If you tell me: “Hey, no one owes you anything. Why should anyone give you money for free? You need to provide value in return for the resources you consume; and when the AI outcompetes you, then you deserve to die; you should have been smarter and luckier and probably born rich to start your own AI company,” then all I can say is: “Fair point.”
You don’t even have to say fair point. You can say this instead: all land and resources occurring in nature somehow ended up owned by people in a very unequal way. (It’s well known that the miracle by which naturally occurring land turns into land owned by somebody is not explainable by libertarianism.) This was the Big Steal. So there’s no need to force anyone to work for you; everyone can keep 100% of the proceeds of their work, and the profits of their businesses and so on. All we’re asking is that the proceeds of the Big Steal, not borne of work, be divided equally among all people. This would be enough for everyone to have food and shelter, from the calculations I’ve seen.
I am sympathetic to this position. But I also suspect that in a parallel universe where I own the land, I am probably right now writing a sophisticated economical argument for why people should want, from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, that the land be owned by the people who have superior… uhm… land-owning skills. (Though if I own lots of land, I probably have a think tank to write these things for me.)
Then the debate might switch to open borders, et cetera, and we might end up debating nature versus culture, the repugnant conclusion, or that the planetary UBI actually wouldn’t turn out to be that much.
So I chose a smaller scope on purpose: my preferences. And I am stating them, not trying to justify them.
This comment’s proposal is totally wrong and would very badly break all sorts of things throughout the economy and society, creating some weird combination of instant financial collapse + instant civil war. But the intuition that this proposal is crudely groping towards (rent-seeking is distinct from the kind of genuine labor we want to incentivize; we should heavily tax rent-seeking and distribute the revenue to everyone) is called georgism and is basically correct and good.
I certainly know about Georgism and my comment was partly a pointer to it. It’s a very good description of a system we might want to build. But it’s lacking as a description of how we might build that system, what obstacles we have to overcome and how we can overcome them. To me this points to a clear next step in thinking after Georgism and I wish more people understood it. In a comment sometime ago I phrased it like this:
My view of Georgism has shifted from “obviously good idea economically” to “good idea, but those with more land will block it” to “oh, that’s why people say the only important war is class war” to “if class war is won, people can get a right to housing and healthcare, and it’s not super important which taxes it’ll be based on”.
The “not super important” is a bit polemical, but the point is, when solving a problem we need to focus on the actual hard part. For this particular problem the hard part is conflict-theoretic, not mistake-theoretic. We’re not all in this together. The beneficiaries of the big steal will fight tooth and nail to keep their unfair advantage. This needs to be acknowledged.
idk this kinda proves too much, right? by that logic no reform or good thing could ever happen, it’s just all-or-nothing bloody worldwide communist revolution or bust. But 1. lots of good progressive reforms have happened (social services like subsidized healthcare and retirement pensions in almost all developed nations, expansions of voting rights, having democracy at all instead of monarchies / dictatorships everywhere, having progressive rather than maximally regressive taxation, the abolition of slavery, other work-related reforms etc), and 2. i doubt that a cataclysmic communist revolution would end well because starting a giant global class war would introduce a few of its own political economy problems lol.
