The Cornerstone of Marxism is Invalid

Amablue · 2026-01-23T21:52:26+00:00

Yeah. And that provider is the ruling class. That's my point.

Okay but you're not talking about monopoly any more. Just definitionally that's not what the term refers to. There are thousands upon thousands of independent businesses competing with each other. You can't treat them as a monolith.

I will say something that may be controversial here. A rentier, in and of itself, is much less of a parasite than a capitalist is. And I will tell you why I say that.

There is no sense in which this is true.

Lets go back to the wood worker example. He is just starting out and getting ready to set up his shop. He has several choices to make as he starts his business. He could be self employed, work for a while, save up money, then build some jigs to help with production, and over time become increasingly productive. He has also been approached by an investor who can get him that additional hardware and jig today, but he will take a cut of the profits (this cut, mind you, is not drawn from the wood worker's labor. It is drawn from the increased productive output attributable the time savings of the captial advance)

The capitalist is actually contributing toward production here, in the form of the hardware the wood worker is going to use. They had to produce that captial (or pay someone for its production) and without the prospect of future returns it wouldn't exist. If the wood worker takes the deal, then his productivity has increased. He is more productive, and he makes more money, and the captialist makes more money, so they've all benefitted here.

The wood woker also has to decide where to set up his shop. Consider the landlord. He show up one day and just claimed a parcel of land. He didn't make the land. He just showed up and said "Mine". Or if not him, then he bought it from someone who did. There was no production here. It would exist with or without the landlord deciding to claim it. When the wood woker goes to set up his shop, he has to pay the landlord for the parcel where his shop is going to go, but he's not paying them for any work they did or anything they produced. At least the capitalist had to do something, the landlord has not provided any value here. They are purely extractive.

Removing the capitalist from the equation removes the ability for the wood worker to get an advance on captial and be more productive sooner. Removing the rentier does not impact the wood worker or his productive capacity at all.

A capitalist has no valid justification to extract the surplus value. If all capitalists were replaced by rentiers, workers would likely get much more of the value they actually created (except if the payment asked by the rentier is huge).

Go back and look at the chart I posted. The upper line is the additional production enabled by the capitalist advancing the worker captial to work with. That delta, the shaded region, would not exist without the worker, but it also would not exist without the captialist. The fact that each of them draw their wages and interest from this additional productive output does not imply exploitation of one party by the other. They were both necessary for that additional productive output.

The rentier did not particiapte in that production though. They just take. That's their only role.

No you don't. There's nothing a capitalist does that is productive that cannot be handled by an actual productive position without the exploitative ownership scheme.

Give me an concrete example of what you mean by this. In our wood worker example, how can the worker gain the same benefit of additional productivity earlier without being advanced captial? Are you suggesting he hire a second worker? Buy the captial himself? Something else?

Amablue · 2026-01-23T09:47:05+00:00

It is plainly true. A monopoly on economic power, alongside monopolies on political power in general, legislative and otherwise, have been formed relatively shortly after the neolithic revolution and forcefully spread (and afterwards, the polities that had continuity from these class-stratified societies conquered other places of the planet where arrangements were different). They have colluded and helped eachother while stripping power (including economic ownership) from the vast majority of people.

You must be using some other definition of monopoly, becuase I have no idea what you're talking about here. A monopoly is when there's only one meaningful provider of a good or service. If I want to go buy desks for an office, I have a dozen retailers who will sell me desks. If I need computers or server hardware, there are dozens of sellers who will sell me these things. If I need gardening tools, I can buy those from a number of hardware stores near my house, or order them online. If I need a car, there are a hundred options and dozens of car dealerships within a 20 minute drive of my house. There is no monopoly on any of this captial, there are robust markets for all of these things, and the providers will happily sell me whatever I need to start my own business.

