Just because it’s getting mentioned around here a lot lately: Tolstoy was a convert to Georgism (the philosophy backing Land Value Tax). It’s interesting to see a very specific idea suddenly win a person, and see it reflected back in their output.
> The question of buying freehold land recurred to him again and again.
> He went on in the same way for three years; renting land and sowing
wheat. The seasons turned out well and the crops were good, so that
he began to lay money by. He might have gone on living contentedly,
but he grew tired of having to rent other people's land every year,
and having to scramble for it. Wherever there was good land to be
had, the peasants would rush for it and it was taken up at once, so
that unless you were sharp about it you got none. It happened in
the third year that he and a dealer together rented a piece of
pasture land from some peasants; and they had already ploughed it
up, when there was some dispute, and the peasants went to law about
it, and things fell out so that the labor was all lost.
"If it were my own land," thought Pahom, "I should be independent,
and there would not be all this unpleasantness."
Yep can't see any sort of economic ideology regarding land ownership at play here.
I didn't say the story is about Georgism, I said its influence is reflected in the short story. It's "about" greed, but it's no coincidence that the greed is specifically greed for land and that it goes into such depth about specific ownership structures of land.
I've always found it interesting HN is so focused on Georgism given it's leanings. It works out fine for hyper capitalists who eek out highly efficient use of land for stuff like a steel mill but is arguably devastating to the average joe who uses it for economically unprofitable uses like a place to let his toddler or dog play.
Property tax is definitely more preferable to the prol and even programmer wage slave, who can eek out low taxes on a larger leisure plot by not improving it and won't be forced to drill for oil or something to pay the George tax like it held a higher averaged common value.
In many senses property tax is progressivism while Georgism land tax is a hyper capitalist steamroller that cares not you've barely been able to improve the land with a decrepit mobile home and meanwhile taxes the baron with the gold plated loan shark palace the same.
- Under the premise that a land tax should extract all value from the land leaving the improvements to the owner, it would expectedly be very high land tax near urban centers and very low taxes in rural areas. In order to maximize the return on urban plots, the builder is incentivize to build the smallest units possible in the greatest quantity. This is great for young professionals who dig living in studios, but would make family-sized housing of multiple bedrooms extremely expensive.
- What do you do for all the people who will see a massive increase in taxes? Force them to sell? I'm pretty sure that's political suicide for any politician. Or do some sort of exemption like Prop 19 al la California? Now we're back at square one.
- Who decides what the productive value of the land is? Presumably someone will need to set it, as there is no objective way to determine it (like there is with the value of raw land). Nor would it stay static over time, since improvements around a property, increase the productive value of the land. That's a huge opportunity for politics to come into play to game the valuations, and create special exclusions to buy votes.
And if you think about it, we have a quasi-land tax already in place. In CA, the tax rate is static, and most of the value of a house is in the land anyways. So owners (ignoring Prop 19) are paying a property tax based on the value of the land. I do recognize it's the market value of the land, which is different than Georgism which is the productive value of the land.
A land value tax is not on the “productive value of the land.” It’s on the unimproved value of the land, I.e. raw land value.
And no, Prop 19 is not effectively a land tax, it in fact yields the exact opposite effect which is appreciation in the land does not impact a landowner’s tax bill. Under LVT, fluctuations in land price directly affect the landowner’s tax bill.
The deeper question is whether society should subsidize inefficiency for the sake of social stability. You're making the claim that social stability is always preferable, but this is more widely considered to be debatable at best.
* Should healthcare payers (whether private, through regulations on private insurance, or public, e.g. Medicare) be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for life-extending care for the terminally ill in great pain, thus inflicting responsibility for those rising costs on the rest of society?
* Should the elderly be spared from rising property taxes on the mostly-empty houses where they raised their families, so that they won't be forced to move, thus making housing shortages worse?
* Should we prevent employers from firing people from jobs which are no longer needed, like gas station attendants, so that those workers will have guaranteed employment, thus preventing consumer prices from falling?
