> Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.
But isn’t land ownership and renting free markets? If there is profit to be made by renting out land, investors should look to buy land to rent out, since both the land market and pool of renters are limited this should naturally drive up prices of land while driving down rents. And as such you should move towards buying land to rent out becoming a very low margin business and renters end up paying only marginally more than they would if they bought the land themselves.
That’s in theory though, so what’s keeping this from happening in practice?
Not sure how it's "free markets" to distribute land to the people good at conquering things and then let their descendants hang on to it for the next 1000 years.
There’s a realeastate market, we agree on that right? That market is a free market in the econ 101 sense is what I’m saying. You are questioning whether it is morally fair that the world is the way it is. That has nothing to do with my post.
Because the higher house prices are, the less people can afford to buy (to live). Those people then need to rent, increasing demand for rental, so rental prices go up too.
When housing bubbles burst, rental prices go up.
I really don't think it's a free market because people must live somewhere.
Further, banks only let you have one normal mortgage, so you can't buy multiple properties unless you're already wealthy.
That wouldn't be a sustainable pact. Any builder could profit by breaking it and there would be nothing the colluding builders could do about it.
Builders have an incentive to liberalize development laws and do push for upzoning. It's those who own condos who have an opposing financial interest in limiting development.
Beyond financial interests there are NIMBY and other cultural interests that seem to be decisive, like heritage preservation.
There is also bureaucratic inefficiency limiting housing development by imposing lengthy and expensive processes for getting permits and approvals.
A condo is an apartment unit in a building where units can be owned individually. Upzoning means changing the zoning laws of the neighbourhood where the property is situated to allow taller buildings with more square footage of living space.
Many neighbourhoods have zoning laws that impose height limits that prevent high-density developments, and this constrains growth in the supply of housing.
Winston was writing in England (which is what the article is about) in 1909.
Property taxes in the UK essentially don't distinguish between "nice house" and "an actual palace". A tiny bedsit pays grade A taxes, my nice flat is grade B, My mother's old house (a four bedroom cottage in a pleasant village where lots of rich people live) would be category H. There aren't any categories above H. They're charged to the occupants, so if you own a town of a hundred dwellings and let them out, the residents pay those taxes, not you. The exact mechanism has changed substantially since Winston's time (and indeed was the cause of major riots decades ago) but this general thrust has been true for generations.
It's true that rental income due to a landlord is taxable income, after expenses, but I don't see how that's relevant?
Capital Gains Taxes only kick in if you sell. If you're content to profit off ownership indefinitely you are never charged CGT.
They used to. In 1909 we had rates not council tax. Rates were originally brought in during 1601 to fund poor law provision!
They had a huge advantage over the council tax - and Thatcher's brief foray into a poll tax. Houses don't move, people do. The rates were on the property and were charged on rateable value which was a value distinct from market value, but not banded. People and inhabitants did not matter (at least in the 20th century - not sure about earlier).
Every government from Attlee's in 1945 onward promised to replace or reform the rates. Every one except Thatcher concluded it would be not worth doing, and far more expensive to run. All that was needed was a tax break for the little old widow stuck in the old family home after the family had left, as an exception.
Council tax is in effect a massive tax break for the wealthy, compared to domestic rates, as the highest band is an absurdly low value that catches every property worth more than £320,000 in band H. Same tax for £320k and £25m.
Ah, Hacker News, where even Winston Churchill is an ignorant leftist.
1909 was a very different tax landscape. Income tax was 3.75% and Winston Churchill was trying to raise it. I don't think CGT existed in its current form at all.
You are correct, I think his sentiment still has a great point though when looking at it through the eyes of ownership being of the few, and inheritance tax being overlooked in the UK in some cases.
Especially seeing as royal family wasn't the greatest fan of him.
Edit: In my own opinion, this iniquitous state of land ownership in Scotland is somewhat compensated for by the fact we have the Right To Roam - which means even though a lot of land is kept as hunting estates anyone can wander about pretty much as we please (with some fairly minor restrictions).
The article seems to suggest Right to Roam was only introduced in 2004 in Scotland. Is this really so?
In Scandinavia Right to Roam (alle-mans-rätt / All Men's Right) predates even the earliest modern laws, so is generally not even codified but based on an immemorial legal tradition.
It was codified in 2003[0] but dates back centuries. Here's the wikipedia entry for the code that governs access.[1] The tl;dr is "you can go where you want, just be responsible" - don't camp in somebody's garden, don't annoy the sheep, don't interrupt the hunts/stalking, and leave no trace.
It really is a fantastic tradition. As a Scottish expat, but frequent visitor, it's nice to be able to hike, bike, canoe, and camp pretty much anywhere. Trying to do the same in much of the US is likely to result in being chased off with a gun.
"Trying to do the same in much of the US is likely to result in being chased off with a gun."
this is a real problem in the West of the US. There is so much land fenced in that it's really difficult to do cross country hiking. When I visited Scotland it was a breath of fresh air to see how easy it is to get around there.
Wait, what? I live in Colorado, and a third of the state is public land. There's two long distance trails (The CT and the CDT) that go over much of the state, or completely through. I've lived for months on a bike, and never camped in the same spot twice - and never once had to pay for it.
I think there's more public lands in the county I live in currently (Boulder, CO) than there is in all of the State I grew up in (CT). I know many places in this state that I could walk 100 miles through, without hitting a paved road. I live 30 miles from a National Park, and 18 miles from the nearest Wilderness Area.
A, "right to roam" law would certainly be nice to have, but we're not being suffocated by private land ownership. Things are just different here, than in Scotland. Less people per area of land.
In CA when you go out to the desert areas you often hit fenced in areas you can't/shouldn't cross. This makes it very difficult to approach interesting areas. Sure there plenty of trails but I only realized how confined you are in CA when I got to Scotland where it's so much easier to roam around.
A lot of desert ecosystems are incredibly fragile, and if just one asshole with an offroad vehicle starts doing donuts for fun on the weekend will get damaged in ways that can take decades to recover.
There are plenty of public lands in CA where you can walk around off trail.
Yes, but the existence of jerks with offroad vehicles explains some of the fences.
There are plenty of places where just having visitors regularly hike across the ground off-trail does significant damage to the ecosystem, which is why fragile or popular parks restrict public access to marked trails and designated campsites.
I've stood on mountaintops in California where I couldn't see the end of the National Park I was in, past the horizon. Sequoia-Kings Canyon NP itself is half the size of Scotland.
California has 199,490 km2 of protected public lands, more area than 2.5 Scotlands.
unfortunately there are still many "land locked" public lands among those protected lands in california: public lands which are encircled by private lands, with no easement. in the sierra the access situation is generally very good, however there are definitely examples elsewhere which beg the question of what it means to be "public" when it can't be accessed.
for example, although the summit of berryessa peak is on BLM land, the only access is through private land. fortunately one land owner was convinced to allow an easement on a short section of trail to allow the opening of the berryessa peak trail, and access to this peak, but for years it was public and yet off-limits.[1]
on the west side of lake berryessa, cedar roughs wilderness, currently has no access. there are old roads/trails in there which are accessible from private land, but no public easement.
there was an article posted here last year about similar issues surrounding the crazy mountains in montana[2].
Yes, there are national parks but if you are not close to one you are out of luck. Go out to the Mojave for example. There are huge areas that are fenced off.
There are pretty huge swaths of public lands in America that are easy to look up on a computer. Texas is one if the few states that's deficient in them, by comparison. As unpopular as this statement may be, it really does behoove you to look up where you're going before you start just cutting down fences. But I never bought into that whole anarchy argument, as it quickly devolves into might makes right, by default.
Also, these are typically situations where someone owns land on both sides of a river, and illegally strings wire across the river. Ignoring the fact that the river is a public waterway. Even though their land is posted against trespassing.
The right to roam is said to have it's origin in the middle ages when merchants and other travelers where allowed to grab a hand full of hazelnuts from anywhere to sustain themselves. Similar traditions where common throughout the land. The name "allemansrätten" (right to roam) was invented in the 40's and in the early 90's written into law.
Funny thing is that it's not defined in the legal text, it just says: everyone has access to nature as described in the "allemansrätt". We're expected to know what that means.. :)
Scottish expat here. It seems like a mixed bag for sure. The current land ownership state of affairs combined with the right to roam does tend to keep the large estates free from development and open for tourism. That's good.
But, as the sibling comment mentions, there's a long history of oppression of tenant farmers, who until recently were prevented from buying the land they tend. And the economic impact - while some estates have changed hands over the years, as far as I know, they tend to be sold relatively intact, so there's little chance for people of more modest means to own any of this land.
If you are a tenant farmer, you aren't being "oppressed" by not someone not selling you land. If you offer me £20 for my house, are you being "oppressed" if I don't sell it to you?
The Church of England, Anders Povlsen, and others have all acquired huge amounts of land recently (that is why there is so much complaining about landowners from England who only come up to shoot). There is tons of forestry to bid on, and if you offer the right price then you will find willing sellers...if you offer the right price.
If some aristocrat’s great-great-...-grandpa was a thug soldier in a conquering army or the screwup third son of some foreign noble who the king owed a favor to or possibly a merchant who made a fortune in the slave trade and then married into a noble family (or whatever, pick your favorite backstory), and the aristocrat’s tenant farmers’ ancestors were the local people pressed into involuntary labor who then literally built everything nearby with their own hands over the subsequent few centuries, why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force sometime in the distant past continue to own everything, while the ones doing all the work own nothing?