But also, while your response explains that you’ve come to support violent revolution over incrementalism, it doesn’t actually explain why you support your odd plan of “take everyone’s land and give everyone equal-value portions of land (and then presumably block everyone from buying/selling land going forward since that would recapitulate wealth agglomeration / inequality)”??? Why not just support “violent revolution --> under the new regime, implement normal georgism where you simply tax people’s land --> problem solved”? Under your system, do I get to keep my house? (i hope my recently bought $500k home’s value is lower than 1 8-billionth the value of all land on earth, so i can still keep it after the revolution!! what happens if I only get $250k, do I have to live in half my house?? Or probably i have to sell it and find a new cheaper house? But who’s buying if all people on earth have been reset at the median wealth of 250k or whatever??) Does it even make sense to value the house so highly since it’s mostly propped up by surrounding high prices in my first-world neighborhood in colorado and if we’re distributing everything equally globally in theory no such inequalities will remain? Or, if i get to keep my house AND i have money left over and I get assigned a small parcel of random farmland in malaysia (or even nearby in colorado), what do I do with this?? I don’t want to farm part-time. Even if I wanted to do this as a whimsical lifestyle choice, it would be super inefficient for everyone on earth to become part-time smallholder farmers… what about specialization, etc?? Inevitably I’d end up leasing my land (if this was even legal under Big Steal Communism) to some real farmer who actually knows how to farm. But wouldn’t this therefore just end up recapitulating a really weird messed up fragmented form of georgism with extra steps? (Everyone is getting land rent as essentially UBI, but instead of tiny slices of the national pie it’s deals they negotiated themselves and maybe got ripped off on, applying to specific idiosyncratic pieces of land...) What do you do when somebody discovers oil under their land and becomes rich and powerful, or founds a new town on their vast expanse of previously worthless desert land that grows into a thriving city that 1000x’s their land value? Are such windfalls illegal and we bring down the hammer again on anyone who gets too rich (but then whence the incentive to do economically useful things?), or is this a one-time bloody jubilee / purge and afterwards we declare that all the injustices of the past have been adequately addressed once and for all (i mean except for all the injustices we just inflicted lol), and henceforth normal capitalism, now freed of the original sin of the Big Steal, will reign?
Seems a lot easier to just pay 5% tax yearly on algorithmically-assessed land value or whatever, assuage today’s landowners by having this policy slowly phase in over 20 years or whatever, and counter the political weight of Big Land by appealing to the political power of Big Everybody Else Who Pays Taxes Or Receives Government Benefits by pointing out that landowners will pay more taxes but other taxes will be lowered (or alternately government services will be increased) so the average person will be totally neutral and the median person could easily be much better off. Sure some people will fight tooth and nail against this, but probably fewer than would fight tooth and nail against a violent global communist revolution.
Ah, I see, we don’t actually disagree. By “proceeds” in my comment I didn’t mean divide up the land itself, I meant divide the gains from it, something much like Georgism.
And it’s not revolution or bust. The thing can be achieved incrementally and even peacefully. Point is, it can’t be achieved without at least some overruling of interests of those who benefit from the current state of things. It can’t be achieved just by educating them or something.
I agree that gradual change is better. I suspect the big land owners would fight the gradual change just as hard, because they can clearly see where it goes.
You don’t even have to say fair point. You can say this instead: all land and resources occurring in nature somehow ended up owned by people in a very unequal way. (It’s well known that the miracle by which naturally occurring land turns into land owned by somebody is not explainable by libertarianism.) This was the Big Steal. So there’s no need to force anyone to work for you; everyone can keep 100% of the proceeds of their work, and the profits of their businesses and so on. All we’re asking is that the proceeds of the Big Steal, not borne of work, be divided equally among all people. This would be enough for everyone to have food and shelter, from the calculations I’ve seen.
I am sympathetic to this position. But I also suspect that in a parallel universe where I own the land, I am probably right now writing a sophisticated economical argument for why people should want, from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, that the land be owned by the people who have superior… uhm… land-owning skills. (Though if I own lots of land, I probably have a think tank to write these things for me.)
Then the debate might switch to open borders, et cetera, and we might end up debating nature versus culture, the repugnant conclusion, or that the planetary UBI actually wouldn’t turn out to be that much.
So I chose a smaller scope on purpose: my preferences. And I am stating them, not trying to justify them.
This comment’s proposal is totally wrong and would very badly break all sorts of things throughout the economy and society, creating some weird combination of instant financial collapse + instant civil war. But the intuition that this proposal is crudely groping towards (rent-seeking is distinct from the kind of genuine labor we want to incentivize; we should heavily tax rent-seeking and distribute the revenue to everyone) is called georgism and is basically correct and good.
