> Land is only valuable due to scarcity. You really can't make more of it even if you dig up parts of another bit of land to dump into a bay (like how they made

> Land is only valuable due to scarcity. You really can't make more of it even if you dig up parts of another bit of land to dump into a bay (like how they made the airport in Tokyo). Well, the majority of the land extensions in Tokyo (and elsewhere) have generally been created by using the spoils from tunneling. So in this sense, the total land area has indeed been increased with no reduction in area elsewhere. Secondly, I would say that land isn't valuable "only due to scarcity". Demand matters too. Lots of land on Earth is not in demand for much of anything, because it's not near anything useful to anybody, or has nothing useful upon it. The overwhelming majority of land value is due to the proximity of economically useful things (the aforementioned buildings and infrastructure and so on.) The reason to have private property in land is because many things are necessarily tied to specific parcels of land. If you don't have private land ownership, then all land-attached investments are insecure. (UPDATE: That is to say, private land-attached investments are insecure.) > If you own the land in an area by definition you got a monopoly there.[...cut for length...] But that's a special case and it's one that really suggest you read up on when you have free time. Firstly, this salty suggestion of yours that I need to "read up on" land economics "when I have free time" is pretty unnecessary. I did my reading, six years of it, in the process of two degrees in urban geography/economics. I have been through literally thousands of pages of reading on this subject. Now, you may disagree with me and that's totally fine! But maybe stash the assumptions about what I have and have not done, alright? To say that someone has a monopoly on land because they own some small amount is to excessively broaden the meaning of the word. A monopoly doesn't exist in a situation where there is a wide range of substitutable goods available from multiple owners/suppliers. The fact that a good is limited in supply does not make any owner of a small fragment of the total supply a monopolist. And people are mobile - the fact that land is generally immobile doesn't mean that people are unable to exercise choice, since they can do so through movements, even quite small ones. Centralized land ownership is almost never a case of corporations or private individuals - indeed, it's usually the case that the largest land ownership centralizers are municipalities and other governments. Many of the reasons that slums exist is due not to the private ownership of land, but other factors: rent controls drive down returns from buildings, making upkeep uneconomic, high taxes overconsume the returns in a similar way, insecure property rights lead to underinvestment (this last one is most common in low-income countries.) The private land owners of most cities are usually huge in number - competition does exist, and monopoly, at least due to private owners, typically does not. I'll further note that while land is, in a sense, limited in supply, the services provided by land are much less so. This is the whole reason behind urban density and building upwards (and down). Land ownership is just a prerequisite to these investments. > 1. There's no such thing as a "special" law. There's just laws of certain types. I was referring, apparently too obliquely, to things like patent law, which I agree are different. (Since by copying an idea, one does not seize or destroy the original.) >2. And of those people, does it seem logical to allow them impede the utilization their capital when they leave it fallow or otherwise try to depress wages while utilizing it as a practice of employment?[...cut for length...] It can be as simple as a cooperative shared among members of the neighborhood or the city. Firstly, I don't think "leaving fallow" is something easily defined or decided. Of course, the original "fallow" was to let the land rest after a harvest - indeed, it was an investment (foregone consumption in expectation of future returns.) But even land owned "speculatively" and appearing to be fallow may be serving an important purpose. For example, let's say I might be building out a large area one piece at a time. So first, I'll be extending and improving infrastructure. I'd like to get the maximum benefit of that investment, though, so I'll buy up a large amount of land around it ahead of time, even though I'll not be building anything on it for a while. Or, to give another example, let's say I'm an investor hoping that housing demand will cause land in an area to become more valuable. So I'll buy it up and wait, hoping to build on it later - what the sellers get is money now, which is more valuable to them than their expected money later. What I'm doing is taking a risk - it might pan out, it might not - but by selling to me, the previous owners transferred that risk to me in exchange for a known upfront payout. These are perfectly reasonable things to do, even if they look like "land speculation". And "equal access" is of course not guaranteed by collective ownership. There's nothing about a collective that ensures that its capital will give good returns. And if you've got things on the scale of a neighbourhood or a city, then naturally some neighbourhoods or cities will have much better capital than others. Then all that happens is that some localities are wealthy and some are not - "equality" is only within the cooperative. Yet if cooperatives aren't fixed and mandatory, the failing ones will just evaporate and be bought out. And you're back to inequality. >Then you should have no issues with paying for a land value tax (which would be lower than a property tax in most cases) for that use. And I'm not objecting in principle to a land value tax. It's perfectly compatible with private land ownership, although I'm a bit skeptical of it being a particularly effective or progressive tax. But that's neither here nor there. >What if publicly traded corporations fails, as they will? [...cut for length...] I think you need to study this part of the matter on your own because honestly HN isn't the place to go indepth with alternative incorporation schemes and laws. I have nothing against cooperatives at all, they're a perfectly reasonable ownership structure, albeit one disadvantaged by a number of tax and liability laws. I have been a member of a number of cooperatives, and have done a reasonable amount of research on them. (Again - your assertion that I "need to study this on my own" is rude and a non-argument.) What I was referring to was your argument that land and "capital" should all be owned by cooperatives. (Perhaps I should have said "Norea-Armozel-model cooperatives" or something.) What I was arguing is that, if people in these cooperatives are free to leave them, free to start them, free to exclude non-current-members, and free to be in a one-person cooperative, then you're right back at private ownership of land and capital. The only way you can ensure continued collective ownership of capital is by blocking off these avenues of choice. >No. Just, no. The burger I'll eat today for lunch is no more capital than the notebook I use to write my notes on. Capital are goods which can directly make more goods. Think ore, timber, machines, patents, corporate assets (money, stocks, etc). These are capital. Individual's personal cars, homes, and skills aren't capital by any definition from any school of economics that I'm at least aware of (there might one but I seriously doubt it's considered orthodox). The capital/consumption distinction is not one inherent to the good itself, though. It's a useful economic concept but is different from the public/private/club/common distinction. What I was saying is that this distinction is not a hard-and-fast one, but more like the distinction between a tropical storm and a hurricane - a line you draw somewhere for the purposes of analysis. You say, "capital are goods which can directly make more goods". Well, take that private vehicle for example. Now, transportation is needed somehow to get the workers to a factory - it is essential to the production process. So at first the employees drive their own vehicles. Then, let's imagine that the factory owners have the bright idea of starting a company carpool van service, to cut down on parking needed. They buy a bunch of vans and start bringing employees to work in them. The service of transportation is still rendered, but now the vans are "capital goods" because they are used to make the factory's operation possible. It's still a vehicle - did anything change about the good itself? Not really, no. I mean, are kitchenwares capital goods or not? They certainly directly make more goods - but does that mean that all kitchenwares should be collectively owned? What if somebody starts making and selling food in their own home? A dentist owns many tools which produce a good/service - clean and healthy teeth. They seem to be capital. But many of these same tools, providing quite similar services, in people's homes, are not capital? (As the old question goes, "do I get to own my own toothbrush?") Beds, walls, and bathrooms, when in a hotel, produce a good/service. But those same goods in the home are not capital? (And what about BnBs?) Capital is distinguished from consumption goods just as a helpful measurement category; the goods - and their potential to be owned - do not change.