This is exactly why the US [used to] have a meaningful inheritance tax.
Without such a tax, compound earnings on investments implies that over time, a very small fraction of the population will control the vast majority of all economic resources.
At the Federal level there is a progressive estate tax up to 40%.
I don’t believe the rates have changed much, but the base amount which is excluded has increase to ~$5.5million per person, $11m per married couple.
Why do you say “used to”? This is not nearly so much of an exclusion amount as to approach an effect where “a very small fraction of the population will control the vast majority of all economic resources.”
Why should they continue to own it? So that some other account can't write a four-line paragraph and tell us to take what you own. We protect other peoples' property rights in order to secure our own.
Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Citizens should not be accumulating dynastic aristocratic fortunes. Small groups of people should not – based on accidents of history – end up inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society.
This is not about opposition to private property. I’m fine if people own a house, or a family farm, or a small business, or even a controlling stake in a large business they built from nothing. (Though it would be great if at that point the public had transparency into their self-serving political activities.)
But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society. It creates perverse incentives away from long-term thinking towards large-scale fraud and abuse, and entrenches the political influence of an aristocratic class whose primary goal is to maintain their fortunes rather than contribute to the society.
Why are they unjust? I don't see how wealth transferring from one person to another is the same as "inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society". Did the heirs also steal everyone else's things when the wealth was passed on? How does that happen?
If inequality is very high (say 1% own 40% of the resources), and a child inherits almost a percentage of the _entire society’s wealth_ just by birth then that select group of inheritances is receiving incredible portions of the accumulated wealth of society by birth becomes an aristocracy.
Yes that's true, but the actual percentage of ownership hasn't changed, it stays the same. But the bigger issue is that the economy is not really a finite thing. Owning a certain amount of land, maybe by inheritance is not the same as owning a never changing percentage of all the resources. A good counter example might be something like inheriting shares of Google, or Amazon. Those people might never have owned any significant percentage of land but that did not stop them from owning something else that is more valuable than the land. So the resources change over time and I don't really see why land ownership is being used as a proxy for everything. Now, also, you may have not been making that point yourself but just clarifying. I just want to talk people down from the land confiscation movement because it seems destructive and pointless.
1% of 1 million people is 10,000 people, who will be roughly half kids and young adults — the heirs.
So you’re talking 0.00008% of the wealth being passed down, roughly. That’s still pretty unequal in a society with a lot of people, but I’m also not sure smashing any granule of accumulated wealth leads to a vibrant society — the inter generational transfer of structures is essential for culture.
Capitalism is fundamentally just highly mobile aristocracy, though — and that may be the best we can do.
So there are a couple issues here. Taxes(on the rich), economic opportunity(from monopolies and corruption), land ownership, and implicitly a notion of fairness and these all become merged in to one issue but I don't think they really are all the same at all.
Land ownership seems like a much more mundane part of the economy actually but it is being equated with the entire economy. So what does land ownership have to do with monopolies, corruption, and the rich paying proper taxes? What are proper taxes for the rich to pay?
To me the land ownership issue is being used as a wedge to reinforce a different idea that a tiny percentage of people have economically disenfranchised everyone else. I really don't think land ownership should be equated with that however. At this point, the argument is very different. It's gone from why we should confiscate people's land to what tax rates should be, or who the "rich" are, or why real estate prices are what they are. To me the land confiscation case seems like scapegoating of landowners for things like real estate prices or economic inequality.
Really? I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.
> But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society.
I actually don't disagree with this. But we're talking about England here, and even if you stop the money, you still have the class structure and the connections, which still lead to political power.
But even more, while I agree that the problem is real, I disagree with your solution. "Lets just take it from them, and give it to those who have less" is such a seductive dream, but it destroys societies and economies where it is tried.
> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.
You have people like Buffett, Gates even Andrew Carnegie and many other billionaires saying that their wealth should go back to society instead of their kids, are they all wrong?
> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.
Saying it's your stuff, is the misnomer. It was found by your because it was someone else's stuff, but there's supposed to be some moral virtue of you receiving it, because you benefited from it during your upbringing.
Being offended by a perceived slight in Procedural justice is a matter of circumstance - ie altering the principles you were born under for Distributive justice, even if you don't think it's as equitable based on your experience. From a pragmatic point of view, inheritance causes Capitalism to fall into anarchy in the long term...making it inherently immoral, as a practice. Unless you want to dispense with capitalism, in which case it's still immoral to a lesser degree (lesser evil against a greater evil).
It doesn't sound like the inheritance is the problem but the concentrstion of power. A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Therefore every generation splits the wealth among two or more people which leads to a reduction in wealth concentration.
In romanian history I know 2 positive examples where land was confiscated and redistributed with positive effects: one by Alexandru Ioan Cuza who confiscated most land owned by church(roughly 25% of the country) and another instance during ww1 when the King decreted every peasant fighting in the war will be alloted land by the state.
Nothing bad came from that, the people were already working the land, they just got to take home the fruits of their labor more.
Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2.
The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system.
Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.
But the collectivisation was the exact opposite: it took land from everybody and gave it to the state.
My point was, land/wealth redistribution, can and often is a good thing, it's not a sacrilege that aytomatically ends in dissaster as some die-hards make it to be.
Everybody?! The communist propaganda was very careful to underline that they only took from those "who had too much" to give to those "who needed" for the "betterment of everybody".
Too bad if you (dirt poor and uneducated) went to fight in WW1 to get some land and then spent the years after WW1 working that land like crazy to buy more land because you believed that gave your children a better chance in life than you had.
Because that's what happens when you don't have principles (like "private property is sacred") and you replace them instead with nebulous beliefs that sometimes it's OK to steal from others, as long as they have more than you do and you get some of that booty.
That was just propaganda. They took priate property away from everyone that had something. Even if you had two cows, they took that away and made it state property. The process is quite nicely illustrated in the Morometii sequel that came out last year:
That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.
The people digging in my grand parent's garden to find&take their hidden winter children clothes and provisions were 100% Romanians, locals from that tiny village, previous lazy losers freshly empowered into dedicated tools of the communist regime.
It was roughly the same during the French Revolution and giving public land to veterans is a practice since the Roman Empire. But in the USSR during Stalin, colectivised agricultural land amounted to 91%. The blosheviks took land from everyone who owned land, big or small. Add to that other private property such as livestock, means of production.
I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.
Land reforms and redistribution never work. It just disrupts the current social order, pisses off people from which the land has been taken, pisses off people who didn't get as much as their neighbor and eventually, roughly within 50 years, leads to similar social structure as before the reform. Only with different social class becoming the owners. The old aristocracy gets displaced by new oligarchic aristocracy. This has happened all over Eastern Europe.
The actual solution is capturing of the rent as the land value increases. The increase on land value is due to society contributing, but the beneficiary is the landlord sitting on it. Tax the consumer, not the producer of the value. Tax land, not labor and business.
The aristocratic power law society has to be broken in order to fix the system. Bolsheviks didn't understand this. Or they did and they organized the coup just to become the new bosses.
Without this understanding our society will still be very primitive and suffer from revolutions and aristocracy cycles. At least in ancient times they understood basic ethics in terms of ethics of ownership and how destructive debt was on a society. It seems like today we are blessed with all these new technologies but live more and more in some medieval dark age dystopia.
The oligarchs are generally former Communist managers who cashed out as the Soviet Union crashed. So really not that different from William the Conqueror etc.
> We protect other peoples' property rights in order to secure our own.
And from there follows a simple equation - when the distribution of benefit from recognizing existing property rights is too skewed in favor of the few, the gains to be had by the rest from refusing to recognize those rights anymore exceed the risks of not being able to secure your own.
When elites forget about this equation for too long, revolutions happen.
Property rights beyond "what you can defend is yours" are a purely human invention; there's nothing innate to the world that says that the property rights regime that exists now is the right one.
There are other ways you could approach it that would distribute ownership and political power in a more egalitarian way, and as ownership (and political power) become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, more and more people will realize that "we protect others' property rights to secure our own" is not meaningful. There's nothing of our own to secure, and never will be in a significant way.
This sort of refiguring of property rights can happen incrementally and peacefully (through tweaking taxes, etc), or suddenly (revolution). We've seen both lots of times in history.
Where we go next is the question; but ending the discussion the way you wanted to isn't all that practical or interesting.
Look, if you want an inheritance tax, I don't object, even if it's 50%. (I might at 90%, though. And if you're going to rely on an inheritance tax, you also probably have to tax trusts...)
I just object to the "they have to much, so we should take it from them" rhetoric, on the principle that, once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich, and they should take what I have. In the process, they'll destroy the economy of the country. I really would prefer that that particular genie stays in the bottle...
The UK's landowners have already destroyed the economy of the country. The country has food banks, literal starvation, and barely functional health, education, and transport systems. Industry has been almost completely sold off, and services are following in due course.
Overt this period the landowners have accumulated more personal wealth than at any time since the Enclosures.
Your point is naive first-order thinking about a third-order problem. "If we let people take billionaire stuff they may take my stuff" is nonsense.
What actually happens in redistributive economies is high taxation leads to high stability combined with high opportunity - not the false rhetoric of opportunity hiding a reality of very poor social mobility, which is what the US has, but genuine social mobility and business opportunity.
Huge inequalities are actually more like to result in revolution and war than stable economies where wealth is more evenly distributed.
Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation.
This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.
