But why? If someone is creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services what moral justification is there for it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary level?
I think there are good "system stability" arguments to set limits. Roughly, states are dynamic multivariate systems whose objective function should ideally track citizen well being and state security, and taxes are one of the feedback loops that prevent individual actors from dominating or otherwise destabilizing the system.
The mistake is thinking that the fictions we created to establish this system are fundamental moral imperatives in and of themselves.
“ if some minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land”
And
“ creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services”
Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value?
How did the land to acquire become yours?
Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to think you should receive anything
You don't even need to construct the scenario where someone with enough capital just buys up as much as possible, knowing they will get lucky with some subset of their property. That's both a modern problem and the plot of Blazing Saddles (yes, I'm choosing that example to focus on how widespread of an issue this has been for centuries).
> Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value?
I'm not sure what you mean. Finding and extracting the asset adds a valuable, productive good to the economy (ignoring the enormous downside).
Are you debating the word choice, "creating"? I guess I don't see that discussion as valuable. Are you using the word choice to make a point? Make it!
> How did the land to acquire become yours?
You know how; again, please make your point?
> Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to think you should receive anything
Is all of this an argument for communism - the only ones who do anything valuable are the workers? I think that's as self-serving and narrow-minded as the ultra-capitalists who think only they matter. Providing and allocating capital is essential and a valuable skill; if it's easy for you, I'm sure you have plenty of it by now.
Correct! Because the act of creation is where value is created.
By definition capital does not create value, otherwise there would be no requirement to have labor to do the “transformation.”
Exactly to your point I have at points had quite a bit of money (not currently true). But it’s not from “capital growth” it’s from aggressively selling my labor and capturing the majority of my labor value. That said, if you were to compare the amount of value, I’ve created to the amount of money I received, It’s not even fucking close I’ve created 1000x more value than I have captured.
Why? because at the time that I did those deals, I was not in a powerful enough position to demand the value capture, because we’re stuck in a state where the vast majority of people need to debase themselves simply to survive.
Is that the type of system that has long term capacity for multigenerational equitable success? The answer is no and there’s no way you can slice that that makes it a yes.
If, however, your goal is a infinite race to the bottom for worker self exploitation, where people will literally destroy themselves in order to otherwise survive, based on the whims of hoarded capital owners arbitrary self inflated egos about how the world works. Having been a LP in a venture fund, a Director in a large public company, and a multitime start up founder I can guarantee this is exactly how it works. If that’s the world you want then we’re right on track.
My perception is that the labor/capital allocation of return is far out of whack, due to a power imbalance.
But I feel you still aren't accounting for the value of capital. It's too easy an answer, intellectually, just to dismiss the whole thing and ignore the complication.
Production requires capital and labor. If I lend you my truck for your contracting service, shouldn't I get some return on that? What if you use my property to manufacture your skateboard (or whatever)? What if I give you some of my personal cash to hire workers, who then produce the skateboards, which you sell at a profit? I know these are simple, chosen examples, but where do you see the problem and how do you quantify appropriate returns?
Holding keys to a cache of goods isn’t a skill.
Even if you claim to have thought really really hard about when to open the vault, the simple act of hoarding less, does not transform the goods into value.
The fact of hoarding, crowds out others use of the resource (reducing monetary velocity) so that means for people who want to make more, the choices made for when to open the vault are solely dependent on an mathematically unequitable distribution of the resultant created goods, in effect stealing directly from the people making value.
To be clear I’m not making the Labor Theory of Value argument - I’m simply demonstrating that by capitals own standard (increase in value based on capital labor mix) capital should get no excess return.
In fact the only argument capitialists have left is the contract and this is the Mises style MaximumCapitalist like Hans Hoppe. The argument goes that as long as a contract is signed, there cannot be anything unethical.
I'm sure you know the next issue: How in your system is capital efficiently allocated? The issue is not hoarding (or not necessarily), it's natural scarcity of capital. How do we decide who gets to use the truck or the property, etc.? We know the capitalist method of allocation, which is rather productive in aggregate. Other methods have been unproductive, broadly speaking. First come first serve?
Also, the worker in your system gets all the return. Great. Now they have some money and they buy a truck. But now they own capital, the truck and hopefully some cash left over. Must they lend it to someone else without return? I dunno, but they might not be happy with that!
Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...
(You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular)
Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this
On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such.
How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism.
Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it.
Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think:
https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
Thanks for the debate
You may be interested:
In the study of cultural universals, there are four leading anthropologists going back ~100 years afaik, and all four say private property is universal, based on the evidence. Some caveats: Generally speaking, they say it; there's detail there that I don't have time to look into now. Also, defining and classifying the behaviors of all cultures, current and past, and associating them with some modern English words, yields uncertain definitions - as those anthropologists will tell you. Certainly how a 'cultural universal' is expressed can look very different in different cultures.
* Clark Wissler, Man and Culture (1923)
* George Murdock, "The Common Denominator of Cultures", in The Science of Man in the World Crisis ed Ralph Linton. New York: Columbia University Press. 123-142. (1945)
* Charles Francis Hockett, Man's Place in Nature, McGraw-Hill (1973)
* Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991)
These are seminal works in that field - the seminal works as I understand it (I'm not an expert). You can find all/most at the Internet Archive, as far as I know.
What moral justification is there for them to hoard absurd sums of money, particularly when we have folks without homes and kids in poverty?