Dan Sullivan quotes
1
The document is not the contract; it is merely evidence of the contract. The contract is simply the mutual understanding between parties, and is usually based on custom. My favorite example is that when you visit someone's home and they as what you would like for dinner, the assumption by custom is that it is a free dinner. When you enter a restaurant, the assumption is that they are asking you what dinner you would like to purchase. There is a contract in the latter case, whether you signed anything or not.
When you acquire property in a municipality, you have agreed to any terms of that municipality that are consistent with custom whether you have signed anything or not. Even contracts within condo associations do not have to include items that are consistent with custom, as such items are generally understood.
2
Smith's labor theory of value was a theory of tendencies, like water seeking its own level. Smith started out saying that all value is subjective, including the value of labor needed to produce wealth in the first place. However, when the market value of an item exceeds the labor cost of making it, the response is to hire more workers and make more until an equilibrium is reached.
Suppose, for example, that people making tables and chairs are getting $20 an hour, and similarly skilled people making chests of drawers are getting $30 per hour. Well, fewer people will make tables and chairs and more will make chests of drawers until the return to both are approximately the same. The end result is that the price of labor-produced goods equalizes around the return to labor. That is the actual labor theory of value, and Austrians are too busy straw-manning a bogus theory to deal with the actual theory.
Marx acted as though the labor needed to make an item was everything, and subjective value was nothing, while Austrians talk as though subjective value is everything and necessary labor is nothing. The reality is that the labor components of these items equalize through the higgling of the market, exactly as Smith said it would.
Smith left out the land component, which Ricardo solved by showing that the value of land was a result of the additional return to labor it provided over marginal land.
3
Marxists conflate land with capital in order to attack private monopolization of capital, which is not a problem. Austrians conflate them in order to defend private monopolization of land, which is a problem.
4
Land monopoly isn't a "wrong of the past" any more than monarchy is. It is not merely that A stole from B in ancient times. Rather, it is that A created a system whereby B and all of B's descendants would have to pay tribute in perpetuity A and all of A's descendants. It is impossible to own land "honestly," because there is nobody to buy it from. Certainly one can take up land and use it, and enjoy exclusive possession of it. However, one has an obligation to those who are dispossessed unless there is "enough and as good, left for others." This is called the Lockean Proviso. Rent is the exact measure of the degree to which the Lockean Proviso is exceeded, for there is no rental value to land if there is enough and as good that others can take up for free. All of the classical liberals who specified how to fund government called for land value tax, and until the right-wing shift under Hayek, Rothbard, Rand and Mises, the libertarians who upheld property in land also advocated land value tax.
Typical pseudo-libertarian reactionary quip, unless you are calling John Locke, William Penn, Francois "laissez faire" Quesnay, Adam Smith, Mirabeau, Turgot, Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winston Churchill, Frank Chodorov, Albert Jay Nock, Paul Samuelson, William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, LP founder David Nolan, LP News founder Karl Hess, and first LP Presidential nominee John Hospers all "commies." When your take on an issue requires that the great icons of liberty are communists, it is likely that your take on the issue is wrong.
"Taxation is theft" isn't wrong, but it lacks nuance. To the degree that some people pay and other people benefit, the element of theft is there. For taxation to not be theft, the payments have to be apportioned to the benefits. Land value tax does that, because the value of land is not related to anything you did to improve the land. Rather, improvements are assessed separately and not taxed.
Also, government has to spend the land on things that increase the value of the benefits by more than the cost of the taxes. If the benefits manifest themselves as land value, then a valid government expenditure is one that increases land value by more than the amount of the tax. All public services either increase land value or waste money, and all taxes reduce land value.
The problem with a sales tax is that it falls on things that were privately produced and privately transacted. When Obama said, "You didn't build that," he went on to say that the fellow's business was successful because of all the roads and bridges to that business, because we had educated people to become more productive employees (ostensibly, at least), and because we have a system of order. The problem is that these things manifest themselves as land value, and Obama wasn't proposing to tax land value. Rather, he was proposing to tax income, and income tax does not distinguish the value that the entrepreneur creates from the value that the community or society had creates.
"Tax the landlord and he passes the cost to his tenants."
Economists overwhelmingly agree that that is false with regard to land value tax. Land value tax drives down the price of land rather than raising rents. David Ricardo first proved this in what is known as "Ricardo's Law of Rent." John Stuart Mill called the Law of Rent the "pons asinorum" [bridge of asses] of economics. It refers to a bridge that jackasses are afraid to cross. Today, it is textbook economics that land value tax is not passed on, because the tax does not reduce the supply of land. Rather, it induces people holding land idle to put that land on the market.