Labour rhetoric. The UK isn't "barely functional", that's a ludicrous communist fantasy that can be traced back right to Marx, who tried to convince his readers of the dire near apocalyptic state of England by committing various kinds of fraud - like making up quotes and attributing them to the PM, or relying on obsolete government reports into factory conditions. Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents.
Nor have "landowners already destroyed the economy of the country". The UK economy is the fastest growing in Europe right now (of the rich nations), unemployment is at record lows despite a long term massive influx of immigrants: its economy is literally the opposite of destroyed. You're lying about the reality of the UK, whilst criticising others for being naive.
Shooting down your trad-Marx rhetoric with economic facts is easy so I'd like to focus primarily on this oft-cited belief:
Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation. This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.
But it is a moral point. The people who perform "seismic social dislocation" in response to (perceived or actual) economic inequality have a long history of performing that dislocation by shooting peaceful people, stealing all their stuff, building forced labour camps, liquidating all their political opposition and then turning their countries into hellholes. The communists who did all these things absolutely deserve moral condemnation and their acts cannot simply be whitewashed away as some sort of mechanical inevitability, no more than someone could excuse the Nazis as some sort of mechanical inevitability given the inequalities imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versaille.
Compare the fate of every country where your views have gained critical mass vs America. The latter is one of the world's most successful countries, if not the most. The others are all slowly recovery from absolute poverty, and recovering only because they finally turned their back on your Corbynite views.
> Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents
I've heard most of the anti-Marx stories - some invented, some just rumor, a few true. Never heard this one before. Not sure what one of these jibes you are referring to.
Marx traced the history of capitalism in England. Actually in his studies he showed how working conditions had gotten better in some respects. He was writing a history, so of course he referred to "obsolete...long since reports".
You are correct that he predicted capitalism was in a death spiral. Just as he had observed feudalism in a death spiral, and knew about the Roman slave latifundia economy's death spiral before that.
Corporate America going to the taxpayer to bail out "too big to fail" deregulated banks is precisely the kind of thing Marx predicted. Marx said eventually that would lead to the end of capitalism.
Who knows, the amount of carbon poured into the atmosphere increases every year, perhaps capitalism and humanity will both end at the same time before Marx's visions could be realized.
> ...once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich...
Doesn’t mean it’s right either. Taken from the link you cited:
> One reason why I am skeptical has to do with the difficulty of the causal reasoning needed to establish that a slope really is slippery; most slippery slope arguments make little or no attempt to do this hard work. Moreover, it is difficult even in retrospect to tell whether a slippery slope mechanism has actually been at work.
I see no attempt on the part of the commenter I replied to, to make this kind of effort. And to save them the effort of doing so- even if they had established the presence of a slippery slope, they’d still need to prove it was the causal agent of the consequences they described.
Short of evidence to prove in advance that action A will lead to consequence B, this comes across as scaremongering.
The flaw here is talking about the 'rich'. You can divide rich into absentee landlords collecting hight rents and stifling the economy down and the actual rich who became so through entrepreneurship or other positive impact activities.
I think the sequence of events you're proposing is implausible, on the order of likelihood of a zombie apocalypse or the apes rising up to overthrow mankind.
"If we decide that billionaires represent a policy failure that has allowed a few to concentrate wealth and power and society collectively wrests some of that back from those with such a disproportionate power and wealth, then that means eventually 'they' will come after my inconsequentially meager possessions."
I saw an interesting documentary recently about the British Royal art collection, and it included the interesting quote: "At the root of every great fortune is a crime".
The original British Royal art collection was confiscated in 1649 by Cromwell and it's putative owner was put to death! Almost all of it was sold off, with some parts later returned after the restoration and then glorious revolution (which was more or less a coup). The subsequent collection was built up significantly by the Hanoverian's.
I expect that the crime being referred to was the execution of Charles 1st?
In the documentary they were examining a famous piece from the collection depicting Ceasar's conquest of Gaul (France), which, according to the documentary, was effectively a genocide.
A quote attributed to Honoré de Balzac, but when I went to use it a few years ago I wanted a citation and found that his actual words were neither so pithy nor so broadly implicative:
"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly/cleanly done," is my fairly literal translation, but I am not really fluent enough to capture subtleties.
Ignoring the fact that a lot of the land has changed hands since then (the issue is concentration not identity of owners...a dangerous conflation): are you saying that a morality test should be applied to the family tree of all property purchasers?
I am sure this is attractive to you because you are a member of the "virtuous class" no doubt, but have you checked your family tree? How far back? What genetic crimes prohibit property ownership? Class traitor? Rightist? Capitalist Roader? Perhaps religion?
And why do these people still own land? Presumably you aren't personally being pressed into involuntary labour, so why do you as someone who is doing "all the work" still have nothing? These inbred landowners are presumably so feckless they would take anything (certainly, lots of these estates go for sale every year).
If you go far enough back in my family tree of European peasants, I’m sure there are plenty of bastard children of feudal lords in there. Not to mention thieves, killers, psychopaths, abusers, and so on. Likewise, I’m sure there are plenty of aristocrats (both historically and today) who are lovely people who treat their servants pleasantly and pay them above market wages, and so on.
That’s not the point. The point is that a small group today shouldn’t be the inheritors of the entire society’s wealth. We shouldn’t be judging people today based on the actions of distant ancestors. And the way to avoid that judgement is for the majority of absurdly wealthy people’s property to devolve to the state when they die.
> And the way to avoid that judgement is for the majority of absurdly wealthy people’s property to devolve to the state when they die.
That just makes the state the owner of most of the society's wealth--which in practice means the small group of people who control the state own it. How is this better?
Because it’s far easier for someone with a great vision about how to use the state’s wealth for everybody’s benefit to get themselves elected to the governing body than it is for them to get themselves reincarnated as an aristocrat.
Is it though? In the US, I think, it’s far easier for someone to make a billion dollars, and thus be able to buy a bunch of land or whatnot, than it is for a president or major politician to be elected with a clear enough vision to do something.
I base this on the number of new billionaires vs the number of major new political initiatives.
I think it’s quite easy to have a vision, but very difficult to filter those through the will of the people. In the sense that a great vision is very subjective and may not be believed by the large number of people necessary to change things in a constitutional republic.
> someone with a great vision about how to use the state’s wealth for everybody’s benefit
History shows that such people are much, much rarer than people who have a great vision about how to use wealth they have either inherited or built up themselves for everybody's benefit. Or, to put it another way, people with a great vision that will actually work are far more likely to become entrepreneurs than politicians. Bill Gates is eradicating malaria using his own wealth while governments have failed to do so for centuries.
I agree. But it can be made simpler than that. If the owner actually wants his land property to be inherited, why shouldn't he pay for the property protection over his life himself? If he convinced the society that he really is the owner this way, I don't think the society would have found this private
land property or inheritancee unethical.
What they find disturbing though is that they as a society have to pay for all these property related services like internal protection (police, courts, law system) like external protection (army) and give these to the sitting and do-nothing landlords for free. While paying for them from their pocket through income taxes and receiving nothing back.. Actually the landlords are then so kind as to increase their home rents as a Thank you.
Okay, that isn't the point...but that is what you said: "why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force"...how else is this supposed to be interpreted? Because of someone's ancestors, this group shouldn't own property. If you want to make a different point, then make it.
And it isn't random. You can acquire this property if you want. But be aware, you seem to be expecting to acquire the "entire society's wealth"...most of this land isn't that valuable and that land that is requires work (which is why it is valuable).
Again, I don't understand what your point is here beyond anger that someone else has something you want?
EDIT: Are you actually familiar with the population distribution and density in Scotland? A good chunk of this land is just agriculture and rough grass that has few economic uses. This isn't land that anyone wants to live on. The main concern of the govt, as I understand it, is to encourage forestry (which will mean more large owners, not less).
I happen to think there are good social, and perhaps most importantly, ecological reasons why the current land ownership situation in Scotland isn't ideal.
And that's without looking at the rather nasty and complicated history of land ownership here - but I can recommend Andy Wightman excellent book The Poor Had No Lawyers to explain that.
1% of England's population is about 550,000, that is extreme inequality. You seem to think its OK for a small percentage of people to have everything as long as you have the right to roam around. I respectfully disagree. Wealth equals political and social power and it should be divided more evenly in order to ensure democracy. Make not mistake Capitalism mean fair and free - but in our warped form of Capitalism we have those with money rigging the rules for their own benefit and as such we don't have Capitalism we have Aristocracy.
> You seem to think its OK for a small percentage of people to have everything as long as you have the right to roam around.
Agriculture in the United Kingdom uses 69% of the country's land area. 476,000 people work on those farms. That farms take up a disproportionate amount of land compared to urban areas doesn't tell us anything about income inequality. Most people in England want to live in cities, so even the wealthiest citizens might own little to no land (how much land does a wealthy penthouse owner own if all they own is that penthouse).
To be clear, I'm not saying that income inequality doesn't exist. We just don't see examples of it by looking at farmland.
The wealthy penthouse owner is actually an interesting case in point.
Traditionally England only had Leasehold ownership of 3D space, you couldn't own it in perpetuity. Since the penthouse is presumably above many other properties belonging to other people its owner could only own a "long lease" (e.g. 100 or 250 years) on the penthouse, with the permanent freehold rights separate, often owned by brass plate companies with the ground rent and other fees paid to them disappearing into opaque foreign corporations.
Some years ago, recognising that this is crap, the British government introduced Commonhold, a way to own 3D space that acknowledges that the property owners who share the same physical building need to work together but rejects the approach that the Freehold should be a profit centre for rent-seeking third party investors.
