers who use it. That would not be Capitalism.
The defining attribute of Capitalism is that the decision of how to divide the wealth created by the workers using the capitalist's capital is given entirely to the capitalist.
Yanis Varoufakis is not the man who got Greece into its current mess, he's the guy who tried to negotiate a way out. The EU and IMF eventually refused to deal with him (he is much better at macroeconomics than they are) and forced the Greek PM to cave in to their demands. Veroufakis resigned as a result but not in disgrace; he was offered another government job but declined.
Teleomere shortening is one of the body's defenses against cancer...and she's apparently turned that off.
The articles are sadly lacking in detail as usual but my impression is that they have performed a one-off lengthening, not turned off shortening. Also, it seems it was only done to her leukocytes not every cell.
there are other findings that suggest that senescent cells are the ones most likely to turn cancerous.
There was a recent result in mice where they managed to eliminate all senescent cells. So do that first, then lengthen the telomeres periodically and who knows how long you might last.
There are variations on a theme - but socialism has the means of production under government control and promotes (to various degrees) a collectivist social order in which individual freedom is subordinated to state needs.
Stalinist centrally planned command economy is only one of the seven systems listed by wikipedia, which also notes that many socialists regard it as state capitalism and not a form of socialism at all.
Conservative may mean something but it does not cross national boundaries. A conservative is Russia is not a conservative in Saudi Arabia and is not a conservative in the US.
'Conservative' simply means 'resistant to (social) change' so it is the same in different countries, even though the social arrangements they want to preserve may be very different.
However a socialist means roughly the same in all places.
Yeah, it means 'a scumbag who wants to change things'. In fact if you look up 'socialism' on wikipedia it names at least a dozen different kinds, and 'socialist economic system' has seven kinds.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that somehow the DNC generated 3.7 million more votes for Clinton than Sanders?
We often discuss voting machines here. We don't like them.
Smoking gun?
You do not own anything if you are renting it. It is absurd to think otherwise.
It depends what is meant by 'own' of course. If you can dispose of something as you want and prevent others from using it you 'own' it even if those rights are conferred by a contract with the community rather than by a promise from God or the strength of your arm. You said yourself if you stop paying your tax they will take your land.
Everything you are trying to accomplish is already accounted for.
Some jurisdictions come close I suppose but what I am proposing (the idea comes primarily from Henry George if you missed it) is less a material change than a different way of thinking about it, which can lead to a better way of doing it.
I think you've drifted into confusion between the rental value and the sale value, also the unimproved value and the improved value. Property taxes are generally assessed on the sale value which includes improvements.
I am saying that a landowner should, in effect, rent the land from the community at its market rate as unimproved land. If he makes improvements that should not affect the 'ground rent'.
If he sells it with improvements, for more than he bought it for, he can keep the profit. He earned it.
If the community builds a city round it and rezones it as suitable for millionaires' mansions, that should affect the ground rent.
That may mean it is no longer viable as cattle pasture (or whatever) in which case the owner can either build mansions or sell it to a mansion builder.
If he sells, should he keep the profit? He didn't really earn it, it was created by the community. But the community is recovering the additional value through the increased ground rent, so perhaps we can consider the profit as compensation for having to move.
Property taxes were one of the first taxes in the U.S.
In the early days property was one of the few sources of wealth. Only property owners were worth taxing.
Property taxes have several desirable characteristics: they are hard to evade, they cannot be shifted onto others, they are fairly easy to assess and they are fairly constant. If they are high enough they discourage speculation and hoarding. They keep land prices affordable and they encourage wide ownership and development.
over the years, even at lower values, more taxes than the current value of the land would have been paid. I'm not sure it is important to distinguish between the rental value in this regard.
The sale value largely depends on the rental value. The rental value depends not only on the land itself but on its surroundings. Improvements to the surroundings made by the community increase the rental value of the land through no effort of the landowner. That increment rightly belongs to the community.
That's really a non point.
Many people these days are trying to figure out exactly how the elite are screwing them over. The private monopolisation of land and natural resources is one of the ways. It makes no difference that today's landlords are not the original expropriators, they are still extracting unearned income from the nation.
Society already accounts for it via taxes and if you don't pay them, they take it from you.
It depends where you live. The landlords always try to use their considerable political clout to move taxation off land and onto labour. The entire rental value of the unimproved land should be taxed. Not many places do that.
Needs it for what exactly?
Everyone needs land, if only for a place to stand.
mystical value
Market rental value. It's only zero until someone wants to use it.
Land becomes valuable when you build something useful on it
Or someone else builds something near it.
How do you use unimproved land to live off the labor of others?
You rent it to someone who needs it.
then we're back to "where did those resources come from".
The point, which you are trying to blithely assume away, is that ultimately somebody took those resources for free and used them to live off the labour of those who didn't.
Where do you imagine those resources came from? Someone worked to create them.
Who created land?
Gaffney doesn't really make this case but I suspect that JB Clark was commissioned by Rockefeller and Morgan to come up with neo-classical economics and they then persuaded their fellow robber-barons to found or endow a university each to ensure that it became the orthodoxy.
