From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 06 2002 - 21:03:23 MST
On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 04:22:05PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > Say someone owns all the farmland in a country. A million people might give
> > him $10 for the right to grow food on his land. Or $100, if he raises the
> > rent. Does that person deserive the $100 million? He's not doing anything,
> > he just controls the land. Similarly Gates controls the right to copy MS
> It may be more difficult to see the economic benefit of rents, but
> they exist nonetheless, and outlawing them would just make things
I don't deny rents have benefits.
I also don't deny extreme economic concentrations might not be harmless. In
the reductio case, monopolies are usually considered to be rather distorting
of 'free markets', and oligopolies may or may not be much better, depending on
complicated factors. And the moral/social justification for a high
concentration of wealth seems lower for simple ownership/rent than for someone
who (reductio again) physically made each and every item he sold and happened
to sell a lot of items.
As for Michael Dickey's
"In what kind of situation could anyone ever actually own all the farmland in
a country? A massive communist or socialist state is the only place in which
such a thing has ever happened."
... uh, ever hear of feudalism? The land reforms various Latin American
countries performed in their socialist periods were breaking up the huge
landholdings of colonial times and distributing them to the peasants who'd
been working them.
Of course Zimbabwe is busily proving that such things aren't always
beneficial, but I bet there are some other differences, such as a lot of
physical capital on the Zimbabwean farms, vs. practically feudal structures in
Mexico, worked literally by peasants.
-xx- Damien X-)
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