So in principle today a penthouse could be owned Commonhold, which means it comes with membership of a "Commonhold Association" an entity that exists only so that the Commonhold owners can all be members, and to own the Freehold that they're all dependent on instead of it being possible for somebody else to own that.
In practice people didn't say "I demand Commonhold" and accept a price premium for this improved ownership. So if you developed a piece of land after the reform you had the choice, sell a property Commonhold for £X or sell the same property as Leasehold with say a £1000pa escalator ground rent going to Property Holding Corp 3472 based in the British Virgin Islands, for £X. It was a no brainer, and there are very few Commonhold properties today and plenty of these mysterious property holding corporations earning fat stacks.
Sure, its farms. Tell me another one. If yo see who owns all the wealth, it would be about an equal percentage of the population. Stop deflecting from the gross income inequality that exists in UK and across the world. Its a fight that you can't win because the numbers don't support you. (pfss. "It's farms").
69% of all the land in the UK is farm land. Most farms are owned by individual farmers. Those farmers make up roughly 1% of the total population. The numbers absolutely support this (feel free to research it yourself if you don't want to take my comment as gospel).
There are legitimate signs of income inequality. This just happens to not be one of them. No one defines income equality as everyone in the country owning roughly the same acres of land. The vast majority of people live in urban areas, so we wouldn't expect that those city-dwellers all owned roughly the same percent of farmland.
how can we cure these poor people from this delusion that they have a right to possess what they have not earned?
life is inequitable you have to fight to get a higher station. substituting taking responsibility to create wealth for convincing yourself you're entitled to it just disempowers you.
I'm not saying it's not hard. but that it is hard is not special and that it is hard is the motivation to overcome it. and when you get there that your hard earned achievement can be taken away by people who don't want to overcome is wrong.
The fundamental point is this wealth is not some free right it's not some magical thing that just exists. wealth is precisely the value created by overcoming difficulties.
wealth is made by work and the people who make it ought to be free to choose what they do with it rather than coerced into surrendering it in the name of equity, a false equity which is inequitable to the moral nature of wealth, responsibility and hard work. that kind of idea is a disease that will erode away the social foundation.
I'm not saying wealth disparity is easy nor that it creates no problems. it creates a lot of problems but I don't believe the solution is by redistribution. at least not at this stage of human and economic evolution. while our species is still bounded by the amount of energy we can extract from our surroundings.
taxes yes, State yes, a social welfare net yes, but not to an excessive degree, and not to cure inequality.
if energy was free of course it should be distributed to all without cost. like air.
but it's not. to do so would bankrupt our species in the name of compassion. the greater compassion is the realization of the poor state we're in, and the preservation of all. not the temporary satisfaction of some who convinced themselves that things should be easy.
one day as a species we will get there. no crushing disparity. but we're not there yet. trying to live like we are already there is a toxic delusion that doesn't help us get to that more compassionate future.
Wealth is made by labor, yes. But it is not accumulated by it. It's accumulated by being in a position of power whereby you can extract rents from the laborers who make it. In older times, this was done by threat of physical force. These days, it's more often done by exploiting some economic advantage - for example, if you own any valuable resource, such as land or means of production, you can extract rent from people who use it.
Whenever you see concentrated wealth with such extreme disparity that you have one person owning more than a million others, there are only two possible conclusions: either they really are a million times more productive, or it was actually produced by that million, and extracted from them via rents.
You could argue that those rents are fair, since they stem from legitimate ownership. But what makes it legitimate? Most land was originally taken by force, for example, and the result enshrined in law (that was written by the people who did this) post factum. If that doesn't make economic advantages that stem from such ownership unfair, then surely the same standard holds today, and those people have no right to complain if society decides to take it away from them by force, and enshrine it into law, just because it can.
Exactly, and there’s in particular the very special kind of rent extracted by the hiring of people to work for you without profit-sharing, and using your negotiation power as a capital owner to get people to agree to the terms of your employment contract stipulating your appropriation of the whole work product.
I’ve found the writings of David Ellerman to be very elucidating on this topic, and admirable for giving a deep critique of capitalism without any reliance on Marxism. He relies on a labor theory of property rather than a labor theory of value, and a Lockean liberal notion of inalienable rights. Two short texts that make a good introduction:
Land is finite natural resource and its ownership is a zero sum situation. Company ownership, however, is not. It is entirely possible to own your sweat and labor, which is demonstrated by millions of small business owners.
The sentiment we hear often, however, is yearning for benefits of co-owning a (ideally mature and profitable) business while retaining the hired hands' rights. Not many are keen to give up their 8 hour workday, benefits, social welfare net for the upside of owning their share of corporate profits.
Exactly, people are making choices, and then complaining about it, which make sense as a coping strategy, but not if you really want to own your own labor.
There's hardly a place in the world (yes, even in Scandinavia) where starting a business entitles you for welfare or the usual labour rights. A typical small entrepreneur has to live with that for years, until the cashflow becomes viable enough to support them employing themselves.
I realize that's not what most people have in mind when they ask for profit sharing. They want to be a part of an already successful operation, and take no risks. And that's precisely what I've been talking about. The process of building a successful business is given little thought, as if they grow on the trees or are being brought to Earth by meteors.
Then there's that thing with businesses statistically being just slightly more often in black than in red. Would your profit sharing scheme involve absorbing the losses as well? How many takers you think it will have? If not them, who will get to absorb the losses, potentially reinvest to weather through rough times etc? The expense would be not negligible, on the order with the profits.
Scandinavian entrepreneurs and coop workers can certainly participate in the social security. Probably some reforms could make the situation better, especially if cooperative business becomes more of a norm.
When the firm spends more than it produces, it needs access to capital. This can be in the form of savings, credit, or new investment. Small new businesses are routinely launched through loans. Credit institutions are quite used to absorbing losses.
A worker-owned coop can also take investment from external capitalists. It would just be in the form of a profit-sharing contract rather than equity with voting rights.
We are in Norway and my wife ran her own small construction engineering business for a few years. You get no welfare, as it is funded from your previous payroll contributions, and only for up to 2 years. If you business is too small for you to have yourself on payroll, tough luck. Getting there takes a while, as tax burden on a business here is quite significant.
> Credit institutions are quite used to absorbing losses.
They are also quite good at taking the profits on their investments. If a bank bails you out, it wants to take its pound of flesh. You essentially arrived at status quo.
It’s also naturally abundant in the form of land, those cadastral game tiles on which life plays out, dominion of which are allocated by the state in a system of hereditary monopolies.
Wealth is not allocated the same way it’s created. That’s why we have the concept of rent-seeking, behavior that increases one’s share of wealth without creating more wealth.
Owning wealth lets you accumulate more wealth without working, because you can charge other people rent in exchange for using your wealth. Not only that; you can also hire people in an arrangement where you automatically own everything they produce using your capital goods.
Rich people know that labor is a very inefficient and tedious way to increase one’s own share of wealth. That’s why they prefer rent, interest, and staying on the top of the employment hierarchy where they have a legal claim on the products of others’ labor.
Yes, work is a true source of wealth, and so is capital and land and the other factors of production. There’s a long history of criticizing how most of the wealth created by working ends up owned by the owners of capital and land—that’s the essential critical point in the discussion of capitalism, whether Marxist or Georgist or Ellermanite.
Or you could say the crucial question is how can we cure the rich people from the delusion that they have a right to appropriate what they have not produced?”
no you couldn't. I think you've been deluded by fancy sounding ideas.
you could just as well say that people are rent seeking with their labor, using the capital of their bodies.
if you deny personal ownership of property and land and the ability to extract wealth for rent from that ownership you may as well also deny personal ownership of one's own body and personal space and the ability earn income for renting out one's time, or professional service or the capital of one's body. that gets you to slavery in one step, well done.
so the simplistic argument that labor capacity of people is fundamentally different to other capital is false. consider that you invested your time and your money in your education to better your skills increasing your ability to rent on your own capital. if you want to deny people extracting money from their investments and property why not also deny them extracting money from their investments in their own education?
so again I think on the premature path to compassion and equality in your mind you have actually found a shortcut which disempowers people and limits their freedoms. I don't think you did this intentionally, you just haven't thought it through.
I understand the temporary appeal but it does not actually provide a workable solution to the problems you are trying to address.
the next step is consider what the second-order effects of policies inspired by your theories would be. the ultimate goal of this is to create a dependent slave class to do the bidding of the elites. these theories have been designed for mass appeal.
Nowhere have I argued for eliminating private property or renting out land or capital; I’m for all of that, so I can’t really respond to your condescending dismissal.
How do you extend this argument to, let's say, three of the richest people on the planet namely Bill G, Mark Z and Jeff B ? What cure do you suggest for them?
Something like using legislation and taxation to shift corporate structure towards something more like democratic worker-owned firms. But that’s a long term project; I don’t suggest suddenly and forcefully restructuring existing corporations. As a fundamental long term goal I suggest abolishing the renting of people (a la David Ellerman), along with heavy taxes on land value (a la Henry George).
That's why the Marxist critique of capital is wrong. Was use of capital to extract rent from others ethical or not? Maybe yes, maybe not, who knows. It is impossible to decide.
Georgist perspective doesn't blame the rich capitalist, but the rentier, no matter if rich or poor. Rentiers provably extract others people's and businesses' labor.
