Give them fish, the landlord will increase the rent. Teach them how to fish, the landlord will charge fees to access the pond.
I was given recent hope in humanity when genius and common sense came in the form of pink hair and with the name of Cinnamon. Cinnamon realized that national debt was a welfare program for the idle rich, as she called Mitt Romney a communist.
Unfortunately, she seemed to miss that Obama works for the same people as Mitt Romney. However, it is still comforting to know she made the connection that rich people were getting richer with the help of the government and at the expense of the working tax payer, and called it what it is, communism, or the state granting privilege to individuals at the expense of others. The Bible calls it usury.
Economists agree we don’t even need national debt. We can pay off the national debt by ending the dishonest and unsound fractional reserve banking system, blamed by economists for the boom/bust cycle, with a sound and honest full reserve banking system. In doing so, the government can simply print the money to pay off bonds as they bring partial bank reserves to full bank reserves as private debt is paid. The savings in interest alone can more than balance the budget. If government needs financing, the government can simply print the money as George Washington did to finance the American Revolution and as Lincoln did to finance the American Civil War.
“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.” — Thomas Edison
I agree with Cinnamon. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both socialist communists who believe in the redistribution of wealth of American labor to idle and non-productive bankers, aristocrats, land speculators, and other usurers around the world.
Not only is the interest collected upon national debt a form of communism, especially when communist China collects interest from American tax payers on a good chunk of the national debt, land ownership itself is a form of communism.
Whoever collects the rent is the de facto State.
Land owners are dictators of the land they own. Land ownership is statism. Landlord is the de facto State of a geographic region. Ownership is dictated by the legal fiction of a larger State or enforced with force of the person or persons claiming ownership of land they found, bought from a swindler, or conquered. They set the rules and collect land rents or collect fees on the use of the land. They may sell it or transfer it to someone else for profit, also known classically as the unearned wealth of rent. Such unearned increments of wealth is value being stolen from those who produce and redistributed to someone who merely holds title.
Neoclassical economists today seem to miss this point. Classical economists believe land is a unique component of production and should have a progressive tax imposed on it rather than labor or real capital. The Old Testament believe that land should not be sold forever, the profit of the earth is for all, and that your toil and real capital is your own. Henry George wrote a book on the subject. One blogger expressed it’s relevance today in a very clear and concise manner, which gave me more hope for humanity: “Georgism and the Single Tax on Land: Why a 130-year-old Idea is Still Relevant Today.”
There is a nice poem about three monkeys and an ape which illustrates this point: “Uncivilized.”
On a completely unrelated note, who knew that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was just a metaphor for beer.
Keith,
Leviticus 25:23-24 is not commanding a land tax (see verses 25-28) but is commanding that a person’s agricultural land can not be permanently sold and is to return to the original owner at the 50 Year Jubilee or earlier if the original owner (or a relative) redeems it for a price proportional to the number of crops till the 50 Year Jubilee.
However, tithes (10%/yr) of crops, wine and olive oil were required and I believe there was an additional 3rd year tithe too.
So the Bible is very much for the continuance of family farms.
There are several details to the land lease in Leviticus. However, it is essentially a land value tax in that land and closed buildings are treated differently and the families weren’t allowed to profit on the land itself, with redeemable value being proportionate to the years leased. You can permanently sell a building but not the land. In essence, the land owners paid rents to the Levites, which is how things should be. The land owners should pay rents to the citizens. The citizens should not pay rents to the land owners.
again, your ideas are great about everything else besides property rights. You just don’t understand farming or rural America if you think we should be kicking small farmers off of their land. Most of these people, including myself, are struggling EACH AND EVERY DAY. We are hammered by high gas prices and regulations already…. There is already a huge tax on us.
Please stop grouping broke people who own a hundred acres with Monsanto or the commercial mega-farms. It’s not cool and not Libertarian at all.
I have lived in rural America most of my life. There are two rural Americas – Corporate owned, and those like me who are tiny by comparison and simply struggling to eat. All I own is land and I love it, but it’s a struggle…. Taking all I have (it’s not worth much) is the wrong idea.
Otherwise, your blog is cool
Where can I find info. on fair allocation of land for productive use – assuming it has no owner, i.e. How do you propose to allocate the disire by multiple people to the best areas? For example: Many farmers seeking an especially fertile parcel – planting crops over one another wouldn’t work. Ownership and market pricing handle this, but without ownership how can it be allocated without the initiation of force?
check your local lvt group on facebook…