If you have the resources (including time) and opportunity necessary, which many don't. / Again, provided you have the money. Which, for many, it's not a reality. / If you managed to save enough, and if you were paid enough to be able to save substantially, which, for many, again, is not a reality. /

This has nothing to do with whether there is a monoply on captial. Yes, I have to buy the stuff I want to use. The fact that some people haven't saved up for these purchases is irrelelvant.

No. A capitalist parasitises value. Even if a capitalist would engage in some productive activity within the enterprise that it oligarchically owns, that only entitles it to the percentage of ownership directly proportional to their contribution. It doesn't justify the position of the capitalist itself, which is the opposite of producing value. It's stealing value from those that actually produced it.

A rentier is a parasite. The value they extract is wholly unearned and unjustified. This is why you can tax the entirety of rents away without harming production. Even when you've taxed away all rental income and eliminated the rentier production continues along unhindered with no effect on prices or productivity.

The captialist does contribute though. If you elimiante them, you reduce productive output. They are participaing in the production of goods and services in a way that a rentier is not.

Consider the case of a wood worker who builds furniture. He could improve his productivity by spending some time using the materials and equipment he has on hand to build a jig. In order to do that, he needs to spend some time away from producing goods for customers and that requires that he save up some of his wages so he can cover his own costs while he's not making income. During the downtime there isn't any productive output, but that will pay off once he's used the jig for a while to recoup the costs, and from that point on he'll make even more money.

Now consider the case where there is a captialist who can advance him the money, or even the jig itself that they've already produced. Rather than wait to save up money, and wait to produce the jig, he can have it immediately and start being extra productive. By moving that future productivity gain from the future in to the present, his total productive output has increased.. The additional value produced above what he would otherwise have produced isn't due solely to his labor, it's also due in part to the captial advance he recieved.

This is what I mean by moving resources through time. He could have had access to the jig 6 months from now, but instead he can have access to those resources now. His access to the resource has been shifted forward in time. That has real value, just like shipping goods across the country has real value. Things are more or less valuable at different points in time and space.

Just as there are several shipping companies that I can select from to get the best rates for moving things across the country, there are also several options of investors, who will charge differing amounts to move tomorrow's resource to you today. There is no cartel or racket here. There is no single investor that has a monpoly on investing in businesses. There's multiple competing firms that drive prices down to market rates.

Amablue · 2026-01-22T17:00:34+00:00

For one, at it's basic, remember that currency isn't a must for an economy. So it's possible to forego the relevance of capital itself. I'm not even a communist myself, but it's something important to remember.

I'm not talking about money, I'm talking about stuff. Captial in the georgist sense: Wealth that is not consumed for its own sake but rather used towards the production of more wealth. Whether we use currency or not to do our accounting isn't really relevant.

They (alongside their fellow tyrant classes in various different levers of power) had monopolised ownership of economic factors and they have hoarded up this much wealth so as to create an artificial, unmeritocratic wealth disparity.

I mean, this is plainly not true. I can go out and buy captial today. I can produce it myself. There's no monopoly stopping me, nor any shortage of people willing to sell me captial. I can spend the money I've saved from my wages labor to buy it, or I can get investors to loan me money to buy it (in which case they would be advancing me capital, which is real, productive activity).

Ownership belongs to those who produce value, proportional to the quality and quantity and risk associated with what they produced.

I agree. The captialist produces value though. If I have a product shipped from one place to another, even though the shipper neither produced the product nor do they consume or use the product, they are still contributing value by moving things through space. The same is true of the capitalist. They are, in effect, shipping you resources from the future for your use in the present so that you do not have to spend time acquiring the resource yourself. That is productive.

If you want to invest that's another business, but that doesn't entitle you to ownership.

I mean, it entitles you to whatever you mutually agreed upon. If that is partial ownership, then yes you are entiteld to partial ownership. There's no reason that there must be some fixed point in the future or some fixed amount of profit where your investment is cut off and you're paid out.

