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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Change My View: Its not the business owner's fault that they can't pay enough wages to hire enough people. It is the landowners and land speculators fault for raising the rent / price of land to the point where the businessowers don't have enough money to pay.people because all their revenue is going to the landowners. I believe we need a land value tax to fix this issue.
A very Georgist view, but a lot of companies are just scummy and want to make the most profit possible.
Sure, but at least companies can be competed with and if they get too big, are subject to government scrutiny. On the other hand, its really hard to control a large population of landowners and speculators who have a personal incentive to do whatever they can to increase the perceived price of their owned land.
too big? government scrutiny?
what century is this?
Have you ever heard of Google? There is no such thing as 'too big' anymore. Hasn't been for a long time.
This is a very Polyannaish take and places way too much faith in a "free market" and government oversight. There is no free market when we are regularly allowing companies to get massive and become practical monopolies. When was the last time a company faced serious repercussions for getting too big?
There is certainly some more competition among smaller, local businesses. And the price of land/real estate can be an issue for them. But I would also ask to see how much the business owner is making in relation to their employees.
All that being said, I would like to see landownership completely overhauled, if not abolished.
Your tip system is cancer.
Wdym my tip system?
OK I hear you on redistributing weath from landlords, but how do we keep the landlords from passing that tax on to their tenants?
About 6ft length of rope.
If landlords don't want to hemorrhage money by not having a paying tenant on their land, they will lower their prices. The problem with land is that we can't create more of it. It is not a commodity supply can be artificially restricted to the detriment of the rest of society. If land holders constantly lost money for not having their land generate wealth, there would be no incentive to artificially reduce supply.
Land, as all else, is commodified under capitalism.
Idk what definition of commodity you are using, but I will say that it seems that by wikipedia's definition something like food or manufactured goods are more of a commodity than land, something that can not be created.
I would agree that housing is a commodity though, so long as there is more land to build it on.
I'm using the definition of commodity explained in chapters 1–3 of Marx, Capital, vol I.
Capitalism is commodity-producing society. In this political economy, the means of subsistence – things we need to survive – are produced for their exchange value and their use value. Socially necessary labour time is the only source of this value. This roughly coincides with your definition, that a commodity must be manufactured in some way.
But the Wikipedia definition is incomplete. At some point in the history of capitalism, humans come to fetishise commodities. At this point, even things that are not produced as commodities, such as land (including their minerals, trees, etc) are treated as if they have value and, from then on, are commodified.
It is the same process that commodifies women, meta data, etc. These things are not produced as commodities, yet they are treated as having a use value and an exchange value. One of the ways that this occurs is through financial derivatives, such as potato futures. This allows someone to buy and exchange something that does not yet exist: hence the commodification of everything under capitalism, even things that aren't 'produced' or aren't yet produced.
This is favourably referred to in the Wikipedia article that you referred to, under 'commodification of labor'. A direct reading of Marx and an analysis of the implications of his work reveals the additional argument that I provided about the commodofication of land.
This 'commodity form' is the root of the problem that you identified to begin with, about rent/wages. I have prepared something about that, which I will post soon.
Rent control
It's the fault of capitalism. In socialist theory, a distinction is (generally, since there are always many schools of thought) made between the Bourgeoisie, basically the ultra rich at the very top like Musk and Bezos, and the Petty Bourgeoisie, which is your average restaurant owner and such. The former is what we refer to when we say things like "down with the Bourgeoisie," we're not actually dreaming of sticking the manager of the McDonald's down the street in a guillotine. The Petty Bourgeoisie are also chained into capitalism like the workers.
Okay deleted my previous comment because this CMV is not really about socialism vs capitalism.
You are technically correct in saying that people not wanting to work because they aren't paid enough is a capitalism problem, but it doesn't really change my view on the solution of a land value tax, as it is a capitalist solution that I think only applies to a capitalist system.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#who-would-sweep-the-floors-under-communism
It’s actually no one’s fault per se that useful land is more expensive. After 2008 there was a major lack of investment into housing that reared its ugly head around 2019. COVID amplified the existing problems making it harder to build and get materials, and created soaring inflation.
There are things we can do now such as change zoning and make permit times faster but it’s going to take a while even in a best case scenario to move the housing stock and commercial real estate supply to where it needs to be.
I think a land value tax would speed up the process of building more houses, and would make housing denser because owners of the land would be incentivised to build as many houses as possible to not loose money to the land value tax.
There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):
This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.
Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415
One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.
The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.
You can read about this in:
The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.
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https://piped.video/watch?v=XlhFMa4t28A&t=3901s
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