Government declares gold is legal tender for payment of debt and taxes.
Person A and B have 100 ounces of gold each.
Person A spends 100 ounces of gold to buy a warehouse.
Deflation makes the gold worth twice as much and the warehouse worth half as much.
Person A has a net worth of 50 ounces of gold with his warehouse. Person B has a net worth of 100 ounces of gold.
Person B has stolen 50 ounces of gold from Person A with the help of the government making gold to be legal tender.
Why would anyone buy a warehouse and start a business if you get more value from doing nothing and letting the golden legal tender steal a free lunch for you?
Deflation steals value from all real assets and redistributes the value to those holding monetary units. When government makes gold legal tender and legalizes theft through deflation, it is socialism for the idle, lazy, and non-productive rich, specifically Ron Paul and his golden comrades in the gold boiler room.
Read “Commodity Monetarism is a Trick Mechanism of Usury and Coercion” if you want more logic.
[...] managed to maintain constant valuation according to demand, or the prevention of inflation and deflation, both forms of theft. It is further proposed that the monetary expansion necessary to prevent [...]
Are you actually this dumb, or did I miss the creation of a brand new satire site, competing with the Onion, where I am now about to be heckled for such?
We watched what happened in places where inflation was allowed to skyrocket, and THAT stole the value of anyone’s paycheck well before they were able to spend it. It’s cheaper to burn a trillion dollars in a certain well-known african nation than to buy heating fuel, even wood, with it.
People who quote “the fictitious value of gold” while trying NOT to notice the fictitious value of paper money have only themselves to blame for A) not knowing what a “consensus reality” is, or B) having grasped the concept of “scarcity” as a bulwark of value.
No, Im actually a genius who does his own research. I’ve reached my own conclusions and actually read the classics instead of read an article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute about their interpretation of them.
Oh how interesting. Strange that I’m ALSO a genius, and came to a completely different conclusion. When has THAT ever happened?
I see you’ve also censored my other reply, rather than rebut it! That’s fine, I’ll just make sure this one also CCs to facebook, and ensure at least 700 people get a chance to see it, even if your readership is herded elsewhere.
Your problem here is that even as you wish to pull away from government, you haven’t gotten your head completely outside the paradigm. Why use government for money at ALL? *I* can write checks, and they don’t have to be for dollars. Credit cards could certainly measure in grams of gold, or bitcoins, head of cattle, liters of clean water, and whatever else society values.
I challenge you to show me an article endorsing the term “consensus reality” either in von Mises words, or, heck, even on his whole site. I can show YOU a few where they dismiss the idea… If you’re going to accuse me of being a hack, you’ll need to do better in terms of attributing me to a source. Perhaps you’re a believer that originality is merely the art of concealing your source? Not my problem.
I’ll retract my statement about deleted comments, I had forgotten that there were two separate locations that my comments were being posted.
I think you’re the one being herded with the art of “praxeology” and “consensus reality.”
I was a card-carrying member of the libertarian party. I worked as a volunteer and donated money. I have stacks of dusty austrian literature. I know all about their tortured rationalizations of rothbard and the verbal garbage of von mises and the circular logic and definitional switching and the cherry-picking and desire to ignore science and a lot of history.
Have you actually read an economic treatise, and if so, which one? Perhaps you need more diversified information so that you don’t reach your independent conclusion by missing the whole point.
There is nothing wrong if you want to barter in something other than legal tender. However, most people prefer legal tender. Most people also prefer law and order rather than anarchy. The “coercion” of government is a little more predictable than the “coercion” of people carrying guns and spears trying to claim a geographic area by force.
Most people prefer what they were brought up with. Hindus think it horrible that we eat hamburgers, we think it horrible that Koreans eat Dog. How do people know that they prefer “law and order” to anarchy? Where is there an anarchy? You’ll quickly berate me for my own ideas, though I’m also berated for not getting them from someone else’s treatise (another flaw: Why would you need to know who I’ve read? Would we be setting up for a nice ad hominem attack rather than an addressing of the idea?) and yet people who’ve never read a treatise on anarchy (or experienced it!) are right just because there are many of them?
Here’s what I’m talking about:
” The “coercion” of government is a little more predictable than the “coercion” of people carrying guns and spears trying to claim a geographic area by force.”
How much more predictable can it be? People carrying guns and spears will continue to ride and conquer land till they run out of one resource or another. In either case, how predictable does a thing need to be, before it’s acceptable? I don’t see the two as related. HIV is predictable… I still don’t want it. The lottery is unpredictable. I still don’t buy in.
I’ve found more definitional switching in statists than anarchists. Call a thing what it is. If someone refers to “the income tax program” for instance, it’s a taking of money with threat of gunpoint and caging. “Legal tender” simply means “a medium for which the government will take up the flag if falsified”. But there needs to be no such backing, if a person wants to use gold, its propriety in trade can be established the obvious ways: 1)Run an electric current through it. There are meters that can tell you the carat-rating of gold by just poking it with a multimeter set to resistance. and 2) then you weigh it. A smart business could buy a device which will do both, to the accuracy of a postal scale, and for about what a register will go through in a year, in the way of those FRN-testing markers.
“There is nothing wrong if you want to barter in something other than legal tender. ”
While *I* would agree, unfortunately this falls under that curious treatise about how the average person commits 3 felonies a day, unawares. Do you KNOW the names of the laws against it? I don’t either, but I’m aware of at least two, one citing tax evasion, and the other citing creating your own currency.
arguing points which have nothing to do with the main point is a good way to miss the point
“arguing points which have nothing to do with the main point is a good way to miss the point”
not getting the relationship between them is a good way to show you already missed it.
no, i get the relationship, to that of false premise that land and legal tender is labor-made property rather than law-made property. pointing out the specific fallacies and how your points miss the point of your tortured arguments would be quite tiring and rather futile since you’re not here to learn but to call someone stupid because they don’t believe as you do. you’re here to preach the gospel of ron paul, largely funded by bilderberger and banker peter thiel, and preach the gospel of austrian economics, originally funded by the rockefeller foundation, the same people who also setup the federal reserve and united nations and who believed in eugenics, social darwinism, malthusian theory, and competition is sin.
law-made property is the common welath. taxation of law-made property can fund government to enforce property rights without collecting an hour of labor and the interest on labor-made capital. it can also fund a citizen dividend to guarantee that everyone has an equal right to land so that they can own their own labor. the right to land is a prerequisite to self-ownership.
monetary origination of the legal tender can also fund a military, as george washington and lincoln did, without any taxation and without inflation if done at the right rate, though a mild inflation rate is argued to be necessary to allow for increased monetary velocity, full employment as population grows, and as money is exported.
roads and other public utilities can also be built with costs associated with such funded with appropiate excise taxes by those who use such.
funding a minimium government with the taxation of labor is not very libertarian, especially when law-made property can fund such a minimum government and especially when law-made property should be a public utility rather than a means of private individuals to extort labor-made property from others.
” you’re here to preach the gospel of ron paul, largely funded by bilderberger and banker peter thiel, and preach the gospel of austrian economics, originally funded by the rockefeller foundation, the same people who also setup the federal reserve and united nations and who believed in eugenics, social darwinism, malthusian theory, and competition is sin.”
Holy shit WHAT conspiracy was this??
lol. oh man, here’s what I just saw happen
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/12/03
no conspircy. it is well-known and documented that the rockefeller foundation funded ludwig von mises. it is in a couple of biographies of ludwig von mises, written by austrian economists. you can even find that information searching at mises.org. peter thiel is an elected member of the bilderberg committee, which is easily verified by bilderberg documentation. peter thiel’s donations are large, and i’ve looked him up in fec databases in the past to confirm. newspaper articles have also revealed such funding of super pacs. ignorance might be bliss until you realize you’re ignorant.
I can’t imagine how many times I might have to point out that I didn’t even MENTION Ron Paul. He seems to be your personal bugbear, but my mirth at the last comment was that 90% of what people spread involving the word “bilderberg”, OFTEN throwing in “eugenics” and “malthusian theory” are padding their headgear with tinfoil. You don’t help your case by holstering that along with more of that second-person ranting, wherein you attempt to throw feces and see how much of it sticks. Ad homs, strawmen… Attribute viewpoints to me if it’s what you gotta do: It’s your story at that point, you tell it any way you want to.
“I’m not a follower of Mises because he hated a group of people, also.”
Great, I drive a Chevy because Ford was an anti-semite. It says nothing for the quality of Ford vehicles…
i checked your facebook page, and yes, your political likes include ron paul, peter thiel’s libertopia, and ludwig von mises. even did the classical ayn rand like. but that was already confirmed when you posted the lew rockwell link. no surprise that you also had pictures of yourself in a double wide.
those who talk about eugenics, malthusian theory, and bilderberg also are fans of alex jones who promotes ron paul. malthusian theory was debunked by henry george in progress and poverty (i’m a fan of henry george). but you would have to be more well read in economics, philosophy, and history to understand the relevance and the irony of it all.
ron paul has a cult-like following, and ron paul is considered the poster boy of austrian economics. my way of saying you’re a fan boy.
I’ve fanned a LOT of things I don’t personally believe in. Like how I’m also following YOUR page. Think about that.
Why yes, I’m living in a doublewide at the moment. I’m renting my other house, but thanks for the bigotry that implied. We needed to be close to ASU when we got married and had the baby. But I suppose your perusal of my facebook page was scarred by confirmation bias, and you didn’t notice any of that. Alex jones is a subtle little establishment shill, and just has the sort of “flash” that gets him subscribers.
Be honest now: Is your main problem with von Mises his economics, or his anti-semitism? I’ve never bothered with malthusian theory because the industrial revolution put it out of business, for the most part. As far as that goes, George died before that happened, so I think you’re offering credit where none is due. Henry George’s entire concept that the average man was responsible for the increase of land value makes the bullseye on that target WAY too big. When land LOSES value, because someone puts in a sewage treatment plant, or a landfill, do the average joes pay BACK to the landowner, for value their poop and trash have cost him? I bet they don’t. You’ve perhaps heard the term “socializing losses and privatizing profits”? It’s not any more moral in reverse. It’s just more “you have a lot of stuff, so I feel better about taking it from you”.