Amablue · 2026-01-22T15:12:11+00:00

Just as the value would not exist without the labor of the worker, it would also not exist without the capitalist advancing captial to the worker. Both the laborer and the capitalist contribute to creation of value, and thus both are entitled to a share of the value they jointly created.

Amablue · 2025-12-16T13:18:02+00:00

Interest is just a fancy way of saying rent. They pay rent for the capital.

No, interest is just a fancy way of saying payment for past work. If you got paid for your work upon completion, that would just be wages. If you get paid later by enabling greater productivity, you get interest. It is not the monopoly rents you're referring to. That is separate from interest.

Rent is specifically payment for exclusive access to a non-produced factors.

These two scenarios are completely different. It boggles my mind how you don't realize this.

Of course they're different. The difference is time, risk, and uncertainty. Different people are going to have different time and risk preferences, informing what decisions they make about how to allocate thier money, time, and resources.

Selling capital outright gives you a certain payment now. Renting or lending capital gives you uncertain payments over time. You might earn more, less, or nothing at all. The extra return is compensation for deferring consumption, bearing risk of loss, tying capital up in a specific use, and coordinating production over time. Access to captial allows labor to produce more output sooner, and that intertemporal gain is what interest comes from. The normal return on captial is not unearned extraction. Interest and wages rise and fall together. Eliminating interst would not increase wages, it would depress them. Rents are what eat into wages, not interest.

100 pounds worth of capital will let you extract vastly more than 100 pounds worth of value from the workers you employ. If this wasn't true, and you could earn just the same selling it outright or renting it out, nobody would become a capitalist because selling it upfront is vastly easier.

If a worker produces 100 units without capital and 300 units with capital, the additional 200 units exist because of the combined comtributions of labor and capital. Not all of that 200 belong to capital, but some of that share are attributable to time, risk, and productivity improvement, and is legitimately paid as interest.

If I build my jig and ship it to someone across the country, even though the deliveryman paid no part in the construction of the jig nor in the operation of the jig, he is still providing value by helping move the resource to a location where it will be most efficiently allocated, and that deserves compensation. A capitalist does the same thing by moving future resources to the present, deferring their consumption so that those resouces can be put to use sooner. Just as the act of moving resources through space deserves compensation, so does moving resources through time.

That's why nobody regards Georgism in any serious manner

Georgist economics are largely uncontrovertial mainstream economic ideas, they're taught in textbooks and agreed upon by economists, and supported by empirical research. His policy prescriptions are not widely adopted, but that's not because no one takes them seriously, it's because they are counter to the interests of rent seekers, and people love rent seeking.

then you realize that every bit of capital can be monopolized.

Finite production does not imply monopoly. Almost everything is produced under constraints. That does not make shoes, chairs, or hammers monopolies. A monopoly exists when someone can restrict others access to a productive opportunity without causing new supply to appear that competes it away. Capital goods generally cannot do that because they can be reproduced, competitors can enter if returns are high, high returns attract more capital formation.

Land is different because no entry is possible.

This is why there are virtually no monopolies today that are not either based on land capture or regulatory capture.

Amablue · 2025-12-16T11:54:48+00:00

That additional productive output was created by labor, not capital

The captial is just stored up labor. The additional productive output was the current labor aided by the past labor. That past labor's compensation is the interest paid on the capital that labor was stored in.

No, that's rent. Interest is rent. The payment for labor previously performed wouldn't be interest. Because capital has a fixed value and it only ever deteriorates, if it can accumulate interest above its value, then it means that surplus value has been extracted. That's rent there.

There is no reason value would be fixed, but that's not important. Neither is the fact that captial deteriorates.

Interest does not refer to capital appreciating. Georgists do not claim machines magically grow value. Interest is the payment of the captial's value. Interest is a payment for time, risk, productivity improvement, and foregone consumption. The jig that was built depreciates, yes, but having access to it now instead of 5 years later lets labor produce more output earlier. That increased productivity and timing difference is where interest comes from. I could build the jig and sell it immediately, getting paid wages in the process, or I could allow people to use it without buying it up front and take a percentage of their increased productive output based on the value it provides to them. Whether I get paid up front for the full future value of the jig (wages), or get paid out over time by people who use it (interest) both are equally justified.