At the very least, it's debatable, and not obviously a good thing.
As an ancap you're the first to ever accuse me of this, and my mere ability to view outcomes from perspective of others is in no way the claim you've accused me of making.
This is absolutely wrong, the average person owning a home would be far better off with a land value tax than property tax, it's typically a tax cut. Gen the increased economic efficiency helps a ton.
The only people who "lose" are speculative land bankers and exploitive landlords.
If the rental value of the land were taxed away (replacing other, less-efficient taxes), the primary beneficiaries would be all those who can't currently afford to own their own home. The market doesn't care if you never intend to rent out the land you live on, it could be rented out and will be priced accordingly. Worse, land values are known to go up, and the market accounts for that too. You aren't just buying something you don't intend to rent out at prices dictated by how much it could be rented out for, you're also paying more for it because everyone else wants to speculate on its value.
Land value taxes attack both of these factors. The rental value is taxed away, and appreciation is also taxed away in the form of higher taxes on more valuable land.
Land owners usually clamor the other way. They want their land value to appreciate, as it does when society progresses, technology advances, and land values remain largely untaxed. As much as I favor it, land value taxation has a self-defeating quality to it. After enactment, land values fall because land ownership would be benefit and obligation in equal measure. Suddenly, every land owner has a direct incentive to get the tax repealed so that their property value can reinflate. It's one of those collective action situations where we can't have nice things because everyone wants what is better for them and worse for everyone.
I'd much rather be taxed for my land usage than my income and spending, and not spend the majority of my working life indebted to a bank because land, one of the necessities of life, is a non-depreciating asset with considerable rental value, prone to speculative bubbles. I would rather be incentivized to use my land well by a tax rate that doesn't care what I do with it, than be punished for development through property taxes that go up if I try to use the land better (not that I could if I wanted to, but restrictive zoning bylaws are a separate problem).
Any transition to LVT would need to be done gradually to prevent our finance/insurance/real-estate-based economy from cratering. This would require collaboration and collective force of will far beyond what our ossified society is actually capable of. It's more than just tax policy, it's the idea that land appreciation belongs to the landlord rather than to the society that caused it. I'm convinced that we would sooner collapse than transform something so fundamental.
> This is absolutely wrong, the average person owning a home would be far better off with a land value tax than property tax
Everything I've read about LVT is that it would indeed hurt individual regular people home owners the most.
With LVT the tax assessor is free to declare that your plot of land would be a lot more profitable with a highrise apartment building on it, so now you're going to get taxed as if one existed there. Even if all you own is an old shack.
Most people do not live on a plot of land where a highrise is economically feasible.
Those who do already have homes worth astonishingly high values.
Check out ant actual evaluation of LVT, such as Lars' Doucet's. Or places where it has been implemented (Vancouver pre 1970s, parts of Pittsburgh, etc.).
The LVT was relaxed in Vancouver in part because of the grandparent noted concerns of the democratic vote of the average joe in small non-profit-seeking property holdings that can't bear the (functionally regressive) tax the same as the ibanker overlords squeezing a skyscraper of tenants in faux-luxury studios dry.
I think your last sentence there bears out that you have enough bias on the issue that perhaps the real concern is that it allows sky scrapers.
Since dropping the LVT, Vancouver has used restrictive permitting and extreme downzoning to keep homeowners very wealthy, but also keep a far larger number of people from having access to land in Vancouver.
In a normal city, you don't go from sprawl of single family homes to sky shapers, you have gradual addition of duplexes, then triplexes, then a smattering of small apartment buildings, and finally, only then perhaps, taller towers in a very tiny number of locations.
This is the reality of normal development that has not been restricted by zoning. That Vancouver has so restricts housing that a skyscraper is tenable in so many locations next to sprawl homes is an indictment of the lack of so many other options in between.
Certainly not a problem for a land value tax, that's a societal problem is a city ruined by exclusionary planning.
I have no problem with skyscraper. I'm for the abolition of taxes, which are in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer. LVT is a transfer of tax balance from those unable to improve their land, to the rich who can. LVT accelerates this balance towards the skyscraper landlord-baron.
