Most Western films are really about rent seeking

JT and RA set the hare running in the comments to an earlier post about Fiat Currencies In The Movies, so just to summarise...

1. The underlying theme of Western films set pre-1850 or thereabouts is usually white settlers versus Red Indians (aka Native Americans), and the underlying theme of those set post-1850 is usually about established white settlers/small holders fighting off Large Evil Businesses, such as railroad companies, mining companies or property developers (sometimes they are about white settlers fighting off outlaws, but as like as not, said outlaws are in the pay of the LEB's).

2. See e.g. Once Upon A Time In The West, Heaven's Gate or Pale Rider. They used exactly the same basic plot in Nowhere To Run, which is a Western in a modern setting, and property developers are the stereotypical baddies in modern children's films such as The Borrowers or Hannah Montana: The Movie (" there is a firm battle developing with the residents of Crowley Corners and a team of developers who are planning to destroy the meadows and build a shopping mall on the site"). The final bit of Miss Potter follows the template as well.

3. There were a couple of documentaries on television recently which fit into the overall scheme:

a) The one about Abraham Lincoln says that before the Civil War, he was not so much anti-slavery or pro-emancipation (that was later forced upon him by events) but anti-slave, i.e. anti-Negro. He assumed that because all the land had now been appropriated, there was a limited pool of money left over available for wages of labourers and that it was better for the poor white Europeans to earn these wages than for the rich landowners to import even cheaper labour from Africa (again, whether he was subconsciously anti-landowner or just racist or a bit of both was unclear).

b) The one about Wyatt Earp said that all the fighting and tension in Tombstone was between the middle class urban people/farmers and the cowboys, who were the lowest of the low, as they had turned up too late to be given any land for free and led a semi-nomadic existence carrying out acts of brutality on behalf of the big landowners who employed them. Earp himself was just a lawman of no particular political views, but we see the same as with Lincoln, it's not clear whether the real struggle was against the landless minions of the large landowners or against the landowners themselves (one of the people whom Earp shot dead was such a large landowner).

4. So, in movies as in real life, whether the baddies are Native Americans, slaves, cowboys or large landowners (railroad and mining companies are of their very nature large landowners), all these battles are about land ownership and not just land but rents; there was no danger that the disorganised cowboys would obtain title to land by terrorising the townsfolk of Tombstone, but by so terrorising, they certainly depressed the rental value of the land. This is the Faux Libertarian contradiction: no, we don't want the government restrict our actions; but yes, we do want the government to restrict the actions of others because, er, we were here first.

5. The key scene in Once Upon... is where Cheyenne asks what is so bloody important about the dry acre of land to which the heroine's murdered husband had staked a claim and which the evil railroad company is trying to prise off her by fair means or foul. Charles Bronson's character explains patiently that because of the topography, the acre is in the likely path of the coming railroad, and because of a nearby river or spring, it happens to be exactly in the right place for building a train station.

OK, replies Cheyenne, what's so important about a train station?

Bronson then explains the concept of agglomeration. Once the station is built, that is the best place to build an inn (the murdered husband already had an inn sign carved) or to have the post office. It's also the best place to build shops, because the goods can be picked up straight from the station, so other settlers will want to live near the station; those who live further away will visit the shops, post office and stay overnight at the inn; the existence of the station (built at the railroad company's expense and ultimately funded by its passengers) is enough to trigger a whole new little town, and once the town is built, the land will be worth millions. 6. In other words, the murdered man merely wanted to steal a march on the railroad company and collect all these rents for himself by staking his claim where he did. He had ordered enough timber for the first few buildings, so effectively, he was trying to blackmail the railroad company and they get their own back by killing him, which triggers a further cycle of violence.

In the film, the railroad company is portrayed as the baddies, because they employ the more violent minions, but in economic terms, they are as bad as each other. More to the point, the LEBs who are called upon to play the baddies in film after film are clearly rent seekers, they want to make easy money by owning certain locations or mining rights, but aren't the heroes in these films fighting for the same thing, i.e. rents?

7. To what extent all these Western films represent what actually happened, I do not know, but there must be some truth in them. Now, as a thought experiment: what would have happened if the Founding Fathers had followed Tom Paine's sage advice (in turn based on what Queen Elisabeth had actually done for real in England two centuries earlier) and stopped these rents falling into competing private hands (which is what triggered all the unpleasantness) by having the government collect them, spending a little on things which enhance rental values (i.e. law enforcement, irrigation, railroads, whatever) and dishing out the rest as a Citizen's Dividend?
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UPDATE (for my own future reference), there's also a scene in "The World's Fastest Indian" where Anthony Hopkins' neighbours complain that he never mows his lawn and this depresses property values. The only film which shows the downsides of new infrastructure, i.e. the negative impact on land values elsewhere, is "Cars". The cars live in a sleepy little town on the old Route 66, which has been dying off since the new interstate was built.

You can take a Faux Libertarian to water but you can't make him drink

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.

Colonel Gaddafi - surprisingly libertarian

From The Times:

Forty years into the revolution he unleashed on Libya Muammar Gaddafi has announced plans to dismantle the Government, hand the riches from Africa's biggest oil reserves to the people and nationalise foreign oil operations that have recently been allowed back into the country.

“The administration has failed and the state economy has failed. Enough is enough. The solution is, we Libyans take directly the oil money and decide what to do with the money,” he says. To end the corruption that has sapped the vast oil wealth, bundles of cash should be delivered to the poor, three quarters of the ministries should cease to exist and the workers should run hospitals and schools.

He'd be stupid to nationalise oil operations, of course, it is far better to let the experts get on with the job and let them pay for the value of the oil they extract, and I don't like the sound of only paying cash to "the poor", a flat rate Citizen's Dividend is always better, but hey, apart from that, it sounds good to me. It's a bit like Tom Paine's idea of two centuries ago, except he probably hadn't realised how valuable oil would be in future, and so suggested raising the tax from usage of other natural resources.