But the problem with the intermediate positions is the same as the problem with Georgism and Marxism: The state must substitute for the evil speculator.

So the state must from time to time decide that one use of land is inefficient, and another efficient, and move people off.

Which in practice it does extraordinarily badly. Observe almost any location that has been subjected to eminent domain for examples.

Here it is:

http://michael-hudson.com/2011/10/simon-patten-on-public-infrastructure-and-economic-rent-capture/

It contains some criticism of Georgism, which seems quite reasonable to me. The author is a Marxist, but he seems to be a fairly intelligent and honest one. Thanks in advance.

His blog is as secure as SSL. It just isn’t “trusted” by top level CA’s.

His refusal to buy a signed cert is a quiet protest against the useless “security theatre” of authority-signed certificates that don’t actually provide any additional security.

He recently posted examples of CA signed certs being used by Phishing sites as proof that CA’s will issue a cert to anyone who pays for it, therefore negating the so-called value of the CA-signed certificate.

However the sit ins of universities were theater, a conspiracy between the administration and their puppet students where the administration had the students demand that the administration do what the administration secretly wanted to do: politicize the university and politicize education, boycott Israel, ban military recruiting on campus, and on and so forth.

When “student demands” were actually put to the vote of the student body, the left, aka the admin, invariably lost badly, and the “student radicals”, aka the admin responded by not taking votes, and just flat out barefaced lying about the outcome of student votes on “student demands”. So at least some of the leftist protest of the sixties, in particular the University Occupations which “Occupy Wall Street” sought to emulate, were theater.

Much to my surprise, Wall Street declined to play along. Instead of meeting fake police repression, the movement met real property security guards, who swiftly showed them the door with the minimum of fuss and drama and the maximum of firmness. Occupiers that declined the security guard’s assistance to find the exit were tasered and hauled out like a sack of potatoes. When this happened to the front most occupier, the hindmost got the message. It was generally only necessary to deal with a single occupier who was unable to find the exit, for the rest of the occupiers to swiftly discover the exits and leave at high speed. So they rapidly switched to “Occupying” government and quasi government property.

It then rapidly became apparent that the occupiers would make very bad boy scouts. Their camps were overrun with crime, disease, and human feces. So dramatic confrontations were staged to rationalize shutting down the camps.

Another education was to hear from a friend whose father was in control of the riot crew in a high security UK prison.

It is known how to control mobs. It works, It is a question of how much you want to control the mob, and whether it is the main priority.

Of course, in the UK at any rate – if you do the right thing, the bureaucrats will vote, sooner or later, to have you crucified; and bureaucracy goes all the way to the top.

No individual is allowed power, only committees. Things can or cannot be done because a committee somewhere has voted – nobody is responsible nobody can change it.

When the collapse comes, I suspect that the very first thing that will change is that all committees will be abolished, and the (ahem) ‘leadership-principle’ of individual power/ responsibility imposed: military hierarchy, not civil service hierarchy.