I stumbled across this exchange on Ron Paul's 'blog from three years ago, the typically mild-mannered proper libertarian, the unfortunately named Martfuncher explains as follows:
The Founding Fathers believed that property ownership was THE basis for freedom. They viewed property as the means of production. If a person can produce and keep the fruits of their labor they can control their own destiny and pursuit of happiness.
The Founding Fathers wanted as many people as possible to own land (the means of the production). They did not want people to amass large holdings of unproductive land thereby depriving others who might make that land useful and productive empowering their own freedom.
A small land tax was a way to penalize and discourage hoarding of land and the keeping of it in an unproductive state and at the same time out-of-the-reach of those who WOULD make it productive. Notice that the first and preeminent principle of socialism/communism is to deprive persons of the ownership of property and the means of production and to confiscate the fruits of labor.
Of all the taxes I believe land tax is one of the "good ones". It is not responsible to hoard land in such an unproductive state that the owner is unable to even pay a small tax when there are many others who would gladly put the land to productive use....
And then the inevitable FL shit storm breaks loose:
If "access to and ownership of land is THE basis for freedom" how can we be free if land we own can be taken from us for inability to pay taxes on it?
Er... if you can't afford to pay the tax, then you are over-occupying and hence, in economic terms, a land hoarder, a privatised tax collector, a rent-seeker, a feudal oppressor or whatever you want to call it. You may pretend that this makes you A Free Man, but that's not much of A Freedom if you have to rely on the force of the state to make others Unfree by enforcing and protect your interests against others - without you even being prepared to pay for it, even though others would - overall there is a net loss of Freedom.
In practical terms, it's quite obvious that everybody will be able to find something to suit their budget. Those willing to work the hardest and pay the most will get the nicest bits of land but end up paying the most; and those who can't or don't want to pay have to make do with what they can afford from their wages (plus Citizen's Income if you raise LVT above and beyond what is necessary to pay for core functions of the state).
It's the closest you'll get to a free market in shares in what "society" or "the community" has to offer - nobody will have to pay another private individual for something which that individual hasn't created - which of necessity contains a small core of things provided by "the government". If you want more of it (lots of other people, streets, utility and broadband connections, hospitals, shops, job opportunities) you pay more per square yard than if you want less state (open countryside, poor roads, no mains utility connections, no broadband, no shops or hospitals, limited job opportunities etc).
The choice is yours.
Thursday, 11 August 2011
You can take a Faux Libertarian to water but you can't make him drink
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er... closing HTML?
Fixed, hopefully.
"The Founding Fathers believed that property ownership was THE basis for freedom. They viewed property as the means of production." Indeed.
"If a person can produce and keep the fruits of their labor they can control their own destiny and pursuit of happiness."
So what about the slaves, then, Mr Washington, Mr Jefferson, Mr.....?
DM,
Yup.
There was a debate, I understand, among the founders and the constitutional framers at P that perhaps slaves should be counted as having 'half a right' under the proposed constitution.This was an idea too far for some!
Best,
MikeW
Somewhat off topic, but a rare and succinct statement from the Guardian comments string:
The excuses are piling up already here with the usual swiss cheese of logic. "Cameron and Boris were chortling raas in the Bullingdon who trashed a restaurant" therefore its only right that looters drive cars into innocent boys; bankers get big bonuses - so lets smash up Sony shops and get a playstation. If this is broadsheet readership's intellectual throw weight its time for the tits and arse rags to step up. The problem we have is that when on the rare occassions its absolutely crystal clear what the moral issue is and there exists the means within the British constitution to address it, there are a raft of self interested bigots of all persuasions out there seeking to deflect the impact of action. Most of the posters on here pontificating big picture theories will do nothing to address any of the problems they so pompously identify. The immediate issue is addressable - the impact of gangs in areas of low income. The answer isnt "spend more money [on social welfare] and the gangs go away" its smash the gangs through zero tolerance policing and help those who need it. Unfortunately virtually none of the former happens. Operation trident is the best the Met has and no doubt that politically handicapped effort will be further emasculated because an armed gang leader died in a minicab.
On the Founding Fathers: (1) there was an almost unlimited supply of land at the time - the difficulty was getting it settled. (2) Federal Government and States owned vast amounts of land that they handed out to people - and were still doing 100 years later. (3) The issue of slavery was fully understood as an intellectual and moral (as well as human) blot all over the carefully written text of the Constitution (NOTE the word never appears in it) - by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, as well as Jefferson and Washington. But we know that it tore the union apart and led (directly or indirectly) to the death or injury of 10% of the US population in the War of 1861-5. It doesn't need any clever clogs here to mention it.
D, MikeW, if you start your working life committed to a huge financial liability merely for the right to live somewhere, you are still an economic slave. Clearly, the misery of today's wage or debt slaves is in no way comparable with what US slaves suffered, but it's a question of degree.
CB, they had little problem getting it settled, as you say they handed it out. But why should the govt give away something of value, why not do a Tom Paine and tell people they can have as much land as they want provided they pay rent for it?
In any event, while there was (and still is) plenty of farmland. But by definition, there will never be enough urban land (and the settlers were quick to build towns and cities), it's the urban bit they should have been taxing, because that is the bit where it's clear that value is created by the residents in general as opposed to the legal 'owner'.
Mark - I'm not making a fundamental disagreement with modern analysis of land value and tax. Just with the historical point about the context of the situation in which the Founding Fathers wrote/adopted the US Constitution. Almost all of them had an agrarian philosophy that equated successful republican government with the circumstances that would reward virtue and nurture independence - they wanted the population to have the basis for political participation, and ability to support their interests without redistributive use of the state. Hence the significance of wanting everyone prepared to settle on vacant land to be given enough for a homestead. They were not hostile to urban development per se, but did not see reasons (or ways) to expand it that fitted their political vision. The inherent contradictions and conflicts in this position did not really begin to play out until aftre the Civil War, and revolved around currency and tariff issues.
One should add that the feeling in 1787 that there was almost unlimited land available was generally correct - in its own terms - for the lives of most of the Founders and way beyond. But their vision of the agrarian economy obviously was never really consonant with the commercial reality of the C19.
'tits and arse rags to step up'
What does this mean o verbose one?
CB, yup, Niall Ferguson did an episode on this contrasting what the S American countries did (landed gentry from Spain snaffled all the land for themselves) with what they did in the USA (settled by landless peasants from Europe) and all in all, the Founding Fathers made a much better fist of it.
Problem was, unless land 'ownership' is matched with land taxation, there is a natural tendency for holdings to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands*, so within a hundred a years or so the USA was back to the same old, same old.
If you look at USA today, it is no different from Europe in terms of how few people (incl. banks) 'own' most of the land.
* Which is why a Mugabe-type land redistribution is pointless, it causes massive upheaval and a few decades later we are back to the old pattern.
Please don't use the word "state" to mean civilisation or community.
There is a distinction between state services paid for out of taxes (e.g. streets, hospitals), and community based services provided by private enterprise, (e.g. shops, broadband). I know it doesn't affect the argument you're putting forward here, but there's enough misunderstanding on this point from the Left as it is...
AC, good point, that occurred to me on the way home and enables me to delete some of the following explanatory paragraphs as well.
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