Those who hate taxes, and have investigated them, universally point to the LVT as the "least bad tax."
Now, I'm not opposed to taxes, but given the choice between taxes that increase prosperity and taxes that decrease prosperity, I'm picking the ones that make us all wealthier and remove rentierism.
If you think that all taxes are "in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer" I'm not sure you have a solid understanding of taxation.
If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT. It eliminates the rentierism that creates barons. It takes their land rents and redistributes them to productive uses. That's the entire point.
> Those who hate taxes, and have investigated them, universally point to the LVT as the "least bad tax."
Can you post links to specific analysis work of these people?
> If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT.
That's difficult to believe. The consequence of LVT is to remove regular people from owning homes in order to transfer it to wealthy corporations who can afford major developments.
I continue to be curious how LVT is supposed to be benefitial for regular people but I've yet to see any evidence in that direction.
> Most people do not live on a plot of land where a highrise is economically feasible.
Over the whole country, you're right.
But let's be honest, the strongest advocates of LVT are not pushing to implement it in some sleepy village in the middle of nowhere just to lower taxes on the villagers.
LVT is always brought up as a solution in expensive areas as a tool to pull people out of their homes (because there is no way they could afford the taxes so they have to move out) and give the land to corporate developers to build big apartment buildings.
Wrong. The most serious proposal for LVT right now is in Detroit, where it is going to be used to give resident home owners a tax break, and charge land speculators more than they are currently being charged.
My political organization that advocates for LVT is also driving through bills for social housing, not for big corporate developers.
A classic case of theory vs reality. Some things that look good on paper in a limited scope are devastating when used in more complex contexts. See also: communism and all it's other variants.
Communism only looks good on paper if you know nothing about human behavior.
Georgism aims to take the best aspects of capitalism (market-driven optimization) while restraining some of its worst qualities (speculative bubbles driving higher prices and rents which in turn strangle the economy).
I'm not sure if you are being serious or not, but just in case: many versions of communism and socialism have been tried. When introduced at a country level, not only didn't they eradicate mass poverty or class inequalities (they just got other names), but for some reason they came with totalitarianism, violence, restricting freedom of speech, prosecuting enemies and other side-effects.
The cases where it (kind of) worked were local communes like Longo Mai (but even in these cases people argue because they receive donations, use external medical care etc.). The key difference in my opinion is that for any ideology to succeed, all members need to believe in it and actively engage towards its success. It's pretty much feasible at a local level but extremely difficult at a state level.
Tolstoy explaining how much land a man needs by writing a just-so story while at the same time enjoying the payments his former serfs make for sharecropping on his remaining latifundia and the ones the government processes for the lots he sold to them after giving them freedom sounds exactly like a former plantation owner explaining that the Blacks can only prosper under his wise guidance and that's why they shouldn't own land directly, but work as sharecroppers.
And we all know that a man needs at least 160 acres and maybe two or three times this area if the lands are marginal. Pahom's first lot was 40 acres. His second lot was 135 acres, still smaller than he would have received in the US or Canada. His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
Thanks for putting the areas of his different possessions in perspective. My main takeaway goes in the direction of your last statement:
> His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
Balance in life might be the pathway to happiness and fullfillment. You need health, family & friends and of course some wealth. Not too small and also not to big. Balancing my efforts between these pillars is sometimes hard when the general attitude often is to maximize wealth. It comes down to me leaving early at work to spend time with my family or do sports while other colleagues stay and work longer hours. But in the long run, I feel like this is the right way for me.
Interesting. I liked the writing, I had expected a typical cliché moral lesson, when he showed self awareness and took a shortcut I didn't know what sort of ending to expect. Tension was raised and although the moral lesson was what I initially had thought it would be, I engaged with the story more seriously because it had shown some independence from the necessity to follow strictly one format only.
I struggle to separate the man from the ideals, when it comes to political and economic matters.
