What Does It Mean to Be a Libertarian

Reason has an article on what it means to be a libertarian, to which several libertarian thinkers contributed their views. In particular, I was interested by David Friedman’s view that there are different degrees of libertarianism, and different views which can be defended as libertarian. In particular, he wrote about Georgism:

“Going further afield, it is possible to construct a libertarian argument along Georgist lines for a government funded by taxes on the site value of land, on the theory that the holder owes compensation to all those deprived of access to his parcel, which, not having been produced by human effort, ought properly to be a commons. It is equally possible to construct a libertarian case in opposition, based either on a Lockean claim of just ownership or on the consequentialist argument — which goes all the way back to economist David Ricardo’s rejection of Adam Smith’s case for land taxes — about how a real-world government can be expected, in practice, to implement such a tax.”

My readers know where I stand. Perhaps I should read Ricardo; I am aware that land value taxes often end up being sabotaged or malassessed, putting the burden back on people other than landholders. But should one then just give up and agree to have the burden of government placed on productive workers instead of landholders? There are serious problems with that, as well.

Scammer

I came home to find a message on my answering machine. Someone giving her name as Kathy Jackson had said that she was calling from Microsoft, which I had paid for computer services recently (I had not), and that I was due a refund, because the company had been ordered to go out of business; she left a number for me to call.

This seems directed at low information voters, shall we say.

Crystal City and Crony Capitalism

Amazon will be placing half of its second headquarters in Crystal City, with which I am familiar. It’s about three miles from where I sit (perhaps less as the crow flies, but the roads aren’t designed for crows), and it’s where the Patent Office was located when I started work in 1998, and for the next several years, until we gradually moved to Carlyle in Alexandria; my work group was one of the last to go. It’s still where I go to the optometrist, and there are various shops and restaurants there. I attended a conference in Crystal City as a graduate student, with no idea that I’d one day be working there.

I don’t hate Amazon, but I’d have a better view of it and Jeffrey Bezos if only they had declined all special subsidies and asked only for fair treatment and low taxes for everyone. I’ve read that Virginia could have cut corporate taxes 29% all round instead of giving special breaks to Amazon; that would have encouraged development by various small and large businesses all over the state, and likely created more jobs, but it would not enable the politicians and bureaucrats to point to one big project, and claim that it was due to what they accomplished with their special tax breaks.

Amazon collected a variety of offers from different cities and states, and I’m afraid that New York and Virginia may experience the winner’s curse: An auction is won by the bidder with the most optimistic view of what the lot being auctioned is worth, and the most optimistic view is often an excessively optimistic view. If a horse auction is won by Mr. Jones, who takes the most optimistic view of all the bidders on the question of how likely the horse is to win the Triple Crown, that’s normally just Mr. Jones’s problem; here, however, the winners are public officials playing with other people’s money.