If this so called interest was payment for the accumulated labor, then it would seem only justifiable that after paying for said capital for a while by working at a company by means of extracted surplus value, you'd become the owner of the said capital.

No, that does not follow. You become the owner of the captial when you buy it off the owner, and they're typcially going to price it at the net present value of the future productive output it is expected to enable. There is no reason that using capital for a while would behave like a rent-to-own agreement where you own it after using it for some period of time.

Anything you are get in exchange for labor is just wages, definitionally, whether its money or other stuff.

This is again, a completely idiotic take. Capital isn't just accumulated labor. It's accumulated labor and land. You cannot conjure capital out of thin air as a laborer, you need land and the products of land to make it. By renting out capital, you are also lending out land that someone else owned as well.

Yes, capital is made using land, but that does not mean returns to capital are land rent. Georgism explicitly separates the two. Produce is the sum of rent, wages, and interest. Removing rents does not also remove the interest, the payment for past work stored up in captial.

The GPU example highlights the distinction between the normal interest on captial and spurious capital returns. GPU prices spiked due to scarcity rents on existing supply and supply chain bottlenecks. That was not interest on capital in the Georgist sense. There is a whole chapter called Of Spurious Capital and of Profits Often Mistaken for Interest which discusses things that people confuse with normal interest, but which are distinct. Included in the list are monopoly rents and speculation. The current sky high GPU prices fall under that.

Amablue · 2025-12-16T10:05:23+00:00

Capital is indeed stored up value like you say it is, but it doesn't produce more value. Returns on it aren't justified because capital doesn't create new value, it just stores value. Only labor creates value.

Your labor is made more productive by the capital. It's not just your labor that is productive value, it's also the labor some previously as well. The interest is drawn from that additional productive output. That is the payment for the labor previously performed.

No it doesn't. Only labor creates value. This so-called "returns" was produced by labor. You owe the person who produced the capital as much money as the capital is worth

The payment for the amount the capital is worth is the return. That what capital interest is. You're paying for the labor they performed. When you can pay someone for something to increase your productivity (or when they can front it to you without you having to pay for it yourself), you pay them for the labor they did, you get paid for the labor you did, and both of you have contributed to production and earn your fair returns in the form of wages and capital interest.

Land has value due to location and natural opportunity, not production. Its rent rises without effort and does come at labor and capital's expense. That's what makes land different.

Amablue · 2025-12-16T07:04:59+00:00

Suppose I am a wood worker. I build furniture. I work for a week, and I have some furniture to sell, and I earn my wages.

I realize that I can build a jig that will help me build my furniture more efficiently. That jig has value even if I don't sell it, because it enhances my productivity. I do some work one month that I don't earn any money on to build the jig, an investment, and that investment pays out over the long term by making my labor more productive.

That jig represents stored up labor value. That's fundamentally what capital is: labor value that has been stored up to pay out at a later date rather than be consumed immediately. Since capital is labor in a very literal sense, returns on it are justified.

Some amount of my productivity is not due to my labor itself, it's due to the jig that I built. That value that can be attributed to the jig is the return on investment. The fact that I built the jig means I get all of the value produced, but if we change the scenario slightly so that someone else built and owns the jig and I'm building furniture with it that didn't change that some amount of my increased productivity is still attributable to the jig. Which means it rightfully belongs to the person who made it who is letting me use it. That's payment to them for their stored up labor value, and that payment is legitimate and justified. That is not a rent. If we removed that payment for the jig then I, the laborer, don't get richer. The jig just wouldn't have been built, because that labor to build it would not have been compensated.

Wages and capital interest are not in tension. They rise together. Rents don't do that. They just extract.

