Stockholm Syndrome isn't even a real diagnosis. It came from a bank robbery in Stockholm where the women hostages were thought to be infatuated with their captor. Afterward, a psychologist coined the phrase Stockholm Syndrome and the women were all like, no, we were just trying to not die.
Well, they also refused to testify against their captors and raised money for their legal defense. So there's that.
Bonus fact: the reason they suspected the hostages were infatuated? Because they were scared by the police going in guns blazing, and didn't welcome them with open arms.
It fits closer to trauma bonding
I dunno. I started my own company, and now I work twice as hard as before. My boss (me) doesn't let me take sick days or vacation because we have no employees and would literally have to close to do so... I have self-induced Stockholm Syndrome?
sigh
Fine...
grabs spray paint
unless you own a small business...
There.
You played yourself buddy 👍
At least I'm earning equity for myself this way, instead of someone else. Le sigh
Okay so I know nothing of the nature of your business, but something tells me that you are forced to work that much in order to survive. That is very much a result of capitalism (most of your work value is probably ultimately going to the capitalists), and the fact that you seem to feel that this is fine implies some sort of Stockholm syndrome relationship with the capitalists.
I'm complaining but I'm also not complaining. I guess I'm a capitalist now. A slightly left of centre capitalist. But I also work. Hard.
I do scientific equipment -- ground penetrating radars and similar. I started this business because I made a device when working for another company and didn't get to own the intellectual property. Which is fair -- they bankrolled it. But I wanted to own my next creation, and to do that, I needed to go independent.
It took a lot of education (7 years), experience (12 years), and capital (I wagered my entire retirement savings). I work this much because I want the business to snowball, and it is. It means I only pay myself like a student (fortunately I chose a low cost of living city to startup in), but pile up equity in lieu of salary.
I will note that this is only possible because of socialism providing the safety net that it does in Canada. I had no family wealth. My education was good and relatively cheap. I was student loan free within 5 years. I don't worry about health care. Soon we'll even have dental care on a national scale (2024). I pay taxes and am happy to pay it forward to the society that helped make me, provided they do so smartly. (Radical Centrist.)
But, yeah, the business model I chose doesn't allow me sick days until we have our first employee.
If you were a farmer you'd have to work hard to survive too
All I can picture is a CEO driving past that in his limousine and laughing.
😞
Alt text: "You are not a capitalist, you are a worker with Stockholm syndrome" written on a wall with black spray paint
If you own stock are you like ... sort of a capitalist? A half cap?
You’re the younger sibling with the game controller that’s not plugged in while the older one plays the game.
Honestly that's such a perfect metaphor. I'm impressed!
You're aiding and abetting capitalists.
It's not until you have enough to sit on a board of a fortune 500 that you can at least consider yourself part capitalist.
Interesting way to redefine capitalist.
I guess it depends on if you define capitalist as someone who owns capital or simply someone who believes in the economic ideology that is capitalism, i.e., you believe land, labor, and capital ought to be privately rather than socially owned. But I suppose that's the point of the graffiti, that if you are not the capital-owning type, then you're probably just stockholm syndrome-d into being a believer in the economic ideology that is capitalism.
But what I also find interesting is that our current system isn't purely capitalist, as we have all sorts of instances by which land or labor or capital aren't privately owned. For instance, when we tax labor, we're partially socializing ownership of people's labor, which is something a purely capitalist system wouldn't do. Heck, not even a purely socialist system would tax labor, because socialism is about social ownership of land and capital, but not labor.
All that said, however, we are certainly closer to capitalism than any other economic system, but still worthwhile to consider the endless complexity that is the economy and how we attempt to describe it. Not even sure where I'm going with this comment anymore, but I hope someone out there finds it at least mildly interesting.
I think this discussion is more interesting around the "labor" part than the "land" part.
Many people think they should own their own house. Few people think they should get buy a percentage of their neighbors' salary for life. And yet that's what private ownership of labor is.