The fact that Tolstoy was a (no disrespect meant, but I'll use the modern term: ) 'nepo baby', born and raised into nobility on his own estate with all the trappings, and then in turn begat his own large brood of noble-born nepo babies (who by-the-way were paid a special allowance by their government in order to maintain the family estate, following Leo's passing - quite the opposite of the elsewhere-mentioned Land Value Tax, then), is somehow a sad indictment of the way humanity trumpets it's hard won wisdom either during, or after, doing the opposite themselves.
That said, he was also a very good writer, and an intelligent and accomplished person in many ways.
You are not alone. A lot people struggle with this. Truth is the person is irrelevant, what matters is what they wrote or said or did. If Putin writes something intelligent and Churchill wrote something stupid that’s all you have. A stupid text and an intelligent text. No need to get excited. That way you can also endure both kinds of texts originating from a single person without being disappointed.
And no worries, once you can detach the work from the creator you are qualified to judge the work. Automatically. :)
That works for novels and so on. For philosophical writing... If someone is advocating for X yet not even close to dogfooding it... It's tricky. Sort of like Marx and Engels. Or all the modern caviar socialists.
Footnote #3: The brick oven in a Russian peasant's hut is usually built so
as to leave a flat top, large enough to lie on, for those who want
to sleep in a warm place.
This story was used as a chapter title in Antony Beevor’s book on Stalingrad (or another one of his) and it was so fitting. Germans racing across the Soviet Union, conquering everything but exhausting their momentum and overextending their supply lines, then the last line of the story answering the chapter title. Beautiful.
"You have an awful lot of media, and I only want to read a single page of text content."
The site admin replied, "5m."
5m? What kind of content-length is that?
That's how long your access token will remain valid. You can receive as many bytes as you like, once you've completed our captcha. But you can only load visible content, and 5m is all you get. Our javascript will follow along as you scroll and load the content progressively.
He solved the captcha and began scrolling.
It was good content. He knew he had to reach the end, but he paused here and there to consider the implications. He even scrolled up to reread an early paragraph, thinking this passage would inspire a fine bon mot in some future conversation.
At the three minute mark he started becoming nervous, observing that he was less than halfway down the page. He kept a looser focus on the text and tried to devour it as a flattened procession of scenes and story elements to be interrogated for meaning later.
Four and a half minutes- he began to skim. Now it was just a string of nouns and verbs, representing hardly more to him than its underlying utf-8 byte stream.
He scrolled wildly onto the half-occluded final line of text, but it was too late: the token's time to live had already fallen below the round-trip latency to the server.
Or had it? There was still a request in progress, and it had already reached the server milliseconds before expiration. Status 200: the response arrived successfully!
As the final line was revealed, the page footer approached the view region and triggered a final refresh. The full page of content was invalidated before his eyes reached the end of the line, and now his browser displayed only a 404 message. This final response delivered no content at all-- only a header, 651 bytes long.
I got this message under the "why was I blocked?" which is why I didn't consider geoblocking.
> This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
Just because it’s getting mentioned around here a lot lately: Tolstoy was a convert to Georgism (the philosophy backing Land Value Tax). It’s interesting to see a very specific idea suddenly win a person, and see it reflected back in their output.
Interesting piece by Tolstoy’s son on how big an influence George was: https://cooperative-individualism.org/tolstoy-ilya_leo-tolst...
I don't think that's what the short story is about.
> The question of buying freehold land recurred to him again and again.
> He went on in the same way for three years; renting land and sowing wheat. The seasons turned out well and the crops were good, so that he began to lay money by. He might have gone on living contentedly, but he grew tired of having to rent other people's land every year, and having to scramble for it. Wherever there was good land to be had, the peasants would rush for it and it was taken up at once, so that unless you were sharp about it you got none. It happened in the third year that he and a dealer together rented a piece of pasture land from some peasants; and they had already ploughed it up, when there was some dispute, and the peasants went to law about it, and things fell out so that the labor was all lost. "If it were my own land," thought Pahom, "I should be independent, and there would not be all this unpleasantness."
