"This is your paradise"

This week I have been busy writing, rehearsing and recording my new hit song:
It was difficult getting the lead guitar right, so I ended up playing and recording it twice, the one on the left is with a phaser and the quieter one on the right is with chorus. The drums are a drum machine (Roland R5), the rest (guitars, bass, lead and harmony vocals) is all me.

A comparison between the Communist, Home-Owner-Ist and Georgist Manifestos

The Original Communist Manifesto:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.

The Home-Owner-Ist Manifesto

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.

So approximately half the original Communist Manifesto has been gleefully adopted by the Homeys.

The Georgist Manifesto

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.

Only about a third of the original Communist Manifesto re-appears in the mainstream Georgist Manifesto, and even less than that in the Geo-Libertarian Manifesto (let's not niggle).

There are overlaps between the Home-Owner-Ist and Georgist Manifestos as well of course, but at least we don't need to argue over those.

So now we know: Home-Owner-Ism is far closer to Communism than the Homeys would like to admit and certainly closer to it than Georgism is!
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It's also interesting to show the Communist/Homey overlaps in purple and the Communist/Georgist overlaps in green, bits common to both Home-Owner-Ism and Georgism are in grey:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools.

There's a lot more purple than green, doesn't there?

"Land rents don't exist"

The strange thing is that it is not just the Homeys and Faux Libs who deny that land rents exist, the Commies do it as well.

From the comments in a leftie blog:

Marx is not so much deploying the Smith/Ricardo LVT as criticizing it: abstract average socially necessary labor time is not so much embodied in commodities as extracted/abstracted from them through the system of market exchanges.

But at the same time, surplus-value is generated from the hiring of commodity-labor at "fair" wages, as determined by reproduction costs, and it is the need to reproduce surplus-value to maintain the valorization of capital stocks that is the key dynamic driver of the whole system.

At the same time, neither natural resources lying in the ground, nor capital goods can accrue any value unless activated by labor processes. (Land rents don't exist except within some system of production that deploys labor and capital).

Splendid state of denial there!

Wages are a very high share of any business' total income, usually about four-fifths, the rest is return on capital used in the business, first-mover profits etc. For sure, you can argue that some people are underpaid, no doubt they are, but other people are overpaid, exploiting their own monopoly power etc. There is no such share with land rents - all land rents go to the owner.

It strikes me as pretty hard to envisage a "system of production" that doesn't "deploy labour and capital". That's what "production" is, it's the deployment of labour and capital, and with a bit of luck, the value of the outputs is more than the cost/value of the inputs.

(Even if it is value-detroying, it is still "production" i.e. British Leyland were "producing" cars right up to the bitter end.)

And as soon as you have a system of production, you have land rents.

Whether that system of production is hunter-gathering or sitting in a swanky city centre office making important sounding phone calls and shoving paper round, it all requires land, so that land has value and that value is rent.

"The Devil Wears Pravda"

From Wiki and Wiki:

Andrea "Andy" Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring journalist fresh out of Northwestern University. Despite ridiculing the shallowness of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she lands the job "a million girls would commit genocide for": junior personal assistant at Pravda, a Russian political newspaper started by the Russian Revolutionaries during the pre-World War I days.

Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the icy editor-in-chief of the leading newspaper of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution subjects Andy to bizarre and humiliating treatment which Andy tolerates in the hopes of getting a job as a reporter or writer somewhere else.

At first, Andy fumbles with her job and fits in poorly with her gossipy co-workers, especially Miranda's senior assistant Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt). However, after the dissolution of the USSR, Pravda is closed down by the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

With the help of art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci), who loans her designer clothes, she suffers a huge economic downfall and is sold to a Greek business family.  She also meets the attractive young Communist Party of Russian Federation (Simon Baker) who re-acquire her in 1997 and established her as their principal mouthpiece.

Problems arise in her relationships with her college friends and her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier), a chef working from the same headquarters on Pravda Street in Moscow where Pravda was published in the Soviet days.

During its heyday Pravda was selling millions of copies per day compared to the current print run of just one treasured "Book", a mock up of the current edition, delivered to Miranda's home along with her dry cleaning.

Andy finally succumbs to the Communist Party's charms after spending the night with them and becomes well known in the West for her pronouncements as the official voice of Russian Federal Socialism.

Ah well, at least the proper Commies hate us too...

From WorldSocialism.org:

Date: Tuesday, 18 October 2011 - 8:00pm - 10:00pm
Chiswick Town Hall, Heathfield Terrace, London W4 4JN
All welcome. Audience participation. Free entry

Discussion between the Socialist Party and David Wetzel.
Former Leader of Hounslow Council and tax reformer Dave Wetzel (see http://markwadsworth.blogspot.com/2011/10/dave-wetzel-on-bbc-politics-show.html) subjects his views to the Marxian socialist criticism that a tax on land values will make no difference to the position of the majority class of wage and salary workers as it would still leave the rest of capitalism intact.

That's the whole point about Georgism: it leaves proper capitalism intact, and if anything it helps it (because it prevents corporatism etc). I see that as a big plus, obviously.

Thought for the day

I was standing outside the hall with a fellow Ukipper yesterday, having a smoke, playing the "First they came for ..." game. I said "smokers", he said "hobby anglers" and so on until I got to "amateur photographers". This was a new one on him, so I gave a few examples, i.e. you aren't allowed to photograph police officers, government building or even people in the street (paedophile paranoia and invasion of privacy).

A Fellow Smoker overheard us and said it was more complicated than that (he was a hobby photographer and appeared to know what he was talking about). Photographing police officers is not against the law at all, they just smash your camera out of principle; photographing government buildings is a criminal offence (anti-terrorism - he was aware of one or two incidencts) and photographing people in the street is a civil offence rather than a criminal one (you're allowed to photograph them but not publish them; but this restriction does not apply to the "press", as defined). This all sounded like a bit of a mess to me, and he agreed. (Later in the evening, somebody else regaled us with a tale of somebody who had a visit from the police because he had taken photographs near a police station, I'm not sure how that ended but this is just to illustrate that it can and does happen).

OK, others know more about this topic than I do, but the punchline to this post is that when we told the fellow smoker, with whom we had chatted gaily about the police state, that we were there on UKIP business, he laughed and said that he was a hard-core Marxist.

It appeared to be completely lost on him that the fact he was forced to smoke outside in the drizzle and had to be a bit paranoid about what he should or shouldn't photograph was because the Marxists (or something akin to them) are in power.

"Seized properties shame Poland"

Here's another example of why it takes countries much longer to recover from left-wing dictatorships than from right-wing ones.

NB - I am not trying to downplay the Poles' historic anti-semitism or their possible complicity in The Holocaust, that's a different topic.