• ObliviousEnlightenment
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    1 year ago

    Considering how much billionaires hoard, im happy just tacking a sales quota on at the same time so they just have to eat losses for a bit. People eating is more important, and frankly anything that forces the robber barons to lose money back into the system is a good thing

      • @[email protected]
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        -21 year ago

        They could, and if they do, the land it occupied should be seized and turned into a community owned cooperative.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          Cool, so, the government can just turn into bandits if we don’t like what private citizens do on their own land. Oh, and if they complain, why not just send them to the gulag?

          • @aesthelete
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            1 year ago

            Yeah it’s not cool to seize commercially zoned land when a corporation is idling on it because it doesn’t like a policy, that’s a communism guys!

            However, seizing residential land so that we can build another casino on it… that’s just the wonderous free market at work!

            Edit: eminent domain isn’t communism, pick up a grade school civics book

            • @[email protected]
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              -11 year ago

              Eminent domain involves compensation at fair market value, not theft. And typically, we use property taxes to motivate property owners to find economically productive uses for their land/buildings.

              • @aesthelete
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                01 year ago

                a) you’d be surprised how little the “fair market value” often is under eminent domain

                b) no we don’t, if we did we’d be largely following georgism… The majority of current property taxes tax improvements on the land, not the land itself. It’s often cheaper to have an empty lot than a functioning business.

                • @[email protected]
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                  11 year ago

                  Land value taxes are great. But even without them, it makes little sense to have a potentially functioning, commercially viable plot of land sitting empty. Any rational company is going to sell or lease that land out. Including farmers.

                  As long as it’s commercially viable.

                  • @aesthelete
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                    11 year ago

                    But even without them, it makes little sense to have a potentially functioning, commercially viable plot of land sitting empty.

                    “It makes little sense” and yet it happens all of the time precisely because unlike the fictional policy set you concocted for your argument, we actually don’t incentivize people to make the best use of their land through property taxes.

                    Most localities in the US tax land improvements instead of the land itself, which is the exact opposite of what you were saying we do.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            A society that values an individuals right to profit over the collectives right to eat is not a just or moral society, and it is the collective responsibility of the many to change the society to preclude from such possibilities. If that means sending mentally ill speculators and unethical industrial farmers to prison, then so be it. Better than sending the poor and minorities there for crimes of poverty only necessitated by others greed in the first place.

            Speaking of gulags, why does the US have both the highest prison population and highest per capita prison population in the world, if we don’t already send people to the gulag?

            • @[email protected]
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              -11 year ago

              You might have a point if communist nations didn’t have a history of dismal agricultural failures and capitalist countries didn’t have a history of food surplus. Lmao

              Also, whataboutism with the US prison population doesn’t excuse locking up political prisoners, since you’re apparently fine apologizing for that.

              • @[email protected]
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                1 year ago

                Political prisoners like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Fred Burton, “Xinachitli” Alvaro Hernandez, Reverend Joy Powell, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader and Shukri Abu-Baker, Eric King, Daniel Hale, Alex Saab, Ed Poindexter, Veronza Bowers, Jessica Reznicek, Emmanuel Quinones, or any of the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers illegally detained at the border and held in concentration camps every year? Or lest we forget Edward Snowden, who fled the nation to avoid becoming a political prisoner, or Chelsea Manning who spent 7 years as a political prisoner, or Julian Assange of course?

                Look, I’m not defending political prisoners, I’m calling out your random talk of gulag as what it is, a lack of reflection on the most heavily criminalized and incarcerated society in known history and a rabid reactionary whataboutism when faced with the inherent injustice the system we currently have represents.

                • @[email protected]
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                  -11 year ago

                  You couldn’t list off the political prisoners of communist regimes in a month if you never stopped typing. And yes, I got your point. It was whataboutism. You want to talk about overuse of prisons in the US, you can, but the US doesn’t lock up people because they disagree with the government. Every communist regime has. Brutal authoritarianism is a defining feature of communism.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    11 year ago

                    They literally do. They manufacture crimes with no witnesses nor evidence against prominent dissidents and imprison them for life.