Tim Worstall justifiably gets angry about this plan to force owners of coastal properties to allow the public to have access to the properties, and without compensation. I weighed in with the comments on the board and deciding not to let the discussion go to waste, I wanted to quote a character called Kay, who comes up with what I might call the “brute utilitarian” argument one hears for compulsory purchase/eminent domain laws here and in other nations:
Allowing veto rights to every landowner and shareholder results in complete deadlock. That ridiculous stance may be taken by some who posted here, but the rest of us would rather live in an advanced civilisation with electricity, railways, roads, public limited companies, etc.
I sense that this argument is nonsense, but there may be something in it. It is interesting that the commenter mentions limited liability corporations – we have been over that issue before at this blog. But is it really the case that say, electricity could not be easily conveyed across the UK without coercing landowners into letting this occur? I assume, of course, that if many landowners refused point blank to do this, that the situation would result in lots of very small, easy-to-move electricity generators being built. But in practice, the vast majority of landowners want easy access to electricity, water and roads like everyone else, and with a bit of inducement – shares in revenues from tolls, rental payments for pipes and pylons – would agree to things being built on their land. There may be “extreme cases”, where landlords hold so much sway that they try to strangle beneficial technologies across a vast tract of land, and I suppose this is possible, but it strikes me as not very likely. I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the 18th century canal-builders required a lot of compulsory purchase laws to get their way. If memory serves from reading history, what happened was a lot of haggling and the odd bit of special legislation passed in the House of Commons.
I think the problem with the “brute utilitarian” argument is not simply its undertone of “We want – we take”. It is also its deafness to the fact that most people, most of the time, have sufficient rational self interest to act in ways that benefit not just themselves but most of the rest of us. The trouble is that once the enthusiasm for seizure takes hold, it is often hard for its proponents to even think about how things can be ordered differently. I have heard people express admiration for the Continental, Roman Law-based system which supposedly is so much less messy and fuddy-duddy than the Common Law one in this respect. When people start to invoke “efficiency” and so forth, guard your wallet and front door.
Meanwhile, for a good discussion on the tricky issue of how property claims can be arrived at justly in the first place, this book is worth a read. One thing that bugs me about discussions about property is when some character will argue that “X or Y stole the land from poor benighted natives in the Year xxxx BC so all property since is tainted”, as if that somehow justifies looting now. It does not.
As an aside, it is also worth noting that compulsory purchase laws, particularly when used to turf people off their property to create other, supposedly more valuable economic outcomes, is a vehicle for corruption.
Update and side-observation: it is only fair to say that some – in my view misguided – libertarians have tried to argue that land, because it was not created by Man, should be taxed more heavily than income or other things, and for some people, this sort of tax is a sort of “rectification” of any previous injustices inflicted by the acquisition of property. The name of 19th Century writer Henry George occasionally comes up. I was once quite taken with the idea but there are weaknesses to it. For a start, a person who makes more use of land than was the case before because of his entrepreneurial vigour should not, in my view, be penalised for thereby raising the value of that land, which is what a land-tax, if based on land values, would do. There remains this view, widely shared, that land should not be ultimately owned by any individual because land and minerals, or indeed the sea, is “just there”, an inert set of substances that we can manipulate, but not create new value from. That seems to undermine the very notion of wealth creation per se, in my view.
Oh, and here is an item from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on eminent domain.
Another update: Devil’s Kitchen shares my opinion but does so in a more, ahem, salty way. Check out the comments, where Samizdata regular Ian B takes on Kay Tie. In boxing terms, the judge would have had to stop the fight to protect Kay from serious injury.
Strange, my recall of Kay Tie posting on Telegraph blogs is she’s normally rather libertarian. Maybe my old memory is failing, or there is more than one Kay Tie in the world.
Needless to say Johnathan, you are quite correct in all you say in the discussion.
As an aside, it did occur to me that ironically the people who would be most likely to be the dogs in the manger in a land without compulsory purchase would be uber-statist greenies, refusing at any price to allow electricity, gas or rail companies to despoil the pristine perfection of mother nature.
It does
“It does”
How?
“Allowing veto rights to every landowner and shareholder results in complete deadlock.”
When, where and on what number of occassions? What is the actual empirical strength of this bog standard commons argument?
criminal, the late Robert Nozick looked at the principle restitution and like many others, concluded that backtracking over thousands of years to some original act of theft was almost impossible to do accurately, and hence penalising people today for what happened in say, 1066 is impossible, in fact likely to involve fresh and worse injustices.
Oh well, at least you haven’t invoked the “law” of entropy this time, which is a merciful relief to us all.
Ian, thanks. Yes, I am rather surprised that environmentalists do not speak up more for respecting property rights than they do. To be fair, there is a small but significant move by some environmentalists to embrace property rights.
Now I maybe just a smelly Troll, but i hope someone else can see hypocrisy of your thinking.
You Say:
Owning Property is not really ‘Theft’ because its for ‘The Greater Good’ of “valuable economic outcomes”
then when someone else comes along and says:
I want access to this land for ‘The Greater Good’ of publics access to nature
You response is that its a moraly wrong act of “looting”
criminal, you miss the point, as you tend to do.
If it were possible, and easy, to state that owner X had inherited it from somone who had stolen it, and that there were clear beneficiaries whom could be identified and indemnified, then there might be a case for restitution, although you should remember that a limiting factor is that someone living 1,000 years after an original act of theft cannot really be held accountable. And as I said, fresh injustices, including very significant ones, can be inflicted in the name of righting historical wrongs to do with specific lumps of property.
In the case of seizure of property now, the victims of such an act of seizure are clearly identifiable, they are able to object and state their claims. So it is entirely practicable as well as right for them to object to the act of seizure and demand compensation. The issue of time clearly is relevant and hence your charge of hypocrisy falls down.
Criminal,
It sounds like you’re trying to argue that property is tainted by some sort of original sin and that there has been no redemption, no rehabilitation, no “living it down.”
If I were sober, I’d be reasonable and say basically what Mr. Pearce said. However, I’m tired yet insomniac and have been drinking after working a twelve on my day off dealing with high levels of human stupidity, so I’ll simply go with “Who the f— crawled up your ass and made you god?” And if you’re not God, then where the hell do you get off prescribing punishments for sin?
As for the notion of forced sales for public benefit, there was a case in the Denver area (Arvada?) in recent years. A guy owned some property. It had a lake. He liked his lake. Wal-Mart moved in next door. Wal-Mart wanted more space for its parking lot. Wal-Mart convinced the city to condemn the lake under eminent domain in order to take it and sell it to Wal-Mart, who would pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
I don’t remember how that shook out in the end, although that episode is why I refuse to ever do business with Wal-Mart again. Thieving assclowns that they are.
So clearly ‘Relevant’ that its only now that you have decided to initate this “time as passed” as a defence.
You are now saying property stolen 1000 years ago is moraly fine. Meaning property stolen 999 years ago or sooner is moraly “Looting”
I’m fine with that if you can justify it and I will take the credit for the improvment of your argument.
else my charge of Hypocrisy stands
I did mention it. But even if I had not, I cannot be expected to trot out every single defence of property rights for your benefit. The point about not being able to go back in time to some “utopian” origin of property rights, or some “immaculate conception” is hardly new and you should hardly need to have that pointed out. In practice, acquisition and transfer of property is legitimised, not least because without respect for such laws, there can be no certainty, no ability to plan. Imagine how buggered our economy would be with the constant risk of seizure in the name of the “public good”.