Compare this list of robber-barons to famous universities. Not all of them are named after themselves. The Chicago School of Economics was Rockefeller's, Morgan funded Columbia, etc. Rockefeller was also instrumental in the creation of the American Economics Association.
Neo-liberalism is indeed the problem, but it goes back much further than 1971.
It was invented by a conclave of neo-classical and austrian economists in 1947: Mont Pelerin Society
Neo-classical economics was invented in the 1880s to protect the robber-barons from the single-taxers: Against Henry George
It was based largely on austrian economics which was invented in 1871 as a rebuttal of Marx: Carl Menger
2) US government bankruptcy (this destroys the fiat dollar and a generation's savings, but the gov't can no longer can run up debt that squeezes discretionary spending.)
a) You can't go bankrupt if you can fiat money into existence.
b) The 'debt' is the money that people spend.
I'd take that over our current Golden Rule model every time.
From the context I take it by 'Golden Rule' you mean 'he who has the gold makes the rules' rather than this
Golden Rule which does not seem to be our current guiding principle.
Norway and Switzerland. ... dominated by oil or banking, respectively)
According to Ha-Joon Chang Switzerland has the highest manufacturing output per capita in the world. And it's not just chocolate and cuckoo clocks.
The best thing to do would pick up an economics textbook used by any entry-level Macro Econ 101 course.
And read it with extreme scepticism as they are chock full of nonsense. Even better would be to pick up something like The Anti-Textbook or Debunking Economics which will point out the nonsense for you.
We're paying interest on it. That makes it a liability. One doesn't pay interest on equity.
Only the portion that holders have swapped into treasuries has interest paid on it. The government can swap them back at any time to suit its monetary policy.
How do you explain the money people used before we had trillions in national debt?
That was part of the billions in national debt. As the economy grows it needs more money. And it needs more money to grow :-)
If it were payed off there would still be plenty of money left to transact with. Worst case, people come up with their own medium for indirect exchange, one based on assets rather than debts, as people have done for thousands of yearsâ"it's not as if money can only come from the government.
Most money comes from private banks. But they expect it to be paid back, with interest. With no government money being created the banks end up with it all eventually. Asset backed money has only ever been a small thing. It is barter by proxy and cannot sustain a growing economy. Credit based money has always been the big thing. Anyone can create it, the trick is getting people to accept it.
trillions in National Debt
The National Debt is actually the (base) money in circulation. If the National Debt was ever to be paid off nobody would have any money to spend. It would be counted as equity not liability on the national accounts if it wasn't for History. In other words it is not a problem and people should stop getting their panties in a bunch over it.
You need to read The Monster.
Care to explain why the US market has recovered faster than the EU?
The US had more stimulus than the EU. Not enough perhaps, but more. The eurozone is locked into neoliberalism by treaty, its individual countries are prohibited from creating stimulus. Germany has a massive trade surplus and therefore has no need of stimulus, neoliberalism works just fine for them.
The only really defining attribute of Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production.
Not really; the means of production (capital) can be owned privately by the workers who use it. That would not be Capitalism.
The defining attribute of Capitalism is that the decision of how to divide the wealth created by the workers using the capitalist's capital is given entirely to the capitalist.
Yanis Varoufakis is not the man who got Greece into its current mess, he's the guy who tried to negotiate a way out. The EU and IMF eventually refused to deal with him (he is much better at macroeconomics than they are) and forced the Greek PM to cave in to their demands. Veroufakis resigned as a result but not in disgrace; he was offered another government job but declined.
Teleomere shortening is one of the body's defenses against cancer...and she's apparently turned that off.
The articles are sadly lacking in detail as usual but my impression is that they have performed a one-off lengthening, not turned off shortening. Also, it seems it was only done to her leukocytes not every cell.
there are other findings that suggest that senescent cells are the ones most likely to turn cancerous.
There was a recent result in mice where they managed to eliminate all senescent cells. So do that first, then lengthen the telomeres periodically and who knows how long you might last.
There are variations on a theme - but socialism has the means of production under government control and promotes (to various degrees) a collectivist social order in which individual freedom is subordinated to state needs.
Stalinist centrally planned command economy is only one of the seven systems listed by wikipedia, which also notes that many socialists regard it as state capitalism and not a form of socialism at all.
Conservative may mean something but it does not cross national boundaries. A conservative is Russia is not a conservative in Saudi Arabia and is not a conservative in the US.
'Conservative' simply means 'resistant to (social) change' so it is the same in different countries, even though the social arrangements they want to preserve may be very different.
However a socialist means roughly the same in all places.
Yeah, it means 'a scumbag who wants to change things'. In fact if you look up 'socialism' on wikipedia it names at least a dozen different kinds, and 'socialist economic system' has seven kinds.
'Liberal' means 'free' or 'generous'. Check a dictionary.
The opposite of 'liberal' is 'authoritarian' aka 'social conservative' in the US.
One can be liberal and conservative (eg. Libertarian) or liberal and radical (eg. democratic socialist, green, anarchist).
Historically, Liberals favoured mercantilism or capitalism over the more socially rigid feudalism.