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Ayn Rand, the ideals of America, and the space industry: three new mini-books announced at OCON
The post ARI Announces Three New Mini-Books appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.
"[The Land Tax] suffers from a much more fundamental flaw. Namely: A tax on the unimproved value of land distorts the incentive to search for new land and better uses of existing land. …
“Take a real estate developer. One of his main functions is to find valuable new ways to use existing land. ‘This would be a great place for a new housing development.’ ‘This would be a perfect location for a Chinese restaurant. And so on… ‘Information about the land can be considered an improvement in its own right. Some of the land's qualities have very low search costs to discover: is it arable, will it support any type of building, is it in the middle of a city or rural area, etc. Discovery of other potential uses may require significant search and/or investment in other technologies. An entrepreneur brings these qualities to market - they do not bring themselves. Until he does so, the value of the land is undefined.’”~ Bryan Caplan from his post 'A Search-Theoretic Critique of [Land Tax'
“[Land] taxers claim that the tax could not possibly have any ill effects; that it could not hamper production because the site is already God-given, and man does not have to produce it; that, therefore, taxing the earnings from a site could not restrict production, as do all other taxes. This claim rests on a fundamental assumption — the hard core of [land]-tax doctrine: Since the site-owner performs no productive service he is, therefore, a parasite and an exploiter, and so taxing 100 percent of his income could not hamper production.
“But this assumption is totally false. The owner of land does perform a very valuable productive service, a service completely separate from that of the man who builds on, and improves, the land. The site owner brings sites into use and allocates them to the most productive user. He can only earn the highest ground rents from his land by allocating the site to those users and uses that will satisfy the consumers in the best possible way. We have seen already that the site owner must decide whether or not to work a plot of land or keep it idle. He must also decide which use the land will best satisfy. In doing so, he also ensures that each use is situated on its most productive location. A single tax would utterly destroy the market's important job of supplying efficient locations for all man's productive activities, and the efficient use of available land.”~ Murray Rothbard from his post 'The [Land] Tax: Economic and Moral Implications'
"[Land] values are created, not intrinsic. Why else would land in Tokyo be worth so much more than land in Mississippi? A tax on the value of a site is really a tax on productive potential, which is a result of improvements to land in the area. [A] proposed tax on one piece of land is, in effect, based on the improvements made to the neighbouring land.
"And what if you are your 'neighbour'? What if you buy a large expanse of land and raise the value of one portion of it by improving the surrounding land. Then you are taxed based on your improvements. This is not far-fetched. It is precisely what the Disney Corporation did in Florida. Disney bought up large amounts of land around the area where it planned to build Disney World, and then made this surrounding land more valuable by building Disney World. Had [the] single tax on land been in existence, Disney might never have made the investment. So, contrary to [the land-taxer]'s reasoning, even a tax on unimproved land reduces incentives.~ Charles Hooper, from his bio of Henry George in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
"[Economic historian Marc] Blaug reviews five major contemporary objections to [a land tax set to acquire major revenue]:
- The Anti-Landlord Thesis: Since [profits] are ubiquitous in a capitalist economy, why single out land and landowners?
- The Inseparability Thesis: It is impossible to [accurately] separate the value of land from the value of improvements to it.
- The Adverse Incidence Thesis: Land taxes would simply be shifted forward in terms of higher prices and higher rents.
- The Inelasticity Thesis: An exclusive tax on land would be unresponsive to the changing requirements of public revenue.
- The Moral Hazard Thesis: A land tax would nullify the individual ownership of land and have negative incentive effects."
~ Mary Cleveland summarising Blaug's case in 'Henry George: Rebel With a Cause'
"'What gives value to land?' asks [the land-taxer]. And she answers: 'The presence of population—the community. Then rent, or the value of land, morally belongs to the community.' What gives value to [the land-taxer]’s preaching? The presence of population—the community. Then [the land-taxer]’s salary, or the value of her preaching, morally belongs to the community."~ Benjamin Tucker in 'Liberty' magazine, August 18, 1888."Spare a thought for Queensland property owners, who were hit with a retrospective land tax ... along with a redefinition of 'unimproved' to include 'the hard work of property owners, including (among other things) the buildings they have erected, the leases they have in place, business goodwill and infrastructure charges.' Would you rule out any of that happening here?"~ from the post `Retrospective land tax to hit Queensland property investors at PROPERTY TALK"[C]onfiscation [by by government by means of a land tax] on the whole rent [on unimproved land] means the same as the nationalisation of land. [Because] once the government has this whole field of taxation open to it, will it not stealthily nationalise all land by charging land taxes higher than the rent and high enough to make the private possession of land uneconomical?"~ Pierre Lemieux from his post 'Land Taxes: The Return of Henry George'"I am most emphatically opposed [to the theory of a tax on land]. A theory which advocates state ownership of land is pure collectivism, and it doesn't matter whether its advocates consider themselves individualists or not. Without private property in land there can be no private property right at all, and without property rights no other kind of rights are possible."~ Ayn Rand in her letter to David Goodman, May 24 1946, collected in The Letters of Ayn Rand
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on the Fourth of July, the air conditioning wars in Europe, and the boom and bust of artificial intelligence.
A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
A Nation of Immigrants
1776 America Had a Higher Immigrant Share Than Today
Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this month. One of the Declaration’s grievances with King George should resonate with Americans today:
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.
…All the major founders explicitly stated the desire for America to be an asylum for the masses of people of all religions and nations from around the world seeking freedom. It’s not just that they favored immigration. They established the freest immigration system in the world. My purpose in this post is to show that the Founders were not naïve. They had witnessed high rates of immigration firsthand and chose to expand that successful policy….
The United States had an average annual legal immigration rate—as a share of the population—of about 0.9 percent from 1700 to 1770, including slaves, and about 0.5 percent excluding slaves. In FY 2026, the rate will likely be less than 0.3 percent, including people already in the United States who adjusted to legal permanent residence. Even in FY 2025, the legal immigration rate was less than 0.4 percent….
We also have complete records on the birthplace of members of Congress, and these records track the same pattern as my estimates of the immigrant share in 1776. Immigrants were 14 percent (8) of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers at the Second Continental Congress. The Constitutional Convention, which is not included below, had a similar percentage, 14.5 percent (8 of 55). The Constitution intentionally allowed immigrants to run for office, partly to encourage immigration to the United States, and the very first Congress under the new Constitution had the highest share of immigrants, 10 percent of members, in US history aside from the Continental Congress. Congress’s immigrant share is less than 4 percent today….
The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith. The immigration rate they experienced, the share of the population that was foreign-born, and the ethnic and religious composition of the founding generation all point to the same conclusion: America was never a homogeneous nation that only later became diverse through immigration.
It was diverse and immigrant-heavy from the start.