“my way of saying you’re a fan boy.”
blah blah, pot, kettle, Georgie boy.
“those who talk about eugenics,”
You might want to be specific: Do you mean those who believe that the STATE should interfere in people’s breeding, or VOLUNTARY eugenics? Because one leads to the ol’ third reich, and the other leads to “family planning”.
And when gold increased in value during the Great Depression and during the banking panics that happened frequently since the gold standard was started in 50BC…. deflation is wonderful! Nothing like a free lunch!
“And when gold increased in value during the Great Depression”
…RELATIVE to the crashing dollar, you mean?
Hey, I’m all for facts, but you don’t get to make your own up.
The value of gold today isn’t all that high either, when measured by barrels of oil.
Maybe you just prefer the constant theft of value from the working man that the government is able to get away with, by using the federal reserve. It’s not like we get to negotiate our pay upwards by, writing euler’s constant into our pay rates…
the dollar was backed by gold and the dollar gained in value (deflation) relative to all other assets. if there is an oil shortage, the value of oil increases relative to other assets. if oil was a currency, the economy would experience deflation in that currency.
it is good for a commodity to increase or decrease in value relative to all other assets. it is bad for the common money to increase or decrease in value relative to all other assets.
oil and gold are two different things. however both are rare and require extraction, processing, and distribution. oil is more useful for common wants. however, both are ultimately commodities. a means of exchange is something completely different, especially one selected by government for payment of taxes to secure basic natural rights and any property rights extended by government.
money can be anything, as you correctly suggest. money is most ideal if it retains constant value relative to other things in the economy. the article you commented upon was an article trying to use an example to demonstrate why it is a bad thing if it experiences deflation. i’m sure with ron paul’s help, you already believe inflation is worse than it already is. however, many people with ron paul’s help seem to have forgotten elementary microeconomics that deflation is really bad too.
you want it to be a good thing, especially if you hold units in a commodity that you view as monetary units. that’s just being a good commodity trader. and that’s part of the problem. you want to be a commodity trader. and you want your favorite commodity to be as popular as say federal reserve notes. you want your favorite commodity to help you become wealthier in your sleep. that’s a good thing, right? yes, if gold is a commodity. you’re holding gold until supply is low and/or demand is high. you’re providing an economic service, and a very good one at that. however, that is a very bad thing when it comes to money. you want value to remain constant, not be volatile. you want to be able to quickly produce the money in the money factory and produce the right amount. the right amount is the tricky part, but can be done. democratic governments are the best choice since there is oversight, transparency, and accountability. there is no oversight, transparency, and accountability in free banking. it makes it worse. history has demonstrated that it makes it worse. sure government can make things worse if they run the printing press wide open and the british runs the printing press offshore. however, nobody profits when that happens so it is unlikely to happen unless there is motive to destroy the economy to bring in a false paradigm. and everyone clearly understands what is happening when it does happen. and the solution is clear. a little bit of inflation is a good thing if the inflation is used to finance public needs rather than finance usurers. a little bit inflation encourages economic growth and allows for economic growth when the population grows, when there are unemployed, when the economy has more velocity, or when the money is exported for offshore use. read a book to find facts. that is the scientific method. beaver skins, grain, and spanish gold notes made horrible currencies. bronze and silver fiat has a good history building the roman empire for 220 years. silver fiat had a good history helping china survive the great depression with economic growth. various public and inflationary scrip served economies well when they have been used during bad economic times and in the funding of war machines. hyper-inflationary scrip hasn’t performed well, but that is statistical noise due to the extreme printing. the continental itself helped win the american revolution despite heavy counterfeiting, and even it wasn’t hyper-inflationary. gold has the worst history, with frequent boom/bust cycles, especially when combined with demonetarization of a cheaper fiat. ludwig von mises praxeology is a scientific word for creative bullshit. it isn’t science. it is the theology of the bankers’ status quo.
gold as legal tender in history has actually been a bad choice because of it’s rarity. it was too expensive. it was easy to limit supply for demand and difficult to make supply adequate for demand. bronze and silver has a better history of being able to make supply adequate for demand while making sure it was easy enough to limit supply for demand. on the other hand, gold can be a good store of wealth, especially if it remains in the free market, but you still have to be a wise commodity trader because gold does have volatile value. a bad economy can increase demand as a good economy can decrease demand due to it’s popularity as a store of wealth.
macroeconomics and the basic principles can be confusing and counter-intuitive, even when you’re trying to understand them without bias, and especially when your intuition has been skewed and misled with propaganda.
when i finally decided that my intuitive disagreements with austrian economics had merits because i finally read enough and thought enough, i still had many sleepless nights and headaches as i thought through all the principles at work to make sure i understood them. then, when i reached conclusions and formed my hypothesis, i researched to find who else reached those same conclusions, and the findings surprised me how many people did reach the same conclusions.
There is a distinct difference between a thing being “backed by” a commodity, and having that commodity in your hand. It’s like having stock in a company, and you only find out the day they go bankrupt that there are 30,000 people in line with their hands out before your feet hit the floor in the morning. You had a promise? How nice, they say… These people had a better one. If I show up at the Federal reserve with a gold or silver certificate, and demand a dollar of gold or silver, do I know ahead of time that they actually HAVE it? That causes a run on the bank, as well. People will refuse to take money that can’t be used for anything.
When you have a thing in your hand, nobody can strike some vault somewhere with a missile and vaporize your investment. Now to vaporize your investment, they vaporize you too, and in short, you have bigger problems. Gold’s value hasn’t been volatile, even recently. It’s merely a sounding board for the volatility of the dollar. Gold’s value has been in its rarity, durability, and mass-acceptance. The dollar loses all of those comparisons.
I’d like to take a moment to stop and reflect, that the statement above me contains an inordinate amount of “you statements” from a person who doesn’t know me. I sat in on a group therapy sort of environment for a while, in which one of the first rules was “make “I” statements, or you’re setting yourself up for combativeness, because the things you say come out as attacking, and debasing your conversational partner”… I just did a page-find for “you”, after I found myself gritting my teeth and wanting to strangle you for a minute…
No, I don’t want to be a commodity trader, I dont want my ‘favorite commodity’ to be compared to FRNs, I don’t hold my gold, I got out before it looked suicidally greedy, and sold my only pieces: an unfortunately no longer needed wedding set I bought in the persian gulf, and a 1907 double eagle in swiss certification case. I sold a used wedding set for more than it cost me, new, and made a thousand dollars off the coin. Honestly, if I were still holding them both, they might be again worth twice that.
Look carefully at what you said here:
“you want value to remain constant, not be volatile. you want to be able to quickly produce the money in the money factory and produce the right amount.”
My hackles go up with the amount of “control” you want to exercise (Keynesianism, I presume?) but mostly I’m saddened that you can’t see the contradiction you just put forth. Your system would now depend on “the right people” being in charge. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this NEVER HAPPENS. Even here in the US *sarc*, we don’t have a promise of good government, we have a promise of REPRESENTATIVE government. We get the average guy’s idea of who’s right for the job, not yours, not mine.
When the wrong guy gets into power, we get post-WW1 Weimar Germany, or modern Zimbabwe. How does this happen with gold? Your premise made assumptions, leaping from A to B to C without showing justification for them.
“Deflation makes the gold worth twice as much and the warehouse worth half as much.”
Says who? Why? I mean, I’ll still buy a car, knowing full well that if I write them a check for $20,000, and drive the car off the lot, it’s now only worth $12,000, because $20,000 is a really hard thing to ride to work… But I don’t have your reason as to why BUYING something with your (real) money makes it worth less. Do you think the other guy’s gold is now the whole supply, as though the guy who sold me the warehouse, or built it, is now going to bury/shred/explode the 100 ounces of gold I paid him?
If the whole premise is that a voluntary transaction can equal theft, then we should at least agree that involuntary takings are theft, first. I feel that you haven’t gotten this part behind you yet. So now I find myself looking at a person who is fine with involuntary taking, but takes issue with voluntary transactions, and find it hard to proceed with anything further.
you can call something voluntary, but it isn’t voluntary when all the land of england is legally owned by barons and people are forced into such voluntary contracts just to legally put their feet somewhere. this is something you seemed to have missed. your other arguments are so tortured, i can’t even follow them.
you probably need to return to your group therapy sessions. and you probably should follow two more rules. the 1st rule is that you must admit that you’re an asshole (your first statement to me was calling me stupid) and that you might be wrong. the 2nd rule is that you must refrain from consuming austrian economic propaganda for 5 or more years to detox yourself from the brainwashing. it was that brainwashing which caused you to come to my blog to be an asshole, to call me stupid with your first words to me. you came here to attack me and attacked me with your first words. and you’re not the only brainwashed zombie who has done that.
there are many times when i use 2nd person when i should use 3rd person. i recognized this bad habit of mine when i was adult. however, it is a habit that i developed before i even learned to write, so it has been hard to overcome it.
i think using 2nd person to call you out as an asshole was appropiate use of 2nd person, as it is appropiate for me to say “thank you” to people who write more supportive and constructive comments. you’re not the only asshole. there are many people, just like you, who come here to call me stupid because i don’t believe in their paradigm.
“you can call something voluntary, but it isn’t voluntary when all the land of england is legally owned by barons and people are forced into such voluntary contracts just to legally put their feet somewhere. this is something you seemed to have missed. your other arguments are so tortured, i can’t even follow them.”
cart before the horse. I believe you can’t follow my arguments, but I think you’re working on the wrong first-principle, there.
Firstly, don’t miss that we’re NOT ENGLAND, hereditary title is something we wisely never adopted. Nobility attempts to place man over man, grading the importance of a life on a curve. We don’t do that.
Secondly, in a country where the amount of homes for sale must be at record levels these past few years, a “buyers market” is something you should consider. Heck, the former owners of these properties are the ones being “exploited” at the moment.
