You might find mlatu-6[0] interesting- it’s convertible to SKI calculus but concatenative (like Forth) rather than applicative. It’s actually a subset of Mlatu, a language I created for similar reasons to explore “how low can you go.”
It seems like you would identify with Georgism[0]. The fundamental premise is that land/natural resources should belong to everyone, so it is necessary to pay everyone for the land we exclude others from.
This is known as context-dependent memory [0]. Interestingly, it also occurs with your mood and other cognitive states: If you’re always happy in your class, you’ll perform better if you’re happy for your test, and vice vers if you’re sad.
I read through it and didn't see any refutation, just a description of the historical movement. At least to my understanding, mutualists like Benjamin Tucker have historically agreed with Georgist philosophy to a great extent, including breaking the monopoly on land.
Common solutions include appraisal (like property taxes are today) or a Vickrey auction, where we auction off the land, and the first place bidder gets it at the price of the second bid.
Land prices decrease proportionally with the level of LVT implemented: 0% of today gives a 100% sales price; 25% LVT gives a 75% sales price; etc; 100% LVT as I propose gives a 0% sales price. Of course the prices increase in a particular transaction more than the exact amount if the buyer wants to live on the land for a long time, though.
I will admit that I misunderstand TimPC’s point about people having to pay the land value tax in addition to the mortgage; I misunderstood mortgages in terms of who really owns the land.
But the point still stands. If the land value tax is paid by the homeowner, the sales price of the land is zero (under a 100% LVT), so the mortgage rates are lowered by an equivalent amount. So there is no additional burden upon the homeowner. If we flip the model and say the bank owns the land, they will pay the land value tax until it is paid off. In this case also, the sales price also drops to zero so the mortgage just incorporates the land value tax and the building payment. In all possible arrangements, there is no additional burden on the homeowner until the mortgage is paid off.
I do understand that mortgages are on both the land and the buildings. We were talking about land only though. It is irrelevant to the question of who pays the land value tax that the mortgage also includes the buildings.
Yes, I agree with you on what will happen in big cities where the land value is already high. The idea is more that in the Montana's and the Kansas's - where they already give land away free to people who promise to build improvements - there will be even more of an economic incentive to move to underdeveloped states, giving more families economic opportunities, which will then cause network effects as more families move out, causing housing prices to fall in the big cities. Housing prices will become more equal across the nation, and vertical development will be incentivized over urban sprawl.
Perhaps I'm explaining it poorly, that's entirely possible. The frontier is where land value is zero, at the margin of production. It is possible to get value out of the land, but only with hard work. Currently this land may be held without using it for production, but it largely doesn't exist. This is because the lack of a land value tax incentivizes landholders to own all land for the purpose of speculation rather than production, even if it's economic rent value is low. With a land value tax, people who hold land purely for speculative sales prices would sell it because the sales price would drop to zero, therefore freeing up those pieces of land for families to move to and work upon. The frontier, the margin of production, where only hard work would make the land valuable, reopens and other land also becomes more mobile because there is a disincentive to holding land for speculative purposes, reducing the price of housing in general and contributing to housing liquidity.
I agree that land has to some extent been widely redistributed in the United States because of the frontier, which continued to exist and distribute land ownership up until the 1880s. However, since the frontier died, land ownership distribution has stayed more or less the same. Compare the coasts to England, where land mobility is even more limited because the frontier died even longer ago. What Georgism and a Land Value Tax would do is to re-create the frontier at the margin of production, where land is free and there is no tax to be paid, but the land itself is still workable without profit. Recreating the frontier would re-introduce land mobility and make land more liquid, while also countering NIMBY desires to keep their land and neighborhoods the way they were fifty or a hundred years ago.
Companies are arguably not very widely distributed. The stock market is ownership of companies by those who do not work for it, so the distance between the worker and the owner is still greater than in small businesses, family businesses, worker cooperatives, or even traditional corporations with Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Trust-busting is one way to decrease that distance, although true anti-monopoly policies like a land-value tax or a tax on intellectual property enforcement would truly remove the privileges these big companies have and allow smaller ones to truly compete.
I think it would be at least partially solved by reorganizing government to be based upon subsidiarity :) but yes, this isn’t necessarily a question which political economy can or should solve
Well other taxes are not precluded by Georgism. See for instance Piguovian taxes and IP taxes. But additionally, I don’t think it can be assumed that the government will continue to need its current amount of revenue. Under subsidiary, the size of the federal government would drastically be reduced as power moves downward to local governments.
Yeah, I think I misunderstood both the above point and who owns the property in a mortgage. Essentially I think that the land value of the property, which is used in calculation of the property, would go to zero no matter who is paying the tax, reducing mortgages by an equivalent amount if the individual is in charge of paying it, or raising mortgage rates by an equivalent amount if the bank is responsible. Either way it does come out of the individual’s pocket, but mortgages don’t necessarily raise their prices.
I wasn’t aware of the reforms before I just looked it up, but from what I see, it looks like he had distributist goals. He was almost definitely not aware of the concurrent academic movement in England, but many thinkers individually came up with similar ideas.
I think you might misunderstand Georgism, or maybe I did a poor job explaining it. Georgism does not propose taxing improvements (buildings etc), only the actual land. So many peoples tax burden would be decreased, and if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage, they are the ones paying the tax, not the people taking out the mortgages.
Answer from another layperson: The photons even while the lightbulb are on are constantly being emitted and absorbed by the materials around you as energy. When you turn off the light, the stream of photons stops but the remaining photons continue on their way to their destination where they are absorbed as energy, or reflected to be absorbed somewhere else. The photons no longer exist as particles but do exist as energy in the objects around you.
I’ve had a similar experience but heard back from the Founder that many of the invites from before January 8th didn’t go through, and that he manually approves a new batch every few weeks now
Really? I could see the other third parties like Green Party, American Solidarity Party, Libertarian Party, etc. having those issues on their platform. But Republicans and Democrats have shown time and time again that they value corporations over people and want the government to be more closed. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though
The Patriot Act is still alive and well, it's simply dropped out of the public imagination. It's still harming people through excessive surveillance and the lack of privacy, which is one of the reasons we would work to repeal it if we were to gain power nationally.
Yes, that's on our docket to add to the platform because many of us feel strongly on the topic. Thanks for bringing it up, you should join our platform comittee on the Discord![0]
I wouldn't call putting people before corporations and opening up government wedge issues; they're right in line with the Pirate Wheel[0] which leads to all pirate politics' positions on issues. I think these are excellent examples of what the US Pirate Party should focus on.
To answer your question, the United States Pirate Party is pro-democracy, like all pirate parties. We believe a more representative democracy would be beneficial for all third parties in the US, and support various electoral reform policies to further that goal. We also believe in the longer term that liquid democracy[0] is the way forward. I do agree that this could be communicated more clearly on our site, thanks for pointing it out.
I'd suspect based on SPJ's previous comments that it would be a strict statically-typed pure functional language but it probably depends on what amount of control he has on fun/research vs utility to Epic.
I don't think it's trivial, as it is built on Chromium instead of Firefox. However, if you or we as a community wanted to experiment with adding a similar native adblock using the Brave version as a model, I don't think the maintainers would be opposed.
The reasoning given is that maintaining a native version of uBlock Origin would be very costly, and so not worth the focus right now, especially considering that many of their users are already familiar with the extension.