@cee I am strongly against taxing held assets. income tax is ok, but i dont think its the best approach to tax either. If it were up to me all tax would be in the form of sales tax with various tax grades for how much a luxury something is (with bare essentials not being taxed).

@freemo so like GST?
i mean, i can understand the logic, (although one could argue that income taxes and tariffs could trigger inflation).

The Georgist argument would be that, the LVT is a temporary measure used to break up land monopolies (prevents landlords from artificially jacking up the rent) and underutilised land could be put to good use. So instead of having to fork out a fortune from interest by the central banks through real estate, you'll end paying less on tax and land gets to be legally held under ur name.

@freemo I've forgotten to go the library yesterday and order "Poverty and Progress", but yea, this is my basic understanding of it

@cee I generally would address monopolies through antitrust laws. If one person owns 95% of the land across the whole country (or even in just a really large region) then yea, probably a need to break it up. But this is rarely the case. It is usually land owned by many people rich and poor all competing with each other. This isnt a monopoly.

What seems like poor reasoning here is that they wind up taxing **everyone** in the hopes of breaking up monopolies that probably either dont exist in the first place, or if they do exist should be targeted without harming ordinary land owners.

@cee its also going to empower monpolies more than it hurts honestly.

A monopoly means you own a large enough portion of land to price-fix your rents. This means you exlude competition by lowering rent in any region where someone competes with you and raising it everywhere you dont have competition. Your competition goes out of business because they cant rent out land, and the monopoly owner ultimately buys their land at a discount and then restores prices in the region to high prices.

If you tax the land then the person struggling to compete with the monopoly will just fail all the sooner due to the extra burden of being a land owner. Meanwhile the pricefixing of the monopoly owner gives him a financial advantage and is capable of paying the taxes due to the price fixing and the extra income it brings in.

Overall that means land taxes will bolster monopolies and drive out small owners. The exact opposite of the intended effect.

@freemo @cee associations with a perfunctory level of competition has been the new meta since bell was broken up. you see it in stuff like ex. the MPAA where they are "competitors" but they all belong to a union of elites for optimal removal of public rights.

@icedquinn

I have no problem with a "union of elites" so long as they dont collaborate with eachother to engage in price fixing (which is against anti-trust laws). Obviously the word union here you are imply the act collectively for the benefit of all elites. I wont say that doesnt happen but i will say if it does then that is and should be illegal. The problem with antitrust laws isnt that they dont work, its mostly that they just arent enforced when they apply.

@cee

@freemo @cee i don't think they price fix but they do engage in pressing things they want in to the government the same as if it was a single gigacorp lobbying.

verizon and at&t sometimes throw "memorandums of understanding" at one another to synchronize rules at the top, in a much less formal manner.

its come out in congressional testimony that big tech does similar. they have secret slack chats where operators collude moderation policy decisions with plausible deniability shields to upper management

@freemo @cee * testimony doesn't actually say they use slack, but they do have active back channels with other big tech that are used to coordinate censoring targeted persons.

@icedquinn

Yea this is what i mean, the issue isnt that antitrust laws dont work, its that antitrust laws just arent well enforced.

@cee

@freemo The queen of england has a monopoly on Australian land still 🤮

Ohhhh, ur coming at it from that angle. So what Georgists and Geo-libertarians are actually hoping to accomplish is to abolish Propertarianism (landlords) completely. Since land rent requires economic coercion; the thing is, even if we were to establish anti-trust laws here in Australia (99.9% of landlords here break the law irregardless and still get away with it)), having a royal commission only occurs when things get to worst case scenario (we dont want it to get to that point, we want to prevent that).

The rlly messed up thing is that landlords are horrendous when it comes to dealing with mold outbreaks.

@icedquinn

@cee

Of course she has a monopoly on england, you guys are an english colony afterall. You are just lucky she lets you guys live there instead of the prison building she built for you all :)

As an american might I suggest you guys throwing some of her tea in the ocean, I know from personal expiernce the only way to piss off the english is to fuck with their tea :)

Me personally, I'd be strongly against completely abolishing landlords, to do so in any effective way you'd need to abolish land ownership, if you dont then landlords will just own the land still but use it for other purposes and not let anyone live on it.

Sounds to me the issue you guys have is exactly what I said, your anti-trust laws just arent enforced when they should be.

