Ask_a_Geoist

Like any idea that's worth half a crap – i.e., any nonviolent idea – geoism doesn't require ham-handed control over a continent-sized slab of land and the 300 million people it contains. It only requires that as****es with guns don't actively prevent it among the people who want it.

If you're one of those people who mindlessly clashes for "your team" to control the federal government -- i.e., to pass laws that control the lives of 300 million people -- and you act surprised when the losing team storms the Capitol (which I don't condone), you might not be thinking very critically.

You want people not to get violently upset with you? Don't violate them.

You want more local autonomy? Tell higher-level governments to get out of the way.

How? Abolishing the federal income tax is a good place to start. It neither raises revenue -- MMTers are right about that one small thing -- nor creates demand for the currency to any greater extent than it destroys it. It is pure economic su***de.

Do you live in a city? You can have basic income (from land rent) starting yesterday. You don't need "encouragement" from a higher government. In fact, any "encouragement" they could provide will hurt the purchasing power of the basic income you can provide yourselves.

Quit with the attitude of controlling other people, or you'll get absolutely zero sympathy from me when it comes crashing down.

Sometimes I stream on Twitch. This is the sort of thing I do.

https://youtu.be/vFxE_V81FVk

GeoGuessr - Christmas Battle Royale In retrospect, I think I overedited this. Battle Royale is pretty frantic, and next time I'll probably avoid cutting within rounds.

Pretty much.

(JG)

Land rent is not a cost.
Land rent is not a cost.
Land rent is not a cost.

Land rent is surplus.

So many people look at their tiny plot of land, their little freehold, if they have one, and think, "I'm a winner."

Zoom out a bit.

For anyone who doesn't understand why basic income is the only fundamentally justifiable way to issue the currency, this may begin to offer a glimpse.

Seen on Twitter.

The only real vote you have in this world is the one you make with your feet.

If you actually had that vote -- i.e., if immigration restrictions were not a thing -- where would you go?

In its modern iteration, the law is nothing more than a method of organizing violence. In other words, it is the literal job of police officers to do wrong.

Does that mean they should do their job? No. One of the things I hope to accomplish is to convince individuals to be less violent and less likely to obey the orders of authority figures who command them to hurt nonviolent people. One of the most meaningful outcomes of this would be police officers who intentionally do *NOT* enforce certain laws or, generally, just act less like as****es.

But it's a dangerous oversight to blame police when, in most cases, they are carrying out orders on behalf of a moronic, black-hearted populace who want to create arbitrary rules and use police violence to literally force those rules on others, bearing zero personal responsibility for the damage this does to human lives.

If you're not willing to be a grown-ass adult, offering to change people's behavior through persuasion or compensation instead of state violence, don't be surprised when you get treated like a child. If your only tool is a hammer, don't be surprised when your head feels like a nail.

(To clarify, none of this is directed at the guy in the attached image. I'm just explaining why police officers are different from fire fighters. The latter act in defense of people; the former are commanded by law to hurt people.)

🤣 Landowners be like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXQkXXBqj_U

Fun logical test. I found this sentence written on a web page. Using your knowledge of language alone -- no economics background necessary -- can you explain why this sentence is inherently absurd?

"Monetary Sovereignty is the foundation of economics."

PEOPLE DURING PANDEMIC:

"Taxes are a real burden."
"Patents are a real burden."
"Rents and mortgages ... what's with those?"

PRO TIP:

Keep thinking this way after the pandemic passes.

I'm shocked. Shocked I say! To learn of yet another law that stifles human life and productivity.

Now is the Time to Eliminate Certificate-of-Need Laws that Limit Hospital Resources and Space for Patients The coronavirus has sent governments scrambling to address the insufficiencies of existing health care systems. Though the president took a step in the right direction by loosening restrictions on telehealth communications, the federal government is not the only source of constraints around health c...

"It is the government-granted monopoly that would make a vaccine expensive, not anything inherent to the production process or the normal workings of the market."

When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, and it comes as a series of three injections, each at the price of a testicle, I hope people will remember this simple truth. But they probably won't.

https://www.salon.com/2020/03/07/patents-are-slowing-the-development-of-a-coronavirus-vaccine_partner/

Patents are slowing the development of a coronavirus vaccine Even if we have a vaccine, we have no guarantee it will be affordable.

This can't get enough attention.

Absent reform to our system of Rule by Violence, probably the most important thing you can do to improve the quality of life where you live is to participate in your local sheriff's election and vote for the least violent option.

These guys enforce the land monopoly, they set the tone and culture of local law enforcement, and they run the jails. (I guess that could be summed up by saying, simply, "They run the jails," lol.)

These guys are the front line of The State. I think just about no one, including some of most egomaniacal sheriffs out there, understands the power sheriffs possess to effect change, good or bad.

Depending on whose names are on the ballot where you live, your vote for sheriff could be orders of magnitude more important to you and your community than what you do with your presidential vote.

https://youtu.be/v_kak7kAdNw

Sheriffs: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) With over a thousand sheriffs up for election this year, John Oliver discusses how much power – and how little accountability – they have. Connect with Last ...

Prices. Health insurance *prices*.

Middle-class Americans getting crushed by rising health insurance costs Premiums and deductible contributions are eating up more of middle-class Americans’ paychecks, increasingly burdening America’s middle-class working families.

Arguments against geoism are actually worse than this, but this'll have to do for now.

(Found on the Anarchyball page. Not sure where it originated.)

A quick word on .

TL;DR -- UBI is the only inherently correct way, not to mention the only public way, to spend public dollars.

***

It is often forgotten that "the public" is composed of individuals, and that as an equal member of the public, your desires don't deserve any special treatment or service over and above others'.