I certainly know about Georgism and my comment was partly a pointer to it. It’s a very good description of a system we might want to build. But it’s lacking as a description of how we might build that system, what obstacles we have to overcome and how we can overcome them. To me this points to a clear next step in thinking after Georgism and I wish more people understood it. In a comment sometime ago I phrased it like this:
The “not super important” is a bit polemical, but the point is, when solving a problem we need to focus on the actual hard part. For this particular problem the hard part is conflict-theoretic, not mistake-theoretic. We’re not all in this together. The beneficiaries of the big steal will fight tooth and nail to keep their unfair advantage. This needs to be acknowledged.
idk this kinda proves too much, right? by that logic no reform or good thing could ever happen, it’s just all-or-nothing bloody worldwide communist revolution or bust. But 1. lots of good progressive reforms have happened (social services like subsidized healthcare and retirement pensions in almost all developed nations, expansions of voting rights, having democracy at all instead of monarchies / dictatorships everywhere, having progressive rather than maximally regressive taxation, the abolition of slavery, other work-related reforms etc), and 2. i doubt that a cataclysmic communist revolution would end well because starting a giant global class war would introduce a few of its own political economy problems lol.
But also, while your response explains that you’ve come to support violent revolution over incrementalism, it doesn’t actually explain why you support your odd plan of “take everyone’s land and give everyone equal-value portions of land (and then presumably block everyone from buying/selling land going forward since that would recapitulate wealth agglomeration / inequality)”??? Why not just support “violent revolution --> under the new regime, implement normal georgism where you simply tax people’s land --> problem solved”? Under your system, do I get to keep my house? (i hope my recently bought $500k home’s value is lower than 1 8-billionth the value of all land on earth, so i can still keep it after the revolution!! what happens if I only get $250k, do I have to live in half my house?? Or probably i have to sell it and find a new cheaper house? But who’s buying if all people on earth have been reset at the median wealth of 250k or whatever??) Does it even make sense to value the house so highly since it’s mostly propped up by surrounding high prices in my first-world neighborhood in colorado and if we’re distributing everything equally globally in theory no such inequalities will remain? Or, if i get to keep my house AND i have money left over and I get assigned a small parcel of random farmland in malaysia (or even nearby in colorado), what do I do with this?? I don’t want to farm part-time. Even if I wanted to do this as a whimsical lifestyle choice, it would be super inefficient for everyone on earth to become part-time smallholder farmers… what about specialization, etc?? Inevitably I’d end up leasing my land (if this was even legal under Big Steal Communism) to some real farmer who actually knows how to farm. But wouldn’t this therefore just end up recapitulating a really weird messed up fragmented form of georgism with extra steps? (Everyone is getting land rent as essentially UBI, but instead of tiny slices of the national pie it’s deals they negotiated themselves and maybe got ripped off on, applying to specific idiosyncratic pieces of land...) What do you do when somebody discovers oil under their land and becomes rich and powerful, or founds a new town on their vast expanse of previously worthless desert land that grows into a thriving city that 1000x’s their land value? Are such windfalls illegal and we bring down the hammer again on anyone who gets too rich (but then whence the incentive to do economically useful things?), or is this a one-time bloody jubilee / purge and afterwards we declare that all the injustices of the past have been adequately addressed once and for all (i mean except for all the injustices we just inflicted lol), and henceforth normal capitalism, now freed of the original sin of the Big Steal, will reign?
Seems a lot easier to just pay 5% tax yearly on algorithmically-assessed land value or whatever, assuage today’s landowners by having this policy slowly phase in over 20 years or whatever, and counter the political weight of Big Land by appealing to the political power of Big Everybody Else Who Pays Taxes Or Receives Government Benefits by pointing out that landowners will pay more taxes but other taxes will be lowered (or alternately government services will be increased) so the average person will be totally neutral and the median person could easily be much better off. Sure some people will fight tooth and nail against this, but probably fewer than would fight tooth and nail against a violent global communist revolution.
Ah, I see, we don’t actually disagree. By “proceeds” in my comment I didn’t mean divide up the land itself, I meant divide the gains from it, something much like Georgism.
And it’s not revolution or bust. The thing can be achieved incrementally and even peacefully. Point is, it can’t be achieved without at least some overruling of interests of those who benefit from the current state of things. It can’t be achieved just by educating them or something.
I agree that gradual change is better. I suspect the big land owners would fight the gradual change just as hard, because they can clearly see where it goes.