It's interesting you mention home ownership, as that's actually bundling land and capital. The land on which a home sits is obviously land, but the building atop the land is capital. There's actually a school of though that I subscribe to, Georgism, which believes land ought to be socially owned but not labor nor capital. Specifically, it aims to achieve this by replacing income, sales, etc. taxes with a land value tax (as well as other types of economic land, e.g., externality taxes like carbon tax, as well as severance taxes on natural resource extraction).
The reason being that the key characteristic of land is that it is naturally occurring and can't be created. The key result from this is that you can get in early, claim dibs, then extract unearned profit from all those with the misfortune of being later to market than you. For example, consider a land speculator who sees their city growing, so they buy up a bunch of vacant land, sit on it for a few years, and resell it when it's shot up in value. They've done no work, and all their profit comes from exploiting the zero-sum nature of finite natural resources.
Capital, on the other hand, can be created, so long as you don't have high or artificial barriers to entry like restrictive zoning, rampant NIMBYism, monopolistic patent and IP rights, or hyper-expensive university tuition (education is a form of capital, after all).
And so the core idea of Georgism is we can achieve the goals of socialism by socializing the commons, aka land and natural resources, via taxes and busting down barriers to entry for creation and acquisition of capital, be it housing or education or software or power tools or infrastructure.
And I think there's a pretty compelling moral argument to it all, like you suggest with how no one would say they feel entitled to a portion of their neighbor's salary for life. You didn't create land, so why should you be able to own and profit off it? But you do create capital (e.g., your own skills and education), and you do do your own labor, so the fruits of those ought to be yours and yours alone.
Plus, pragmatically, taxes like land value taxes and carbon taxes are known to be just really good policy.
I'm interested to know how a system like that would handle someone who is unable to work. If you can only own and profit off your own labor and no one else's, how could a mentally disabled person survive? Wouldn't you consider any food or shelter provided to them as "unearned"? Or is there a subset of people who are actually allowed to benefit from the labor of others?
Georgists are also in favor of a citizen's dividend or UBI. The idea being that profits from the scarcity of land can be captured via taxes instead of privately captured, and thus these revenues can be used for public benefit via public works, citizen's dividend, welfare payments, infrastructure, etc. After all, the inherent profits from the land and natural resources belong to society at large, not any single person, so we as a society can choose to use these revenues to benefit all, including those physically unable to work. That is to say, welfare needn't be paid out of others' labor, but rather out of the inherent value of the commons that collectively belongs to all of us.
A benefit of citizen's dividend or UBI is it also lowers the barrier to entry for creation of new capital. For example, if you don't have to worry about having a roof over your head and food on the table, you're much more able to go back to school to improve your human capital, or to start a startup in the hope of doing something new and innovative.
And if you're wondering if land value taxes are really enough to fund all our whole government, well, it has been shown that a land value tax alone is capable of funding a government at all levels.
Thanks. This is all super interesting! After reading the wiki, I'm still not sure I understand how the land value tax is supposed to solve everything. Several countries already have something like that but they're still mostly capitalist.
If you don't mind a few more questions: Let's say you want to start a business. You buy some land (you'd still need to already have capital to do that). Are you allowed to have employees? Seems like no, since you would be profiting off their labor. So then, how do most people accumulate capital if they all have to work for themselves? You can't just get a job.
How do you pay for the land tax before your business is profitable? Seems like you'd just be passing your UBI back and forth between you and the gov. to pay your taxes. And then what happens if the city builds a huge park next to your business, causing your land tax to go up to the point you can't afford it? Couldn't that be detrimental to commerce? Seems like the public improvements would drive inflation, and the wiki didn't really mention inflation.
Sure, no problem! One big area where socialist and Georgist thought diverge is on the nature of paid labor, i.e., employment. Socialists often tend to view it through a lens of it being inherently exploitative, whereas Georgists tend to view it through the lens that it often is exploitative currently, but that it doesn't have to be. Perhaps this is best explained with an example.
I'm an engineer in a niche field. I work for my employer, and in return they pay me good money, treat me well, respect me, give me a good work-life balance, etc. The reason why they pay me well is not out of the goodness of their heart; rather, it's because they have to. If they don't pay me well and treat me right, I have other options. I'm not easily replaceable, but my employer is replaceable to me.