Duh: I plucked the round figure to make a general point that identifying injustices over long periods is hard, in fact impossible. That is why, for instance, one gets statutes of limitations in law.
Or maybe “criminal” might want to argue that murder is okay since, as he explains with reference to entropy, we are all going to suffer extinction anyway!
It’s not just a matter of the difficulty of proving who stole what from who- even though that would be to all intents impossible. There’s also a matter of it being entirely wrong to try to apply modern conditions to the past. The various thefts of land took place under different legal structures entirely- even different definitions of nationhood and citizenship. In Britain, some of us arrived here and “found the land” shortly after the interglacial started. But since then all manner of folks have invaded, stolen bits and bobs, traded them, fought with each other over them etc and, significantly, often in conditions when that was considered entirely the right way to go about things. You fought the next tribe, and whoever won got the land, stole the women and raped the livestock. It’s just how things were done. You can’t try to impose modern definitions of property on people of the past. It’s no better than retrospectively convicting a man of an offence that was legal when he did it.
I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the 18th century canal-builders required a lot of compulsory purchase laws to get their way. If memory serves from reading history, what happened was a lot of haggling and the odd bit of special legislation passed in the House of Commons.
Well, I can’t speak for the canals. But the reason Didcot has a rail station, and is the size it is today on account of having that rail station, is because Abingdon said no the GWR. Great Western had to change the route and plumped for Didcot instead.
Mind, that was 160-odd years ago. I’ve no idea what would happen today, assuming we were even building new lines.
Somewhat off-topic, ‘criminal’ shows the absurdity of justificationist (as opposed to falsifcationist) thinking and as pointed out in fact he is indeed making a justificationist ‘original sin’ based quasi-religious argument.
The theory that gets my critical preference on this is that once both restitution and liability are impossible to assign, the fact property was once stolen becomes moot.
Perry, not off-topic at all but a good point. With things like property rights, my attitude is, “Without overwhelming evidence to the contrary, these rights should stand and aggressors against said should sod off”.
Taking Criminal at his word, is the argument that:
A) If I could show that the land he/she currently occupied – be it purchased by him/her or provided to him/her by the state – was wrongfully taken from my ancestors by invading Normans, Vikings, Romans or whomever that he/she would walk away and give it back to me or provide me with some form of compensation?
or
B) You cannot really own land as it was here before humans were and will still be here after we are long gone as a species?
I’m curious because if either of these are the argument then really you have no property rights – not simply no rights to land and home but to anything as it was probably made in a factory on someone’s ill gotten land, from resources taken from someone else’s ill gotten land etc.
This reminds me of a tale of the dimwitted folk of my home town Northampton. Back in the early 80s vast monies were spent by the towne council on a big concert hall called Derngate. After they’d finished it, one of the local inbreds discovered that he was the inheritor of some obscure bequest of the land by King John, or someone, to a distant ancestor, and it turned out that he owned the land it was built on, and could have taken the towne council to the cleaners for ye rent. Instead, he gave the bloody council the land in return for two tickets to see Jack Jones in concert.
The general consensus in the town as I recall was that, natural rights aside, such people just don’t deserve to live. What a fuckwit.
Yes fuckwit indeed.
Now if it had been Tom Jones…
I gave the only figure you provided, you need to define what counts as a “long period of Time” if 1000 years, why not 999. if 999 why not 99. if 99 why not 9.
No I wouldn’t want that argument but I would argue that Free will is well proven to be illusionary and so crimes based purely on the ‘intent’ of the criminal are misguidedly proscuted.
Not “well proven” at all to be “illusory”. I mean, did you just type your words as a determined act? Was there no way you could deny yourself?
I gave that figure as an example, is ought to be obvious. As far as the law – at least in the UK is concerned – I don’t know how long title deeds etc are applicable, but when as Ian B and others have said, there is all manner of confusion, to-and-fro over the centuries, restitution is a mug’s game. In the most general terms it makes sense to have a statute of limitations on whether property transactions can be challenged, if only because the whole system of property rights – which have clear benefits in terms of prosperity and liberty – fall apart.
Anyway, I don’t see how I can make it any clearer and I am losing patience. Get orf my land!
The Romans required there to be gaps between farms, where people could pass. Presumably other rights of way could have been arranged for similarly.
Within the coming decade, for a variety of reasons there will not be much need to transmit electricity over long distances. There’s a lot of progress coming in this area.
Thanks for letting me know about Wal-Mart. They hardly ever sell anything worth buying, and they sell far too much stuff that I will not buy due to its having been made in Communist China, but I don’t do business with thieves.
The trouble is that once the enthusiasm for seizure takes hold, it is often hard for its proponents to even think about how things can be ordered differently.
So many people look at the world in a “It’s good God gave us ears or else our glasses would fall off” sort of way. Only now God is of course replaced by the State, and all the good that exists in our lives originates from the a government origin. No thought is ever given to just perhaps where we would be today without omnipresent taxation, regulation, incentivization, and war. We are told how much we have advanced because the State engaged in this or that, and no thought is made just how far we would have gotten with people behaving and trading freely without Force. The notion seems to be we would be stuck in some 1890’s doldrums, kids still rolling hoops with sticks and velocipedes all the rage. The real truth is we’re stuck in the Statist doldrums and we’re drifting powerless and rudderless into an iceberg. These are days riddled by superstition, and, historically, days so riddled are dark and gloomy and filled with short lives crudely, fearfully lived.
Brad, that qualifies as a Samizdata quote of the day. Bravo!
Here is an example of an actual, real life, problem. I own an appartment in an old building, which has 36 flats. It is situated on premium urban real estate. A developer is offering to tear down the old building and build a new one, much higher. He offers each owner a new, modern and bigger appartement in the new building. The new appartment is estimated to be worth at least double the worth of the old one.
Obviously, the consent of all 36 owners is needed for the deal to materialize. Now, you can never get the consent of all. There are always some old people who say: I’m not interested. So, some 3, 4 or 6 holdouts ruin a lucrative deal for all the rest.
The council is debating a new law, which would permit the project to materialize after just 80% of owners signed on. That means: 20% of owners would be faced with a compulsory purchase.
Are you for or against such law? Debate. (I’m for).
It’s this deeply engrained ‘land owners are sacred and their rights go above all others’ thinking that got us into this economic mess (via house price and credit bubbles).
If landowners refuse to allow a strip of land to be used for rambling (in return for modest compensation) then the council should get its own back and build a fucking great motorway suspended above the beach.
If you are a rabid libertarian and say anybody can do what they like with their own land, what right does the Hallowed Landowner have to stop the council building the motorway as a quid pro quo for teh landowner’s right to prevent ramblers walking along cliff edge or you are for sensible solutions.
If it were up to me I’d introduce Land Value Tax anyway, the value of the cliff edge view is in many cases so enormous that no landowner would be able to afford to pay it.