Thirdly, pointing to a country with a population density somewhere upwards of five times ours is a bit disingenuous. Moreso when they have less rights-protection than we do… for the moment.
“you probably need to return to your group therapy sessions. and you probably should follow two more rules. the 1st rule is that you must admit that you’re an asshole (your first statement to me was calling me stupid) and that you might be wrong. the 2nd rule is that you must refrain from consuming austrian economic propaganda for 5 or more years to detox yourself from the brainwashing.”
re: “asshole”,
“yo kettle, what up, mah nigga?”
I’m sure another genius gets that.
Re: therapy, See: “asshole”.
Re: rules.
You don’t make them, and they’re not even particularly pertinent.
Re: ” and you’re not the only brainwashed zombie who has done that.”
see: the other post;
“I’ve spent my life being the kind of guy who isn’t going to avoid looking a certain way, or enjoying a certain thing just because some jackass who thinks he’s an alpha puts a few ridiculous adjectives in front of them… So you’ll have to do better than them.”
i find you to be a rude and stupid guest to my blog. there are some parts of this world where you would be shot coming onto someone’s property to call them stupid. you’re the pot calling the kettle black, and a rather racist pot calling the kettle black.
that is how delusional you are because you don’t even realize you’re the asshole who came to my blog to attack me and call me names with your greeting. expecting me to open the door and be polite to you is very delusional. it would be like breaking into someone’s home to shoot them and whine that they shot you first. please seek help. i believe you’re delusional to the point of being a danger to yourself and others.
i was actually entertained by your stupidity. however, i must admit, you’re becoming boring and rather pathetic. don’t expect much more of a reply to your comments.
You find that?
Thus far you haven’t found your ass with a flashlight and both hands.
See the difference between commentary and trolling NOW?
yes, i suppose you can call yourself a troll, as well as a stupid and delusional asshole.
The saddest part is that your replies’ value hasn’t dropped much.
And yes, I often like to throw out “yo kettle” to see who, rather than indicating that they get it, throws the race card IMMEDIATELY. You’re in very particular company with that, by the way. The last guy who cried “racist” was a raging bushie neocon basement dweller who said he’d leave the country if Obama won again.
you’re also FAR from qualified to judge my mental state. If you wanted respect from the beginning, you might’ve chosen a worldview that didn’t try to apply gunpoint violence against peaceful people. If I couldn’t own land in your world without paying for it, in perpetuity, I’d MAKE you come get me and throw me in jail. Don’t hire someone else to commit your violence, sack up and come do it yourself. You’re a statist, and that makes your position cowardly.
WOW… do more of this… this is entertaining…. you feel you are justified to trespass and be a disrespectful asshole on my blog because i happen to have a deeper reading and understanding of economics and history than you do and because you believe my system of governance is one of coercion, violence, and fraud just because i believe your system governance is one of coercion, violence, and fraud?
maybe you can get out your gun to force me to sign a voluntary agreement to live under your system governance. or force me to sign someone else’s voluntary agreement. calling slavery and indentured servitude “freedom and voluntary” doesn’t make it so when i have no choice but to chose among a limited supply of land/law providers already legally occupying all the land (that should be a “squirrel” hint of what it really is). true anarchy of non-violence/coercion is like a computer being able to hold the full result of division by zero (infinity) in it’s registers. it isn’t possible unless you design an infinite-bit computer. it is a good utopian fantasy but it doesn’t exist when there is more than one person in a given region. there is no utopia. we can only hope to reduce bad government, tyranny, fraud, theft, coercion, and violence, and increase good government, peace, and true voluntary organization and free markets. unfortunately, doing so is not always straight forward. fortunately, we have a lot of history and the classical liberals to help us make sense of it all.
lvt actually makes land cheaper, most of it virtually free. combined with a cd, it is actually free. so not sure what your problem is since most of your wealth is likely labor-made property. i’m sure even that double wide is probably worth more than the land it sits upon. most of your problem is that you’re so brainwashed in one school and so uneducated in history and other schools, you can’t even hope to begin to understand. i am afraid you would feel justified in committing violence against me because you think i’m wrong and you’re right. isn’t that what religious people do? isn’t that what brainwashed fascists do? but the point is lost upon you because you’re so brainwashed, trapped into a delusional dementia.
“you feel you are justified to trespass and be a disrespectful asshole on my blog because i happen to have a deeper reading and understanding of economics and history than you do and because you believe my system of governance is one of coercion, violence, and fraud just because i believe your system governance is one of coercion, violence, and fraud?”
lol, trespassing on the internet? I knew you lacked, but I didn’t think you were ACTIVELY delusional. Deeper understanding? Keep telling yourself that. “different” understanding I might’ve bought…
No, I believe your system is one of coecion and violence because you ACTIVELY refuse to tell me how you plan to ensure you get these land-taxes, and what happens to the land-owners if they don’t pay up.
Telling me that *I* have a system of governance shows a PERSISTENT lack of reading comprehension. Remember? Anarchist?
So choose now: Do you, or do you NOT regard it as a right to control the property you own?
“maybe you can get out your gun to force me to sign a voluntary agreement to live under your system governance. or force me to sign someone else’s voluntary agreement.”
What I could do through power and what I could do through right are completely unrelated, aren’t they?
by the way, I love how you keep trying to slip this “my gun” camel’s nose under this tent. What do you think you know about that? And why would you think it mattered? Maybe you’re showing your hand a bit more than you wanted. You’ve been trying to dye the fur as libertarian, but you’re showing a LOT of liberal stripes. Not even a small-government type, you’re going out-and-out “tax and redistribute” democrat.
and no, like most economists, i’m against the fractional reserve banking system, where usursers profit on the privilege of providing the supply of the legal tender. i fully support the end of fractional reserve banking of the legal tender. i want to separate credit and commodity markets from money. i want to nationalize the legal tender. i want to privatize credit and commodities. i want to pay off the national debt and cancel unsold national debt by ending fractional reserve banking, make monetary origination fund public needs rather than private privilege of usurers, and make printing the default course of action to finance public needs, as george washington and lincoln did, rather than the selling of usurious bonds. fractional reserve banking only came about because caesar allowed the banks to put us on a gold standard in 50 bc and the only way to make sure there was adequate supply of money was to engage in fractional reserve banking under a gold standard. and we didn’t get rid of the gold standard until 1935. and we still have a ways to go to get rid of the fraud and government privilege of fractional reserve banking. the federal reserve is just a symptom of the main problem — fractional reserve banking of the legal tender.
You shouldnt assume what other people believe especially if you dont have adequate background in understanding the different schools of thought youre making assumptions about. As a genius, you should be asking questions and reading more when you discover something new.
” i want to nationalize the legal tender.”
Woops.
pretty sure they even tried to nationalize gold once. Nationalizing ANYTHING has always turned out to be the wrong direction to go.
“You shouldnt assume what other people believe especially if you dont have adequate background in understanding the different schools of thought youre making assumptions about.”
I completely agree. I also think it’s advice you should take, before giving…
” As a genius, you should be asking questions and reading more when you discover something new.”
…Such as making presumptions as to what I am, and am not, learning more about.
delusional is not recognizing that I was using the word trespass with it’s primary definition, not it’s secondary legal/criminal definition. it is not surprising that someone who lives in a fantasy that privatized government/no government is equal to no tyranny/no coercion would also lack reading comprehension skills.
Definition of TRESPASS
1
a : a violation of moral or social ethics : transgression; especially : sin
b : an unwarranted infringement
2
a : an unlawful act committed on the person, property, or rights of another; especially : a wrongful entry on real property
b : the legal action for injuries resulting from trespass
even if one did not know the primary definition existed because they live in a bubble, any person of reasonable comprehension skills in such of a bubble, would realize i meant the word in such context to have such definition as a metaphor to the secondardy legal/criminal definition.
you do seem attracted to fantasy according to your facebook photos, complete with sword wielding knights under voluntary contract with feudal land barons.
Stick to the computers, you’re clearly completely incapable of understanding human beings.
You’re a programmer, and as such you think you can program people, and by poking just the right way, you’ll get predictable results. Thus: you’re a socialist. You’ve still avoided dozens of useful points to discus whenever the answers wouldn’t have suited you, invented MORE dozens of strawmen attacks against me, including, now, putting my personal life into a political discussion. If anyone reading this didn’t know you were grasping at straws before, they certainly do, once the Ad Homs start.
You’re long since hung out to dry.
i understand humans. i specialized in software engineering, databases, and engineering psychology. i also independently studied psychology. you were ignored by your parents as a child, likely while they smoked pot and drank beer. you feel inferior and can’t stand when someone else disagrees with your religion. so you spend all your time here calling me names and whine when you get it thrown back at you. i also studied experimental science as part of my engineering psychology specialization, and austrian economists is considered a religion because it is based on circular logic.
perhaps i’m wrong you were ignored as a child, and you just need some vagisil so you can move along while you continue to believe you’re george washington (who printed paper money by fiat to fund the american revolution), thomas jefferson (who believed in the progressive taxation of land), thomas paine (who believed in the taxation of land and the citizen dividend) and an anarchist who doesn’t believe property is theft, while you believe that i’m karl marx even though i don’t over-simplify everything to das anarcho-kapital like you do and don’t believe the government will magically disappear and the world will share the planet and live in perfect harmony without tyranny like you do. in that sense, you weren’t ignored as a child, you are just very naive.
“i understand humans.”
Welp, you’re doing a bang-up job on that front, seeing as literally everything you said after that point, specifically trying to show how well you knew me, was bass-ackwards.
“i also independently studied psychology.”
translation: “I read whatever books I felt like, and wasn’t structured in any way, and never had my viewpoints challenged, so that now when it happens I respond with ad-homs, because I can’t conceive of anyone thinking I’m wrong”
“you were ignored by your parents as a child, likely while they smoked pot and drank beer. you feel inferior and can’t stand when someone else disagrees with your religion.”
…Like I said, not a BIT of that is true.
“..so you spend all your time here calling me names…”
I think you’re an idiot. You’re doing a hell of a job confirming that. Thus far you’ve shown a remarkable race to the bottom strategy, and you’ve LITERALLY gone as far down as to insult “my momma”.