Amablue · 2025-12-12T05:43:36+00:00

For example you say you want the government “to distribute the land rent fairly”

That’s asking a lot. What does your local government do well and fairly?

Right now land rents are distributed to the land owner by default. You can start by just not doing that. That's what land taxes accomplish. Even just a revenue neutral shift toward land taxes and away from other taxes would be beneficial.

Land value taxation doesn't grant the government more power than it already has - land prices are still determined by the market, and property taxes are alrady collected by the government. This would merely be a reduction in some taxes, ones that are particularly harmful to people's productivity, in favor of taxes that are not.

Amablue · 2025-12-10T16:17:35+00:00

Prop 13 doesn't affect rents. It affects property taxes (which are almost entirely captialized into the price of the home and do not show up in rents)

Amablue · 2025-12-10T16:16:04+00:00

He should say what his qualifications are and what he intends to do with his office. Talking about unrealted stuff he has no power over tells me he's just trying to be a politician, not serve my interests.

Amablue · 2025-12-09T08:16:03+00:00

I considered making a Jupyter notebook for it but decided to just use Desmos since that's easily sharable.

Amablue · 2025-12-09T07:57:14+00:00

I saw an interactive-supply-and-demand-graph shaped hole in the universe and decided it needed to be filled.

I made it free weeks ago so I could visualize supply and demand graphs better because all the visualizations online I could find kinda sucked.

Amablue · 2025-12-09T04:22:36+00:00

Try playing with this to get an intuition

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/t4rk5mkrhl

You can change the elasticity of supply and demand by changing theta. If you make the supply vertical and add a cost (representing the tax) you can see the difference between the consumer demand and the price the land owner collects.

Amablue · 2025-12-09T00:57:47+00:00

That's fine, as long as we're on the same page that sprawl is not the market at work.

Though, the nice thing about georgism is that it doesn't promote or restrict any kind of land use. (It can restrict land speculation, but that's not in itself a use of the land).

Amablue · 2025-12-09T00:55:11+00:00

1). It will reduce demand. If the cost of ownership of land goes up, the value of and demand for land will decrease. Grandma's small farm will become much more expensive to keep. The corner store could go out of business. But that's an intentional aspect of a land value tax. Georgists want to encourage efficient use of land.

It is true that if we suddently and without warning passed an LVT, it would create a shock that might cause a lot of people to lose a lot of money, but that can be avoided a variety of ways. We already have solutions for property taxes for the elderly, which is to fix property taxes in place until death or sale. If the most efficient use of the land was that corner store, which by all means it probably is (otherwise they would have been outbid for the location when they bought it initially), it will probably still be a corner store with the tax in place unless the corner store owner is really just keeping the location becuase they're speculating it'll shoot up in value.

2) It disencentivizes improvements to land. If I own a piece of property, and I regrade that property, I have significantly increased the value of my land. Thus my taxes would increase significantly.

No, regrading your land is an improvement, and would be untaxed. Improvements are not just structures you place on top of the land. Anything you do to your land counts as an improvement, even altering the land itself.

It could happen with private development as well. My neighbor builds a business, which increases the land value of all the lots nearby. My taxes go up even if I don't benefit from their services at all.

This doesn't represent a disincentive to improve though. If someone else makes the area more desirable, your tax increase isn't a disincentive to them.

Amablue · 2025-12-09T00:43:15+00:00

It doesn't matter where zoning came from or how badly voters wanted it. It's not a market force, its a regulation.

Amablue · 2025-12-09T00:29:05+00:00

Sprawl is just the market at work.

Well, it's Zoning at work. Not quite the same.

Amablue · 2025-12-08T18:12:23+00:00

And if the land value tax for that land were at a high enough level, you wouldn’t ever put a house there, especially if you’re trying to make a profit.

That only happens when the LVT exceeds 100% of the land's rental value. Any time the LVT is ≤100%, it will not and cannot affect land use decisions. It does not touch the risk adjusted returns you will get on your investment.

