georgism broken record ad nausium

[FrankChodorov]

the SVR is a distributist movement...

http://distributism.com/

[FrankChodorov]

Technically in the State, it has been a very rare circumstance where a municipality, State or Federal government can prove that they own the ground under the road network fee simple.

the right of ways are owned in common as an individual equal access opportunity right.

the roads and sidewalks themselves are collectively owned.

but the land itself?

Technically a property owner abutting a road owns to center line of road.  Technically someone who owns land in the same entity name on both sides of the same road(directly across) could erect a toll.

where do you get this from?

[FrankChodorov]

this recent article (below) written by John Stossel is essentially the same analysis of the new left revisionist historians Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, and William Appleman Williams which mimics the mutualist critique of actually existing capitalism...

http://mutualist.org/id4.html

excerpt:
Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.

The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.

Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randroids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.

But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism--a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value--i.e., capitalism--cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market anarchist Benjamin Tucker--from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow--regarded himself as a libertarian socialist.

http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2006/09/27/big_business_loves_government

Big business loves government
By John Stossel
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

I keep reading that big business wants government off its back. But that's a myth. Here's the truth:

"Big business and big government prosper from the perception that they are rivals instead of partners (in plunder). The history of big business is one of cooperation with big government."

That's Timothy Carney writing in a recent Cato Policy Report. He's the author of a new book, "The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money." Carney's book shows that government and business are not antagonists but allies. They've always been allies. Politicians like it that way because they get power and prestige, and businessmen like it because they get protection from competition.

There was never a time in America when big business didn't get favors from government, which means the taxpayers. Canal and railroad companies loved the big government contracts. Corruption was rampant, and work was often shoddy, but the contracts paid handsomely. The politicians prospered, too. Only taxpayers and consumers lost out.

The history books say that during the Progressive era, government trustbusters reined in business. Nonsense. Progressive "reforms" -- railroad regulation, meat inspection, drug certification and the rest -- were done at the behest of big companies that wanted competition managed. They knew regulation would burden smaller companies more than themselves. The strategy works.

Regulation isn't the only form of protection that big business gets from government. Companies with political clout get cash subsidies, low-interest loans, loan guarantees and barriers to cheap imports.

Even foreign aid is a subsidy to big business because governments receiving the taxpayers' money buy American exports. Fans of foreign aid say those exports are good for the economy because they create jobs. Don't believe it. If the taxpayers had been able to keep the money, their spending would have created other jobs -- probably more jobs.

Most people don't realize that Enron favored the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and wanted energy regulations beneficial to itself; Philip Morris favors tobacco regulation; Wal-Mart's CEO came out for a higher minimum wage; and General Motors embraces tough clean-air rules. Why? Because, as Carney points out, big companies with lots of lawyers and accountants can make the regulations work for themselves, while smaller competitors are hampered.

Carney's is not the first book to bash big business. What makes his different is that rather than opposing the free market, he loves it -- which is why he hates the business-government alliance. In a free market the consumer calls the shots. In the corporate state the business-government alliance restricts consumer choice.

Another friend of the free market hated the business-government alliance: Adam Smith. In "The Wealth of Nations" Smith wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick. . . . But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."

There's where things went wrong. The government does facilitate such assemblies. More than that, it provides big business something it can't have in the free market: the power to restrict competition by force. Anyone worried about the power of big business should remember real coercion comes only from government.

The voluntary, competitive marketplace is better for us all.

John Stossel is an award-winning news correspondent and author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel--Why Everything You Know is Wrong.

[Lloyd Danforth]

No....probably just a normal free market, private property advocate libertarian

[AlanM]

Elimination of limited liability corporations and partnerships is the first step to free markets.

[FrankChodorov]

the article on John Stossel that was moved?

http://forum.soulawakenings.com/index.php?topic=5330.msg97667#msg97667