Timeline for What reasons are there for a Capitalist to oppose a 100% inheritance tax?
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13 events
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| Apr 7, 2019 at 17:17 | comment | added | gerrit | @Random832 AFAIK the pre-Columbian population of North America had no concept of land ownership, but I can take it that a libertarian might argue they are owners even if they themselves don't consider it as such. | |
| Apr 6, 2019 at 16:11 | comment | added | Random832 | @gerrit the "first improvements" in the case of North America would have been by the Native humans (or any previous populations they may have displaced), not by the Europeans who stole the land from them. Like I said, that's one of the problems with libertarian ideology in practice. (The other is that, well, in my opinion, the idea that the largest landlords can simply exercise absolute power over everyone else isn't hypothetical, it's already happened: that's what a state is, and Libertarians are therefore hypocritical in not recognizing state authority if they believe in land ownership.) | |
| Apr 6, 2019 at 7:11 | comment | added | gerrit | @Random832 "from whom", you ask? Simple: from nature. The first "improvement" almost always involves displacing the natives (such as by cutting a forest to make it into agriculture), which may be animals or (in case of, for example, the USA) humans too. The US "manifest destiny" was a violent business. | |
| Apr 5, 2019 at 22:18 | comment | added | Random832 | @gerrit As for the lease idea... my understanding is that at least in some technical sense, all non-allodial title to land is, in some sense, a "government lease" (with tax being the rent). | |
| Apr 5, 2019 at 22:12 | comment | added | Random832 | @gerrit I think the argument is that there is nothing preventing someone from making improvements to unowned land, and if they have, it can't be taken from them without also taking the improvements. I don't agree with the conclusions, but I think you can't really say the first person to build something on land must necessarily have acquired it by force (from whom, who was using the land for what purpose)? Of course, in reality, most land has been taken by force from a previous owner multiple times, with the new ownership allowed to stand, and it would be impractical to unwind the results. | |
| Apr 4, 2019 at 0:19 | comment | added | johannes | @gerrit is it "capitalistic" (in the sens of the question) if the land is owned by the land? - Marx would have liked if the means of production were owned by the state. ;-) | |
| Apr 3, 2019 at 20:24 | comment | added | Stian | @gerrit I seldom applaud arguments but yours I will make an exception for. Well done, sir. | |
| Apr 3, 2019 at 7:59 | comment | added | gerrit | You can have multigenerational private forest management without private property of land, by the government putting out a lease for the management of that forest. The market value to transfer this lease to another party will depend on how sustainably the forest has been managed. | |
| Apr 3, 2019 at 7:57 | comment | added | gerrit | I've never seen a neoclassical / libertarian argument in favour of the possibility to own land. Land ownership can never be the fruits of anybody's labour (even a Dutch polder is just changing wet land into dry land). We can acquire it from a previous owner, but the first owner can only get it through what libertarians would call force; if one rejects that first transaction, then, by extension, all subsequent transactions and thus all land property is illegitimate. | |
| Apr 3, 2019 at 7:23 | comment | added | JollyJoker | The land the trees grows on is valued based on future production. By not maintaining the land they're lowering its value. It would be better for them to sell it off at some point and consume the money somehow. | |
| Apr 2, 2019 at 22:29 | comment | added | bta | You can actually expand this to any sort of long-term business investment. Since anyone can die at any time with no warning, long-term investment is very risky if it all goes away upon death. Privately-owned businesses would be heavily focused on the short term to minimize risk, but that's not good if you want businesses to thrive and grow over the long term. | |
| Apr 2, 2019 at 12:55 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 2, 2019 at 13:15 | |||||
| Apr 2, 2019 at 12:52 | history | answered | johannes | CC BY-SA 4.0 |