This is a picture of a private landowner who refused to sell out. The green triangle along 112th Ave S. is a private residence. Almost every thing else including the big building and the parking lots belong to The Boeing Company. A couple of clicks zoom out and you can see the Boeing Delivery Center and the old (pre-Chicago) HQ building and the old B-17 factory. So this person literally lives in the Boeing parking lot.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=47.534711,-122.31688&spn=0.002579,0.006743&t=h&z=18
What utter foolishness is this?
Private ownership is an individual good which redounds to the public good, NOT the other way around. This basic flaw sets up your second pratfall.
Indeed. If a rapist wanted to father children and care for them, to pleasure his victim for hours and send her into orgiastic rapture, and become an honest member of society through his love of this unapproachable beauty, it’s still RAPE if she says ‘no.’ Likewise, if someone steals that which is not theirs, it is theft regardless for the betterment of all (vanity, that) or for prurient reasons.
The point still stands: There exists currently a system of property ownership.
Imposing (new) law on the land is not a contradiction. Native peoples do not own their land because they have no laws – and they will tell you this: “All the world is nature’s, yadda yadda yadda…” Maybe so, but if so, then we will have a tough time tracking down deeds and bills of sale from the Ents. And conquered people too are devoid of their previous law, because their previous sovereign was destroyed.
Establishing law in a lawless nation or conquering another is not theft. It is exactly that: establishing law or imposing a new one.
What is dishonest is that you have taken on the position of the conqueror, and yet couch the terms your enemies must submit to in flowering garlands of “Justice,” “Fairness,” and the public “Good.”
Nonsense. You have confessed that the whole human experience is a farce, so those words mean nothing to you. Evidentiary exhibit A:
Free Will is illusory? And has proven to be illusory!
Heh, not hardly, my friend. The preponderance of evidence points to exactly the opposite – that Free Will is a fact – not least by the crushing failure of determinists in explaining or ordering the current world.
Much of your argument represents precisely the kind of contempt for property rights and the assertion that the greatest good trumps rights that caused me, like Tim Worstall, to see red in the first place.
Your attempt to pin part of the blame for the credit/asset bubble on respect for property rights is bizarre. I thought it was mainly driven by cheap money and a deranged system of fractional reserve banking.
As for whether the rights of landowners are “deeply engrained”, well, they are clearly not engrained enough, judging by all the various assaults on property rights seen in recent decades, with the odd pause.
I am surprised at your remarks, Mark. I did not realise you were so hostile to property rights. In my book, no coherent defence of liberty is possible without a respect for property.
No. Artificial restrictions in land zoning drove up housing prices by restricting supply and the credit bubbles were driven by government intervention in the market through federally-backed subprime mortgages (at least here in the US).
The rest of your rant is subliterate. Go to Mexico City, see the shanty towns; that is publicly owned land people live on, but cannot buy because it costs too much and takes too long. I’ll take Hallowed Landowner any day over Hallowed Bureaucrat.
Renters? Why not wait until the lease is up and do not renew it. If owners, then why wouldn’t they sell?
Seems like the problem is with the whole idea of owning not land but a tenement. It’s a basic breakdown in governance. If each person owns one piece of the whole, then the whole is subject to each person, but if each person owns their own, then each can go their own way.
Ownership of Property is a total concept. Any rules, regulations,policies or claims by any non-owner simply reduces the original owner to a share-cropper.and in essence a non-owner.
Thievery, legal plunder,robbery stealing is wrong by its nature. If one can justify on any level, it can be justified on all levels. The point of thievery is taking ones property in violation of will of owner.
Thanks Anne cleveland
Well, they are owners, and don’t want to sell. Why? I dunno, but this is immaterial. It’s a fact that they refuse to the swap (new appartment for the old one) and hold up the project.
It is not immaterial at all. If they are elderly, if they have children, if they have family members who are special needs, then moving or evicting them can do extraordinary harm as they will be forced to find other accomodations, at the same expense or less. And maybe they are just a bit more on the ball and see something you do not; an opportunity or a danger and so they will not sell.
Here’s the problem: everyone bought something which they do not really own. You can do whatever you want to do with your flat, but you do not in fact own the whole building. You own part of the building. You can do whatever you want with all the parts of your building together, but you still do not possess the rights to the entire building.
For this type of thing, you should get into a co-op or some kind of Homeowners Association, etc, ie a legal contract that would give your entire building some sort of future governance. There are arrangements which will bypass these issues, but they come at certain costs. Seems to be that you bought what you paid for, which is just your slice of the pie.
Jacob, all the apartment owners bought their apartments aware that they were buying a share of the building. They don’t have a right to force a change by majority; being subject to the agreement of others for this “upgrade” was part of the terms they agreed to when they originally bought. It’s inherent to their choice to live there. They should not have any entitlement to force a change on the other owners, who have every right to make their own choice to refuse. If the original contracts gave any one owner the whip hand over the others in a matter such as this, then that is what should stand.
To think otherwise is the same “greater good” trap as all compulsory purchase thinking. It is plundering of the minority by the majority. The fact that others, or most others, or “a consensus” may think the minority irrational is neither here nor there. Neither are the minority denying anything to the majority that they have an automatic right to, however much they may think they do. The majority have no right to gain at the (perceived) expense of the minority. They should regret their earlier decision in silence, not use the power of the state to correct it in their favour.
Precisely right.
I’m speaking from memory, but I think while the canals did not rely on legislative compulsion, the railways were very different, especially in London. ‘Landlords to London’ by Simon Jenkins gives a good account, not just of the railways, but the way the landed estates guided and directed the growth of London.
Of course most of these estates existed because Henry VIII stole the land from the Church to give to his favourites, but who did the Church get it from?
We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we may think it should have been if Ugg hadn’t defeated Ogg over water rights way back when…
On free will:
Free will is a religious issue. It is the question of whether or not God constructed the universe with all things predestined. Consider that Ian B commits the sin of Onan looking at Simpsons pr0n. If God predestined this, He cannot reasonably punish Ian B for an act He Himself chose Ian B to commit.
Since, however,God chooses to punish Ian B for committing the sin of Onan while looking at Simpsons pr0n, we must conclude that God believes that the act was not predestined. Since God is perfect, he must be correct. Ergo, the universe is not predestined, and free will exists.
The concept has no meaning nor validity outside theology and cannot be addressed meaningfully within a secular or scientific worldview. Confusion and debate regarding the issue within a scientific context exists purely due to a failure to understand that an impossible question (within that system) is being asked.
What the feck it has to do with compulsory purchase orders, I have no idea, and I suspect even the Lord might scratch his head a bit over that one, too, if he existed.
So I take it that gay hobbits are passe now.
Sadly it is not a matter of “Common Law” verus “Roman Law” – because “fedual” concepts like limited government are long dead (well long dead in the United Kingdom – it dies today on Sark).
Even in the 18th century Common Law thinkers (such as Blackstone) argued that Parliament could do anything it felt liked – and once you allow that the big distinction between land “owned” unless the ruler decides otherwise (i.e. the right of the Emperor to steal want he wanted – a right brought back in modern legal thought) and the “feudal” idea that land can not be taken from its “holder” (even by the King – apart from in certain set circumstances) collapses.
By the way the idea that there would be no canals, railways and so on without “compulsory purchice” is largely nonsense.