Renting out capital is not an ethical problem, but renting labor is. Human actions are not a commodity, and treating persons as tools is wrong for the same reasons “voluntary slavery” is wrong—it violates inalienable rights. The problem with capitalism is that capital owners alienate persons from their own natural property rights through the injustice of employment contracts. (Land ownership is also a problem in our world but it’s sort of orthogonal to capitalism, although it depends on how you define capitalism. Georgists make a big distinction between capital and land; maybe we can talk about both capitalism and “landism” as different strands of the economic system?)
I think you're being uncharitable towards OP's post; he doesn't make the case you're suggesting. Although I'm not sure that your broader point is too far off.
...yep, and the fact that the population of Scotland is tiny and over 50% of that population live in the Central belt.
Afaik, the only solid evidence against is an apparent lack of "participation" from local communities on land use. Unfortunately, this is an issue that applies as much to council as private landowners in Scotland and also tends to elicit opinions on what "should" be the case, rather than what is actually possible (i.e. people who live in the middle of nowhere complaining about the lack of economic development, complaining that the landowner isn't selling them a house at a cheap enough price, complaining that the landowner only comes up from England to shoot, etc.)
There has been an abundance of loose reasoning on that is justified only by the perception that of unfairness (and, unf, a bit of light bigotry about the English). One of the sources for the rather brief Land Commission report was some political theory on power and participation (https://landcommission.gov.scot/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/R... - Section 5 - I studied Politics postgrad btw, theory shouldn't be used this way...it is basic). Madness.
It's not really a "perception" of unfairness... it's a long rooted and fossilised class system, acting to the detriment of the entire country. (Hopefully your politics postgrad included the clearings.) England at least had the Civil War to equalise things a bit, Scotland has never had any kind of revolution or similar to break very old land ownership structures.
Scotland's second biggest problem is England, in the form of unbalanced monetary transfers from borrowing from London, and the brain drain to England, and for that matter the rest of the world. But its greatest problem is itself, and the domination of control in a few families hands.
You've repeatedly crossed into personal incivility in your HN posts. We've had to warn you about this before. We ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
"...someone who is poor in Scotland can become rich..."
Five minutes of casual googling didn't yield Scotland's current measure of social mobility. The Great Gatsby Curve is a rule of thumb suggesting that inequity & mobility are strongly correlated. Further, the members of the commission responsible for the Elite Scotland report (meant to update the measurements) all resigned in protest, which is probably a bad sign.
> It is amazing that you aren't able to distinguish between your opinion and reality.
This is snark, and is not welcome here.
> my politics postgrad most certainly did not "include" the clearings (I am not even sure what this means
neffy is referring to the Highland Clearances which were a brutal and iniquitous time for tenants in the Highlands. I'm quite surprised that given your chastising tone and appeal to authority by bandying around your politics postgrad studies you hadn't heard of this.
> the result of the Civil War for Scotland was imposition of govt from England.
Whilst there may have been some ripples down through history as a result of the Civil War, there are more conclusive reasons why Scotland became governed from England. Perhaps you should read some Scottish history. In particular the bits about the Union of Crowns and the 1707 Act of Union.
I'd also suggest grabbing a copy of Andy Wightman's "The Poor Had No Lawyers"[1], he explains land ownership in Scotland and the reasons why it is difficult for ordinary folks to make inroads into fair land ownership here.
> It not only reeks of bigotry but is a self-destructive pattern of thought. Scotland's decline is a function of the nation and it's people. These "stab in the back" myths only help the weak-minded find (empty) solace in their failure.
Hoo boy....I'm shouldn't even grace this with a response it's so ludicrous and ill-informed; and I'd suggest you not accuse others of bigotry as it's downright rude.
Politically (not culturally) England has always been a problem for Scotland. I highly doubt you're a member of the SNP (I am and your claim from the comments above fail the sniff test), maybe you meant the BNP?
You've broken the site guidelines badly yourself in this comment. Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling, regardless of how another commenter has behaved.
This is oddly seen as something to be proud of rather than an embarrassment among some of the media:
>It is encouraging that a man whose family first got rich because his ancestor was the fat huntsman (gros veneur) of William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference. It gives hope to us all.
If you're open to a bit of interesting fiction, _The Wake_ by Paul Kingsnorth is a post apocalyptic novel set after the Norman invasion of 1066. Kingsnorth wrote the book in an invented version of old english:
Here's Kingsnorth writing about the consequences of the Norman invasion upon England today:
> [...] legacies of 1066 remain with us. Take that law enacted by Guillaume in 1067. In Anglo-Saxon England, the idea that one man — the king — literally owned the entire landbase of the nation would have been unthinkable. Today, it remains a legal reality: England is still owned, as a whole, by the Crown. The hereditary monarchy introduced by the Normans remains too, and the French concept known as ‘primogeniture’ — in which estates are inherited wholesale by the first-born son, rather than parceled out between children as was more common in Anglo-Saxon England
> [...] Today, Britain is the country with the second most unequal distribution of land on Earth, after Brazil. More than 70 per cent of the land is owned by fewer than two per cent of the population. Much of this is directly traceable to Guillaume, whose 22nd-great-granddaughter sits on the English throne today.
> [...] ask yourself whether the development of early modern capitalism in England would have been possible without that concentration of land, and therefore power and wealth. What about the consequent empire? Did the industrial revolution begin in England because that funnel of power and money made it possible? Or what about class, which is directly connected to all of those things? We are still one of the most socially and economically stratified countries in Europe. In today’s England, the rulers still drink wine and the ‘plebs’ still drink beer, just as they did in 1066.
> [...] The Duke dealt with this problem in characteristic style: with violence. He marched his army up through the south-east, burning, looting and raping. He circled London, burnt Southwark to the ground and then marched west, brutalising the populations of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire.
Quite, some good old fashioned respect for the rule of law there...
The Wake is an exceptional book. It introduced me to the fact that Welsh meant slave in old English. It also led me to wonder whether the British trait of forelock tugging or deference to a supposed upper class was really just “colonization of the mind”.
Come come old chap, you don't get to be editor of an esteemed organ like the Daily Torygraph by cultivating self-awareness, irony, or other kinds of flim-flammery.
> Upon his father's death, in August 2016, as well as the peerages, he inherited a wealth currently estimated at £9 billion, with considerable trust funds for his sisters. This wealth is held in a trust, of which the Duke is a beneficial owner but not the legal owner — an arrangement which received considerable press attention due to the inheritance tax exemption this confers.
I don't think its to do with fairness, but as this exemplifies, wealth accumulates over generations. If left unchecked then over 400 years a few people own a huge chunk of the world. Why? Is that good for society? Doesn't seem so. Yet society spends a lot of time and money enforcing these laws. Certainly you want your children to inherit if you've done well, but hundreds of years later?
Ownership is a fiction of society, as are most rules, and its probably up to us to decide what "fairness" means. I find it hard to make an argument that someones great grandchildren to the nth level has any claim on this property. So inheritance taxes do seem reasonable.
I have wondered if the modern trend of the rich establishing "foundations" is a way to sidestep inheritance taxes. The foundation will accumulate assets that will be controlled by the heirs some goes to charity which is good for society, but still more and more assets will of necessity be controlled by the foundation and all tax free.
I don’t know. If I’ve been paying taxes over my income all my life, and I’ve chosen to do nothing with what remains, what business is that of the government? It’s just another way of double taxation.
Does it make more sense to think that a grandson should get paid because the grandfather inherited a billion that the son (who dies) wasn't able to spend fast enough to squander? Both inheritance scenarios are conventions and both are a bit silly when presented nakedly without nuance.
You have it backwards. When a person dies, their property becomes unowned (dead people cannot own things). It is active government intervention that takes that unowned property and gives to rich kids on the basis of some scribbles on some pieces of paper.
You say that like it goes to the government and stays there. But really this would just be another part of the public budget. So try it the other way around:
I don't think it's fair that public services for all have to be cut so that some people who's parents (not themselves!) got very rich can stay rich. Let them start out from "wealthy" or from "well off" instead, and let everyone else go from "scraping by" to "okay" in return.
If you extend this logic then it would imply that government should simply prevent anyone from getting rich - dead or alive. If you were socialist then you still wouldn’t have issue with this but for all others this would be infringement on their right to own property and more broadly to achieve prosperity even while doing nothing illegal. In other words, becoming rich should not be an act of crime that leads to stiff penalties.
A more logical view is to think of inheritance as just usual income to other person and hence eligible for usual income tax as contribution towards shared goal of the society.
1. You can extend that argument like that, but I wouldn't. At least not to "there should be no rich people at all". But at some level of wealth, a difference in quantity (of money owned by an individual) becomes a difference in quality, and IMHO we should think really hard if we want that difference to exist in our societies.
2. I agree that an inheritance can/should be treated just like an income. And that's why I applied the usual tax fairness argument of "the more wealth you have, the more responsibility you bear for financing public services, because you have greatly (if perhaps indirectly) benefited from them."
> I'm not sure why everyone thinks it's fair the government should get paid when a citizen dies.
I'd argue that it's even less fair that the government feels it's entitled to a percentage of your income. Taking money from a dead person doesn't seem as bad as taking money from a living person.
Nobody likes taxes, but they have been a part of society for several thousand years.
You might not need your money when you're dead, but people you very much wanted to provide for and support, like your spouse or your children, certainly do need it if they survive you. Providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth.