Yep can't see any sort of economic ideology regarding land ownership at play here.
I didn't say the story is about Georgism, I said its influence is reflected in the short story. It's "about" greed, but it's no coincidence that the greed is specifically greed for land and that it goes into such depth about specific ownership structures of land.
I've always found it interesting HN is so focused on Georgism given it's leanings. It works out fine for hyper capitalists who eek out highly efficient use of land for stuff like a steel mill but is arguably devastating to the average joe who uses it for economically unprofitable uses like a place to let his toddler or dog play.
Property tax is definitely more preferable to the prol and even programmer wage slave, who can eek out low taxes on a larger leisure plot by not improving it and won't be forced to drill for oil or something to pay the George tax like it held a higher averaged common value.
In many senses property tax is progressivism while Georgism land tax is a hyper capitalist steamroller that cares not you've barely been able to improve the land with a decrepit mobile home and meanwhile taxes the baron with the gold plated loan shark palace the same.
I think Georgism has three main pitfalls:
- Under the premise that a land tax should extract all value from the land leaving the improvements to the owner, it would expectedly be very high land tax near urban centers and very low taxes in rural areas. In order to maximize the return on urban plots, the builder is incentivize to build the smallest units possible in the greatest quantity. This is great for young professionals who dig living in studios, but would make family-sized housing of multiple bedrooms extremely expensive.
- What do you do for all the people who will see a massive increase in taxes? Force them to sell? I'm pretty sure that's political suicide for any politician. Or do some sort of exemption like Prop 19 al la California? Now we're back at square one.
- Who decides what the productive value of the land is? Presumably someone will need to set it, as there is no objective way to determine it (like there is with the value of raw land). Nor would it stay static over time, since improvements around a property, increase the productive value of the land. That's a huge opportunity for politics to come into play to game the valuations, and create special exclusions to buy votes.
And if you think about it, we have a quasi-land tax already in place. In CA, the tax rate is static, and most of the value of a house is in the land anyways. So owners (ignoring Prop 19) are paying a property tax based on the value of the land. I do recognize it's the market value of the land, which is different than Georgism which is the productive value of the land.
A land value tax is not on the “productive value of the land.” It’s on the unimproved value of the land, I.e. raw land value.
And no, Prop 19 is not effectively a land tax, it in fact yields the exact opposite effect which is appreciation in the land does not impact a landowner’s tax bill. Under LVT, fluctuations in land price directly affect the landowner’s tax bill.
The deeper question is whether society should subsidize inefficiency for the sake of social stability. You're making the claim that social stability is always preferable, but this is more widely considered to be debatable at best.
At the very least, it's debatable, and not obviously a good thing.As an ancap you're the first to ever accuse me of this, and my mere ability to view outcomes from perspective of others is in no way the claim you've accused me of making.
> I've always found it interesting HN is so focused on Georgism given it's leanings. It works out fine for hyper capitalists
That seems pretty much right on target for HN.
This is absolutely wrong, the average person owning a home would be far better off with a land value tax than property tax, it's typically a tax cut. Gen the increased economic efficiency helps a ton.
The only people who "lose" are speculative land bankers and exploitive landlords.
Can you give an example where property tax changed to land value tax and a home owner was better off?
If the rental value of the land were taxed away (replacing other, less-efficient taxes), the primary beneficiaries would be all those who can't currently afford to own their own home. The market doesn't care if you never intend to rent out the land you live on, it could be rented out and will be priced accordingly. Worse, land values are known to go up, and the market accounts for that too. You aren't just buying something you don't intend to rent out at prices dictated by how much it could be rented out for, you're also paying more for it because everyone else wants to speculate on its value.
Land value taxes attack both of these factors. The rental value is taxed away, and appreciation is also taxed away in the form of higher taxes on more valuable land.