“…and whine when you get it thrown back at you.”
Implying I’ve done the above.
“i also studied experimental science as part of my engineering psychology specialization, and austrian economists is considered a religion because it is based on circular logic.”
Austrian economics is based on experience. Perhaps your schooling flew so “high” that it avoided the very basics. Try this one on for size: “the difference between theory and practice, is that in theory they’re the same. In practice, they’re not.”
“perhaps i’m wrong you were ignored as a child,”
Holy shit, he makes progress!
“and you just need some vagisil so you can move along while you continue to believe blah blah blah…”
…And just like THAT, it’s gone.
God, you’d think if you were going to try using metaphors, and analogies you’d at least TRY to make them realistic. Maybe that doesn’t fit your philosophy, either. Maybe I’m oppressing you by demanding that.
“…and an anarchist who doesn’t believe property is theft”
What, you think it is? Meh. Fuck you then. You want something of mine, you work for it, and gimme something I consider of worthwhile value. You don’t get to choose the disposition of my property, nor change the rules after I’ve created or earned it. If I spend a month of my time working for something, and you suddenly “decide” it’s not my property, and take it, you just either stole a month of my life, or enslaved me for that month. Needless to say, if someone tries to enslave me, I plan to shoot them.
“while you believe that i’m karl marx even though i don’t over-simplify everything to das anarcho-kapital like you do and don’t believe the government will magically disappear and the world will share the planet and live in perfect harmony without tyranny like you do. in that sense, you weren’t ignored as a child, you are just very naive.”
See, you do SO much better than I ever could at displaying how poorly you’ve been reading my comments… Marx has one of those views I could legitimately claim are the OPPOSITE of mine. That nobody could own a thing, since all of society owns everything equally… Which is another way of saying nobody owns anything at all, because to change ANYTHING, you’d have to ask permission from EVERYONE. And since you’re claiming that “society” is owed a tithe from every piece of land in the world, to be divided up… how exactly? (yeah, corruption will never take THAT over!), you’re more alike than you know.
As to the government magically disappearing? Another $20 challenge. Show me where I espoused any such thing. The same excuses people give for keeping government around were used 200 years ago to explain why we were keeping slavery around. “Oh, they wouldn’t know how to feed themselves… They’d kill each other off… What about all we do for them? They’re not evolved enough to look after themselves”…
As to the rest of this… Boring. I see you actually excusing not reading my comments and responding to points because you found nothing of interest… (“i will admit i didn’t read all the content of the comments you’ve posted. you’ve proven nothing”) Which you couldn’t know, having not read them.
“you’ve only entertained. i don’t expect you to understand that.”
No, I get it exactly. I have a new baby who loves to watch educational TV, but I’m aware that he only comprehends the colorful nature and moving pictures, and that what’s being relayed is happening on a level he’s not even aware of yet. So yes, I understand precisely what you’re entertained by.
“i have read j.s. mill and understand your desire to call me utilitarian rather than libertarian. it is my belief if the utilitarian solution is better than the libertarian solution, the libertarian solution was not formed and reasoned correctly. the utilitarian approach is just science, constantly trying to better understand a complex world.”
So, utilitarianism, that wonderful theory of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”… The parts of your body could save dozens of needy people, awaiting organ transplants, skin grafts, blood transfusions, bone marrow, stem cells… And yet you haven’t written out the will and put a bolt gun into your brain stem yet. Must be easier to talk the talk than to actually handle the consequences. The utilitarian solution is the one that ignores human rights in exchange for convenience… And yet you still accuse ME of socialism. I’ve never seen a person that needs this much force to crane their head around so they can look in the mirror.
And now that I had a new email come in, I had a nice chat with the “unsubscribe” button that, counterintuitively, doesn’t seem to exist on the actual page, so gibber all you’d like, I now no longer have to see your attempts to deny your urge for control people that’s so bloody obvious to anyone else. Honestly, if there are people who want to be left alone in this world, and people who won’t leave them alone, you’re type #2, and that’s why you’re a socialist. Leave landowners to their land, and stop turning envy into a school of philosophy.
Yep. A fixed or slowly growing money supply relative to the real economic growth rate rewards risk-free hoarding of that money. But progress requires taking risks so such a money supply is anti-progress.
Ron Paul should realize that Caesar’s money MUST be inexpensive fiat in order to have a true free market in private money creation. Else, the taxation authority and power of government is harnessed for someone’s (e.g. gold owners and usurers) private interests.
thank you again for your concise summary. it is always nice to hear from those who also really understand things.
Nice rebuttal Keith. Russ must be of the more zealous members of the high church of commodity money to lead his remarks with so much rancor. I do think, however that there exists some very interesting potential with innovations in digital money such as bitcoin(that he makes reference to) and digital coin. Money is utlimately an idea and a technology and therefore can evolve along with the economy in order to best fulfill its function as an economic facilitator
Personal attacks noted, and discarded, I’m a man without a church. I DO, however, hold a certain level of distaste for anyone whose philosophy is “I can fix all of these problems, I’d just need to be the guy in charge”.
The solution to pretty much all these problems is to stop trying to put people in charge.
Trying to ‘fix’ an economy with government, is using power against water.
Try holding water in your fist. It’s escaping? Let’s squeeze harder!
Never been a good idea, but like my poor cousin once found out…
kid was never all there, but one day he grabbed an onion from under the counter, and presented it to all, to show what he’d found.
“Apple!” he declared. He then proceeded to take a bite of it.
Much crying ensued, as you will understand, and then an odd thing happened: He scowled at it, and yelled “APPLE!” again. and he took a second bite.
This boy ate the ENTIRE onion, screaming at it to become an apple. I guess he showed it a thing or two…
It never did turn into an apple though, as far as we know.
Repeating the same response once it doesn’t work? Well, the world is an AWFULLY big onion to have to try and conquer…
Nice metaphor and anecdote. But you haven’t applied it in such a way that responds to any of Kieth’s specific points. Maybe you should restate what it is exactly that you disagree with. I agree with the basic point that deflation is bad. A currency functioning properly should remain stable in relation to all commodities. Deflation is actually evidence of a restriction of currency that is always devastating for economies.
It’s not a reply to him, it’s a reply to YOU though.
But if I must, he advocates an attempt to control an economy through government. It beer works, and one of the hallmarks of libertarianism is recognizing that any attempt to control economics leads to black markets, and victimized consumers.
Stupid sneaky autocorrect! It NEVER* works.
that is why the government legal tender should be a public utility. the government shouldn’t play favorites in the free market.
nothing should be a public utility. How do you even TRY to claim you’re a Libertarian?
i don’t believe the functions of government should be privatized profit-seeking institutions. such would be obamacare. government should not institute programs which require individuals to pay usury or rent to corporations. that would be neocolonialism or marxism for the rich, whereby the government forces individuals to pay tributes to other private individuals. the national debt in itself is marxism for the rich, whereby we must taxes to pay interest to private individuals. the monetary system i propose would pay off the national debt without taxation or inflation (by ending fractional reserve banking), would end government borrowing, and would end marxism for the rich. i believe government functions should be non-profit.
i’m definitely libertarian. i don’t see how ron paul can try to claim he is libertarian when he wants government to institute theft. i suppose libertarianism is often defined as what ron paul believes, and thus, libertarianism would be classical conservatism (feudalism). since i’m a classical liberal, that would put me in opposition to classical conservatism, and thus, in opposition to such a libertarianism. however, since one of the founders of the libertarian party includes david nolan, a geolibertarian, i consider myself to be libertarian, or more specifically, a geolibertarian, to differentiate myself from the classical conservatives who parade as libertarians and who falsely identify themselves as classical liberals.
I KNEW David Nolan, and YOU sir, are no David Nolan.
“i don’t believe the functions of government should be privatized profit-seeking institutions. such would be obamacare.”
Not at all. Obamacare is some weird mix of Fascism and Socialism in which large corporations have a stranglehold on a service which government mandates that people buy, or face punishments.
Nobody would be forced to patronize any such institution under a libertarian society. Sure, maybe your personal location on earth necessitates that you need a car, but you don’t need to pay one red cent to a major corporation if you don’t want to. There’re plenty of tinkerers building cars for cheap now that there are no government regs. Hell, if they have half the talent of cuban mechanics, they’re just as good anyways. Get the FRAME of a car with a drive-train, and a windshield, who cares? Dune buggies are awesome.
Don’t want insurance? Feel like you’re healthy and/or careful? Awesome, maybe you’ll be better off putting the same money into an account for a rainy day. Nobody to make you do anything you don’t want to, with it.
Why do you think you can require adults to do things they didn’t agree to, while calling yourself a libertarian? I’d love to see which Ron Paul policy you’re pointing to (I want it on record that YOU’RE the only one mentioning him. I didn’t vote this time around: It only encourages them, and legitimizes their crimes)
i’ve met david nolan and harry browne and many other libertarians. i’ve donated money to them. i even worked directly with ron crickenberger. a couple of my larger donations are even in the fec databases. i can play this game too.
Met Harry Browne too, back when he attended a rally at WPI. Fallacy of false authority, or just bragging?
What’s the point of mentioning the donations? Hell, I bought a lifetime membership in the LP once, thought I might not have done it again if it were happening today. Too much half-measure, not enough excising the cancer.
See, the root problem remains: You think you have to CONTROL something, and that people can’t set up a system that works without applied violence if they don’t do it “your way”.
again, you’re the pot calling the kettle black. you’re the one that started that game.
$10 challenge. Show me a point where I advocated controlling some aspect of society, rather than allowing it to form on its own. Footnote: “my property” isn’t “society”.