Marxists attack the idea of a rational market and Austrians attack the idea of a rational government, when one cannot exist without the other.
The ultimate result of Marxism is that government becomes the landlord, and the ultimate result of Austrianism is that landlords become the government.
Actually, all taxes ultimately come out of rent. Sales taxes depress commercial rents by making commerce less profitable. Thus they destroy rent rather than collect rent directly. The realization that all taxes ultimately come out of rent was first stated by John Locke: "If, therefore, the laying of taxes upon commodities does, as it is evident, affect the land that is out at a rack-rent, it is plain it does equally affect all the other land in England too, and the gentry will, but the worst way, increase their own charges, that is, by lessening the yearly value of their estates, if they hope to ease their land, by charging commodities. It is in vain, in a country whose great fund is land, to hope to lay the public charge of the government on any thing else; there at last it will terminate. The merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the labourer cannot, and therefore the landholder must; and whether he were best to do it, by laying it directly where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the sinking of his rents, which when they are once fallen, every one knows are not easily raised again, let him consider." https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/763#Locke_0128-04_90
Castro conquered Cuba and declared himself ruler. Had he declared himself owner, would the island then be his? What about if he sold it to his brother Raul? What if Raul sells it to one of his children? At what point does stolen property become rightful property, and at what point does wrongful tribute to a ruler become rightful rent to a landlord? People sometimes confuse themselves by thinking of the owner of an apartment building as a landlord. If a $9 million apartment building sits on $1 million worth of land, then the owner of that building is 90% capitalist and only 10% landlord. In contrast, we refer to US Steel as a capitalist corporation when most of their assets are in land and mineral rights, and only a small share is in genuine, labor-produced capital (mills, machinery, inventory, offices, etc.). In the early '80s, US Steel shut down most of those mills and rebranded itself USX for the next 20-odd years. They were truly landlords, not capitalists. It was Marx who conflated land with capital, redefining capital to include all the "means of production." The classical liberals kept the factors of production distinct: land, labor and capital. Capital, then, was neither land nor labor, but was the products of labor used to enhance production and exchange. The classical liberals believed in the exclusive possession of land, but within limits that guaranteed that anyone could have such possession.
Nathaniel Abraham Farley wrote, "Youre a socialist not a libertarian."
Nathaniel, You're a reactionary anti-socialist, not a libertarian. Land value tax was a cornerstone of libertarianism until the reactionary anti-socialists took over. Consider the words of Albert Jay Nock, founder of *The Freeman* and author of *Our Enemy, the State*: "This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or *laissez-faire*, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum-dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-lab our -- nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times. Mr. Gradgrind, Mr. Bottles and Mr. Plugson of Undershot worked their will unhindered with a fine code of liberalist social philosophy behind them, and the mess they made shortly stank in the nostrils of all Christendom. People began to say, perhaps naturally, if this is what State abstention comes to, let us have some State intervention. "But the State *had* intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly, -- the landlord's monopoly of economic rent, -- thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into the factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all *actually* occupied, was all "legally" occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labour-market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus. "Franklin saw this clearly; he used Turgôt's language almost word for word to show that the "labour-problem," qua labour-problem, really does not exist -- it is purely a problem of State intervention, State-created monopoly. He said: " 'Manufactures are founded in poverty. It is the number of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers [i.e., enterprisers] to carry on a manufacture.... " 'But no man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labour to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master.' " http://savingcommunities.org/.../nock.../godslookout.html...
The irony is that the reactionary anti-socialists are fare less effective at exposing the flaws in socialism as the classical liberals and libertarians were. More on that from Nock: "The only reformer abroad in the world in my time who interested me in the least was Henry George, because his project did not contemplate prescription, but, on the contrary, would reduce it almost to zero. He was the only one of the lot who believed in freedom, or (as far as I could see) had any approximation to an intelligent idea of what freedom is, and of the economic prerequisites to attaining it.... "One is immensely tickled to see how things are coming out nowadays with reference to his doctrine, for George was in fact the best friend the capitalist ever had. He built up the most complete and absolutely impregnable defense of the rights of capital that was ever constructed, and if the capitalists of his day had had sense enough to dig in behind it, their successors would not now be squirming under the merciless exactions which collectivism is laying on them, and which George would have no scruples whatever about describing as sheer highwaymanry."