The reasons I have this negotiating power is for several reasons:
The result of all of this is I don't think my labor is being exploited by my employer. And the Georgist vision is to empower all labor to the same kind of negotiating power enjoyed by the professional class.
In general, Georgists want a system free of rent-seeking. For reference, here's a snippet from Wikipedia about rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
As for acquiring land, the key idea of a land value tax is to make possession of land just as much an obligation as it is an asset. How we can measure that is the rental value of land:
Imagine you have a 1-acre parcel of unimproved land. Suppose you could rent that parcel out to someone on the free market for 1k per month. Thus, the rental value of your land is 1k per month.
Now suppose someone wishes to buy your land from you. How much would you be willing to sell for? Remember, they're essentially buying an income stream. You might decide 10 or 15k is a fair price, as you could use the liquid cash to invest in something else, and they could recoup their investment in 10 or 15 years from renting out the land to someone else.
But now imagine we had a "full" LVT as imagined by Georgists. The idea is to try to tax the full rental value of land, because why should you make profit for simply possessing god-given land that nobody made? In this case, the tax would be 1k per month.
So now you can rent out your land for 1k, but you gotta pay all that to the government in tax. Even if you don't rent it out, you still gotta pay 1k in tax per month. That is, possessing that land is now just as much an obligation as it is an asset.
So if someone wants to buy it now, sure they'd be acquring an income stream, but they're also now acquiring an equal tax obligation. Thus, the fair market price of the land should approach zero as the land tax approaches the full rental value of land.
In essence, what has happened in this scenario is we went from privately owning land to simply leasing land from the government, and "selling" land becomes basically just a lease transfer. Of course, if you have improvements upon the land, those can fetch a price still, just the underlying land price should be zero (or close to it).
This effect of LVT lowering land prices has been shown in practice. For example, the Australian Capital Territory passed a pretty milquetoast LVT (nowhere near the full rental value of land), and it still improved the affordability of land, particularly by deterring land speculation.
And if you think of this from the perspective of starting a business or building a home, this is actually great. Instead of having to pay a huge upfront price for land (or taking on a massive amount of debt), you can just lease the land from society via taxes. It means the barriers to entry for starting businesses or building housing are significantly lower, because you don't have to pay upfront for the land value.
As for the city building infrastructure or services near you that improve the land value, how it plays out depends on context. Imagine two adjacent and identical parcels of land in city. On one, Bob runs a grocery store. On the other, Jane runs a paid parking lot.
One day, the city builds a new light rail station with frequent service just a block away from the two parcels of land. This, as you can imagine, significantly boosts the land values of both these parcels, increasing the tax burdens for both Bob and Jane.
Bob doesn't like that his tax burden is 3x as much, but he consoles himself with the fact that he now attracts 3x the customers. Remember, the land only gets taxed more now because the location provides more value.
Jane, on the other hand, faces the same 3x tax burden, but oer parking lot was already full, so she can't scale up her revenue 3x. After all, parking lots are a very low value-per-acre type of land use. Thus, she decides to either sell her property to a developer to make housing or shopping or offices, or maybe she considers developing it herself.
Oh, and for countries that have LVT, while it is true that a number of places have LVT, there aren't any fully Georgist countries. Taiwan has a relatively strong LVT, but even they only derive something like 8% of their tax revenues from it, and the tax rate is nowhere near the full rental value of land. Several Australian states (as well as their capital territory) have LVT, but they're even more milquetoast.
Unfortunately, while LVT is a particularly elegant tax -- I mean, economists call it the "perfect tax" -- I think the problem for implementing a Georgist system is that rent-seeking behaviors are incredibly embedded in society. For instance, in North America, homeowners expect their home to appreciate in perpetuity, even basing their retirements off of that. Likewise, negative externalities are extremely lucrative, and fighting oil companies to pass meaningful carbon taxes is an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, the harms of income taxes are very diffuse. Sure, all the working class pays the price of income taxes, but landlords and real estate speculators and homeowners are a more select group that has a very straightforward way to benefit from rent-seeking.
If you're interested in reading more, here's really good essay on how Georgism fits in within a broader libleft tradition:
I liked your ramble :)
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