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I would support tax paid free education for a persons entire life until the day they die, over tax paid universal healthcare anyday.
The world is overcrowded anyway, last thing we need is healthcare making it more crowded. Smart people on the other hand, those are a rare commodity, we need as many of them as we can get.
@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.
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.
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
Yea this is what i mean, the issue isnt that antitrust laws dont work, its that antitrust laws just arent well enforced.
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
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.
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
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.
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.