Most people will sell if enough money is put in front of their noses – and if they still choose not to sell that is their right (or “property” is undermined – which it has been).
For example, the leading landowners of Stamford did not wish the mainline railway to go though Stamford and they mananged to black the Act of Parliament that would have forced them to sell.
Was their “massive social harm” (allways beware terms like “social harm” or “public interest” or “general welfare”) from this?
No – the east coast mainline went through Peterborough instead. Where the local landowners were happy to see it.
Damn this time difference!
I’d have responded to ‘criminal’ as quick as a shot gun were it not for the inconvenience of wednesday night’s duties.
Mr Pearce, IanB and others – ‘criminal’ ought to have been put down after his 11.27am post. Instead we had to wait until Vercingetorix to wade in with themoral argument for property rights – forget all this nonsense about going back in time and sorting out what belonged to whom.
To repeat: “Private ownership is an individual good which redounds to the public good, NOT the other way around. This basic flaw sets up your second pratfall.”
Property rights are the chief means by which the liberty of the individual can be defended from others. This should have been the first thing that was said to criminal.
For a concrete example of public improvements by private parties, take a look at the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. It was constructed by a private company, and landowners competed to have it routed through their property. They were paid to construct and maintain their portion, so there was a real incentive to be part of the effort. The canal was an easement, not an outright sale, and the use of the land reverted to the owners when the canal was made obsolete by the railroad.
It’s really a question of structuring the deal. Money may not be the best incentive in every situation. In the notorious Kelo case, I am sure that if the city of New London had offered a comparable seaside lot in exchange, there would have been no story in the newspapers at all.
Alisa, even Santa’s going queer! Around here he’s more likely to shout, instead of Ho Ho Ho!, Homo, homo homo!
I consider myself pretty staunchly libertarian, a position I’ve arrived at by attempting to strip away the guff and get down to the bare bones of arguments.
I have to admit though that I’m having a hard time with certain “property” rights. Firstly, I think it’s important to divide things down into certain types of property. There’s probably better terms for these but: Intellectual property (a fictional deceit IMO), tangible property and real estate.
I have to admit that the real estate angle of property gives me some real issues. Some of the aspects are not as straightforward as some on here are making out and I am seeing the red flag words of “clearly” and “obviously”, two words which frequently mean “I cannot state my argument in a meaningful way”.
I have seen appeals to “Well, that was the law then, we have different laws now”. But it is the laws now that enshrine eminent domain. So which is it to be? What does it mean to own land anyway? If a people have been using a right of way for a thousand years, who is someone else to come in and fence that land off? How are different concepts of land ownership to be reconciled? By force? Well, the government has the guns so there is your eminent domain again.
I can understand tangible property just fine but land is sticky. I’m somewhat concerned that the laws as they stand have been set up to protect the interests of those who made them.
Finally, I think some of you are too quick to dismiss criminal and are doing him and yourselves a disservice. He may express his points ineloquently but there are really some points to ponder behind them.
Ouch, I was smited by the comment filter. To make matters worse the apology message is a litany of LOLcats. And worse? Rule #2 on my own blog about page is:
2. If you purchase a cat you will be expelled. If you post a picture of a cat it will be assumed you bought a cat.
Talk about adding insult to injury!
Ian B, you appear to be basing your argument on god being reasonable. I would suggest that there is no evidence of this and is, in fact, documentary evidence to the contrary (cf Job)
Richard:
But what we are discussing here is the opposite situation: a land that was fenced off for very many years, and now the “public” wants to have the right of way. The real issue here is that individual rights take precedence over the public ones, philosophically as well as chronologically.
I also strongly disagree with you on IP. Maybe you are not as staunch a libertarian as you have imagined, or maybe you have not considered the principles deeply enough. Nothing wrong with that, of course, just trying to help clarify things.
That has to rank as one of the most incoherent lines on this thread, Mark. If a person is a landowner, not a tenant, that person has the right to veto the use of land against his will. When you talk about “sensible” solutions, what you want is for compromise: a bit of interference here, a bit of liberty there, etc. I am arguing for the principle. You, plainly, aren’t, and your whole argument seems to carry a sort of undertone of threats. Lovely.
Well property is not a straightforward issue, true, but at its base it is not really all that difficult to see the benefits of several property, as held by different people, as an offshoot from, and essential component of, a free society; similarly, property rights, as defined under objective laws, are vital to prosperity since people will not create wealth if they fear arbitrary changes to the law by looters of various types. As for the eminent domain issue, it seems to me that the only case for invading such property rights is if this is the only way, repeat only way, to guard a legal jurisdiction from attack and protect life. For that reason, construction of defence installations, such as ports or military airfields, or roads, has been regarded as a legitimate reason for ED. But even then there is compensation.
My grandfather had a US airforce runway built on part of his Suffolk farm and was compensated. Think about it:in the middle of WW2, a farmer was paid money to have a runway built, but ramblers today want to get access to people’s land, for free.
I’d like to put it to all ramblers who demand such “roaming rights” the right to come into their gardens and homes, without prior consent. Let’s see how far that goes.
Mark Wadsworth:
So, you want to steal the land. However, you don’t have the sack to do it yourself and instead you’ll have the county assessor do it for you.
Do I read you correctly?
All things are religious issues at heart, for what is religion and philosophy but investigations into fundamental truth?
But this is not illuminating.
For proof of free will, look to criminologists: their prevailing theories posit all manner of root causes of crime, from genetics to diet to poverty, etc. But Edwardian England – much poorer, starved, with the same blood – was much safer than modern England.
Not factors in the world, but factors in the mind explain the basics of right behavior and wrong, good and evil. The key linkage of determinism is broken. Free Will reigns, with God or without Him.
Or look to the communists. No ideology has invested so much in determinism, and been proven so consistently wrong.
@ Jonathan, I am not in the slightest bit hostile to property rights, provided people pay for them. You work to improve your lot, you pay income tax and what’s left is yours to keep. If you build up a business of use spare income to buy shares in other businesses, those are yours and there shoudld be no further tax on those capital values (Stamp Duty, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax etc).
But ‘property rights’ as far as land is concerned are not a once-and-for-all “I’ve paid for it and it’s mine in perpetuiy” affair, like a painting or something. The value of any plot depends on restricting owners of surrounding plots NOT building motorways, sewage plants or whatever. The only sensible way of balancing these competing rights in a free-market way is Land Value Tax.
If said cliff edge owner is happy to pay £10,000 for exclusive access to a view over the beach, the sea, the sky (which in no sense belongs to him nor has he paid for it) then the local council should take his money with thanks, or perhaps other residents would prefer the landowner to waive his exclusive use and save himself £10,000 a year (in which case said local residents have to pay a bit more in Land Value Tax to balance).
The relevance of LVT is that, if levied on ‘bubble values’ would automatically dampen house price bubbles so we wouldn’t be in the mess that we’re in. Fractional reserve banking is a handy boo-man for people who don’t understand the beauty of it.
And I am not a high-taxer – LVT could and should replace ALL other property/wealth related taxes (Council Tax, SDLT, Inheritance Tax, capital gains tax, Business Rates etc etc).
You know it makes sense.
