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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • All they have to do is, instead of calling it a “law”, call it “militia regulation” instead. “Militia” is the entire arms bearing populace; if you own a gun, you are, by definition, part of the Militia. And the 2nd amendment doesn’t merely say “everyone has a gun”; it does so in context of maintaining a “well regulated militia”. All the right to “keep and bear arms” does is prevent them from requiring we store our arms in a central armory (which was one of the controversies over the matter in England when the right was in development).

    I would say we also have a right to own a car. That doesn’t prevent them from requiring we maintain the capacity to bear responsibility if we should accidentally exercise that right improperly.


  • You don’t need to adjust for income. How do you get high value land with a low income? How do you own high value land and not derive an income from it? You’re imagining an extreme edge case of some family that’s been passing high value land down, generation after generation, without ever leveraging this advantage into financial success.

    The more valuable the property, the larger a component of that value that tends to be in the value of the location itself, as opposed to the capital improvements to that location. Low income housing, as cheaply built as it is, is built in an even cheaper location. Conversely, a house but for higher income people is built more expensively, but even greater is the access to good schools, jobs, shopping, low (blue collar) crime rates, and so on that a high value location provides.

    And that’s just residential real estate, which is almost people even think about. With commercial and industrial sites, location becomes even more important.

    People who talk this way don’t know what land value is. They imagine there is a relationship to quantity, when location is almost the entire driver. Maybe a thousand square feet of space in upper Manhattan or San Jose or something is comparable to a hundred acres in rural Wyoming, or wherever.

    And what about the poor in cities? They already pay a land value tax… to the owners of the land. You will say that if the owners are taxed, they will raise rents… but if they can just raise rents like that, why haven’t they already? Normally, a tax can be “passed on” because a tax on a thing affects the supply of that thing: the tax raises costs, which lowers profits, which drives capital out of that industry and into another, which reduces the amount being produced, which allows the higher price.

    But land is fixed in supply. If you’re imagining a way of increasing or reducing the supply, you’re not thinking about land, but capital improvement to it. The supply can be neither increased nor decreased. Its existence is not dependent on any industry or thrift or other service on the part of the landowner and, as such, any income derived simply from owning a location and leasing it out to others is unearned. It’s essentially extortion, one person renting to another the “privilege” of existing, and if there are any landowners not collecting the full value that can be collected, it is either because they haven’t found the highest price yet, or out of the kindness of their hearts.








  • When money is loaned into existence, both the supply and the demand are created at the same time. When there are real investment opportunities (opportunities to make money by expanding production and improving productivity) allowing the money supply to expand makes it easier for expansion to occur. The problem is when such opportunities are thinned out, and people just start rent seeking for want of real investment opportunities. At this point cheap credit fuels not expansion, but just pushes up prices of existing resources and facilitates the transfer of wealth into the hands of people that already have wealth to use as collateral.

    Your suggestion would create a money supply that was fixed until and unless whoever happened to be in control of the central bank for whatever political reason decides to expand it. It also has no means of contracting the money supply, not as stated. The current systems relies on financial institutions presumably needing to be paid back, and thus generally issuing loans when repayment looks likely (which will sometimes be a good business plan). This keeps the decision as close to the business reality as you can, making borrowers and lenders the eyes and ears of the system. Centralize that, and you cut off an enormous supply of information, information absolutely necessary to make these decisions.

    Personally, I think the problem with the current system isn’t a banking problem, but a problem of rent seeking opportunities just being left out there to serve as sources of private revenue. It’s the equivalent of selling tax farming contracts but then letting the taxman keep everything they take. Start treating them as sources of public revenue (start with land value taxation), and you won’t have banks making loans for non productive “investments”. Without these opportunities, there would be no basis to continue making loans when there aren’t any real investment opportunities to put that money into. The credit supply would naturally wax and wane with the rest of the economy.



  • You’re assuming marginal cash has the same value for everyone. It doesn’t. Losing 20% at the top bracket might barely be felt. Maybe can’t buy quite as many classic cars for the collection, or can only have eight yahts, instead of nine. But at the bottom, that 20% can mean the difference between being able to make rent and ending up homeless, or between being able to pay the power bill or not. It can be the difference between having to get a payday loan or not (and thus cause a loss of considerably more than 20%).

    Look up the term “marginal utility” for an academic treatment of the subject.