Super secret squirrel hint: you won’t, for the same reason you don’t see me advocating Ron Paul. I’m an anarcho-capitalist.
you might be right. it appears from your facebook page that you probably don’t own much except labor-made property and likely have a large amount of debt. you look like you probably are a renter. but not sure, you might actually own the double wide and the land it sits upon free and clear. such irony.
again, you’re trying to impose a simplified one-dimensional construct onto a complex multi-dimensional reality. land is not labor-made property. it is a necessary and equal right of all. land ownership is government. to not recognize such and the implications of such, by mixing the concept of self ownership with land ownership, you’ll get the opposite of self-ownership. you’ll use government to impose the coercion and fiction of land ownership, whereby private individuals will be able to enslave others simply by owning government fiction and controlling the natural rights of othera to land to survive and own themselves with that government fiction. even in a pure anarchist non-state, land ownership is fiction, through the coercion of a gun and organization of individuals who attempt to control and dominate land, preventing others from having an equal right to the land unless they agree to terms and pay rents to whomever does control and dominate land with the coercion of a gun. anarchy is government. anarchy is coercion, slavery, and violence. in the anarchist non-state and the biggest of governments, land is being owned and controlled by force.
the true libertarian proposal is to accept the reality that land ownership is law-made property, not labor-made property, and a necessary and equal right of all. the true libertarian proposal is to have government to grant equal shares of land value to all citizens while still allowing land to be valued and distributed through the free market. taxing land values at a 80-95% rate on the undeveloped rental value of land and distributing a citizen dividend would allow for such. the citizens would all be joint and equal shareholders of the land. the citizen government would collect land rents and distribute land rents to the shareholders. good government is used to promote natural rights and self-ownership rather than destroy such rights, as bad government.
under any system, there is a form of government. we both want a good government of self-ownership and free markets. we just disagree on what that means. i believe your beliefs are bad government, a fraudulent government, which destroys the right of self ownership.
you argue that government is bad and thus my proposal of what i believe to be good govvernment is bad because it is government. you further argue that your proposal of what you believe to be good government is good despite being a form of government. you might not see your own logical fallacy, but i do, as others do.
calling “land” a right is a really odd thought. What kind of right? OWNING land may be a right, but you can never equalize, or socialize, the ownership of everything, or it inevitably makes everyone poor.
“under any system, there is a form of government”
How would competing DROs fit that worldview? Do you NOT define government as the monopoly claim to the right to initiate violence within a given geographical area? Maybe we should hit THAT point. What do you think of monopolies? Are some good and some bad? All bad? Is taxation a monopoly, or can anyone do it?
you’ve bastardized a principle… but yes, the land baron who steals a free lunch in his sleep would be poorer, but most people would be richer in that land would be cheaper and since they would get a dividend to rent land. they would also have more of their labor-made wealth to spend on other things. so yes, taxing law-made property is of benefit to those with labor-made property and a detriment to those who profit on legal fiction of the state. and yes, taxing labor-made property does make everyone poorer, well except for the person in india or china who got the outsourced or offshored job.
what is a dro? are you talking about digital credit? so are you saying any business can choose what currencies they accept? that each level of government can also choose what currencies they accept? is it libertarian for government to choose winners and losers in the free market? wouldn’t that be a self-fulfilling prophecy for it do so? could there be a conflict of interest in such decisions? if government had to accept all forms, wouldn’t that be hyper-inflationary if anyone can create bills of credit out of nothing? what would they use to pay government employees? did the u.s. constitution ban colonial currencies because there were problems associated with such a system? did adam smith write about such in the wealth of nations? can maine accept beaver skins? can new hampshire accept grain? can georgia accept spanish gold notes? what if someone in maine bought up spanish gold notes and borrowed beaver skins?
A DRO is a Dispute Resolution Organization. So I’ll take that as a “no”, that you’ve not heard of them.
Thusly, most of your following comment was battering at the wrong door.
Stefan Molyneux may have originated this concept, or if he didn’t, he certainly did the best at popularizing it. He’s explained it in many venues, but the top hit when I tried to find a concise summary was this.
http://lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux1.html
another one of those voluntary things? after paying a fee, you can force the other party to agree that they are wrong, so you don’t have to resort to a gun duel? it might be amusing to read a long-winded and tortured rothbardian apologetic delusion but not today.
oh, you can’t reply to a comment that is already nested to the limit. the limit is set to the wordpress default, which i believe is 5. you have to create a new thread to reply or reply to a higher level comment in the thread.
i think you’re talking about incentive… how there is no incentive to innovate, efficiently produce, and create quality products under a communist system.
and yes, taxing land values would create incentive to use land efficiently. saying there would be less incentive to create land would be the point, you can’t create more land. you can only use it more efficiently. it would even create incentive to create libertarian islands, using the water more efficiently to create new places to put your feet, and high rises, to create more floors to put your feet. this is because we’re taxing the land value, not the value of the labor-made property, the man-made island or the man-made high rise.
and yes, inflation creates an incentive to use, invest, lend, and borrow wealth as deflation creates an incentive to stop producing, stop investing, and stop lending and borrowing.
“another one of those voluntary things? after paying a fee, you can force the other party to agree that they are wrong, so you don’t have to resort to a gun duel? it might be amusing to read a long-winded and tortured rothbardian apologetic delusion but not today.”
You’ve already engaged in this contract, since you clearly have internet access. In the fine print, odds are >95% that there’s a clause about third-party arbitration. You’ve already agreed to circumvent the government-run dispute resolvers, in favor of a private one. And yet, in any dispute there are (at least) two people. They clearly can’t BOTH pay the fee and be found wrong. If this business wants to REMAIN in business, there will be certain conditions met.
-The proceedings may be recorded for use if customer satisfaction is not achieved.
-Two different parties may have pre-retained different DROs, and as such each DRO will represent a party. Any given DROs ought to have also pre-determined a third for such arbitration. Compensation could be monetary, or quid pro quo on cases THEY may someday bring forth. Would look like plaintiff and defendant lawyers coming before a judge.
-DRO can also protect a person’s property through insurance arm. It’s now in their best interest to catch thieves and prevent fire damage. DROs would negotiate with local security providers, and fire brigades to protect a given area, to be paid by ratio, number of subscribers to each DRO in, perhaps, an HOA. DRO pays customer for losses, recoups the money by catching the burglars/thieves, or docking fire brigade for any response time past an agreed-upon amount. (We’re already doing better than government at this point, since SCOTUS ruled long ago that the cops have no specific duty to protect any citizen whose tax dollars pay their salaries).
Don’t worry though, your pre-emptive declaration of a thing you haven’t read as wrong doesn’t cost you any *more* respect. You’ve long since drained that well. Far be it for me to assume you’ve prejudged dozens of other things in your time because they didn’t fit your boxy little worldview.
“can maine accept beaver skins? can new hampshire accept grain? can georgia accept spanish gold notes? what if someone in maine bought up spanish gold notes and borrowed beaver skins?”
No, states can’t accept money, they don’t have any hands with which to grasp it. PEOPLE can choose to take these things or not. You could pay people in graphing calculators, if you’d like. Apparently they retain their value forever. Why are you looking for blanket solutions? That’s just not how an economy works.
so you are an anarchist and believe somehow a person should be able to choose the land trust and voluntary organization they belong. they can enter into contracts with whatever organization controls land in a geographic region. sounds a lot like the classical conservatism of feudalism. such voluntary contracts with the local land baron/trust was often called indentured servitude and serfdom. Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. why not promote tribalism, it was more libertarian than feudalism, well, if you didn’t belong to the wrong tribe, where you were given kool aid or where you had to sacrifice your first born to the gods or where your 5,000 year old peaceful confederation was eventually thrown off your tribal land and conquered by feudalists.
“We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government… Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.” — William Jennings Bryan, Democratic National Convention, July 9, 1896
“This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour — nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times…People began to say, if this is what State abstention comes to, let us have some State intervention.
“But the state had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly — the landlord’s monopoly of economic rent — thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labor market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus.” — Albert J. Nock, “The Gods’ Lookout,” 1934
“Men did not make the earth… It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property… Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.” — Thomas Paine, “Agrarian Justice,” 1797
“Both ground rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own…. Ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are, therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.” — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776
“Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. ” — Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1785
“Wherever, in any country, there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.” — Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1785
“When the ‘sacredness of property’ is talked about it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the general inheritance of the whole species.” — J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848
“They [landlords] grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing.” — J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848
“God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience…. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” — John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690
“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
and please don’t take my making fun of you in the wrong way. i actually feel sorry for you because at one time i was just like you with your same beliefs and behavior.
we pay taxes on our labor to the government. privatizing everything and making us pay taxes on our labor to corporations will not make things better. it will be worse since things will be even more unaccoutable. we need to start making people who get a free lunch in their sleep to pay taxes. we need to at minimum make land free since with free land, you don’t have to pay tributes to anyone. you can produce your own shelter, food, and water. land value tax would make most land virtually free. a citizen dividend would make it completely free. we need to allow the origination of legal fiction (legal tender) to fund the government rather than bank of america. and there is plenty of argument to make even make insurance a public utility since insurance is also legal fiction. right now, the giant insurance corporations are forcing us to pay usury to them for insurance. people are already paying half of their earned income to the government and the other half of their earned income to giant corporations. we need to start taxing unearned income. we need to end direct taxation of labor. we need to stop allowing land owners to steal a free lunch from the working class. we need to stop allowing banks and their large corporations to own everything and everyone plus 5 percent and decide whether there is enough money for everyone to work a job or not. a free market in currency will not make that better. it will make it worse. monetary fraud would be out of control. the rich will profiteer on the inflationary currencies and the deflationary currencies.
“the land trust and voluntary organization they belong.”
Scuse me? Where did YOU learn what anarchy means?
“whatever organization controls land in a geographic region”
lol, government. Not just feudalism. You think I’m wrong, wait for the next ass who says “If you don’t like our government, you can leave!”. If your ‘worst case scenario’ for an anarchism looks like “what we have now” why am I supposed to be dissuaded?
““We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government… Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.” — William Jennings Bryan, Democratic National Convention, July 9, 1896″
They were still choosing their master, rather than casting one off. Why not allow the market to find its favorite currency? And so what if it’s gold? You buy things that devalue NOW, in computers, cars, and houses. It doesn’t keep you hoarding your money while you live in a cardboard box with maybe an AM radio.
