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Follow up on AMA idea- I've designed this for /r/libertarian
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I feel like I've begun rambling so I'm submitting this for people to look at and tell me where I've gone horribly wrong. Everything under this line is intended to be submitted:


First thing I will explain how I've designed this. Basically I'm starting this post off with the intention of getting information regarding geolibertarian positions to the broader audience of /r/libertarian as we tend to possess an underrepresented view. I'm am hopign for some fun and challenging questions, and while I feel like I'm always on here, I'm not. So I have asked other members of /r/GeoLibertarianism to participate as well though I cannot be certain about their participation rate. On to the juice


What is a Geolibertarian?

A geolibertarian draws from both ethical and consequential ethics.

The ethical positions of draw on these principles (and yes I unabashedly stole these from this post:

1) Self ownership - you own yourself and as long as you are a peaceful individual no one may legitimately violate (initiate aggression against) your body.

2) Private Property - You may peacefully and absolutely hold property which you have made from previously unowned resources or which was given to you as a gift or in a contract.

3) Contract theory - you may, by means of explicit and enforceable contracts, arrange for the exchange of property for services or other property

4) Non-aggression principle - you may not initiate aggression against anyone's property or self.

You are probably asking yourself, how is that different from a libertarian? Good. Now I'm gong to change one

5) Public property with private management - Private property from unowned resources (vida supra) is commonly based on the Lockean proviso:

Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.
โ€”Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, paragraph 33

Georgists hold that since land is in fixed supply (unlike virtually all else that enters the market) that the unprovided can not use something as good left. That sounds complicated, but basically the land is in fixed supply and cannot be appropriated by mixing your labor. This is in part because you are not creating in this process, but also you cannot ethically consider plots universally "as good" and are pushing people from having an equitable place to live as such this should be a publicly owned good.

Just to take a break from ethics: Georgism exists on a continuum and you do not need to hold the libertarian ethics to be a georgist. There are socialist georgists, geomutualists, geoanarchists, statist georgists of all varieties etc etc. Take almost any term you can think of and the georgist perspective can fit (I personally can't fit it into marxism but I wouldn't be surprised to learn people have).

Ok now we will take a look into a more consequentialist set of ethics but finishing up public property. Georgists like most libertarians recognize private ownership even in the case of land produces the easiest method to solve disputes. By virtue of this we focus on private management. An apartment is owned by someone else but is privately managed by the tenant. We hold a similar set of policies for land management. You rent the property. This is done via the land value taxation.

I've said a dirty word for libertarians because taxes are force and thus theft. How is this resolved? It goes back to the ethical claim that you don't own the land. It is easiest to call it a tax, but it is simply rent or a payment for exclusion. If you have not taken ownership by your labor thus such a tax is compensation on your violation of other's "right" to use this land.

So now that we are generating rent/tax what is an ethical use of this? What is the consequence? Any minarchist out there must deal with how they would fund valid functions of government- law, police, military functions.. This is one such method and is considered a variety of optimal taxation or simply one that distorts the market the least. This lets us provide minarchism very effectively.

Let us return to "as good as". There is plenty of land everyone will say. Everyone on earth could live in Texas as spaced as they do in Manhattan. Not all land is made equally and some of this has to do with society around us. Rent or the LVT is calculated based on the value both society and nature has generated. Note again neither of these are your labor. Liberals try to refer to this as "the social contract". You intrinsically know this is wrong because the protections of economic giant cities should equal that of Detroit otherwise. However, libertarians, often chided for ignoring negative externalities, want to ignore this positive externality. Again you intrinsically know this is wrong. When someone, fallaciously, asks why you don't move to Somalia you will refer for example to jobs; moreover, if you were opening a factory would you look to a metropolis or Antarctica?. If you bought this factory's location you are paying someone for something they aren't providing.

As such this tax value is easily calculated and hard to manipulate, though I'm going to avoid the math here, I can answer questions to that effect. Another assertion of georgists in general originates with Henry George's early observations that the poverty is tied to this. The theory here is land speculation leads to a business cycle that enhances speculation. Some geolibertarians have tied this into austrian cycle theory.

So I'm going to get off the soapbox and let people ask us anything:

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