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by dragonwriter 1518 days ago
> All forms of economic land, including such things as natural resources and intellectual property, also generate economic rents

Natural resources are consumed inputs and don't generate rents (extraction rights, which are a subset of property rights in land, do); intellectual property isn't land in the usual economic sense (it is not naturally occuring, so not land; it is durable and created, and therefore capital in the classic division.) It does generate rents, but that's typical of capital goods generally.

(In modern use it's more typical to expand the use of “capital” to include land and thereby encompass durable, rent-generating subjects of property rights than to expand “land”.)

1 comments

Well yes, natural resources are dealt with under severance taxes on extraction. By intellectual property rents I mean monopoly rents from government enforced IP law.

And yes, neoclassical economics classes land under capital and that is a fundamental disagreement of Georgist economists with neoclassical economists.

> And yes, neoclassical economics classes land under capital and that is a fundamental disagreement of Georgist economists with neoclassical economists.

Perhaps, but your proposed construction (I’m not familiar enough with Georgism to know if it is the standard there) seems to be equivalent to that in equating classical categories of land and capital, but simply reversing the terminology, making durable (and thereby serving as rent-producing property) non-human factors of production, whether natural (and thus classically “land”) or created (and thus classically “capital”) all “economic land”.