Anyone think Rothbard might have a point in his criticism of Adam Smith? Sometimes Smith barely sounds like a capitalist
>without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
>Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.
Rothbard noted that Smith favored extreme regulation of “usury” and had a built-in distaste for “excessive profits” which exceed “the natural price” (and the “natural price” in Smith refers to the cost to produce something). Smith also held a grudge against rent, and said it often functioned like monopoly in practice, and that no laborer should be afflicted with rent which makes his provisions difficult to obtain
In short, it is questionable just how much of a friend Smith is of the free the market
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Henry George proved that it's better to tax land instead of labor or capital.
Seems like an extreme pain unless you want to tax all land equally
A land value tax is a tax on land values. It can be a maximum of 100% of the land value, per year. The higher the land value tax, the lower the land value. Land that is worth more obviously pays more in nominal taxes, but the rate of taxation is the same for all land.
Taxing all land the same according to area seems extraordinary foolish. No one values or wants land, they want a kind of land or a particular location, and these factors are exclusively what is valuable in land. Size is only a multiplier of these factors
Nope. Lern moar before you insult the land value tax. I can't spoon feed it too you in this thread. Land with crude oil in the ground has a different value than land in midtown Manhattan has a different value than a cornfield in Iowa has a different value than a tiny suburban plot for a single-family home. Lern moar.
Tax on land values is just a tax on capital with extra steps because land's value is literally a direct product of how much revenue it can generate
>Tax on land values is just a tax on capital with extra steps because land's value is literally a direct product of how much revenue it can generate
That's kinda circular thinking... how much revenue it can generate is the result of what? Largely external factors you don't control, you can capture a slice of that growth but it's "unearned income". The Georgist idea is financial speculation on land actually decreases the productive use of land and forcing people to sell what they can't effectively put to use would be a net good.
Anyways the American middle class got where it is by buying homes and capturing a slice of those inflating values... Georgist schemes would force people to play the markets more... a neolibs wet dream.
>That's kinda circular thinking
Nah, not really.
>Largely external factors you don't control
Except when you buy that land or invest in it's development.
>Nah, not really.
Well rephrase it... all I can parse is taxing land is an indirect tax on capital because land is worth what it can charge?
>Except when you buy that land or invest in it's development.
Except the inflation adjusted price generally goes up when you're not buying and just sitting on undeveloped land nonetheless somehow and that presumably has to do with other people spending money.
>Well rephrase it... all I can parse is taxing land is an indirect tax on capital because land is worth what it can charge?
When you're taxing capital you're eventually taxing the revenue made from assets. When you're taxing land value, you're eventually taxing the revenue made from this particular asset. There's nothing circular about it - it both cases it comes down to taxing the revenue you generate. The only measurable difference is focus on a particular asset, so land would get less use in speculation and therefore the prices would drop somewhat, but it would be fully compensated by increased speculation (and prices) for other similar assets. The whole issue has absolutely nothing to do with the do of an asset, and everything to do with speculation being the most lucrative economic activity by a wide margin - but oh God, just like Smith, we're beginning to barely sound like capitalists. Georgists are losing forest for the trees, that's why they are a meme.
>Except the inflation adjusted price generally goes up when you're not buying
Yeah, "generally", and especially if we only consider America or UK. Tell me about price going up in Ukraine, or even America if it's Detroit or some other area experiencing depreciation. The largest factor - WHICH land to buy, is still under your control, and it functions perfectly well as a tool of strategic investment and/or speculation.
To pay a tax you need money... unused land isn't generating actual liquid cash to pay for itself. That's the entire point. Shifting speculation off land and onto something more ephemeral could be a public good, idiots can get rich or go broke gambling on crypto but the swings in price doesn't effect most people much
>Tell me about price going up in Ukraine, or even America if it's Detroit or some other area experiencing depreciation
Which are external factors you don't control. Prices obviously go up and down without any cause from you. The idea is those gains are mostly public and should be captured and used to finance all public goods. Henry George was a liberal and wanted to say all other sources of income were "earned" more honestly... he didn't go for the larger socialist point that you could say the same thing about the gains from the entire division of labour under capitalism and just stuck to the idea the distribution of land was the root cause of all the worlds ills and if everyone owned some land poverty would be abolished
Smith used labour as a unit to think about exchange in because it's the only general input into all commodities. It wasn't a moral maxim or anything just that you can't exchange things into existence without it and quantifying things in a simple economy makes sense that way. Think about how a cardinal vs ordinal utility debate went on in welfare economics after the marginal revolution, starting in those terms would of went to socialist thinking even quicker.
Anyways David Ricardo vs. Malthus kind of made that debate on labour as a unit more explicit... the thing is if you go more "demand side" like Malthus did you should end up eventually becoming closer to Keynes.
>Henry George proved that it's better to tax land instead of labor or capital.
By claiming the interests between capital and labour were mutual and everything wrong in the world was the result of a maldistribution of land. Obviously that's questionable. He knew making land have a cost would redistribute ownership away from the most unproductive speculators. Everyone would get richer, win-win. Basically all his opponents, maybe rightfully, called that socialism but he thought he was a liberal.
Smith already formulated the basic premises and framework Malthus employs, but Smith examines it from a supply angle: that is, population as labor potential and the demand for labor ultimately affecting supply in terms of population. People reproduce more when manpower is in higher demand, and when there is a fall in demand then manpower is supplied less. It can even go to the point of inventory being thrown out, so to speak, which leads to deaths of the lower classes if there is no intervention.
I wasn't talking about demographics... Malthus wrote on economics more broadly. Malthus theory of population was reacting against Godwin, his writings on economics were attacking Ricardo and free trade dogma. Liberals/free traders were against the corn laws because it benefited rentiers supposedly at the cost of everyone else, Malthus thought "Say's law" was bullshit and markets didn't actually need to clear and a glut could occur so thought rentiers getting poorer may result in a decline in demand for servants/etc leading to higher unemployment further putting pressure on driving down real wages.
Malthus was a reactionary but much more clever than libtards who thought there was no such thing as a demand problem. The whole idea more could be produced than people could afford to consume or a market couldn't set prices right to regulate supply and demand to employ resources was an absurdity written off, Smith would of saw falling prices making people richer not poorer.
Rothbard, a greasy, greedy semite is by nature repulsed by the humanist that Adam Smith was.
So he's not enough of an ideologue in Rothbard's eyes? That's the "criticism"?
I'm pretty sure Smith meant something like equilibrium price with "natural price" since he said that that was the price commodities gravitate towards, although not necessarily reachingn it.
Also Rothbard is quite hardcore so evidently Smith is a socialist for him; since Smith is usually held as a hardcore capitalist he went extra hard on him. But yeah, Rothbard has a point if you take into account what he believed. Also Smith contributed some wrong ideas used later on by Ricardo, Marx and many other on the "left".
>I'm pretty sure Smith meant something like equilibrium price with "natural price" since he said that that was the price commodities gravitate towards, although not necessarily reachingn it.
The idea of market clearing prices being a thing obviously isn't the issue... Smith didn't think wages/rents/profits get priced in the same way marginal productivity theory states they are
>Also Smith contributed some wrong ideas used later on by Ricardo, Marx and many other on the "left".
Have you ever looked into how any empirical real world firm engages in accounting or pricing things? Something "right" economists don't
>Sometimes Smith barely sounds like a capitalist