>>Quoting Albert J. Nock
…And immediately after doing just what he explained the ignorant masses were, no less.
You REALLY thought quoting one of the fathers of modern anarcho-capitalism would help your case more than mine?
You JUST tried to cry alarmism about how laissez-faire would cause anarchists to be driven to land-slavery. It’s never been laissez-faire, it’s always been government. But you, you still think YOU can run a government that won’t. It has NEVER been about who controls the power. It’s ALWAYS been about the power itself.
” the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them”
No different than “tax the rich most, they can bear it best”.
…Oh look! THAT’s your next point! Oh, DO remind me how you still list yourself as a libertarian.
You hold so many positions which are based in utility, rather than morality, I can’t imagine the ethical conundrums that keep you up. Or maybe you sleep the rest of a sociopath, how the hell would I know, right?
I left the LP because they kept trying to shrink the cancer and then leave it there, rather than excising it, but I still recall their slogan being “the party of Principle”. You don’t belong. The party of utility is far further to the left.
“and please don’t take my making fun of you in the wrong way. i actually feel sorry for you because at one time i was just like you with your same beliefs and behavior.”
Your pity is just as misplaced as your faith. Funny thing is, I used to believe more like YOU do, that people would be better off if someone tried to level the playing field by taking stuff from some of them, and giving it to others.
Then I lent money to people and saw what it turned them into. I learned that being poor wasn’t noble, and it didn’t give you bragging rights, it just made people rationalize not paying me back. It was as self-centered as HAVING money, with less constraint on respecting rights. The sooner you stop treating people as herd animals, to be tended to, the sooner they can stop acting like it.
“we pay taxes on our labor to the government. privatizing everything and making us pay taxes on our labor to corporations will not make things better. it will be worse since things will be even more unaccoutable(sp).”
Unaccountable? I don’t think that word means what you think it does. Government is ACCOUNTABLE in your mind? How do you stop hiring them, when they fail at the job? Who do you turn to when the government fails to protect your property, your liberty, your children? They don’t care at ALL if they protect you: Your money will keep coming, regardless. I asked how you felt about monopolies, and a brief page-find indicates you’ve ignored the question. Government holds SEVERAL monopolies, among them on the use of initial violence, imprisonment of peaceful individuals, theft of income, and SOLE ownership of land. Nobody else can rightly say they own land if they’re “paying rent” to government, that, if stopped, gets the land repossessed. These are MONOPOLIES. And they’re wrong.
” right now, the giant insurance corporations are forcing us to pay usury to them for insurance”
Right now government has granted them a geographic fiefdom. Don’t like it? It’s not a NEW regulation you need, it’s REMOVAL of a regulation. Competition across borders: a GOOD idea.
And insurance would get NONE of my money if there were no regulations: I’d be saving my own money and getting regular checkups.
“we need to start taxing unearned income”
See: how the HELL do you call yourself a libertarian? I’m pretty sure we’ve poked enough holes here, THAT ship has sunk, not sailed.
“we need to end direct taxation of labor.”
Now you’re talking, you shoulda stopped there though…
“We need to stop allowing land owners to steal a free lunch from the working class.”
Theft?? Well find some evidence, and arrest them. Take em to court, and lock em up!
“we need to stop allowing banks and their large corporations to own everything and everyone plus 5 percent”
Exactly! By removing their government-issued special rights. Why can’t you sue a CEO? Right! Government!
“…and decide whether there is enough money for everyone to work a job or not.”
What makes you special enough to control this?
“a free market in currency will not make that better. it will make it worse.”
Bald assertion with crap for evidence.
“monetary fraud would be out of control. the rich will profiteer on the inflationary currencies and the deflationary currencies.”
Uh, yeah, that’s worked so well for the stock market in currency trading, to date. I dealt with ‘monetary fraud’ in the first hours I was commenting here. You don’t TAKE something as a currency that’s easy to counterfeit. Gold is DAMN HARD to counterfeit, for example, despite an entire alchemical industry attempting it, up through about the dawn of the nuclear age.
Here, I’ll paste in its entirety, as if you’re actually reading my comments anymore:
“But there needs to be no such backing, if a person wants to use gold, its propriety in trade can be established the obvious ways: 1)Run an electric current through it. There are meters that can tell you the carat-rating of gold by just poking it with a multimeter set to resistance. and 2) then you weigh it. A smart business could buy a device which will do both, to the accuracy of a postal scale, and for about what a register will go through in a year, in the way of those FRN-testing markers.”
so the truth is out. you want a gold boiler room. you want artificial demand for gold as a means of exchange and mostly as a means to steal a free lunch in your sleep. good luck trailer park trash. you’ll be one of the ones forced into indentured servitude, signing “voluntary” contracts. you won’t be the plantation owner. good luck with that free market in “government” and your contradiction of land ownership without government.
The truth is VERY much out: You may claim to be a libertarian, but it quacks like a socialist…
And then you shot THAT branch of support in the foot by ridiculing someone for BELIEVING they were poor. Good luck with the rest of this… blogger.
I’ve accomplished all I needed to, and you made yourself look like an idiot in 48 hours.
actually, you have more in common with marx than i do. marx and von mises are both neoclassical economists with no foundation in science and history and both define everything as capital.
i have read j.s. mill and understand your desire to call me utilitarian rather than libertarian. it is my belief if the utilitarian solution is better than the libertarian solution, the libertarian solution was not formed and reasoned correctly. the utilitarian approach is just science, constantly trying to better understand a complex world.
you will get an article. i’m still trying to decide on a title and on the breadth of it. i was thinking of the title “folly and fallacy of an anarcho-capitalist” or “delusions and contradiction of an anarcho-capitalist”…. i will describe what will happen if public utilities such as roads and money were privatized. i will try to give consideration that it would be reasonably possible to privatize all forms of government itself, though there are things there where i would have no historical basis to even speculate what would happen. you assume that the free market will be fair and that any government would be unfair, no matter if the government solution is a good one. you are probably correct that the rich would never allow good government which respects natural rights. i think it is especially true for the free market, that the rich would never allow good and free anarchy which respects natural rights. hadam smith and my article on how commodity monetarism is a trick mechanism of coercion and usury will give you insight on matters. owever, with an attempt to achieve good government, you would still have a vote. in poverty and indentured servitude, there is no vote.
that is your perception. i personally find you to be a rude, arrogant, and illogical asshole full of delusions, contradictions, and logical fallacy.
With your continuous lack of comprehension, it’s no wonder that you can claim to have “read” all these authors and schools of thought, and settled on such a poor one that probably reinforced biases you already had.
Gotta love your alternating defense of “the poor” and denigration of the term “trailer trash”, hypocrite. You’re not the poor man’s advocate, you’re his jailer.
Oh and, “trailer trash?”
That’s “Landowner in Scottsdale”, to you, rental boy.
All this “you, you, you” filth after that, you just couldn’t stick to what you knew, you had to go and make up flighty fantasies about who you imagine I am, and hang that strawman HIGH. Good luck, it’s the only version of me you can ever best.
That you think *I’M* the thief while you’ll use color of government to outright TAKE value from its owner shows just how twisted you are.
so should i assume your land is worth more than your double wide and is why you’d rather pay taxes on the double wide than the land? so if the land in scottsdale falls in value, is it your fault? if the land in scottsdale increases in value, is it your fault? do you believe in the free lunch? do you believe that if the land increases in value that you deserve the free lunch? that you deserve the labor of a restaurant and a farm to prepare you a free lunch? you call yourself a libertarian. i think you’re a socialist looking for a free lunch. i want free land. you want slaves. that is the difference.
this is why you’re trailer park trash…
if there were 100 people starving, and if there was an unclaimed store of food for 100 people, and if you were the 1st person to find the store of food, you would take all the food and keep it for yourself, possibly selling it to others or have them sign voluntary contracts to be your personal servant for a share of the food. you would justify your action saying you were the first one to find it and thus have full claim to it. that is your attitude towards land. that is another reason why i consider you to be a self-centered and self-absorbed asshole. a person with morality and respect for natural rights would divide the store of food among the 100 people. they would even volunteer their toil to divide the discovered fruits.
This is why you’re a moron. You’re writing a blog for free, with bad and outdated information, ignoring tons of salient points posted in the comments section, and making vast and sweeping judgments on people you actually don’t know by the type of domicile they resigned in.
In addition to using the flag of libertarianism to march your socialist ideas under, you are also willing to brand someone as inferior because you believe they are “trailer trash”. Way to aim for the big tent and end up alienating everybody!
I’ve proven my points, we’re done here.
people are often guilty of what they accuse others. i’ve made many salient points, many points in the form of quotations from great people, which you seem to ignore as you chose to setup strawmen with stretched colloquial sayings and under contradictory or circular premises and attack with ad hom. you’re the moron for thinking you can come to my blog to call me a moron without it being thrown back at you. and you’re delusional if you think i promote socialist ideas. you promote austrian economics, which has much more in common with marx’s desire to define everything as capital than the classical liberalism that i promote, which considers land to be unique and different from capital. if you’re weren’t a complete moron and here to call me names, i would be glad to have a discussion and answer questions or have a civil debate. however, it is apparent you’re not here for that purpose. i should have just deleted your comments and threw you out with the trash, but you were such a moron, i found it entertaining. i will admit i didn’t read all the content of the comments you’ve posted. you’ve proven nothing. you’ve only entertained. i don’t expect you to understand that.
Regarding the statement: “It has NEVER been about who controls the power. It’s ALWAYS been about the power itself.” (this is the closest reply-option)
Yes RT, and I share your distrust of government and systems where some exercise power over others. But when one person / groups owns land, and others do not, this is another form of the same dynamic – power over others; and the ‘privatized’ version is even less ‘accountable’ than government – which is really saying something.
I think we would agree that ‘authority’ is where very evil people congregate – every time. I disagree with KG, in that I think the ‘feudalist’ types of today will be found in those ‘government offices’ in a Geo-Lib future. But even setting aside the Cheney/Rumsfeld-type psychopaths who wallow in government power to serve Rockefeller/Carnegie/Koch, there is a constant of human nature which acts within even smaller ‘authority’ systems. That is favoritism / nepotism – ala “Me and Mine”.