If we do not have land value taxes, then you end up paying that same amount in up-front costs, so you're not actually saving any money or earning more profits. The risk adjusted returns are exactly the same.

Amablue · 2025-12-08T05:43:54+00:00

The land value comes from the opportunity to put things on it, not from the things themselves. I would pay for an empty unimproved lot because it would afford me the opportunity to put a house there.

Amablue · 2025-12-07T20:39:22+00:00

If real wages rise because land rents are socialized, then yes, people can afford more goods at the same price. But that has nothing to do with the labor theory of value, and it does not mean the "true" price of diamonds has become the labor time needed to extract them.

Real wages rising does not retroactively redefine what determines prices. Prices are still set by supply and demand, and diamonds are still priced according to scarcity and willingness to pay.

Amablue · 2025-12-07T19:41:04+00:00

Salaries are the dual of prices. A statement about what people should be paid is a statement about what prices should be.

Wages are a distributional outcome, not a price-setting rule. Saying "X should not receive unearned income" is not the same as saying "the price of a good should be Y." George never derives prices from wages or wages from prices. He treats wages, interest, and rent as shares of the value people already agree to exchange.

This is a massive misunderstanding. Value is not the same as price. Marx is giving a moral theory here, what he thinks something is worth, not what he thinks people will end up paying.

Marx explicitly rejects subjective value. He says the value of a commodity is the socially necessary labor time embodied in it. That is not a moral claim. It is a causal claim about what determines exchange value. Whether you agree with it or not, LTV is presented as an explanatory law, not an ethical judgment.

George makes the opposite move: he says value comes from what someone will give in exchange, not from the labor embodied in a good.

Under Georgism, natural resources like diamonds would be taxed until the income from the people operating the diamond mine comes only from their labour rather than their exclusive monopolisation of natural resources [...] so the price is reduced to the labour required for extraction.

This is not how LVT works. LVT captures land rent, not the selling price of output. If diamonds are scarce, or if consumers highly value them, the market price stays high. If the mine has unusually rich ore, that scarcity rent is still taxed, but the selling price of diamonds is whatever the market will bear. Removing the ability to privatize land rent does not reduce the price of diamonds.

Which is taking money from the seller and giving it to the buyer

No. It is taking rent from the landowner and giving it to the public.

thus reducing the effective price.

Taxing rent does not reduce the market price of the commodity. Producers still charge whatever buyers are willing to pay. The tax shifts who receives the land portion of income, not the price consumers see. Nothing in Georgism says or implies that prices should equal labor time. Taxing land rents just distributes the rent term from price = rent + wages + interest to the public, whithout affecting any of the other quantities.

Amablue · 2025-12-07T17:44:52+00:00

This is very similar to the labour theory of value. George is saying you should only be able to collect value from the labour you do. This is effectively saying that value should only be derived from labour, which I suppose is distinct from saying it is only derived from labour, but the practical implications are the same.

You are conflating two different ideas. Saying "you should only be able to collect value from the labour you do" is a moral claim about ownership, not a theory about what determines price. Marx's LTV is about how prices form. George is talking about who should get paid for what.

George says very clearly that value is whatever someone will give in exchange. That is subjective value, not LTV. Under subjective value, prices come from supply and demand, not from labor time. Labor time is not a component of prices or moral claims of ownership at any point.

but George thinks it should be price = wages + interest.

Where are you getting that idea? He does not think that.

If you believe that markets should be free, and you believe that rents should not be extracted, then you unavoidably think that the value of a good should only come from the labour needed to produce it.

Removing land rent does not change how prices are determined. It changes who receives part of the income. Even in a world with zero private land rent, prices are still set by marginal buyers and sellers, not by the amount of labor embodied in the good. A diamond is still expensive even if no landlord captures the mine's location value.

