Or, more bluntly put, if not for the existence of a political economy, you would have to spend most of your time defending "your" land from intruders.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Democratical state guaranteeing the right to private ownership as a fundamental human right does not give it (the State) any prerogative (exceptional situations excepted) to dispose of My Goods.
There you go again with the ideology. The notion of fundamental human rights is an ideological position (one that I happen to share, but also one that the vast, vast majority of human society throughout the history of the species does not).
And I would remind you that for every sob story you can find about poor fishermen being forced to leave their ancestral home because the real estate bubble unjustly inflates their land taxes, there is a multitude of stories to be told about people who quite voluntarily sell their house during a bubble and cash in the inflated price. They have produced no value at all in that transaction - not a single meter of railroad has been built because the price of their house went up, not a single ball bearing has been cast because the price of their house went up, not a single windmill was assembled because the price of their house went up.
Since society in aggregate did not get wealthier, any gain they have made by that transaction comes directly at the expense of someone else in society. How's that fair or just? How's it fair that the price I pay for bread and rent goes up, just because the real estate market is in a manic phase? How is it fair that my job disappears just because the real estate market is in a depressive phase?
Yes, the tools used to pop bubbles have side effects. Innocent people - like your hypothetical fishermen - will be hit by those side effects. But they are less than the predictable and unavoidable effects of not popping the bubble. So if you want to avoid wealth taxes, including taxes on real estate, you have to provide a viable alternative for popping bubbles. Preferably one that causes less collateral damage to innocent people.
If cabins are sold in bubble times, those sales can be taxed. This is a means to fight bubbles, btw, and in the mean time, build some railroads to nicely criss-cross those muddy lands.
Finally, I deeply dislike the idea of collateral damage, no matter how little, that should be tolerated, no matter the reason. This is called injustice and anyone affected should be justly compensated. It is you who was bragging to easily find bubble solutions, btw. I'm just telling you some of them are injust.
(note: the sob story is real, I saw the fisherman's daughter with my own eyes telling it) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Which ideology was that, exactly?
It could be any of several, including but not limited to humanism, constitutionalism and the Enlightenment notion of "natural law." And, of course, a plethora of more or less wingnut versions of lazzes-faire liberalism.
They may temporarily converge with ideas of the modern right, classical liberalism or social democracy, but don't have as a source a particular ideology.
Ah, but you do. And I am actually getting a fairly detailed picture of it by now.
I don't know whether it has a name, but it draws rather heavily upon late Enlightenment notions of natural law, along with a helping of frankly unenlightened Compulsive Centrist Disorder. There's a couple of other things in there as well, but those are the two main points.
Finally, I deeply dislike the idea of collateral damage, no matter how little, that should be tolerated, no matter the reason.
Don't we all. But as it happens, bubbles have very grave collateral damage when they are not popped early.
It is you who was bragging to easily find bubble solutions, btw. I'm just telling you some of them are injust.
Why, yes, they are. If you choose to define justice as a binary attribute, then all policies to deal with bubbles are unjust - including the policy of not dealing with it. Once bubbles form, you have the choice between popping it now and popping it later. When it pops, it will impose some inconvenience, or even hardship, upon everyone it touches. Some of those people will be innocent, in the sense that they were not participating in inflating the bubble. That is beyond the realm of political choice. What you can choose is to pop the bubble sooner rather than later, thus minimising the collateral damage.