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP. So a proper analysis of having children on the economy would compare the output of:
- someone without children; and
- someone with children plus the net output of their children discounted to present day value.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the average person without children individually contributes more to GDP than the average person with children. However, that's largely because raising children takes time, labor, and resources. The person with children is sacrificing their own individual wealth and production and investing it their children. However, when the children's future production is taken into account, discounted by the future value of that production, I suspect that it turns out the other way.
I don't have data on this and although my suspicions feel correct, maybe they aren't. I'd be genuinely to see such data.
> That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP
I think you're taking that in the wrong direction. The op was suggesting that the primary reason people work hard and create wealth is because they want to leave money for their children after they're dead, and that a redistributive estate tax would prevent that. Essentially: people are primarily motivated to create because of their children.
> The op was suggesting that the primary reason people work hard and create wealth is because they want to leave money for their children after they're dead
No, I was not. I was saying that that is one of the main reasons, not the main reason.
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
That's not what I was claiming. I was only claiming that providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth, not that it is the only motivation.
Do you have a dataset showing that people with spouses and children do not do productive work and create wealth?
Of course the thing about systems of rules with people is that they react to incentives in inconvenient ways. At best they would save less to pass on if nobody they cared about would receive any of it.
Really if we valued equality of opportunity at all cost we would either collectivize or randomize children but needless to say that would be incredibly unpopular and not lead to good outcomes given aspects of mammalian child-raising and bonds - we already know from our experience with orphanages that calling the results sub-optimal is an understatement.
That isn't too surprising as an extension of the Upton Sinclair quote
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Essentially those who benefit from the status quo will nearly always rationalize it as why it is a good thing even if it is transparently benefiting from and perpetuating travesties.
It sadly takes a good deal of integrity and self-awareness to not do so.
There seems to be a major cultural force in the UK of enforcing their own bubbles of hereditary elite self-justification at all costs - and that is sadly by no means unique. It has been seen many times throughout history and around globe and usually ends in utter disaster when reality comes along and slaps them in the face - often after many smaller disasters which should have been major warning signs were ignored.
Pandering to their readership. Daily Telegraph is mostly read by rich old white people who need constant reminders that they are upholding ancient and noble traditions to justify their choices.
I don’t need the daily telegraph to remind me of this. Worse than people that exploit others and don’t care are the people that do so and do care to some extend.
Because this is the only positive aspect. In most continental countries family wealth doesn't go that far back not because of enlightened equality but because it was burned in a war or confiscated in a revolution.
It’s certainly impressive to the families that have benefited and more importantly continue to benefit from this stability. If I was a scion of one of these families it would make absolute sense that I would do anything within my power to maintain this status quo.
Looking at that history it’s easy to think that might be how the “born to rule” mentality among the aristocracy in the UK became so entrenched.
To attach this to stability is to implicitly assume that what's important is that the wealth itself was passed down between generations. This would require stability, because if the wealth was all lost in one event, the chain would be irrevocably broken.
The alternative view is that the people in these families have the personal characteristics that allow one to build wealth, and that those characteristics are passed down (either by some kind of conditioning, or genetically, or some combination). This doesn't require much stability at all, since the wealth can all be lost but the capacity to build it is not as long as the person survives.
Examples of the second view can be found in diverse examples like: Wealthy Irans who lost everything in the '79 revolution, moved to America, and rebuilt from nothing to become wealthy again, often not even speaking English to start. Jews after the Holocaust, who lost everything and rebuilt from nothing to now become >17% of global billionaires on 0.1% of global population. And so on.
Though both views are obviously in effect, given the massive instability present throughout history, I'm inclined to say the second causality is dominant over the long term, while the first is only effective over the short term (e.g. trust-fund babies who lose everything in one generation, pro sports players or lottery winners who get millions and lose it all within a few years, etc).
I think it's important to keep both causalities in mind.
Education and development are essentially the most 'durable' of goods - it cannot be stolen once taken - only damaged or destroyed by killing the bearer. In the past nutrition also played a similar role where better nourished aristocrats would have a concrete advantage over peasants.
With no cataclysms to prove their ability to rebuild if needed, wealth's ability to self perpetuate means ascribing it to stability makes sense. Since they would remain wealthy as both with and without the 'virtues' (in the sense of self-promotion as opposed to morality) its presence is irrelevant. All they need to do is avoid doing anything extraordinarily stupid and wasteful.
Good point, theres plenty of storys about aristocrats frittering their wealth away on cards. Genetics? I'll stay away from that one.
I'm not sure it really changes the dynamic very much though. Even if the cream always rises to the top, theres no harm in shaking the milk bottle every so often.
all I'm thinking: it takes a lot of luck and discipline to keep a fortune for 950 years. You could say laws (might forbid sale unless...), but I imagine that they weren't enforced uniformly. Where do you store the title? Imagine what the country went through 950 years.
IIRC, they only lease the land for as much as 999 years, don't sell.
Well not everyone cares, the media gets clicks from the hoards people who can never qualify to even aspire to be in the same situation, but not everyone sees it as an embarrassment
Most weath created in capitalism is a result of very recent development (see all IT companies that top S&P500). The generalizations that this article promotes, do seem akin to communist pamphlets. Those also use populist rethorics and half truth to steer hatred towards the rich.
There's a huge class element to startups. The rich well connected people get more funding faster. The equity distribution and contract negotiations is based on social connections and power dynamics. The access to the right higher education is based on parent's wealth.
I totally have a preference during hiring and promotions whether I like to admit it or not if someone is like me in some substantiative way. I also put up with more bullshit from them. Power perpetuates itself even when you fight again it
The entire silicon valley is dripping with classic robber baron style clubhouse capitalism enormously predetermined by class.
Whenever everything is run by a bunch of similar looking white dudes who grew up in rich neighborhoods claiming it's some bountiful meritocracy of equal opportunity skill based free market Utopia requires some mighty fine rose colored glasses.
There's an important reality here that organizes and filters the structure.
And to ward off the classic responses:
1 It's not necessarily a bad thing.
2 I'm not saying there's something wrong with it
3 I'm blaming nobody
4 I'm not saying it needs fixing
5 I mostly vote libertarian
This is just a reality and your personal politics shouldn't get in the way of acknowledging the sky is blue and water is wet.
YC admits a wide range of founders, and gives them excellent access to SVs networks.
This whole class fatalism/cynicism thing is really disheartening to see repeated over and over on the internet as if it’s some fundamental truth, it doesn’t reflect my experience at all. It’s certainly not “sky is blue and water is wet” level certainty.
Your description is dead on. And it's absolutely dystopian, especially for anyone who falls outside of the specific caste described.
But I find it odd that you wouldn't think there's something wrong with it. Essentially large swaths of the population are locked out. That is a huge problem.
i don't think so, considering that a cornerstone of the marxist historical worldview is that in europe the industrial revolution and bourgeois political revolutions overthew the feudal ruling class and replaced it
The social class system in the UK has shown incredible resiliency over the centuries. The names of Normans who came over after the conquest in 1066 are apparently still over-represented at Oxbridge [0]. Further, and per one study, "social status, wealth, education and occupational status was highly heritable – even more so than one’s height – and could be correlated to one’s family name".
Before anyone reads this article. It is talking about actual acreage of land, not dollar value. Most of these 1% own large ranches in rural areas. For some of these people, the reason they own large rural lands is for conservation purposes. For example, the number two private land owner, Ted Turner, uses most of his land for environmental conservation.
it’s certainly preferable, but that is just once slice of data at one time... what is more important is the trend... are we in the midst of a huge reversal back towards those times?
it would seems so, and if so, i would argue it needs to be stopped before it becomes completely intractable...
There's a sobering book "The Great Leveler" that argues that the only time growing inequality is reversed is during large scale war or other mass death event like plague.
It’s an observable reality that all gains in income by the unlanded class are captured by the landed class in the form of rents. There is hysteresis, so in the short term it can appear the landlord class is losing ground, but it’s just an illusion and they always catch up eventually.
Moral: if you have significant financial assets and no real property and you want to provide lasting wealth for your descendants, then a portfolio rebalance is in order.
It’s also an artifact of the leasehold/freehold system, most properties you buy do not come with a right to the land and you continue to pay a land use tax to the actual owner of the land.
This means that you for example can buy a flat in a newly built development and you’ll have to pay like £100 a month for the land use.
The lease itself is assigned to X number of years with laws being passed to force longer and longer leases as well automatic renewal as there have been issues with homes towards the end of their lease with <100 or even <50 years left essentially tanking in value since technically at the end of the lease the land reverts back to its owner.
Don’t get me wrong this system is completely shit but this is a click bait.
One of my favorite tidbits of history, introduced to me by the Poldark stories, is that of the Basset family of Devonshire. They are one of the few aristocratic families that has an intact patrilineal descent going back to the Norman conquest. Which means that in 2066, they will have maintained their family holdings for 1000 years.
I was just about to point that out. Thanks for doing that!
Imagine a 100x100m piece of London with an 80-storey high-rise where every storey is a massively luxurous penthouse apartment. If you own one of those apartments, that would be 1.25% ownership of an area which is 1% of a square kilometer. -- But it's pretty obviously worth more than 125 square meters of agricultural land.
Add to that the fact that the majority of land by area is agricultural land. Add to that the fact that the land ownership of an agricultural business needs to be of a certain size for the business to be profitable.
This will inevitably lead to the conclusion that this statistic is completely an artefact of the weird way it is constructed. At the same time it pretends to be saying something about wealth disparity.
Ahhh.... I didn’t catch that. Yes, that makes a huge difference. Land in rural areas can be worth a few hundred dollars an acre versus a few million dollars an acre in a major city.
