(no subject)

[ewt]

Since I'll be offline all day and feel like having some good comments to come back to:

Do people have intrinsic worth as human beings? What is the difference between intrinsic worth and value within a society?

Are there intrinsic rights, or only those granted by society?

Does truthful gossip (that is, passing on true information about someone, rather than making up or passing on fictitious stories) form a positive or negative contribution to human society? How and why? Under what circumstances? Why does truthful gossip so often turn 'bad' somewhere along the chain and venture into the area of untruth?

Will the landlord recharge the electric meter by the time I get home today? It's looking a little low. I can laptop for a bit with no electricity but I can't interweb, because something has to run the router. EDIT: it seems to have gone over into emergency credit or something.

PLN for today:
-tidy up a bit here, because it is currently showing the effects of three days of rehearsal and running around with not much downtime or sorting out time
-go have horn lesson, meeting with CDP
-go to Isle of Cats, arriving about 13.15, do lots of big sorting and tidying
-come back here at some point; I'm going to aim for about 21.30 because I've had so many late nights recently.

The hardest thing? Moving the keyboard from the loft to the living room so that when someone comes to pick it up at 7pm they don't have to navigate (or even see) the rest of the house. This needs two strong people, because the keyboard is heavy. Once upon a time I could have been one of those people but this is no longer the case.

Comments

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I disagree with your analysis of property tax as a form of ground rent. Property taxes are generally levied at least partly on the value of improvements to the land, not the value of the unimproved land, and are an attempt at a progressive ability-to-pay tax. You generally do not forfeit your right to the land (and thus face eviction) if you do not keep up with property taxes [your jurisdiction may have particular wacky laws, I know not]. The concept of freehold pre-dates such taxes, indeed, and I'm sure I could name many jurisdictions where there was no such property tax. [England around 1991, for starters].

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it doesn't map precisely. But I still feel that there is some sort of connection there. Because, fundamentally, why do you have to pay property tax?

I'm not asking what you get for it -- that's obvious -- we get police and fire protection, trash pickup, schools, and all sorts of other benefits. But what is the right by which a society taxes land?

I could be convinced that my analysis is completely wrong -- I've been known to be totally wrong before. But the point of which I am more certain is that "ownership" of land is somehow fundamentally different from ownership of things. And that both are fundamentally different from "ownership" of ideas.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree that the ownerships are different. But property tax doesn't enter it to it. Society taxes land on the same bases that it taxes income, televisions, sales, windows, fuel, capital gains, or in some cases, standing wealth: by fiat.

Common law generally regards property law to be a natural right akin to the the ownership of chattels, and not an artificially created right such as copyright.