Maybe, but a private right to land owership doesn't exist either. Just because someone built a farm there two hundred years ago they got to sell it to someone who sold it to someone who sold it to my landlord? I'm fine with someone owning a building they built, but they should have to rent the land from the public at market rates.
Im pretty sure if you look up the laws, that is exactly how private land ownership rights work.
I get that you are trying to make a normative statement of how you think things should work, but it doesn't help to deny the reality you live in.
I'm open to the idea that a different model of land rights would lead to different outcomes, after all, how couldn't it. however, I am not so sure that government ownership of all land would have the positive outcomes you do, at least not in terms of affordability. Would everyone be subject to eviction from their homes by a higher bidder? What happens to homes people built and improvements they have made when they are evicted?
What if those most able to pay high land rent are corporate land lords who can most effectively extract wealth from tenants?
Indeed, I'm talking about what I philosophically believe should be (Georgism)
You're right, those are all legitimate issues that would have to be addressed carefully. A key part of that would be redistribution of the revenues to the people.
My understanding of Georgism is that the revenue would be used to support the government services.
Is there a subset of Georgism which focuses on the redistributive element?
My main concern with Georgism + redistribution is that I think it would generate a feedback loop where the government captures all production value, not dissimilar to Marxism.
If you take the view that rights are granted by society and not inherent then you are technically correct that rights don't really exist. But then neither does money or law. This kind of nihilistic reductivism isn't particularly useful.
What I mean by "rights" are those that are taken to be so by common consensus - e.g. those in the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes the right to life; to deny someone shelter is to threaten that right.
To withhold shelter from people and then rent it back to them is a racket, plain and simple: safety in return for money, underwritten by a threat of violence.
I thought the whole deal with this society thing was a collective endeavour for the common good; structures that hold private interest above common good seem blatantly counter-productive.
>If you take the view that rights are granted by society and not inherent then you are technically correct that rights don't really exist. But then neither does money or law. This kind of nihilistic reductivism isn't particularly useful.
If you take the view that rights are granted by society, then money, law, and property rights DO exist.
I get that you are saying that you want something, but it doesn't exist in either the current defacto social sense, or in inherent moral sense.
>I thought the whole deal with this society thing was a collective endeavor for the common good; structures that hold private interest above common good seem blatantly counter-productive.
I think this is where your position differs with mine, and that, and that generally held by world. Society is not and has never been a collective endeavor for the common good. It is merely a system to prevent people from murdering each other, enslaving them, and taking their things. In one sense, the common good is served in that it prevents lawless anarchy, but few societies have ever bought into the utilitarian view where maximizing the common good is the primary goal.