Land owners usually clamor the other way. They want their land value to appreciate, as it does when society progresses, technology advances, and land values remain largely untaxed. As much as I favor it, land value taxation has a self-defeating quality to it. After enactment, land values fall because land ownership would be benefit and obligation in equal measure. Suddenly, every land owner has a direct incentive to get the tax repealed so that their property value can reinflate. It's one of those collective action situations where we can't have nice things because everyone wants what is better for them and worse for everyone.
I'd much rather be taxed for my land usage than my income and spending, and not spend the majority of my working life indebted to a bank because land, one of the necessities of life, is a non-depreciating asset with considerable rental value, prone to speculative bubbles. I would rather be incentivized to use my land well by a tax rate that doesn't care what I do with it, than be punished for development through property taxes that go up if I try to use the land better (not that I could if I wanted to, but restrictive zoning bylaws are a separate problem).
Any transition to LVT would need to be done gradually to prevent our finance/insurance/real-estate-based economy from cratering. This would require collaboration and collective force of will far beyond what our ossified society is actually capable of. It's more than just tax policy, it's the idea that land appreciation belongs to the landlord rather than to the society that caused it. I'm convinced that we would sooner collapse than transform something so fundamental.
> This is absolutely wrong, the average person owning a home would be far better off with a land value tax than property tax
Everything I've read about LVT is that it would indeed hurt individual regular people home owners the most.
With LVT the tax assessor is free to declare that your plot of land would be a lot more profitable with a highrise apartment building on it, so now you're going to get taxed as if one existed there. Even if all you own is an old shack.
Most people do not live on a plot of land where a highrise is economically feasible.
Those who do already have homes worth astonishingly high values.
Check out ant actual evaluation of LVT, such as Lars' Doucet's. Or places where it has been implemented (Vancouver pre 1970s, parts of Pittsburgh, etc.).
The LVT was relaxed in Vancouver in part because of the grandparent noted concerns of the democratic vote of the average joe in small non-profit-seeking property holdings that can't bear the (functionally regressive) tax the same as the ibanker overlords squeezing a skyscraper of tenants in faux-luxury studios dry.
I think your last sentence there bears out that you have enough bias on the issue that perhaps the real concern is that it allows sky scrapers.
Since dropping the LVT, Vancouver has used restrictive permitting and extreme downzoning to keep homeowners very wealthy, but also keep a far larger number of people from having access to land in Vancouver.
In a normal city, you don't go from sprawl of single family homes to sky shapers, you have gradual addition of duplexes, then triplexes, then a smattering of small apartment buildings, and finally, only then perhaps, taller towers in a very tiny number of locations.
This is the reality of normal development that has not been restricted by zoning. That Vancouver has so restricts housing that a skyscraper is tenable in so many locations next to sprawl homes is an indictment of the lack of so many other options in between.
Certainly not a problem for a land value tax, that's a societal problem is a city ruined by exclusionary planning.
I have no problem with skyscraper. I'm for the abolition of taxes, which are in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer. LVT is a transfer of tax balance from those unable to improve their land, to the rich who can. LVT accelerates this balance towards the skyscraper landlord-baron.
Those who hate taxes, and have investigated them, universally point to the LVT as the "least bad tax."
Now, I'm not opposed to taxes, but given the choice between taxes that increase prosperity and taxes that decrease prosperity, I'm picking the ones that make us all wealthier and remove rentierism.
If you think that all taxes are "in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer" I'm not sure you have a solid understanding of taxation.
If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT. It eliminates the rentierism that creates barons. It takes their land rents and redistributes them to productive uses. That's the entire point.
> Those who hate taxes, and have investigated them, universally point to the LVT as the "least bad tax."
Can you post links to specific analysis work of these people?
> If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT.
That's difficult to believe. The consequence of LVT is to remove regular people from owning homes in order to transfer it to wealthy corporations who can afford major developments.
I continue to be curious how LVT is supposed to be benefitial for regular people but I've yet to see any evidence in that direction.
> Most people do not live on a plot of land where a highrise is economically feasible.
Over the whole country, you're right.
But let's be honest, the strongest advocates of LVT are not pushing to implement it in some sleepy village in the middle of nowhere just to lower taxes on the villagers.