Also if mold is a problem then sounds like you need either better tenet laws or to have them enforced more.

@icedquinn

@freemo
What a lot of us are afraid u see is, if we were to secede from the Commonwealth, we will have a civil war, which would just be a proxy war between the US backed Eastern states and the Chinese backed West. Like BRUH, we lost the Great Emu War, i doubt we'll do any better in a proxy Civil War 🤣

Im not going full on Proudhon and go "all property is theft", i'm still very much for collective and individual property, it's just that landlords kill the free market and destroys small businesses.

> you need either better tenet laws or to have them enforced more.

hm, thats why i find Geo-Syndicalism appealing... and we do have Tenants Associations; will have to discuss more with me old mates from the SocDem unions

@icedquinn

@cee

I dont think we disagree that there is a problem with landlords per se. I mean I dont know Australia well enough to say but I wont disagree. We just disagree on how to solve it. Your approach to me sounds like it makes the proposed problems much worse (and you havent convinced me otherwise), therefore, I would opt for other solutions.

@icedquinn

@xyfdi I agree there, the vast majority of spending needs to go. Education is just too essential not to prioritize it as everything about a countries success ultimately comes to how well informed its populace is. Educate the people and all other problems will fix themselves somehow.

@likho To be fair I really hate the educational system too. I think they do a really shitty and ineffecient job at teaching and there needs to be reform in how we teach.

My hope would be that with such a massive investment in education it would ultimately lead to that very reform.

The other thing is with everyone getting life long free education my hope is the focus moves away from degrees at all as everyone is educated by default. This alone might fix a lot of the problem as teachers are no longer authorities but partners with the students. They arent in a place to judge. I'd even do away with formal grades.

Either way what I know is that as shitty as the educational system is that we have, its all we got. The stupidity of the average american is absolutely overwhelming. So I'll take a half-assed educational system over nothing.

@likho the problem with just making education free, without actually have experts themselves at your disposal, is that most americans have proven they are completely clueless on how to take infinite information and learn what is real and what isnt and ultimately understand the systems well enough to evaluate it.

We dont need degrees or credentials, but we do need demonstrated experts to help guide people to a deeper understanding. Give people a calculus book with no professor and your lucky they will study it at all.

@freemo Improving education is a research project, you can dedicate a budget to a research project, but you can't "cover the costs" of it. All you will achieve trying that is people making up costs to cover. There is no objective measure of education and no objective requirements for teaching and learning, past the basic requirements of survival and prosperity, which includes health care.

@likho

@louisrcouture Thats fair.. how about we compromise... we make all healthcare illegal, except abortions, those are free!

@freemo well what if an educated college student has a disease and must be treated. Do we treat them.

@louisrcouture If it isnt obvious by this point I was mostly just being funny. Most of my jokes are half truths, and yes education is the higher priority for me. But I am not against healthcare or fixing the broken healthcare system. I am against tax paid universal healthcare because it doesnt work, but I am also against commercial healthcare. I support a solution of co-op based healthcare.

@phil_s If you werent alive to do tech or teach the next generation there would be other people around who did survive and could still fullfill that need. More over, and better yet, there would be fewer people in the next generation so less of a need for educators in the first place.

Now to be fair I was half joking in my response. Yes education is more important than healthcare to me. And no I dont want to just kill everyone off by not providing healthcare (I have actual solutions for healthcare I wont go into but it doesnt resemble universal healthcare). But that said my logic that education is more important because maintaining a too-large population isnt much of a plus anyway.

@freemo
No worry 🙂
Just on the topic: Overpopulation is not determined so much by how long people survive, but rather how many children are there. And that point is over, as most of the world's population is out of deepest poverty by now. (My favourite book on this is "Factfulness" by a Swedish doctor called Hans Rosling.)
Yes, population is still increasing a little because of health care, but in the end the topic is solved. All of this is only possible because of education.

@phil_s not exactly. population is defined by how many children they have **that live to child bearing age**.. so without healthcare more people die off before they can even have kids.

@Hyolobrika Who said anything about smart people. Being smart doesnt prevent cancer. With no health insurance everyone dies including smart people.

@Hyolobrika So you'd be better summarizing my stance as follows:

"you dont deserve to live" (notice the lack of qualifiers)

@jojoisjustgay

I might have missed it.. what DM?

@Hyolobrika