Not so. LVT is simply demanding monies for mere ownership of property, and tends to be tied to a basically communist Georgist thing of the state being the renter of the land. That’s deplorable and utterly not libertarian in the slightest.
Human beings are territorial by nature; even in primitive tribes with little personal property as objects, there is the concept (in settled tribes) of territory. This is very natural for us as animals; in fact I’m watching some birds arguing over territory (my bird bath) right now. Most of human history is the story of battles over ownership of territory.
Now people may say, but that’s not individual ownership; that’s communal ownership by tribes or peoples. Indeed. But libertarians are individualists; in that we reduce the granularity of property ownership from the community (state) to the individual. We say that individuals are the best unit, not the tribe. We must do the same for land; indeed, if we do not do that for land, then other property becomes worthless. Tribes secure territory for their own security. “Git orf our land!” Correspondingly, in a libertarian (individualist) society, if individuals are to have security, then they must have absolute land ownership similarly. “Git orf MY land!” Without it, there is no security for the person. If people are forced with menaces to pay others just for permission to stay on their land, it is the very antithesis of liberty.
The other thing is that LVT’ers seem to be being consequentialist. LVT will achieve this, or do that, or make things fairer. Liberty isn’t about that type of social engineering thinking. It’s about principles. I don’t respect your property because it’s good for the community. I respect it because it’s yours. That, IMV, should be the end of the discussion.
@ Ian B, LVT is not mere ownership of property it is raising tax in the least bad way (per Milton Friedman) by expecting payment in return for the right to restrict the activities of others and for those particular benefits that accrue to you* but for which you do not otherwise pay. LVT does not apply to shares, incomes, moveable property, bank accounts or buildings or any other form of property (except maybe landing slots at airports and other special cases)
* A good example is owning a house near a railway station. The rental value increases merely because it is near a station, even though it is the passengers who pay for the railway, not the landlord.
If you are really a libertarian, then I assume you believe in free markets?
OK, if you own a plot of land, as a true Libertarian you say “I can do what I like on my land” but as a faux-Libertarian you then say “But I don’t want my neighbour to do what he likes on his land because that reduces the value of my land”. But in restricting what your neighbour does, you are infringing HIS ‘property rights.
As a free market enthusiast, I can only say that the only way to balance these competing interests is LVT. If your neighbour builds a block of flats that takes away ‘your’ sunlight, then your land value goes down and you pay less LVT. Your neighbour obviously pays more LVT. Automatic compensation, problem solved.
Free markets are easy to understand and they work. There is no special pleading or favouring one group over another, it all sorts itself out.
Oops. That first sentence should read “LVT is not a tax on mere ownership of property”.
anyone got any idea what hes talking about? I think hes suggesting indiviual good and group good are two different things, one being better than the other.
Mark, you aren’t describing a free market. You’re describing a state managed market, and one with underhanded social goals to it at that. It’s as far from libertarian as Naomi Klein.
One major flaw in the reasoning is to consider all land only as its monetary value.
Let’s take Fred. He buys some land in a fairly undeveloped area, builds a house on it, and lives there happily. He’s no intention of moving on, this is his retirement cottage, so the value of the land doesn’t now matter to him. Then somebody builds your railway station. The value of the land, as assessed by the Government Land Value Assessor, rises sharply, and so does his LVT. Now Fred can’t afford to stay in his cottage, because the rent he has to pay to the state exceeds his pension. He has to move out.
And that’s what it’s really about, it’s about forcing people to move about to satisfy this desire to force people to develop land, at least so far as all the Georgist stuff I’ve read seems to say. It’s treating Fred as a dog in a manger just for wanting to live in his cottage rather than develop the land further. It’s pure social engineering.
The other issue is, it’s not even “fair”. It shifts the tax burden onto one class- land owners- thus encouraging non land owners to vote for higher taxes and public spending they don’t have to pay for.
It’s not much of a mechanism for resolving externalities disputes either. Giving somebody a lower tax because there’s a sewage farm built next door doesn’t help them very much. There are other ways around this. My preference would be for a simple law which requires changes of land use to be approved by adjacent neighbours; compensation may be negotiated privately, until agreement is reached. It could evolve into a system of private “externalities contracts” between landowners, simply administrated by magistrates (who would not make any decisions, just ensure the contracts are being negotiated). That’s just my idea though. I certainly don’t think an LVT is much use at all in that regard.
Well of course, but that is hardly what LTV is about. It is a tax to penalise the ownership of property, as your remark to which I took exception made clear. You want taxes on land so as to make if difficult, if not impossible, for certain kinds of things to be owned privately, because, for aesthetic/other reasons, you object to not having access to something as it is owned. Frankly, to pose as a defender of property while advocating Henry George’s crackbrained idea of taxing property values to the hilt is not credible.
Well that is a slightly different point: I am in favour of reducing taxes across the board, not simply trying to micro-manage human behaviours to achieve some sort of “optimal” outcome by the tax code, which is what proponents of LTV like the Georgists tend to do.
LTV are taxes on the value of land; if a landowner improves the quality or desirability of his land by whatever means, he is taxed on that, just as he is taxed more if he improves his “human capital” by developing new skills and developing his earning power. Now land is a “given” of nature, just as the man’s brain is, but in both cases, the owner is penalised for improving the state of both.
As for the “tort” where a person increases his land value by damaging that of another, it seems to me that there are better ways of dealing with this than LTV, which falls on those who improve their land values by honest, positive-sum ways and those who do not.
Criminal, you are confused. The guy is saying that only individuals can own things because there is no such thing as a collective brain; he is making the point that there are general, public benefits to having individualised ownership of property, just as there are general benefits to a society in which people take responsibility for their own actions and are treated as if they have free will – which exists, by the way – etc.
Jonathan, you are now attacking something which I have never proposed, so I find it difficult to defend.
1. Just about the only way that a landowner can improve the value of his land is by putting buildings on it. LVT excludes the value of buildings, it is purely on location value, adjusted for generosity of planning permission. In other words the market value (easy to establish approximately, difficult to calculate precisely).
2. LVT is not about ‘micro managing’ anything, any more than a flat rate income tax is about ‘micro managing’ the economy (the second least bad tax, per Milton Friedman).
3. What is this idea about ‘penalising’? By scrapping Inheritance Tax and other wealth taxes, am I not proposign to lift the burden on other forms of property? Why not take the lefty point of view and deride me as somebody who wants to lift the tax burden on real wealth creators?
4. However small a government you would like to see, there is a hard core of core functions (law and order, defence, immigration, legal system etc) that have to be paid for somehow or other, i.e. out of taxes.
5. Please stop confusing the terms ‘property ‘ with ‘land’. This is neither correct in economic nor in legal terms.
Mark, let’s remember what you wrote:
In other words, if someone has something that is very valuable and for whatever reason, you’d rather their ownership was violated, then you would use a LTV to make if impossible for all but the very rich to do so. As Ian B says in his example of the guy in the retirement cottage who suddenly sees the LTV shoot up for reasons out of his control, this is a tax that will often hit people who are not, by any stretch, rich. Please try and explain how forcing people to move or surrender part of their property rights is consistent with respect for property rights.
Please stop confusing the terms ‘property ‘ with ‘land’. This is neither correct in economic nor in legal terms.
