What, exactly, is socialism? Again this discussion seems necessary.

Blah blah. You're like a drowning man straightening his hair .. in a futile effort to die with a little dignity.

 

No economics again; just poor personal attack. Which bit of my obvious comment confused you? That worker owned enterprises isn't a shift towards socialism? That you ignore the anti-commons? That you invoke charity, rather than any radical change in ownership rights?

 

Is this seriously all you have left? This, and the tin of pilchards?

You go ahead and roll around in those last shreds of dignity, Dear. I need to go and lug buckets of water to vegetables, and talk to someone about shade trees and the possibility of dividing up a large room into more useful spaces.

 

Technically I have left wing economics. I know you don't understand the concept

 

What is the concept?

 

But those who need assitance have NOT freely chosen to be stripped of their rights to liberty by landowners.

GET IT???

GARBAGE. My argument is with those who have stripped others of their rights to liberty, because it's THEY who are creating the impoverished others. By your brain-dead "logic," if A pushes B into a raging river, and hundreds of people see it but are too afraid of the torrent to attempt a rescue, it is somehow THEIR fault that B drowns, and not A's fault! Don't you understand how completely evil such claims are?

 

Already refuted.

Nope. Only in your imagination. But in fact, by plastering band-aids on cancer, you just enable the evil to get away with it that much longer.

False and absurd.

Individual rights are not a luxury.

 

70 or so forum pages of this nonsense and I still point out that the hell-hole that became modern day Venezuela was touted as the socialist dream until it became a hell on Earth reality for its people. That's the problem with this Leftist political and economic scheme of socialism and it's big brother, Marxism; it's all fun and games until reality comes slamming home -- and eventually reality always does pay a terrible visit.

 

Their explanation is just wrong.

No, Marxist "analysis" ignores the fact that it is the landowner, not the factory owner, who strips the worker of his right to liberty, and thus his options and his bargaining power.

No, that's empirically false. Whites have an advantage because for historical reasons they (and the companies they own) own almost all the land; and males have an advantage because they are more willing to work longer hours, and at dirty, demanding, and dangerous jobs, than females.

"Curse"?? Discrimination is a barely detectable harm compared to landowner privilege.

 

You only had the liberty to the land when you were the only person living on the planet. When others showed you had to either share the land or fight for the land. Those other people have the same liberty as you.

GET IT?

If you want to convince anyone to accept this Georgist philosophy you must show some realistic benefits and stop the incessant landlord bashing,

I suspect you see the prices land sales bring and somehow believe that should be your money to be divided, but land values barely keep up with inflation in most all cases. The landowner is not getting rich simply by owning land, there are also many costs associated with owning land, taxes, maintenance, liabilities. It is not a free ride to wealth.

 

They can't grasp that. It was always either clubbing the next tribe to death to take their land ... or the modern and far more civilised exchange of goods/coin for land.

 

Those were totalitarian states.

 

No, that is indisputably false. All our ancestors exercised their liberty to use the land for millions of years. That is how they survived. You know this. Of course you do. Why pretend you do not?

Obviously the others were there all along, using the land non-exclusively. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding economies do not require exclusive tenure, but there is no doubt communities fought over territories..

Right: the liberty of NON-EXCLUSIVE use:

Do you? Do you know what "non-exclusive" means?

How about liberty, justice and prosperity undreamed of in our benighted system? All of which can be demonstrated.

Identifiying the fact that landowners are grossly violating everyone else's rights is not "bashing" them any more than abolitionists were "bashing" slave owners when they identified the fact that they were grossly violating slaves' rights.

No, I see that price and am willing to know the fact that it is nothing but the market's estimate of the net future subsidy to the landowner.

GARBAGE. They almost always vastly exceed inflation in the long run. The few exceptions are in places like remote ghost towns where a mine closed down, etc.

Yes, of course he is.

Nope. Flat wrong. Land by definition does not require maintenance, and there are no liabilities associated with it unless you create a hazard. The tax is merely repayment of a (usually small) fraction of the amount being given to the landowner, as the land value proves.