That's a bit higher than I would have thought. I had to check my own country, UK's neighbour Norway.
"The distribution of net wealth is highly skewed in Norway. While average net wealth for households is NOK 1.6 million, the median net wealth is NOK 900 000. Households in the highest 10 percent for net wealth own roughly 53 per cent of total net wealth, the richest 1 per cent control 21 per cent, while the top 0.1 per cent own 10 per cent of total net wealth." [1]
So not as high but still quite high here as well. 10% is about 520.000 which is still substantially more people than the 25.000 that own 50% of the UK wealth.
Home ownership is quite high here [1], 77% of households own their own home. A lot of that is mortgaged. I can't really find equivalent numbers to that in the UK. A lot of the land is "utmark", like out side of cultivated areas, and can be used by pretty much anyone and a lot is just government owned.
Hansard 4 May 1931
Commons Sitting
ORDERS OF THE DAY
The Chancellor of the Exchequer
(Mr Philip Snowden)
1933 - 34 Financial Year
"... a tax at the rate of one penny for each pound of the land value of every unit of land in Great Britain..."
"By this measure we assert the right of a community to the ownership of land. If private individuals continue to possess a nominal claim to the land they must pay to the community for the enjoyment of it, and they cannot be permitted to enjoy that privilege to the detriment of the welfare of the community."
What amazes me most, is that they still have a queen/king thing going. I am completely unable to wrap my head around how that can happen, in a developed country, in 2019.
Britain's democracy evolved gradually from feudalism, without much in the way of violent uprisings or outright revolution. The entire system is based upon incremental changes to give us the democracy we have today with various checks and balances. The monarchy is a vestigial part of that system. Look at stuff like the Privy Council which continues today, and Magna Carta, which was one of the starting points for it all. Technically, the monarch still has a huge amount of power, but in practice they are required not to exercise it. They have to sign everything into law; in a very real sense the law still is what the monarch signs their name to, as is the freehold system of property rights. All the land is owned by the monarchy; you get a freehold on it.
Like the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, democracy wasn't imposed, it came into being here for the first time, and while it's not perfect, there's a lot of factors, including sentimentality and inertia, keeping the status quo going. You could argue that a clean start with a proper written constitution and federal government (with separate state governments for the different countries) would be a good move. But like for any working system, it's painful to disturb entrenched structures, and there's always the risk of breaking something important. The US was able to do a better job; it's easier when you can start from a clean slate with the knowledge of hindsight.
Also, the monarchy has for the most part been a net positive. Compared with what elected MPs have done to the country, I see it as a rather more benign institution in comparison, in recent centuries anyway.
"All the land is owned by the monarchy; you get a freehold on it."
I know I'll get downvoted, but I am genuinely amazed by how a small minority of people can gain so much control, and absolutely no one complains. I know there are historical reasons, but it is fascinating nevertheless.
All the land is "owned" by the monarchy, but in reality, that theoretical control would be removed in the blink of an eye if they ever made a claim on it.
As far as checks and balances go, the irony is that most of them were introduced on the power of the monarch, and it was done by giving power to the Parliament. This makes sense in this evolutionary approach, because when you start with an absolute monarchy, of course an elected body is preferable.
But now, you have a problem in that your Parliament is essentially unchecked, and e.g. all your human rights protections are mere laws that are within Parliament's authority to repeal (well, and ECHR, for now - but even there UK got a special exemption for this exact reason).
We look at the elected heads of state that some nations have and think "no thanks".
You know that the Queen is still the head of state for most of the commonwealth countries? And half of Europe still have Kings and Queens, and quite a few countries in Asia. I wouldn't be surprised if over half the nations of the world still had a monarch.
Plus it didn't happen in 2019, it evolved over more than a 1000 years. Things get a little warty over that period of time.
> You know that the Queen is still the head of state for most of the commonwealth countries?
The Commonwealth has 53 member states, only 16 of which have the Queen as the head of state. And those 16 contain only 6% of the Commonwealth's population (144 million out of 2.4 billion).
You're right, I'm rustier than I thought, the only exception that sprang to mind was India. I thought plenty of African states had her as head, which is completely wrong!
It's partly because it is difficult to change. All power flows from the Crown, and the democratic system has been bolted on to that, so it's difficult to change in a way that doesn't leave it open to legal challenge or require wiping the whole system clean and starting over.
If you make a new constitution under the current system, it can always be undone-they _can't_ abandon that power. Furthermore, Parliament doesn't have the power to get rid of the Queen, but Parliament requires the Queen in order to have power so she can't remove herself. If you change it on a standalone basis, and completely abandon the old ways, what legal authority do they have to do that, and will it be recognised? I imagine the Courts especially would be sceptical about such a big divergence from the constitution (without an intervening event, which seems unlikely given the Queen polls well).
Realistically, the Queen only have has power on paper (she can never exercise it, except as required theoretically to give power to democratic decisions), so it'd be a big upheaval for little gain.
It's easy to be in support of an organisation whose chief activity consists of ceremony, platitudes, and waving, rather than actually governing a country.
'Crown Land' in Canada is not owned directly by the Queen as some of the other properties. It's de-facto federal land. Whereas in the UK it's a different structure for her land.
Fun fact: 89% of Canada is 'Crown Land', so about the size of the continental US.
'Crown Land' in Canada is de-facto literally government land, parks, open spaces etc...
In the UK there is 'Crown Estate' (which you are referring to), i.e. the Queen's landholdings, from which a bunch of revenue is derived ... and 'Public Estate' i.e. regular public land in the UK, which is more like 'Crown Land' in Canada.
Are we? What suggest this? We’ve had very long stints of governments hell bent on increasing inequality and regaining all they “lost” after WW2, yet what violent revolutions have we had?
Look at the small army of police they deployed this weekend for some climate activists. What would the response be to anyone more violent...
The small army of police being friendly and respectful as the demonstrators are being entirely peaceful. Demonstrators who are going out of their way to get arrested, and who have complained enough have not been yet. How did the civil rights protests achieve change? By civil disobedience. Which two deprived regions of England got most immediate help, and a regeneration programme led by Heseltine, during the 1980s deindustrialisation? Why the two that had riots of course - Toxteth and Brixton. Not the regions hardest hit or the only deprived or affected regions.
For a more violent protest you might not even need as many police. They would no longer need to be quite so considerate and use 4 officers to carry away each lying down protester, or other friendly methods of control and containment.
In many ways the extinction rebellion protests have been truly heart warming - in the nature and scale of protest and also in the police response. Mainstream media is finally discussing the issue properly.
Meritocracy depends of equality and you can't conceptually have equality with wildly differing starting points.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism would require land reform for equality and meritocracy to have some measure of credibility and meaning but capitalist states seem to have 'forgotten' the crucial step of equalization and moved straight to talking about conceptual 'equality' and 'meritocracy' as if they are operational. This is disingenuous.
'Capital'ism by definition favours capital and the only group that had it in the transition from feudalism were the feudal class who had monopolized all resources and used it to accumulate more wealth and power.
Humans have fought for land and resources for millenia and the equitable distribution of this most basic fundamental resource is the prerequisite for an equitable society. It can't be ignored in any discussion about equality and meritocracy and to do so is so deeply flawed and untenable it requires some level of self interest or simplemindedness to accept.
But a population who fail to have empathy for their fellow citizens and are disingenuous about equality and meritocracy every time they talk about it is perhaps a bigger problem.
Say I die and the state wants to decide what to do with my million-acre farm.
They either have to give it to one person, split it up amongst multiple people, or run it themselves. If they do the first, the headline is unaffected, if they do the last, the headline becomes "half of England is owned by the state".
That leaves splitting it up. But splitting up a farm in a useful way is not always trivial. And if you split one farm into three, how do you choose which three people should inherit these tremendous blocks of land?
It seems almost like we have a simple choice between socialism on one side and pronounced inequality in land ownership on the other, when it comes to large-scale agriculture.
What would you do with more land? Considering that in the UK there are significant restrictions on what you can do with the land.
It's a silly metric.
As someone else pointed out in this section, you need to look at holding by value not by area. That's the more important figure.
I can by 1 acre of land in the country for say £20k but I can do nothing with it except perhaps mow the grass. But that £20k wouldn't get me 1msq in the City of London - because that land (well more of it) can be used to generate lots of economic activity due to its proximity to/location within the world's economic centre.
This is the crowd that wants to stay in europe- if you get support per square kilometer for farming, and you are a noble with a estate- this is why you want the poor to support the rich.
This is not necessarily good or bad, one has to look at everything.
An alternate interpretation is half of the property taxes are paid for by less than 1% of the population, who also are acting as environmental conservators by not subdividing and developing large tracts of unspoiled wilderness.
Property taxes (including inheritance taxes) can introduce huge inequalities of their own. Look at Italy for an example, where there are many beautiful villas left to go to ruin because the taxes were unaffordable for the families who owned them. Many landowners both in Britain and Italy are not really rich, particularly when they inherited them. Taxing them simply forces them off the land their families have owned for generations, and that's not really fair either.
You can buy whole Scottish estates, complete with castles and lochs and hundreds of square miles of wilderness, for less than the cost of a small flat in London. They aren't necessarily particularly viable economically, despite their size, and the owners aren't necessarily wealthy (though some are of course). They get put up for sale all the time for a good reason! They are a huge money sink.