Oh come on. If someone has ownership over a bit of land, either he owns it as property, or he does not. For heaven’s sake.
That may be correct, but surely, the way to tax is to do so that distorts or discomforts folk as little as possible. The LTV example you seem so fond of carries considerable disadvantages, as has been pointed out several times on this thread.
Henry George is a false friend of liberty, and I am always rather baffled by libertarians who flirt with him.
One fundamental flaw in the LVT concept is that although it is presented as being in the nature of compensation for infringing on the property rights of the neighbors (or, as Mark W put it, compensating you via a lower tax if your neighbor puts up a large building which blocks your scenic view and thus diminishes the value of your property), the fact of the matter is the the money is actually paid not to the person who is damaged but to the government. If I am damaged by someone else’s actions that person owes me compensation, not the government.
Another flaw is that, as with criminal’s “cliff view” property example, the underlying premise is that the spectacular view somehow belongs to society as a whole (or, more properly, to the government), which thus has a right to charge “rent” for it. I reject that proposition.
OK, one last try specifically relating to the cliff edge view.
1. The view has value.
2. Local taxpayers, the local council and the landowner concerned have to share this somehow.
3. The faux-libertarian viewpoint is that the view belongs to the landowner in perpetuity.
4. But local council needs tax from somewhere.
5. In the absence of compulsory purchase orders (to which I am opposed, as far as humanly possible) but with LVT, there is a free market solution. Either the landowner is prepared to pay higher LVT for exclusive use, or he ‘sells’ the right to the council in exchange for a reduction in his LVT.
6. If landowner ‘sells’ the right, the values of other homes and hotels in the area goes up slightly, because those residents can now go for nice walks along the cliff top. So they pay a bit more in LVT. Other local taxpayers are (indirectly) compensating the landowner for the benefit they gain.
7. Ergo, local taxpayers pay to the council for the value of what they get. How that is shared is a market value decision. I personally am not too fussed about cliff top walks so if I lived in such a town or village, I’d prefer that the landowner retains the right and pays a bit extra tax. Others may differ.
8. LVT could and should replace Inheritance Tax (as a particularly spiteful wealth tax). Pensioners would be allowed to defer their LVT to be rolled up and repaid on death – a statutory form of equity release, if you so wish and much fairer than blanket IHT on everything, whether hard earned or windfall gain.
They don’t “have” to share it. That’s bollocks, Mark. Lots of things with aesthetic content or whatever have value, does it mean they have to be shared. I own a nice picture on my wall; should I be forced in some way to share it with any passer-by? No. And I suspect you would agree with me. The trouble is that when things like fields, cliffs or hills come into it, people find their normal respect for property flying out of the window.
What Laird said. I should add that the underlying premise of Mark’s view seems to be that land is never owned in any meaningful sense, but rented on the sufference of the collective. Quite how this is consistent with a libertarian worldview is beyond me.
Sorry Mark, you’re not persuading me for all that I agree 100% about the evils of things like IHT. But you should bear in mind Ian B’s example of the not-rich guy who owns a home, gets stick with a hugely increased LTV bill, and has to leave. That strikes me as grossly unfair.
JP, LVT doesn’t apply to paintings.
Here’s why:
1. Ownership of the painting IS shared, How do we decide who gets it? Simple – market forces – if the value to you personally is more than it’s “market value” you keep it; if less, you sell it. The notional cost to you is the investment income that you forego. If I desperately want it, I just offer you an eye watering amount of money for it and you give in.
2. By deciding to keep the painting, you are not depriving anybody of it in any real sense, they can always buy a print or a copy or a similar painting.
3. The value of the painting depends in no part upon the efforts or sacrifices of other local residents, businesses and taxpayers. The painting is worth the same whether your local railway station shuts down or not.
4. The Town & Country Planning Act does not prohibit artists or printers churning out as many paintings as they want (there are no NIMBYs in the art world, let’s assume), if there is demand for it. And they pay income tax on their profits.
5. If, OTOH, the government declared henceforth that no new paintings may be created, thus creating an artificial scarcity value in your painting, and at the same time exempted your “Only or main paintings” from Capital Gains Tax, it is only fair to make you pay for that protection and that extra value you get.
As to the “not-rich” guy, honestly! What about all the other “not-rich” people, the priced out generation who are supposed to pay rents out of net income after paying the tax to fund local amenities (the value of which they are already paying for in rent) and then supposed to save up so that they can then pay ludicrous amounts of money for a Barratts hutch?
All because the occasional “not-rich” buy has Hallowed Home-Owner Status (remembering that by and large, most people’s homes are roughly proportional to their income), whereas the Priced Out Generation are just tenants? Are Libertarians avowedly anti-tenant or what? Are they pro-old and anti-young? Pro-landowner and anti-enterprise?
Let’s leave “Intellectual Property” aside for a moment. I assure you that I have and still continue to consider it very deeply given the field I am in. But it is irrelevant to this discussion.
My issue with the “rights” of the property owner are about whether it is really a “right” to fence of a bunch of land and deny others use of it, particularly and especially if one is not using it oneself. The rationale for rights relating to material goods arise fairly naturally but the supposed rights to property do not, in my opinion, arise in the same way and may be more of a holdover from feudal times. A period when ideas of libertarianism were very much not present.
I don’t have time to go through my thoughts here unfortunately. They go fairly deep and I am at work. I will just say to beware of glib or pat answers. There is a lot more to this than considering land as being the same as material goods.
(With that said, I will say that I disagree with eminent domain and that I think the real estate laws at present are probably as good as we can hope to get.) I’ll try and write some more later today
I wake to dawning simplisme…
Higher taxes = free markets? Then absolutism = greatest freedom.
No. Somewhere along the line, a socialist parasite lodged into your head. LVT is opportunism, pure and sleazy, and not free markets, individualism, or anything in the Libertarian tradition.
Three problems:
1) If you improve land – farms, factories, homes, etc – and then you are quadruplely taxed for your investment (purchase tax, sales tax on goods, property taxes, and then the value tax), you will get less improvements. So by “encouraging” – you say – more “freedom” – by this woeful definition – you will get many less improvements.
2) You conveniently stick to the cliffside estates, as if only those have great value. However, hospitals, factories, resorts, hotels, universities, restaurants, shopping malls, stadiums, etc ALSO add value to the surrounding area and thus a neighborhood outside a large hospital will see property values also come into this definition and so hurt everyone in range of the improvement.
By “alleviating” harm done by property rights, you instantly harm millions.
2a) People will fight neighboring improvements if it will cost them lots of money, or even evict them. You will have fewer improvements overall.
3) No one will invest money in a farm or ranch, a factory, a hospital (in Britain, all of yours are public, but not so in America. Yet.), a university, school, or any business, or home, if they stand to lose it for arbitrary reasons or face bankruptcy later for their investment.
You will again have fewer improvements.
These consequences are basic. Higher price, fewer sold, all things equal. Greater risk, same rewards, fewer investers, all things equal.
LVT is not the way. You harm millions instantly to right theoretical wrongs, and discourage, not encourage, improvements.
I believe I conjectured that you were a moron, criminal. Thank you for providing the proof.
