Trump on NPR for 9 minutes and 21 seconds

@citizenschallengev4 - I walked thru’ a uni campus this a.m., we have 2, a red brick where PCR was invented and a very good vocational one, the latter. Not a sign of student radicalism in the 15 years I’ve been here on either.

We have to be local and subversive.

How we ever get to tax wealth I don’t know. Not income, not business, not sales, not purchasing. Wealth. I.e. land and capital. Under Corbyn (the reason I joined the Labour Party) 3 years ago a superb party document, Land For The Many was published. He’s gone. So’s it. Not a whisper. Johnson is treading on air and the Tories should disappear for 10 years and Labour could get away with anything, i.e. radical social justice, in power. But they won’t.

And only social justice can save the planet.

Only social justice can save ourselves.

Saving our biosphere is going to take sober knowledge and emotional engagement with the reality of Earth’s deep time Evolutionary story.

Cheers, :bouquet:

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A different discussion has taken me down a road of researching “tyranny of the minority”. The White majority in America suddenly discovered this when actual minorities started winning the same rights as everyone else recently. Taxation fits this same slot. It’s okay, until you start using taxes to help people who can’t get work, or who have been discriminated against, or whose father’s have been arrested for a pot seed in their jean’s pocket.

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That’s nice of you cc. Thank you. I fear… such highmindedness is not possible. No more than my radical social gospel.

Funny, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville agreed that the solution to the problem of how democracy can’t address the problem of the tyranny of the minority is “justice”. You’d have to study them to understand what they mean by that, but that’s the thing, it changes, it’s an ideal. What other goal would you recommend?

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It’s the tyranny of the rich minority, and they own ‘democracy’. That’s all I understand. So justice can never be obtained under democracy. Let alone any other form of actual government; the Chinese Communist Party is totally corrupt. Even W. European (not England, 2nd rate) and other first rate democracies, like Canada, New Zealand. Let alone America. 3rd rate. Scotland might achieve it. If the twelve men who own a quarter of it grow consciences. Some of them are pretending to have them, deceiving themselves by re-wilding, which is not their right.

There is only one goal. Restore the commons. By taxing wealth. It needs Popes and Archbishops to lead the way. Noone else will. And they won’t either.

Oh yeah, that again. So, no government, except the one that will tax the rich? And it would need to be one that also allowed the rich to exist, so they could be taxed, or otherwise created riches somehow. That’s always the problem with these solutions, they create a new problem.

Yeah that again. You can’t possibly have social justice without it. The rich create riches do they? Where from? Who from? In what form? And no, don’t tax the rich. Tax wealth that is not in common. That again that has never been fairly, harmlessly implemented.

I missed something. You talked about taxing land held by wealthy people, that could result in some equalization, but you avoided saying anything about wealth not related to land. What else is “common”? Oil, gold, minerals, manufactured goods, ideas?

Yep. The first three are under the land and are therefore commons. Manufactured goods are manufactured on land (so they’ll just move to international waters I know…) and increase its taxable, i.e. rent value, like mining the former. Ideas are patented, copyrighted, business modelled, implemented, sold and ultimately traced to registered owners. With registered addresses. Even if it’s a PO box or a trillion dollar cloud site. Tax it. It’s called geoism.

Capitalism is the enemy of humanity in every sense. The politics of its facade are irrelevant.

Oh. But this is your solution?

You go and turn to the first for profit global corporation (and monopoly in many places) for solutions?
Where are the diddling Archbishops and Popes going to lead the way to? Collecting more donations and forcing more woman to have unwanted pregnancies and increasing the burden our Earth is enduring? Pretend heaven is the solution and will reward us for our disregard toward this planet that created and nurtured and sustains us?

I don’t know why you said this. I’m not promoting any politics or facades.

It’s telling that it took this long for you to name the thing you have been talking about. I can now read the critiques of it myself, the successes and failures it has had.

Your response to my question about ideas is one of those weaknesses. You trace it to the patent holder and then say to tax them, but why allow the person to hold the patent in the first place? It’s so rare for one person to independently come up with something unique, I’m not sure it ever happens. A “genius” is the result of education and environment. I’m not saying we shouldn’t reward genius, but a system that forces one piece of paper with a name on it to get credit for the result of the work of many people, is flawed from the beginning.