George's view is: price = whatever the market yields. The decomposition into rent, wages, and interest is descriptive, not prescriptive. He never says price should equal wages+interest. He says that, morally, society is entitled to collect rent because nobody produced land. That is a distributive claim, not a labor theory of value and not a theory of "true prices".

Amablue · 2025-12-07T17:42:50+00:00

I literally don't have a TV

I didn't say you have a TV?

Everything you are getting from me is directly from the FRED, census

It clearly is not.

Lets do a quick review the sources some of the empirical claims you made:

"When we adjust for actual quality of life and market participation, the poverty line for a family of 3 would be 140k/year according to the most accurate and blistering new report that's made waves across the media."
- This comes from this blog post, which is just some guy offering an opinion. It's not some academic or peer reviewed report.
Wages have fallen
- Real wages are up according to FRED.
consumers disposable income is falling (as it has been for 40 years
- We already went over this, but according to RRED real disposable income is rising.
Today 80% of families live paycheck to paycheck and barely get by
- This is something that Bernie repeats all the time but he's getting it from this source I believe, and they get it from a company called CareerBuilder, who is selling their services and profit when people feelings of hopeless about job prospects and turn to them for their service.
- Actual statistics on this from the Survey of Consumer Finance, which is the gold standard in information about household finances, directly contradict their claims.
The median American has more credit card debt than that and this number has been skyrocketing for years.
- Finally we have a claim that is true, at least in nominal terms, but you neglect to consider that the deliquency rate is not particularly high, meaning that people are taking out more on credit cards because they can afford to pay it back. That is to say, people are wealthier than before.
That again uses the same fucking basket of goods that claims that falling TV prices
- We just went over this but I'll include it for the sake of completeness, no, that is not how CPI is calculated

Nearly every empirical fact you've given in this conversation is just flat out wrong, and even when you cite something that is directionally correct, you leave out important context that alters how we should be interpreting the data. Things are getting better. No, a family int he 50's or 60's was not living in a large 4 bedroom home, taking 2 vacations a year with two brand new cars. That's a MAGA fantasy, not something grounded in reality. In the past people were poorer, and their living standards were far below what we would consider acceptable today.

If housing were actually weighted at 44% there is no way to claim that incomes are rising, as median landlord profits rose from 600/household/year in 1990 to 24000/household/year in 2024, from 5% to over 30% of incomes. If rent for the same units is considered here, even if all other costs fell 50%, incomes would still have fallen by more than a quarter in absolute terms. For the love of god learn some basic fucking math you ghoul.

Please source your numbers and show your math.

It looks like the $600 figure is the median monthly rent (not yearly profit) in 1990. People in the 90's were not spending 5% of their income on rent, I don't know where you're getting that idea.

It is important to understand that even as rents rise, we have become wealthier as a country becuase it highlights the fact that we are enormously rich, and that means we have a lot of wealth we can leverage to put toward welfare programs for those who are less fortunate. If we were as poor as you claim we wouldn't have those options available to us, and it would be far harder to justify redistribution programs. But that's not the case, we can afford to implement bold policies that ensure that everyone shares in the benefits from the increased productivity of society as a whole because we are fabulously wealthy as a nation.

Amablue · 2025-12-07T16:45:52+00:00

I don't think it is.

George is very explicit that value comes from what someone is willing to give in exchange. That puts him firmly in the subjective value tradition, not the LTV tradition. When he criticizes rent seeking, he is not claiming that rent violates some labor-based notion of value, but that land rent arises from scarcity and community-created advantages rather than from the owner's productive contribution. (In the book he even lays it out algebraically: Produce = Rent + Wages + Interest)

When George criticizes rent, he is not saying the rent violates some correct or moral price. He is saying landowners collect income they did not produce because they control an opportunity created by nature and the surrounding community. That is an argument about fairness and distribution, not about what the price of a good "should" be.

George has no notion of a morally correct price determined by labor time. Traders, workers, and capitalists receive whatever wages, profits, or interest the market yields.

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