On a tangent, to walk down a libertarian path, I wonder how much those who wish to exclude ramblers from their land would be willing to pay for private security to do so rather than relying on the taxpayer funded police force.
It is not “shared”, Mark. If I am rich enough to buy a painting, it is mine. The rest of that sentence is true but irrelevant. So there is market for land, paintings, TVs, cars, whatever. Well but of course.
Well not entirely. The value of a painting will also be a function of changes in fashion and so on. But as for the point about changes to the value of land or things like coastal walks because of changes in land use, please explain to me why you can state that such pieces of land should be “shared”. I have a small terrace garden at the back of my flat. It is mine, I only share it with people I invite in. Those who aren’t invited are known as burglars.
Vercingetorix: excellent points throughout. I hope you pay us regular visits.
Richard, I am also at work and know what you mean. Put some thoughts on later.
My issue with the “rights” of the property owner are about whether it is really a “right” to fence of a bunch of land and deny others use of it, particularly and especially if one is not using it oneself.
That is the only argument worth having. George Washington said something to the effect that the ‘plague of squatters’ was one of the greatest problems facing the nascent United States.
There are laws on the books covering squatter’s rights, and eminent domain, narrowly defined, is also a powerful and existent tool for balancing public and private good. Intellectual property is a different animal from physical property, including land. There are no ‘pirate’s rights’ nor eminent domain for patents (Thank Jehovah!).
So this is really just a power grab, sleazy as can be: the mechanics of redress are already in place for any wrongs done. And only the shallowest would consider a cliffside view for one person as a terrible injustice for everyone.
With eminent domain, however, by law the owner whose holdings are taken must be compensated. This is basic fairness. With LVT, the law is the holdings must be taxed which is, shall we say, not at all the same thing.
Some do already. They are called gated communities, created precisely because so much policing is crap.
This thread (and my simultaneous ding dong with Kay Tie over at Devil’s Kitchen) has kicked off a whole bunch of thoughts I could write one of my wearying essays about regarding how Georgism seems to be heavily based on at least two enormous fallacies- firstly a strange inversion of the discredited labour theory of value, recast as “only labour creates value, so you can only own, and thus profit from, that which is created by labour, land is not created by labour so nobody is entitled to own or profit from it” and secondly a common erroneous belief that there is such a thing as an objective value for a good, which there isn’t, but I’ll leave them for now to just address this-
I think it’s too easy to fall into deep philosophy and forget basic everyday realities. The idea of land as property is simply a more modern restatement of the basic idea of land as territory, which is inherent to our nature, as with many animals. The reason people have a right to fence off land and deny others use of it is the simple desire to have a place of one’s own. It’s the reason people pay more for a flat with its own kitchen and bathroom than shared ones, and why they shut their bedroom doors or lock their front doors. It is because exclusivity of territory provides security. If other people can’t walk around my house, I know nobody will be walking around it nicking stuff or wandering into my bedroom and murdering me in my sleep. On a larger scale the same goes for towns or nations. Humans from the year dot have created exclusive territories, even without modern concepts of specific land ownership. “This is my hut, get the fuck out!”. The idea of a territory exclusive to oneself is the idea of a fundamental security for oneself- which is why every collectivist tyranny denies that right to its suffering victims. You take that away, you ain’t got nuthin’.
@ V
Higher taxes = free markets? Then absolutism = greatest freedom.
Where did I say “higher taxes”? LVT could and should replace loads of other taxes, in a perfect world, all of them, and if that’s accompanied with overall tax take goes down, then so much the better.
1) If you improve land – farms, factories, homes, etc – and then you are quadruplely taxed for your investment (purchase tax, sales tax on goods, property taxes, and then the value tax), you will get less improvements. So by “encouraging” – you say – more “freedom” – by this woeful definition – you will get many less improvements.
Nope. Land Value Tax applies to land only – as I may have mentioned once or twice above. Not the buildings or ‘improvements’. I am against purchase tax or sales tax, they are The Worst Taxes, so don’t pin those on me.
I hesitate to respond to your other points because you clearly haven’t tried to understand what I painstakingly explained above, so what’s the point?
Let’s not forget that for many, even if they do own their own home, they do not necessarily own the land it is built on. Quite possibly it’s on a 99 year lease from the Price of Wales.
Well, besides all else you can’t “just tax land”. Ignoring the issue of how there is no way to find the market value, so it’s just an assessor’s opinion, you have the main problem that any land improvement pushes up everybody’s LVT, such that if we imagine some actual value to the improvement, it may well be more than cancelled by the rise in LVT.
Taking the railways station- to an individual landowner (e.g. Fred, who doesn’t get out much these days) it may be worth little or nothing. But his LVT increases by an amount that (an assessor thinks) it is now worth more by to somebody who would buy the land if Fred sold it, which he doesn’t want to. Rather than your taxes being based on your own decisions (e.g. sales tax) or ability to pay (income tax) or a flat rate (a poll tax), all of which are at least a bit fair, you have a tax based on the actions of others beyond your control, and the hypothetical actions of hypothetical purchasers of your land. Fred’s tax rise is entirely the consequence of the actions of his neighbours!
Ian B, you are right about the basic everyday realities which is why I qualified what I was saying with the bracketed statement. I just find that a lot of what people are saying is wrong with eminent domain is in contradiction with their basis for demanding strong (real estate) property rights. Appeals to the law and appeals to “force of arms” fall down both.
If we are to have a strong basis for real estate property rights, we need to get to the heart of the basis for those rights. I think many here are concentrating on the rights of the man swinging his arm, and not the ones of the man with the nose.
You don’t live in one. Do twenty rosaries and maybe when you die you can lobby St. Peter for LVT.
It applies to the value of the land, right? You do understand that other locations raise – and lower – property values: land adjacent to landfills sell less than land adjacent to beaches or downtown, for instance.
If you somehow believe that this law – the LVT – will tax only prime coastal areas (and by extension, reduce on net the total tax burden), then you need to understand three things:
1) Ratio of surface area to circumference. Hint: England’s border holds far fewer people than the interior. Therefore – if you are to replace even a single other tax much less a slate of taxes – the LVT would have to be extraordinarily high.
2) Governments do not voluntarily surrender revenue. You will have the LVT + death tax + flat municipal property tax + everything else.
3) Value is determined by money in the West, and this is a good system. A home in Hyde Park, or across from Stanford, or along Daytona Beach, or along the Cliffs of Dover, will all fall under the Land Value Tax almost by definition unless you come up with some other means to value land besides money.
Good luck with that.
And, JP, I’m always lurking. 🙂
And again, my last before the workaday schedule draws me away, we are ignoring the primary moral issue.
By what right does the State have to target individual landowners for higher levies, and where does that stop? Should we tax per square foot, per piece of art, per stick of furniture, per dollar of material and labor?
All of the arguments specifically for land use fall flat on a coastal area anyways, for what civil engineer is going to build a highway with a breathtaking view? How many airports are perched over the Channel?
You are asking us to target individual landowners for an extraordinary tax burden, all in the name of freedom.
Sorry, mate. No sale.
Mark, that remark was not directed at me, but in general terms, stop writing as if those who object to LTV are being a bit thick. We have answered your points over and over. You may have “patiently” explained your argument but the problem is that it is wrong, and as several others on this board have said, your defence of LTV is weak in several key respects.