A government does not, and can not, "provide" goods or services to any greater extent than it takes them from you or somebody else, either by stealing the opportunity to produce them, or by stealing the opportunity to consume them.

In the modern world, you get the goods and services the government "provides," whether you like it or not. You are not considered a member of the public; only people who like good and services "provided" by the government are de-facto members of the public, since nobody else, by definition, gets "provided" anything.

UBI means everyone gets equal opportunity to bid on the goods and services they want. You are no less able to get the goods and services that would otherwise have been "provided" by the government. In fact, you are more able to get them. UBI means everyone is an equal member of the public.

(If the price of goods and services is too high, that has nothing to do with UBI. It has to do with state-enforced supply restrictions, like freehold land titles, patents, licenses, etc. Covered by the whole "geoist" thing, as UBI also is.)

You are NOT better off when the government issues the currency to itself instead of to you, and when the government uses that currency to command the supply and consumption of specific types of labor instead of leaving those decisions to individuals themselves. You are NOT better off in that scenario *even if* you're one of the people who actually consumes the labor of a "government-funded" profession.

The *only* way you could conceivably be better off in a world without UBI -- and I'm not so sure -- is if you, by accident of birth, are born skilled at "government-funded" types of labor and, more importantly, if you have a buddy in power who will pull strings and get you hired by the state.

Interesting, but the headline is inaccurate, or incomplete, at least.

If AT&T can raise their prices, it's because they can. The excuse they give or motivation they have for doing it is meaningless. They could write "Property Tax Fee" or "AT&T Office Pl***oy Magazine Subscription Fee" on the bill, and customers would pay it.

AT&T is not "making its customers" do anything. They're asking a new price, and customers, by not switching to a new provider or canceling, are accepting.

What is possible is that AT&T has actual monopoly power that enabled them to get this revenue in the past, but they were too lazy to collect this full value from its customers (the end users of AT&T's monopoly). The property tax -- because it partially falls on privilege -- then spurred them to discover that market rent, much the same way a land value "tax" would spur lazy, inefficient land monopolists to discover and pay the full market rent.

So it's not a tax being "passed on"; it's privilege rent, or possibly a legitimate labor price, being discovered. In either case, it was never wrong for AT&T to go after it. It was only wrong that there wasn't a privilege tax that made sure (a) AT&T would indeed go after the full rent, if that's what it was, and (b) pay it to the right people.

Of course, that whole "pay it to the right people" thing still isn't happening with the proceeds of the meager privilege taxes we have, but that's kind of my point; the story in question -- all parts of it -- is just a transfer of value among different sets of monopolists. There are no good guys in this story.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/att-raises-prices-7-by-making-its-customers-pay-atts-property-taxes/?comments=1

AT&T raises prices 7% by making its customers pay AT&T’s property taxes AT&T tacks on fee after locking customer into contract, raises it from 3% to 7%.

"And now, since they're rolling back those rights and diminishing them so much, you're approaching a state in which women are essentially being conscripted or drafted the way you'd be conscripted or drafted into the army.

My view on that is, if you want to do this -- if you want the state to claim ownership of women's bodies -- you should pay."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyYLVeZIrO0&t=1m30s

Careful there, Margaret Atwood. You're starting to think like a market geoist. ;)

Margaret Atwood Talks Real Life Gilead Events | The View The “Handmaids Tale” author compares the events in the book to what happens in real life. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/2Ybi4tM MORE FROM '...

Regrettably, I caught a news report showing highlights of the last Democratic debate. What a giant facepalm.

Modern political-economic debate is so stupid, it's almost unspeakable. I can't say it's the candidates' fault, though, to any greater extent than it's the fault of the voters they're trying to pander to.

The only thing mentioned during the debate that is, in itself, a good idea is basic income. The narrators of the news story derided it, saying, "It sounds like buying votes."

Uh, yeah ... that's the point. The people who propose to govern you *should have to convince you of it by paying you*. Once we acknowledge that, we can begin to move into Adult Political-Economic Discourse Land, where we can gasp in horror at the idea that Yang wants to introduce a Value Added Tax and presumably continue taxing labor to fund the UBI instead of collecting its funding from the owners of the state.

(In his defense, though, he may be afraid that if he did that, he'd get "disappeared.")

So yeah, I'll guess it'll be about 8 nuclear-war-resets of humanity before random circumstances cause it to stumble accidentally into geoism.

I'll always put an asterisk next to UBI*, but seriously.

*Must be Rent Dividend or will be a joke

Land monopoly, the self-perpetuating disease, in action. Desperate serfs homesteading one of the last frontiers.

Whether Bolsonaro actually wants it to stop is irrelevant. The institution of modern land ownership guaranteed that this would happen. It guarantees that it won't stop.

You can throw as much money at the Brazilian landless as you want. Their landlords will absorb it, and they'll wake up the next day and burn down trees, yet again, in pursuit of the only thing that will turn off the spigot on their wallets -- land.

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/08/bolsonaro-expresses-love-for-amazon-as-it-burns-offers-no-policy-shift/?fbclid=IwAR2RtOYryXCbjkcS5yYdHwZDqA8pq3IBqIOZf1-sDx8IsaxjYbGKH_TtcO4

Bolsonaro expresses ‘love’ for Amazon as it burns, offers no policy shift Critics link this year’s Amazon fires, especially in protected forests, to illegal deforesters emboldened by rightist government’s lax enforcement.

Stuck between armed thugs and other armed thugs.

https://twitter.com/matt_cam/status/1166161730914988033?s=09

Fallout: New Vegas stream highlights from last Sunday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hTkzLKh6Sc&feature=youtu.be

Fallout: New Vegas - 8.4.19 http://www.twitch.tv/ask_a_geoist *Disclaimer: My chat members are just my chat members. Most of them don't know or care what geoism is. This stream included...