It is the force that makes people love their children, but is also that which makes any system of ‘authority’ become corrupt. Travel to 3rd world villages, where the National government has little power / effect, and you can see this in action – even in an environment where everyone knows everyone else.
What Libertarians fail to recognize, is that it is this very same aspect of human nature which brings disproportionate land ownership into existence, creating a cartel-type force, because **disproportionate land-ownership is a form of authority**. Those who have it are ‘safer’ than those who do not; simple game theory applies here.
In short, the only solution is equal access to the land, and only ‘ownership’ achieves full access. Any government ‘tax system’ which attempts to accomplish this by ‘permission to use land’, versus ‘ownership’ leaves all as slaves to government. If you don’t ‘please’ the government – they can arbitrarily change the ‘tax rate’ on your land; you may become homeless or a wage-slave as a result, and we are back where we started.
If I am going to develop my fair share of the Earth, I need to know I can keep it No Matter What – even if I have zero ‘income’ with which to ‘pay’ government (or other forms of landlords).
Therefore, I suggest a non-governmental method of achieving equal access to land, which is articulated on my website, if you click my name.
you articulated well that power will always control access to land, whatever the system is. i believe an lvt, combined with a cd, would guarantee this while respecting free markets, as long as the program is in place, which is better than having the wrong system in place which taxes earned wealth rather than unearned wealth. you would always have the cd to pay your lvt or relocate to less expensive land if necessary. i do think we need a system which allows citizens to bring rackteering charges against those in government with a citizen jury.
hr, i don’t think rt is here to be exposed to new ideas. he is here to act like a jackass and embarass himself.
Within the geo-lib model, I think the “equal universal personal land tax exemption” comes the closest to what I would like to see – provided that one’s land-share was ‘frozen’ and could be passed on, with continued tax-deferment, in one’s ‘will and testament’.
Not only does this accommodate the principle of preserving one’s value-added during one’s lifetime, as well as passing this to one’s offspring, – encouraging development – this also ensures that, in an ever-more-crowded planet, one can rest assured that their offspring could enjoy the same ‘tax-free elbow room’ which they do.
The CD is a good idea in terms of heading in the direction I seek, though I do not think any ‘pre-deductions’ should take place; fee-for-service should be the rule for any collective services, participation in which should be purely voluntary. If you think about it, a well-designed CD eliminates the need for ‘compulsory government services’ as everyone can afford to pay within the market; this prevents the up-creep in costs that always accompanies government funding and makes the consumer perpetually aware of what they are paying for every, individual service.
The CD should also include mineral resources. Mining and refining should remain private, as competition can meet demand in the market, but the minerals themselves are finite and not man-made, hence our equal birthright (and necessary for civilization-development).
Within the geo-lib framework of the LVT and minarchy, I wonder if my model for minerals could appeal to geo-lib folks:
Essentially, each person receives a share of mineral extractions in their commodity-account, and is free to put them up for sale in the open market. Part of the sale-price pays for the extraction (awarded by open bids for service chosen by Individuals). In this way, no concentrated control of resources could come into being, along with accompanying artificial scarcity (“peak oil”) to inflate prices, nor low-balling to depress them while a competing source of energy is undermined, etc.
milton friedman had the view that the cd could function to replace social services and stop the creep as you described, allowing people to seek social services in the free market. milton friedman’s utilitarianism was compatible with libertarianism in that sense — a privatization of social government. mlk also believed in the cd to help all people out of poverty, for whatever reason they are there, including racial discrimination, which is argued to be justice and compatible with libertarianism by civil libertarians. the view that the cd is justly acquired compensation for being an equal shareholder of the planet is the view of thomas paine and geolibertarians and fully compatible with libertarianism with the added utilitarian benefit of mlk and milton friedman.
the personal deduction for land is held by some geolibertarians who believe the cd would be money-for-nothing. however, i hold the believe it is money-for-something, being an equal shareholder of the planet and to guarantee such right to an equal claim of land and to afford relocation expenses if land should become too valuable to hold.
natural resource taxation where the value of the resources is taxed and distributed as actual resources is a new and interesting idea to me. however, land value tax does tax the value of natural resources, whereas, the land owner loses land value during extraction and paid for the natural resources at the increased land value and land value tax before extraction.
he doesn’t seem professional enough to be a professional asshole, but i wouldn’t be surprised if he has a book for sale somewhere that the church of scientology funded him to write. he seems obsessed with the phrase “consensus reality.” he doesn’t seem bright enough to actually have a dissertation on the subject, but it seems the one volume of substance he read or wrote might have discussed that term. i’d put him in the category of delusional kook due to his obsession with “consensus reality.” he’s on a mission to educate us real libertarians and classical liberals, who he incorrectly assumed were big government keynesian socialists, about how bad coercion and fiat money is when he is done rubbing down his guns and counting his federal reserve notes he has deposited in his bank of america account after he pays his mortgage and taxes on the double wide, or something like that.
i suppose because he believes if he educates enough of us to believe as he does, that he’ll be able to afford a new 4-wheeler, without realizing that he’d probably lose the double wide if it did happen. he may have inherited some land or bought something free of clear or has a business which would prosper under a deflationary depression, which would make him a rare exception to the rule. he could be collecting a government check too and wants to be able to buy more with it, which would be irony. he could be a student at a liberal arts college on the government g.i. bill with no hope of getting a job under the current monetary depression and believes an even bigger monetary depression would help him get a job. i would call it a deflationary depression, but we all know it is a stagflation depression, the rising prices of commodities on international commodity markets due to growing economies in india and china in the face of a domestic credit/monetary contraction and as monetary units continues to be exported as a reserve currency, as interest on debt, and as trade deficits.
You make the most intricate strawmen. If you sold THOSE instead of writing blogs, you could have retired already.
I first ran across the phrase “consensus reality” in a book by Charles Stross, regarding future virtual worlds, and the concept was explained to the layman in Inception, where at a certain point you have to agree that the world you see either is, or isn’t real, and treat it as a true medium. The concept is functional and observable in money, language, authority, and rights. None of these will operate in an environment when not recognized by the parties as an agreed-upon protocol.
You want to give me SEASHELLS in return for my carvings? What on earth would I do with those? Similarly, gold, pieces of green paper, or carbide crystals.
You make these odd noises when meeting me… How the heck am I supposed to know what you mean? You should call things what *I* do, and THEN we’d be able to communicate…
You claim to have the right to “own” other people? Man, you’re a kook. Those people own THEMSELVES!
You see, in any of these circumstances, the first guy is completely unable to trade with the second, because they don’t operate on the same consensus of how the world works. It’s a concept you probably USE, but don’t feel the need to name. Didn’t think naming it would cause you conniptions, but hey, everyone’s offended by somethin’.
Def. these guys are working for Big Sis or Big Bro Russell. Anyone thinking we should kick subsistence farmers off of their land is straight up STALINIST and not a Libertarian. Fascist socialism was tried over and over and always fails. Sorry you don’t think the work I put in to buy land is worthless. I know a lot of mom and pop FARMERS who would spit in your face for arguing that land is “for everyone” — where the F were they when the guy worked in poverty and saved up to buy the land or worked to plant a seed??????
TOTAL BS… Move back to Russia
“… worked in poverty and saved up to buy the land…”
That, is pure fantasy. Maybe 1 in a 100,000 people “work themselves up from poverty” to “owning a farm” (or much of anything). The one who does, will get all over TV and Newsweek, as if this were common. If you put 1000 slot-machines in a room “someone is always winning” – but this does not change the real-world odds for the individual player. So sad when people fall for that trick – gamblers and “American Dreamers”, alike.
Most farms are majority-owned by banks, who steal them back when their buddies on Wall St manipulate commodity prices – so that the farmer can start over – or go to work at Wal Mart and live hand-to-mouth until they die.
Also, if you buy a stolen car with a fake-title, you may loose it, even if you meant well. Granted, we should do our best to respect the investments in labor people have made to the land they bought with illegitimate titles. But this does not mean we simply “let it ride” with respect to the status quo.
Why? How can a person be considered “free” if they have no place they are allowed to “be” without permission from a land-”Lord”? Just because you suffered needlessly for permission to have a place to “be” or grow your food, does that mean all future generations should suffer this indignity? That attitude sounds like a justification for a Hazing Ritual, not for sound socio-economic policy.
With regard to the “subsistence farmer” – wouldn’t that cancel out with the GeoLib “Citizen’s Dividend”? Consider the abolition of the other taxes today’s farmer pays, plus his mortgage to the bankers, and he might find the GeoLib deal rather appealing.
But I suspect it is not “subsistence farmers” – but rather, “plantation owners” – who would object most strenuously what is being proposed here. Most Libertarians yack about small business all day, but their proposed policies always seem to serve billionaire “disproportionate-owners” of land and natural resources – things which no person made – i.e. the Koch Brothers and Rockefeller types.
Although I have a different solution (which does not involve taxes), I agree with the nature of the problem of “access to the Earth” Keith addresses here. It is a hell of a lot better than the status-quo.
most farmers inherited their land from their parents. land value tax would also tax the value of the land, not the value of the buildings. the land value tax would also be rebated with a citizen dividend. this makes the family farmer more competitive with corporate farming since the family farmer would receive a rebate with a citizen dividend, making some if not all of the family farm tax free on the few acres they own in the middle of nowhere, whereas a corporation would pay taxes on the thousands of acres they own. if you’re not using your land to make an income and only need an acre and your home, you should sell your excess land to someone who would put it to use. After your rebate, you would effectively pay no taxes on the land and could even receive a benefit with the citizen dividend if the rebate is more than the tax you owe on the acre of farm land in the middle of nowhere. you shouldn’t have to pay taxes as a subsistence farmer. you should have to pay taxes if you own more land than you need for subsistence since you’re denying the right of someone else to use that land.
Nice article Keith as ever interesting and would agree to that.