It sounds like Geoism was one of these transitional ideas, following on Marx and others. In Geoism’s case, land prices would drop as taxes rose, and eventually the land would be worthless in a capitalist sense and the taxes could then be dropped, and ownership would be in the hands of the people, managed by the state of course. That’s fine, but I don’t see a system like that creating small computers or innovations in personal transportation or influencing the arts, or worrying about the environment for the next generation. There need to be incentives to take risks and ways to collectively mitigate those risks so people work together to improve their world.

The Pope could easily lead the way, along with the Queen, Bill Belichick and anyone living the Hollywood hills. Give your crap back. Instead of trying to get from the upper 2% into the upper .01% turn your focus to appropriate technology for the lower 50%. Instead of mining their resources, use your resources to make their lives livable.

Why? You think prayer and Church governance is going to change things?

If they won’t, and they won’t as you say, no one with any moral authority will. If the Church of England, the 11th biggest landowner in England won’t, then no one will follow.

I didn’t say you were. Politics is the facade of capitalism. Whether multi-party, plural democracy - no matter how badly done - or Russian autocracy or single party states especially China. They are all fronts for pluto=kleptocrats.

I’ll come back to your critique of geoism.

Couldn’t agree more.

Only if it is accompanied by the social gospel.

I agree on patents etc, how we ensure that entrepreneurs don’t monopolistically restrict trade, as do landholders also, is surely by taxation? Shame doesn’t work.

Why would land prices drop as taxes rose? In the first instance? When the tax burden was removed from labour? And everything else? Taxes would only rise after the initial recalibration with the increasing profitability of land.

When taxpayers’ money finances infrastructure projects such as Crossrail or HS2, money is taken out of the common purse to provide infrastructure for all to use. However, when the value of the land around these new stations increases dramatically, under the current laws of property it goes directly to the property owner. The extension of the Jubilee underground line in London cost the taxpayer £3.4 billion. Eleven stations were added to the line, increasing the connectivity of these sites and raising the value of the land. An independent survey estimated the increase in value of land 1,000 yards from each station to have been £13 billion, all of which went into the hands of landowners, who contributed nothing to its gain. A Land Value Tax could have entirely paid for the new infrastructure and left the communities affected by the new line significantly better off. - Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass, p 191, para 5

If ownership is in the hands of the people, they will manage it. What state? Who needs small computers? What innovations in personal transport? The arts will never have been freer and there will be no need to worry about the environment. Can you join up the dots please?

Why would I pay you for land, if I also have to pay a ton to the government to keep it? This happens in real estate now.

So, no tax on income. Elon Musk takes his pay in stock gains, avoiding income tax as much as he can. In Geoism, he’d go back to giving himself a salary. Rich people are good at shifting their books to deal with changes in law.

I don’t think I can keep going in circles like this. Economists have already done that work for me anyway. The land value went up near those stations because that’s how the capitalist system works. If you took away that incentive, the land value wouldn’t go up, and you wouldn’t have anything to tax.

If you say “no need to worry about the environment” and “who needs computers”, then no, I don’t think I can connect dots. Your dots are very different from mine. I like the idea of an oceanfront view having the same value as a parking lot somewhere, but someone still has to do something to maintain those pristine places in the world, the ones that we value for commerce as well as pure beauty. I see nothing in Geoism that says we shouldn’t drill in the artic.

Religion never solved anything, especially when it came to issue of governing. It caused more harm than good and sadly Luther’s 95 Theses didn’t solve anything either.

You won’t be paying for my land. You can only rent land from the commons. You pay the commons, to the commons treasury.

Indeed they are. But it sits somewhere. It’s an asset somewhere. Even a hundred million dollar painting. Tax it. He can earn as much as he likes in whatever form he likes, the music stops and it sits down. Tax it.

Oh it’s quite simple. Tax all land that stands to benefit. If they can’t pay, ‘their’ land is forfeit.

Yes, I say there is no need as capitalism is removed from the equation. An ocean view has immensely more rent due to the commons than a parking lot. Someone isn’t responsible for the pristine commons. Everyone is. The community is. If the people decide to allow drilling in the arctic, the full rent of that from the commons must be exacted. Which should be more than anything that can be unprofitably extracted by drilling It’s very simple.

Religion solves a pre-wired, genetic, evolved need. Tax religion.

I didn’t say it was possible, just that, that’s what it’s going to take.

Geoism

Fred Foldvary, Ph.D. - Economist - October 25, 2015

Well that wasn’t very convincing.

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