Postscript to “Feudalism: We Should Be So Lucky”

After my speech last week, someone asked about rich people who owned stocks instead of land. I said that I did not favor imposing high tax rates on productive businesses as opposed to the ownership of land. Also, stocks to some extent reflect the ownership of land by businesses, whether farmland, mineral land, or high value urban land. I gave the example of something I had read about, a one story McDonalds restaurant next to a subway stop in Manhattan. Some day, McDonalds might sell the land or develop it, and could reap a fortune by doing so; they were to some extent in the business of land speculation, not selling fast food.

Taxing land values more heavily would reduce the value of stock in corporations whose assets included large amounts of land.

Holocaust Remembrance Presentation

Earlier today, I watched and listened to the Federal Inter-Agency Holocaust Remembrance Program, taking some annual leave, since watching it isn’t one of my job duties. The presentation was last week, but I had scheduling conflicts, so I instead went to https://holocaustremembrance.org, and went to the link near the bottom of the page to watch the video. There were interviews with two elderly Jewish women who as children were on the fringes of the Holocaust. They were on the fringes in the sense that neither was actually sent to an extermination camp, but one, a German, witnessed looting, vandalism, and violence by her family’s Gentile neighbors on Krystallnacht, and was afterward separated from her family. The other, a Pole, escaped the slaughter of her community, lived in a ghetto elsewhere in Poland for a time, and then, together with her mother, was with a band of partisans in the forests and marshes, where she nearly died of typhus. They both had harrowing stories to tell.

One of them referred to recent events in Ukraine. Man’s inhumanity to man has not come to an end.