LVT is always brought up as a solution in expensive areas as a tool to pull people out of their homes (because there is no way they could afford the taxes so they have to move out) and give the land to corporate developers to build big apartment buildings.
Wrong. The most serious proposal for LVT right now is in Detroit, where it is going to be used to give resident home owners a tax break, and charge land speculators more than they are currently being charged.
My political organization that advocates for LVT is also driving through bills for social housing, not for big corporate developers.
Where do these strange ideas come from?
> Where do these strange ideas come from?
Here is a link to a site that is promoting LVT, so any biases they have would be in favor of LVT.
https://www.progress.org/articles/the-implementation-of-land...
Quote:
"A third possibility is for the retired persons to move to a lower-rent neighborhood, as many anyway move to assisted living or to an apartment."
We can see that it is an accepted goal of LVT to pull poorer/fixed-income people out of their homes so developers can have the land.
A classic case of theory vs reality. Some things that look good on paper in a limited scope are devastating when used in more complex contexts. See also: communism and all it's other variants.
Communism only looks good on paper if you know nothing about human behavior.
Georgism aims to take the best aspects of capitalism (market-driven optimization) while restraining some of its worst qualities (speculative bubbles driving higher prices and rents which in turn strangle the economy).
> Communism only looks good on paper if you know nothing about human behavior.
Yet even HN is full of people dreaming of the proletariat revolution
[flagged]
I'm not sure if you are being serious or not, but just in case: many versions of communism and socialism have been tried. When introduced at a country level, not only didn't they eradicate mass poverty or class inequalities (they just got other names), but for some reason they came with totalitarianism, violence, restricting freedom of speech, prosecuting enemies and other side-effects.
The cases where it (kind of) worked were local communes like Longo Mai (but even in these cases people argue because they receive donations, use external medical care etc.). The key difference in my opinion is that for any ideology to succeed, all members need to believe in it and actively engage towards its success. It's pretty much feasible at a local level but extremely difficult at a state level.
I tried free markets last weekend. It works great. Roger Clinton was right, “free the market and the booty will follow”.
Tolstoy explaining how much land a man needs by writing a just-so story while at the same time enjoying the payments his former serfs make for sharecropping on his remaining latifundia and the ones the government processes for the lots he sold to them after giving them freedom sounds exactly like a former plantation owner explaining that the Blacks can only prosper under his wise guidance and that's why they shouldn't own land directly, but work as sharecroppers.
And we all know that a man needs at least 160 acres and maybe two or three times this area if the lands are marginal. Pahom's first lot was 40 acres. His second lot was 135 acres, still smaller than he would have received in the US or Canada. His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
Thanks for putting the areas of his different possessions in perspective. My main takeaway goes in the direction of your last statement:
> His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
Balance in life might be the pathway to happiness and fullfillment. You need health, family & friends and of course some wealth. Not too small and also not to big. Balancing my efforts between these pillars is sometimes hard when the general attitude often is to maximize wealth. It comes down to me leaving early at work to spend time with my family or do sports while other colleagues stay and work longer hours. But in the long run, I feel like this is the right way for me.
Interesting. I liked the writing, I had expected a typical cliché moral lesson, when he showed self awareness and took a shortcut I didn't know what sort of ending to expect. Tension was raised and although the moral lesson was what I initially had thought it would be, I engaged with the story more seriously because it had shown some independence from the necessity to follow strictly one format only.
I struggle to separate the man from the ideals, when it comes to political and economic matters.
The fact that Tolstoy was a (no disrespect meant, but I'll use the modern term: ) 'nepo baby', born and raised into nobility on his own estate with all the trappings, and then in turn begat his own large brood of noble-born nepo babies (who by-the-way were paid a special allowance by their government in order to maintain the family estate, following Leo's passing - quite the opposite of the elsewhere-mentioned Land Value Tax, then), is somehow a sad indictment of the way humanity trumpets it's hard won wisdom either during, or after, doing the opposite themselves.
