DK has done another post on the practicalities of seceding from the UK to escape the "social contract" which he so abhors, I commented as follows:
It is an interesting thought experiment, so let us assume that a small group of landowners agree unanimously to secede from the UK and the UK allows them to do so.
For sure, most practical things like electricity and so on can be ironed out (as they are provided by private companies).
HM Land Registry would then delete references to land ownership and simply mark that area as "Independent Republic of DK".
As you will abandon all stupid laws and restrictions, people will be keen to move to the IRDK, and you will be happy to rent out land to businesses that want to start up in e.g. drugs or brothels and so on, as well as individuals who want to live in an income-tax free zone.
On an economic point, the rent you can charge is a function of how high income tax is in the rest of the UK - the higher it is, the more people are prepared to pay to escape it.
On a law and order point, if you abandon the legal guarantee to private ownership of land that the UK used to provide, you are also going to have to have your own land registry, police force, legal system etc to stop people from just squatting for free or encroaching on your tenants' right to exclusive possession.
So by definition, you, Mr DK are the feudal landowner just like in Ango Saxon times, and you are also 'The State', however minimal.
So whether you see the money you collect as 'market rents' or as 'tax' is pretty much hair-splitting. Either way, it is a payment made because of the threat of the use of force.
You will now argue, if people don't want to pay the high rents, they can go elsewhere in the UK,
Fair enough, but let's assume every landowner in the UK sees that you are making a killing by seceding and copies your example, we end up with lots of little feudal estates with lots of very rich landowners whose only claim to that land rests on citizens respecting (under the threat of force) a contract that you entered into (to wit, buying the land) under the rules of [what is now] a foreign country and to which they were not party.
You have to realise that ultimately 'The State' and 'Land ownership' are one and the same thing, and you can't really have one without the other (whether land is owned 'privately' or 'by the state' is irrelevant in this example).
Who's to say that all the people who create the wealth in the economy and pay the rents, who then see you living a life of Riley without actually doing very much apart from enforcing your own land-ownership rights don't start to mutter darkly about being 'enslaved by the state' and asking which 'social contract' underlies all this?
I trust that you and Ian B can see where this is heading ...
Monday, 10 August 2009
This whole 'social contract' debate: drawing the obvious conclusion
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8 comments:
But with loads of mini-statelets, you would have vigorous competition between jurisdictions, forcing down rents and reducing other costs on those potentially moving between them. Some jurisdictions might even opt for shared ownership, partly for self-interested reasons of drawing workers in, partly perhaps for ideological reasons.
If I am not wrong, this is more or less how classical liberal ideas developed in the first place amongst independent medieaval cities that ran their own affairs (arguably still reflected in the successful smallish states of Switzerland and the Netherlands).
There is a tremendous book on this actually: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TKUN4UdfVaQC&dq=Medieval+Cities+Henri+Pirenne&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=2S6LIt4PvM&sig=0BF8DnzNjBMhqPkZL6nx4i2yjpc&hl=en&ei=OSOAStziOYKsjAet0pzxAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Not saying your points don't have some validity, only that I am not sure private land ownership is necessarily all that much of a problem in many cases, so long as there isn't a monopoly.
I am working, very slowly, on trying to meld Georgist LVT ideas with Austrian property ideas.
I start, I think, with the idea that the market value of land is created not by the occupier but because of the ricardian rent - ie effectively an imposition on those who cannot use your land but need to get past it.
So I'm thinking that the sort of value you might need to insure in a private law society might come close to your land value - since that is the worth of it to everyone else who has to avoid it. If these insurance payments were through a "with profits" real property insurer, then everyone in that insurer would get a dividend which would amount to a citizens' income from those whose community decide to use that insurer.
It's only a germ of an idea at the moment. So it may be so full of holes yet...
JC,
Land Monopoly Entitlements are an Externalisation that LVT taxes.
The Citizens Dividend is the payout from this.
AC1 - I know all that (indeed tonight I am finalizing a chapter on housing and LVT for a book about LVT and the 1909 budget that ALTER are publishing at this year's Lib Dem conference).
However, my quandary at the moment is that I have become in the past year much more of an anarchist, convinced mroe and more by what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls the "Impossibility of a limited government". And whilst I realize that LVT does not sit well with those Austrians in particular I think personally, as Tolstoy was it said (or maybe Einstein) to the effect that nobody who criticises HG's ideas can have understood them properly.
I know the place that I need to be attacking - Rothbard's criticism of HG and the Single Tax focussed on it being a negation of the private property right (to make someone pay for something they already own). But what he didn't figure was that the externality that "we" want to tax with LVT isn't the owners value at all but that created by all of us because we are *excluded* from that piece of land that would otherwise be advantageous to us to use.
So what I am trying to come up with is a formula in which private insurance (which is what would replace eg the Land Registry in a market-anarchy) guaranteeing title to a piece of land would obviously vary with the number of others who had some kind of a "better claim" on it - so popular locations would cost more to insure and protect. But then how to disburse that to everyone else is another story. If there's no state at all administering some kind of Citizens' Dividend, then it would seem to me that a "with profits" insurance system could proximate to it.
Both Dan Sullivan and Fred Foldvary in the US have tried a similar thing to bring private property libertarians and anarchists on board. And I hesitate to think that I can do any better, but I want to give it a a go!
Cheers,
Jock
For sure, most practical things like electricity and so on can be ironed out (as they are provided by private companies).
At point of user but the source is not by private company, except in that it is supplied to the UK as a whole.
Nick, land ownership, or in the case of the UK "planning permission or building ownership" is a state protected monopoly, or a series of local monopolies.
For sure, a non-landowner can buy land, but then he merely swaps 'rent slavery' for 'mortgage debt slavery'.
As a small government free market liberal, I think a) monopolies are A Bad Thing and b) state protected monopolies are A Very Bad Thing. But in this restricting case, they are inevitable (short of complete anarchy) so I am happy to live with them provided always landowners render unto Caeser what is due unto Caesaer.
HM Land Registry is now known as 'Land Registry'
Iren, not really. It's only a "trading name". Under para 99 of the 2002 Land Registration Act it says that it's name remains, formally, "Her Majesty's Land Registry".
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