Best of luck arguing with people who put a religious like status on gold.
Kieth and Stalin have more in common than Kieth and Libertarianism…. Just sayin… Hegellian Dialectic anyone? BTW 140 plus IQ and now I think this site is CIA Hegel BS because of rejection of private property.
not sure how I’m still getting alerts for this page, I’m sure I unsubscribed, but yeah, I also clock in at an IQ of typically 143. I doubt this page has any government ties, it’s just too scatterbrained, and wouldn’t help any administration positions, though it might catch a few people they’d like to keep an eye on, tops.
i’m all for the protection of property, specifically labor-made property, and specifically trying to protect such earned property from being looted with taxes on labor and real capital and from the usury levied on the government’s legal tender and from the rent levied on government-granted titles to land.
i seriously doubt you have an iq above 140, especially considering you’re an idiot. the tests online don’t count. those aren’t iq tests. the official iq test is administrated in early grade school with an update given in the 8th grade. they are used to predict grade school performance. unless someone measured your working memory, attitude, general knowledge, and reasoning abilities in early grade school and you took an update measuring your logic and reasoning abilities in the 8th grade to continue placement in a gifted program, you have not taken an official iq test.
most amusingly, you find yourself in need of denying the possibility that intelligent people could disagree with you. They tested me every three years, (grades 3, 6, 9, 12) and had me in a gifted program up till high school, who lacked the budget to maintain one. The internet hadn’t gotten to the consumer when I was being evaluated, so good luck with that “online” straw man. Your position continues to be that nobody owns their land, since some governing body can charge rent (call it “tax” if you insist) and take it from you, should you fail to pay up.
I’ve noticed you also don’t seem to pay NEARLY enough attention to the fact that the “scarcity” of land in this country is primarily due to GOVERNMENT’s unconstitutional cornering of that market. The Department of the Interior alone owns about 20% of the country. This is separate from BLM and any state-controlled lands. Best guess in total is between 42 and 48%, but hey, go on about how you deserve some money from other people’s property and how you’re a libertarian.
Here, btw.
http://prfamerica.org/speeches/8th/LandownershipInAmerica.html
should someone privately own the grand canyon? what about all the vacant land… in cities? have you seen detroit lately?
i once consumed the same propaganda you consume… i don’t deny that intelligent people can be deceived…
Someone DOES own all that “vacant land”, and it’s government barriers to entry which keep it so. You can check as easily as I can into Zillow and the county assessor’s office to see who to contact about a particular plot of land. As to the Grand Canyon, ownership is determined by first use, or rightful purchase, and Teddy Roosevelt had the right idea, with the wrong tool: forward thinking people, protecting natural land for hunters, campers, hikers, nature lovers of all sorts… Unfortunately he used force of law to institute what would’ve been a fine idea without the gunmen. Sorta like “The Jungle”. Upton Sinclair did a very libertarian thing, he used a novel to point to an intolerable situation, and in response, people stopped buying the controversial product… But statists got the wrong message, and always ask if we want to go back to “those days” without gub’mint making sure we don’t kill our fool selves…
And consuming different propaganda doesn’t mean much, in particular. It’s a common and popular fallacy to point out that one USED to believe in a thing, and no longer does. I’ve seen people convert to and from all sorts of religions, political parties, and even sexual fetishes. It doesn’t make any one more wrong than another. The trick isn’t in the deceiving, it’s in showing you HOW you’ve been deceived, and convincing you of such.
so you think someone should be able to profit on selling tickets to see the grand canyon? sorry, i don’t. i see the grand canyon as the common wealth, owned by all, as i see all natural wealth as the common wealth, owned by all. i don’t want GOVERNMENT allowing people to privately and fully OWN land with the enforcement of the government paper and government barrier called a title deed with government force, especially without proper compensation to all. proper compensation is collecting of such rent from the owner of the government paper called a title deed and having it fund the public need without the need to tax everyone upon their rightfully earned toil and provide a dividend to the public so that everyone will have access and just compensation of their joint and equal ownership of the land without government helping private individuals to deny access or steal rents upon the land jointly and equally owned by all.
you allow a simple idealogy based on circular logic cloud your judgement and reasoning upon realilty. circular logic is a logical fallacy. furthermore, you aren’t even able to see how your own idealogy debunks your idealogy, and how your own idealogy isn’t even libertarian. nock, spooner, other classical libertarians, anarchists, and classical liberals all saw how land ownership was government. anarcho-capitalism is neither. your logical fallacy is greater than my own logical fallacy of calling you obtuse.
“This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour — nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times…People began to say, if this is what State abstention comes to, let us have some State intervention.
“But the state had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly — the landlord’s monopoly of economic rent — thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labor market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus.” — Albert J. Nock, “The Gods’ Lookout,” 1934
And when was the last time you lent your common-labor to cleaning up such common-goods as the grand canyon? Tragedy of the commons is NOT a hard concept.
User fees (paying park fees to maintain the park) isn’t a hard concept either. Misapplying concepts seems to be problematic for you, as it is for all ancaps because you spend your miserable existence trying to justify the false construct handed to you by the school of Austrian Economics rather than try to accept reality and better understand it. You wouldn’t be prone to misapplying concepts if you started with reality and try to reach your own conclusions rather than start with someone’s funded conclusion and assuming it is correct.
I see two barriers to entry to that land – government and private – not one or the other. If those who lived in Detroit all had equal private shares of that land, they would put it to use. But the landlords and existing Crony-Businesses won’t let that happen – they want obedient worker-consumers who serve their interests and use their Crony-Government-issued “titles” as justification for denying others use.
While the worker-consumers are split with a false left-right paradigm, they will fight each other, instead of their common enemy, and will remain landless-serfs – paying *both* bankers and property-tax-rent in paycheck-operated life-support mode – forever. So, also, with left-right anarchism.
I am a harsh tax-critic, but the Geo-Lib plan, with up to one’s personal land-share being essentially tax-free (any land-tax canceled by their citizen-dividends), would be a heck of a lot better than what we have now. It also could have mass-appeal – unlike AnCap and Libertarian models – but without the Robin-Hood income-tax dependency-trap we all despise.
Thank you for your comment.
“User fees (paying park fees to maintain the park) isn’t a hard concept either.”
Is this really what you took away from my comment? No wonder you think it’s misapplied, if it’s misunderstood this badly.
Anyone can privately own property and charge admissions (in this case, environmental reparations), but you simply avoided my question. If you think such land should be universally accessible, do you think it will be universally maintained, as well?
I’ll refer you to the hygiene of a public restroom, at highway rest stops, and the like. But hey: just starting with reality, instead of applying a concept and trying to make the world match it.
yes, the austrian school of theory that private property owners maintains land better. i don’t buy into that theory since private ownership leads to slums if land rents aren’t captured by the public since private land ownership is more about speculation on the value of the land and stealing rent from the public rather than actually using the land. toil is justly owned by the person who labored. we as individuals must cooperate when it comes to the use of the fixed supply of land. i believe in the natural law that we are all equal owners of the fixed supply of land and should have an equal share and say on it. it is called the school of cooperative individualism.
the primary and justified purpose of government is about cooperative use of the land, setting aside land for public use, such as roads and parks, and zoning and regulating land for private use. taxing land value (as oppose to development of land) tends to make sure people develop, maintain, and use land efficiently and leads to everyone having the opportunity to own land for private use. evidence seems to suggest that the federal and state governments are very good at providing well-maintained parks for public use. the reasoning is that a democratic government is overseen by private individuals who demand appropriate maintenance of parks and roads and zone the land in a way that most would agree for it to be zoned. several citizens and government employees can provide good oversight, better than a redneck trying to steal some rent. quality tends to be really high when government contracts the maintenance to private contractors — the government worker is employed to oversee the work rather than actually do the work and the private contractors emphasize quality to keep the contract with the public. personally, i would much rather camp in a public campground than a private campground and find a gas tax much more convenient than a toll road.
80% lvt to allow market valuation of land… return 20% of the land rents as a citizen dividend so that people can afford land rents not captured on land that would otherwise be free if 100% lvt was captured… end taxation upon toil and nationalize the legal tender and poverty would get a death blow…
anyway, time for some quotes from jefferson and nock…
“The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed… It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:18, Papers 8:682
“It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all… It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.” –Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333
“A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant.” –Thomas Jefferson: Batture at New Orleans, 1812. ME 18:45
“Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:18, Papers 8:682
“[The] unequal division of property… occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which… is to be observed all over Europe.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:17, Papers 8:681
“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:17, Papers 8:682
“AFTER conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with the land. The State assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis, where by every landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms. A point to be observed in passing is that by the State-system of land-tenure each original transaction confers two distinct monopolies, entirely different in their nature, in as much as one concerns the right to labour-made property, and the other concerns the right to purely law-made property. The one is a monopoly of the use-value of land; and the other, a monopoly of the economic rent of land. The first gives the right to keep other persons from using the land in question, or trespassing on it, and the right to exclusive possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it; values, that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means upon the particular property in question. Monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the desire of other persons to possess that property; values which take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means on the part of the landholder.” — Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy The State, 1935
“This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour — nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times…People began to say, if this is what State abstention comes to, let us have some State intervention.
“But the state had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly — the landlord’s monopoly of economic rent — thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labor market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus.” — Albert J. Nock, “The Gods’ Lookout,” 1934
Keith, now you know what I meant when I pointed out recently in a Facebook discussion group of which you and I are both members that an alarming percentage of label-obsessed, privilege-worshiping, straw man-bashing Austrian School cultists are the kind of people who, if you met at a social gathering, would follow you around like obsessed stalkers even after you made it clear to them that you were simply no longer interested in engaging in an endless and fruitless debate with them anymore. They really are that terrified by the presence of a political ideology that is both logically and morally superior to their own (particularly since word might get out to the masses that such an ideology exists). In that sense, it really is the ideological equivalent of penis envy. No wonder they have such a difficult time attracting women into their ranks!
we have to give them credit for trying to argue with superior logic. we’re just hot and sexy classical liberals, and everyone wants to grab what we have.