That said, he was also a very good writer, and an intelligent and accomplished person in many ways.
They say Buddah was the son of a king.
You are not alone. A lot people struggle with this. Truth is the person is irrelevant, what matters is what they wrote or said or did. If Putin writes something intelligent and Churchill wrote something stupid that’s all you have. A stupid text and an intelligent text. No need to get excited. That way you can also endure both kinds of texts originating from a single person without being disappointed.
And no worries, once you can detach the work from the creator you are qualified to judge the work. Automatically. :)
See also: "Genetic Fallacy."
That works for novels and so on. For philosophical writing... If someone is advocating for X yet not even close to dogfooding it... It's tricky. Sort of like Marx and Engels. Or all the modern caviar socialists.
for the opposite extreme, we have "Diogenes Throwing Away His Cup"
I think the Diogenes strategy requires living in a city with a warm Mediterranean climate, not a rural area in Siberia.
True!
(however, they say the cynics in Chelyabinsk are such tough cookies, that they merely install big metal flaps over their tubs to keep the snow off: https://cdn-media.tass.ru/width/1020_b9261fa1/tass/m2/en/upl... )
Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access online-literature.com
I now, truly will never know how much Land does a man need :(
Walter Kirn & Matt Taibbi discuss it about 2 weeks back.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZnMGYuAM4mFnkJju36Y2
Why was Pahon lying on top of the oven?
Check out the footnotes after the story.
Footnote #3: The brick oven in a Russian peasant's hut is usually built so as to leave a flat top, large enough to lie on, for those who want to sleep in a warm place.
The Russian peasant built their brick ovens with a flat top large enough to lie on. This gave them a warm place to sleep or lie down.
It is explained in the footnotes on the linked story.
This story was used as a chapter title in Antony Beevor’s book on Stalingrad (or another one of his) and it was so fitting. Germans racing across the Soviet Union, conquering everything but exhausting their momentum and overextending their supply lines, then the last line of the story answering the chapter title. Beautiful.
10 acres.
A lot.
> > How much Land does a man need
> A lot.
Spoiler: the true answer is the last sentence in the short story.
I was sure I read this story before, but couldn’t recall it for whatever reason, however you hint made me remember it, thanks :)
Apparently I’m a malicious attacker trying to read Tolstoy because cloudflare is blocking me from this page.
How many kb does a man need?
"You have an awful lot of media, and I only want to read a single page of text content."
The site admin replied, "5m."
5m? What kind of content-length is that?
That's how long your access token will remain valid. You can receive as many bytes as you like, once you've completed our captcha. But you can only load visible content, and 5m is all you get. Our javascript will follow along as you scroll and load the content progressively.
He solved the captcha and began scrolling. It was good content. He knew he had to reach the end, but he paused here and there to consider the implications. He even scrolled up to reread an early paragraph, thinking this passage would inspire a fine bon mot in some future conversation.
At the three minute mark he started becoming nervous, observing that he was less than halfway down the page. He kept a looser focus on the text and tried to devour it as a flattened procession of scenes and story elements to be interrogated for meaning later.
Four and a half minutes- he began to skim. Now it was just a string of nouns and verbs, representing hardly more to him than its underlying utf-8 byte stream.
He scrolled wildly onto the half-occluded final line of text, but it was too late: the token's time to live had already fallen below the round-trip latency to the server.
Or had it? There was still a request in progress, and it had already reached the server milliseconds before expiration. Status 200: the response arrived successfully!
As the final line was revealed, the page footer approached the view region and triggered a final refresh. The full page of content was invalidated before his eyes reached the end of the line, and now his browser displayed only a 404 message. This final response delivered no content at all-- only a header, 651 bytes long.
Looks like ham-fisted geoblocking. I'm blocked from accessing it using an Indian IP but works fine with a US VPN.
I got this message under the "why was I blocked?" which is why I didn't consider geoblocking.
> This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
I'm blocked too. Why would they block Indian IPs?
Yeah. Facing the same.
Maybe they compare the geolocation with the browser timezone.
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