> An alternate interpretation is half of the property taxes are paid for by less than 1% of the population, who also are acting as environmental conservators by not subdividing and developing large tracts of unspoiled wilderness.
As I understand it, "unspoiled wilderness" is exempt from the nearest things the UK has to property taxes, council tax (on residential properties) and business rates (on commercial properties).
I guess, you have to answer the question as to how the 1% earned it. If they started on a level playing field and just worked harder or were smarter than everyone else, I would say keep it. More likely though it was passed down for generations and they did nothing to deserve it, I find that situation absolutely insane. We found out in the great depression having an insanely wealthy class of people (Rockafellers,Gatsbys, Vanderbilts... )is not good for society.
I did an economic history lit survey back in the '80s (lost now unfortunately) which showed that a very substantial portion of UK wealth at that time had a direct lineage back to slavery on sugar plantations. Even if you judge that meritocracy works justly within a generation, without appropriate taxation wealth accumulates over time, often consequent on terrible injustices. It takes some pretty heroic ethical gymnastics to justify that let alone consider it efficient or useful.
You did nothing to deserve winning multiple genetic lotteries, namely having sufficient intelligence to fall into the HN cohort and being born into a wealthy country and household with access to it and similar resources. You didn’t earn your spot in the global 1%, but it in no way follows that you should be expropriated to correct the alleged injustice.
Ex post facto law has since the Enlightenment recognized as unjust and even tyrannical. Digging back across generations in search of some offense generations ago and punishing innocent parties today is at best a recipe for chaos.
Lavrentiy Beria was head of Stalin’s secret police and famous for saying, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Expropriating present people because of unfair advantages — a criterion never precisely defined and forever subject to political fads of the day, which is to say meaningless — allegedly enjoyed by past ancestors or owners of property is merely another form of the Beria method.
By your own reasoning, neither did the state today do anything to deserve the property that they’d seize. Even if it were justly redistributed, you’re forgetting about the cut taken by the middlemen in charge of carrying it out — who also did nothing to deserve taking a share of the loot.
No sound economic case can be made that the distribution of wealth was a cause for the Great Depression. Considering how many human abilities have normal and power-law distributions, e.g., attractiveness, musical ability, intelligence, vertical leap, height, programming skill, lifetime poker winnings, writing quality, golf handicap, typing speed, cooking skill, time to change a tire, ability to plan and manage complex tasks, future orientation, etc., etc., etc., income and wealth accumulation being anywhere remotely uniform would be amazing. Considering the math of power-law distributions, your approach would have a huge majority ganging up on a comparatively tiny minority but ironically in the name of fairness.
“No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.”
>Ex post facto law has since the Enlightenment recognized as unjust and even tyrannical. Digging back across generations in search of some offense generations ago and punishing innocent parties today is at best a recipe for chaos.
That's not what's going on here at all. The idea is that property gained through unjust means originally means that the wealth derived from it is still unjustly derived, even if this unjust appropriation happened long ago when it was not deemed unjust then. You would be right if the case were if you were to be punished for the fact your ancestors owned slaves, but the issue is the benefit gained which is currently there.
>income and wealth accumulation being anywhere remotely uniform would be amazing.
Nobody is saying it would be uniform, they're saying that the situation at the moment is not due to the difference in those abilities other than perhaps brute strength in subjugation and plunder. It is difficult to imagine what the world would look like if it hadn't happened, but the distribution of wealth would not be as we see it today in any case.
>By your own reasoning, neither did the state today do anything to deserve the property that they’d seize.
The state may act on behalf of those at a comparative disadvantage, and we have an easier case for arguing they deserve something.
I feel like "people who won the genetic lottery" who become rich,by inventing something or creating something, deserve it because ideally these people made money by improving society and this behavior should be encouraged. I understand this is not how the world always works, but it should be the world we strive for.
In my mind this would be the ideal role of government to encourage behavior that makes society better.
It depends on which Marxists. Some would say that land that your family can cultivate (or otherwise productively use) on your own, without hiring labor, is your personal property, which is not theft. Land that you own, but can't extract wealth from it without hiring other people to do so (and collecting rent from what they extract from it) would be considered theft.
"More likely though it was passed down for generations and they did nothing to deserve it, I find that situation absolutely insane"
It's not insane for people to pass their property from one person to another.
Arbitrary definitions of 'earned it' are far, far scarier.
Surely, it's important to consider issues such as private wealth, inheritance etc. but the OP is effectively correct, this issue turns into 'mob rule' very, very quickly.
In 2019 we forget this, because we don't have any such topsy-turvy situations in living memory, but the 19th and 20th centuries were full of blood and fury over this kind of stuff.
Everywhere East of Berlin does however have this in 'living memory'. Ask a Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian etc. immigrant over the age of 60 about it for an earful. Or someone Chinese over 60 as well. Or Cuban.
I think most would agree that property that was stolen or taken by force from somebody who produced it, is not earned. So it's not an arbitrary definition. And if that is so, why would passing it from generation to generation make any difference to that determination?
I am a Russian immigrant, by the way, born in the USSR back when it was still a thing. I don't have much sympathy for the kind of wealth redistribution that was practiced there. But it's important to understand that the reason why it happened was because inequality was allowed to grow high enough that a sufficient number of people in the country could be motivated to revolt, because they felt the risks justified the potential rewards. And it doesn't even matter if they were right or wrong - the point is, if you are afraid of that history repeating, then you should support measures that prevent the conditions that caused it from happening again. And that involves acknowledging what the society deems fair and unfair, when it comes to property ownership.
1) Applying notions of ownership to systems 1000 years ago - is totally arbitrary.
2) The Sovereign's holding are, and always have been something different than a regular person's holdings. They have always beens somewhat matters of State.
3) Today, the monarchies are constitutional. They do not 'own' the land as you and I would 'own' land.
4) Most wealthy people today did not inherit their land from people 100's of years ago who got it from plunder - this is ridiculous. About 1/2 of the wealthy people today are 'self made'.
5) Almost everyone in modern civilization has access to opportunity, and as you'll notice from this thread, 90% of Canadian land holding for example is by the government, i.e. commons - there is plenty of land and resources to go around. Everyone can participate.
Inequality today is not even comparable to what is is even 100 years ago. People receive free healthcare, almost free banking services, cheap water, cheap transport, cheap entertainment, cheap clothing, cheap access to information, free social solidarity.
I know only one _real_ revolution in history, where the elites were replaced by new blood -- the communist one. Communists killed/expelled anyone who was a little richer than others.
In all other revolutions elites stayed mostly the same.
There are other ways to replace elites and it has happened plenty of times. There have many many times when the 'royal bloodline' dies out to even the most peripheral illegitimate branches and the next best thing holds it and in a generation nobody really knows the the difference.
No, because the rich in this case didn't buy the assets, they inherited them from people who were gifted them for being lieutenants in an invading army 1000 years ago. England is still an occupied country, and the only solution is to revolt against the occupiers.
What’s the temporal cutoff to your line of reasoning? England was invaded continuously by the Norse before William conquered in 1066. Should we appropriate private property from people who have Norse surnames?
No, we recognise that all pretty much land in England has been appropriated by force from the original inhabitants, and that all claims of ownership are tainted by blood.
I've never seen a concrete or comprehensive description of the Georgist scheme.
Say I own 5 acres of undeveloped forest, valued by the market at $100k. Can I immediately know what my tax bill will be, given the tax rate in my district?
What happens to my tax bill if I cut down the forest and build a factory? Or a grocery store? Does my tax bill remain unchanged?
What if I do nothing with my woods, but the guy owning the adjacent lot opens a supermarket? I'll pay more then, right? How is it calculated?
Is there a Georgist story about incentives to preserve natural ecosystems?
Sorry, I'm only working 6 days 18 hours a day this week in the cotton mill. The master has given us Easter Sunday off, because he's a good Christian man. I will endeavor to make up for it next week.
The point is that it’s always easy to spend someone else’s money or to call for taking it away to fund the latest Good Idea.
Flipping it around to suggest that the real problem is the original proponent needs to step it up so the state can take more of her money triggers a shift in perspective. Everyone thinks he pays his fair share, but that guy down the street is another matter.
I didn't read the thread parent as being completely serious, and my not entirely serious reply highlighted the flaws in the argument.
You talk about 'fairness' but you could argue that many different ways. Everyone paying $10000 a year flat rate tax is 'fair', as is leaving everyone with the average income.
Clearly those 2 approaches have problems. At minimum the rich don't want a French revolution type event. But society benefits when people attempt risky ventures, that work out. So clearly you want a balance between these 2 extremes.
The traditional defense of letting richer people keep more of their money is that they worked to earn it through their superior skills. This kind of generational wealth makes a mockery of that.
Personally I would argue for a higher inheritance tax, let each generation compete on a leveller playing field, decrease the tax burden on the living.
The UK’s generational wealth discussed in the article and the generational wealth in France at the time of the revolution were propped up by special treatment in the law for nobles, aristocrats, and the “upper class.” I believe you and I agree that grants of special privilege by the state are unjust.
As for leveling the playing field, what evidence do you present that it is not already more or less level in jurisdictions that do not prop up class systems? Sure, you can cherry pick Paris Hiltons, but the plural of anecdote is not data. What is the distribution of wealth inherited by present millionaires? What studies can you point to that show conclusively that people who are good at building wealth are also good at transmitting these skills to their children, which would be remarkable?
Perhaps natural processes take care of the problem well enough already if overcontrolling micromanagers would only get out of the way.
— Winston Churchill, 1909