For example, your contention that the tax would “apply to land only” ignores all the many factors that drive the price of land, and how this will affect third parties. That is pretty serious problem with LTV and you simply haven’t bothered to deal with that point at all convincingly.
And I am being tough on you because your first comment, in which you stated baldly that LTV would hit people owning certain things that you assert should be “shared” (why?), was nothing more than a support for state-backed aggression. Fuck that, quite frankly.
I could you a hundred different factors that drive “land values”, but the main two are
a) Underlying location value (Knightsbridge will always be worth more than East Ham). Ninety-nine per cent of which relates to generosity of planning permission, whether a site is near parks, tube station, shops etc.
b) The bubble element. This is the really dangerous bit. Whether the bubble element attaches to land or to the house built on top is academic. It is the recent credit/property price bubble that has steered our economy in completely the wrong direction and the bursting thereof is hurting people far more than the earlier illusion of wealth helped them. (Unless like me you know what you are doing, bailed out in time, sold all your properties and banked a vast capital gain at minimal tax cost)
Click link for chart.
Exaggerating what I say doesn’t really help. Somebody on this thread said that Income Tax was not as bad as LVT, superficially, yes, I can understand why people say that (the SNP and the Lib Dems say this as well).
LVT-ers have been accused of wanting to expropriate land (which in my case is quite simply not true – I recommend a tax on location values to pay for local services, no more than that, and a tax on bubble values to prevent the bubbles). Would it advance the argument if I were to say that those who prefer income tax to LVT want to ‘expropriate income’? Not really.
Mark, I don’t think you want to expropriate landowners, but it is pretty clear that your support for LVT stems from the idea that increases in land value – for whatever reason – are considered fairer game when it comes to taxing people than say, an increase in a person’s earning power for some other reason.
As has been explained, this is unfair; it also does not deal with – to repeat for the nth time – those cases of where a person, who finds his property becoming far more valuable due to some nearby development, is saddled with a far higher tax bill. Now you may say, well, he or she can make a nice profit on the sale. But what if the person does not want to leave?
LTV advocates argue – I know since I have met them – that LTV encourages a more sensible use of resources by favouring developers over absentee landlords and the like. Well maybe, maybe not. But clearly this is an example of how a tax is favoured for its effects.
Personally, I think the least-worst tax is a sales tax. But it is a choice of evils.
It is also hard to escape the feeling that there is a strong undertone of collectivism in all this enthusiasm for LTV and the like. Several months ago, I met a US professor, a libertarian, who was and is a big fan of Henry George and his school of land-taxers. (i cannot recall his name). As he went on, he sounded more and more like a Marxist in his treatment of land; it was, he said, not created by Man and hence there was something immoral in profiting from its use without suffering a charge.
A good demolition of Georgism here.
“The form of land-use towards which the single tax pushes us is one in which the countryside is randomly dotted with perpendicular towers (tapering wastes land), 200 metre or so on a side, 2000 metre or so high, each tower a complete small town of 50,000 or so, inclusive of apartments, shops, offices, services and factories, but paying no more tax than a single suburban house.”
I do not dispute that some LVT-ers are socialist/Marxist, but it is also true that there is a Greenie angle, a Judaeo-Christian angle, there are a lot of LVTers in the Lib Dems etc.
What appeals to me is the ‘half a free market is better than none’ angle, which is why e.g. Milton Friedman said that LVT was the least bad tax (click link above).
I am neither a Marxist nor a greenie nor a Christian nor a Lib Dem, BTW. In LVT circles, I count as right wing (possibly because I am in UKIP). But on this one issue, we get along just fine.
Sales Tax is the politicians favourite tax, it is in fact the worst kind of tax (unless it relates to a particular externality like fuel duty to pay for roads).
Finally, LVTers have been addressing “cases of where a person, who finds his property becoming far more valuable due to some nearby development, is saddled with a far higher tax bill.” for over a century.
Simple answer – allow them to defer the tax to be repaid on a subsequent sale or death, without interest AFAIAC. The gummint is committed to enormous future expenditure, so there’s no harm in converting some current receipts into future receipts. Which is why you’d have to get rid of Inheritance Tax as well.
For every one “asset rich cash poor” person who loses out, millions would gain because house prices would be low and stable. Would it abolish boom and bust? No, of course not, but it would sure as heck dampen the cycle.
That is not much consolation for the person who does not want to sell, is it? Also, if sellers can get a complete refund, and a lot of people do this, it kind of defeats the revenue-raising aspect of this.
Sorry, I have had enough of this. I am not convinced.
It is worth remembering that during the propaganda campaign to create a telephone monopoly in the US, the complaint was not that the wires couldn’t go anywhere without stealing someone’s property, but rather that there was a tremendous confusion of wiring — about to be solved by technological change even if the monopoly hadn’t been created.
Government intrusion even for genuinely public purposes is subject to corrupt influences and unnecessary takings, and should be regarded with great suspicion.
Murry Rothbard went into the details of the ideas of Henry George in his work “Man, Economy and State”.
However, if land is not privately owned (in fact if not in name – see later) talk of other private owership is vain.
Of course it used to be a common point that private landownship was better protected under “feudal” (a word used for a lot of different things and a word that need not have anything to do with serfdom) common law systems (of which the English was not the only one) than under “Roman”/”Civil” law – even though under English Common Law (although not under other forms of Common Law) private land ownership did not formally exist (everything since William I – being formally held from the King).
However, changes in law (by both “legislation” and court judgement) have largely destroyed this advantage in practice.
As for “free will”.
One can be a political libertarian withough being a philisophical one.
However, being concerned over the domination of the state over NON beings does seem a bit odd.
After all “free will” means agency (making choices, real choices, and acting on them) – the defining feature of an agent, a “being” as in “human being”.
Surely no one should be concerned about the domination of the state over a population of mindless flesh robots?
To give a practical example of why the “Common Law versus Civil Law” debate is a bit pointless:
Spain is infamous for the government, national and local, taking control of coastal property.
However, New Zealand is a Common Law country (indeed more so than England and Wales are – because we are hit by Euro law) and the government there (I am told) also declared the coast government property.
Indeed the only problem they faced was the native land rights movement based on the Treaty of W. from 1840 (a P.C. cause in New Zealand – even against the Labour government of the time). Ordinary landowners (again I am told) had as little standing under Common Law as they would under “Roman” (Civil) Law.
By the way, the theory of property redistribution based on acts of theft centuries ago is the logical consequence of a Lockean approach to property rights. “The Freeman” magazine recently published an essay by some Mutualist bod who argued this pretty comprehensively and concluded that all consistent Libertarians should support the expropriation of most landowners, the takeover of universities by students and the like.
This tells us something about Locke’s shitty theory, it tells us squiff all about the need to have a big round of looting to create a juster society.
You are over-reaching on this point, Gabriel, as tends to be your somewhat irritating style.
The theory of rectifying previous acts of theft is unimpeachable….BUT the trouble lies in figuring out how to enforce such things given the tangled web of property transactions in the meatime. That is why there has to be a statute of limitations on such things. There is nothing wrong per se with Locke’s ideas as helping explain how property rights can arise in the first place.