Ed Dodson responding... Bryan Caplan wrote: > Robin Hanson wrote: > > An obvious candidate is social insurance. And the obvious question about > > that is how well this mechanism compares to other social insurance > > mechanisms. This one at least is simple and clear, and difficult to > > corrupt. > > I think it far more likely that this was a tremendously costly way of > satisfying envy. My suspicion is that practices like that in primitive > societies were the main reason economic growth was so slow to take root. > > The social insurance rationale is quite weak - weather shocks hit > everyone in the village about the same. So you'd have to focus on > personal shocks to health and the like. > > And since the redistribution happens only every ten years, a person > would need a bunch of bad personal shocks year after year to fall well > below average land holdings. People who gained a lot of land were > probably just low in ability and effort, not unlucky. Ed here: Land distribution programs have been accepted by democratic socialists, primarily, as a remedy to absentee landlordism, to landlordism generally and to imperialist monopoly of land and natural resources. Yet, Marx and Engels understood that what was important was to socialize rent rather than land (their great mistake was that they also advocated socialization of wealth actually produced by labor and by capital). This has only been possible under centrally-controlled and highly represssive police states. Two cases of land redistribution worthy of discussion both occurred following the Second World War. The first is MacArthur's land redistribution program imposed on Japanese landlords. The second is that implemented on Taiwan following the take-over by the Kuomintang under Chiang-kai-shek. The former simply tripled the number of landowners and protected agrarian use of land even in the central districts of Japanese cities. The Taiwanese version placed caps on how much rent private landowners could charge to tenant farmers and eventually socialized a portion of the rent fund. The evidence suggests the Taiwanese model has contributed over time to rather stable economic growth (despite a less than democratic and honest governmental structure).
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