The ride to wealth is not free because you have to pay the ticket's previous owner full market value for it -- i.e., HE already GOT the landowners' escalator ride up to wealth. But once you have the ticket, you too ride up to wealth at your leisure while the community shovels money into your pockets and you do and contribute exactly nothing:

“The most comfortable, but also the most unproductive way for a capitalist to increase his fortune, is to put all monies in sites and await that point in time when a society, hungering for land, has to pay his price.” -- Andrew Carnegie

 

I refuted it.

Nope. While environmental stress often stimulated violent conflict between communities over territory (and this has also been observed among chimpanzees and other social animals), the rule was peaceful coexistence.

The initial appropriation of land as private property was never by exchange -- who could accept the payment? -- always by forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise have been at liberty to use the land. Not very civilized at all. Which might be why it has killed billions of innocent people.

 

We see here how you ignore injustices because they do not fit with your Georgist rant. It is not possible to understand discrimination with Georgist rhetoric. That is just a matter of fact. It is, however, possible to explain it with Marxist analysis. Now that doesn't mean you necessarily have to accept Marxism. An institutionalist, for example, will focus much more on psychological analysis into labour market inefficiencies. However, simply ignoring these debates in order to maintain an one dimensional Georgist rant is simply not credible.

 

Well you don't need to worry about those old 'white people have all the power' tropes in the 21stC. NE Asians and Indians (male and female) will soon own all the land in America/Australia/Canada/New Zealand/UK etc. They see your outdated nonsense about who's in power and laugh about it all the way to the bank .. where they deposit the rent you pay them.

While you were 'ranting about equality', they were actually working to equalise their position.

 

That's just obvious garbage.

It's true that the center of economic power is shifting to East Asia, largely because it has more people with higher average IQs and more cooperative personalities than the West. But all bets are off when SAI arrives. Then people will be a liability: consumers with no way to produce what they consume.

Nope. They -- like most smart people -- usually work to take advantage of injustice rather than be taken advantage of.

 

Nope. I just focus on what is far more important and far more difficult for people to understand. It would be a waste of my valuable time to focus on superficial trivialities like discrimination when far deeper, subtler and more important injustices are so widely and grotesquely misunderstood.

There's a lot of behavioral science that falls outside the purview of economics -- more than neoclassical economists admit. So what?

No. Marxist analysis can only confuse, misguide, and deceive, never explain.

That's a potentially fruitful approach, unlike Marxism.

It's a completely orthogonal issue. To conflate them would be idiotic. Maybe that's why you are trying to do so.

 

Particularly enfeebled comment. You have offered no critique of Marxism, relying only on immature grunt. When confronted with an issue that you can't understand, discrimination, you simply ignore its importance. That Marxism offers an explanation is just icing on the cake, showing how your monist fundamentalism has made you less capable of explaining economic outcome.

Your position is based on hypocrisy. Anyone prepared to ignore discrimination has nothing to say about justice.

 

And they know how to look after each other .. unlike the 'uncooperative personalities of the West'.

Gosh, anyone would think that the opportunity to work towards owning property (and simultaneously erasing poverty) actually exists in our capitalist democracies, the way Asians are doing it all so easily.

 

Erasing poverty? Hasn't happened so please don't make stuff up!

 

What percentage of Asian Americans live in poverty?

 

You mean all that discrimination NOT stopping Indians and NE Asians from getting (very far) ahead in the West?

 

They look after family. Yet they have also dropped their birth rate off a cliff.

The "opportunity" exists, just like the slave's "opportunity" to work towards buying his liberty from his owner. Poverty is not erased by people toiling to become property owners, any more than slavery was erased by slaves buying their liberty from their owners.

If you think they are doing it easily, or that those who arrive in the USA are typical, you are deluded.

 

Why make false statements?

You cannot answer my critique of Marxism, so you have to pretend I did not make it.

No, I judge its importance correctly: minimal.

A wrong one, as with everything else Marxist.

Discrimination can't explain 1% of what privilege explains.

You again resort to just makin' $#!+ up.

That's also just clearly false. You just want to give privilege a free ride, so you pretend discrimination is more important.