I am trying to find a pdf of the "Soul of Liberty" to help in my Geoism research. Anybody have a pdf copy link so I don't have to pay $90 for a 40-year old book?

I've tried to set up AutoMod to remove the spam in question. This will work until such a time as it doesn't. Reporting the posts to Reddit proper seems to do nothing for the moment.

Bryan Caplan, a noted libertarian economist, wrote an interesting criticism of Georgism that I'd like to address; unfortunately I cannot find my source anymore (I believe it was a blog post) and all I have is a single quote but I'd like to analyze it anyway.

Caplan proposes a thought experiment:

If you’re the second person to arrive on an island, and the first-person has already farmed the best land, it seems very odd to claim that you’re “entitled” to half the surplus value of his land.

"Alone on an island" is a popular thought experiment to underline the fundamental characteristics of various economic schools.

In this case I agree with Caplan and would consider this thought experiment to be somewhat of a strawman. However, I like the idea of thought experiments as a mean to present an argument, so I will entertain Caplan's idea and expand on it.

Let's say that a person is stranded on a deserted island. Over time, they work to improve its land so it will bear food; after a while a second person arrives on the island. We will assume that the produce of the land is enough to sustain both, else there's be no way to reconcile the needs of the two.

Doesn't it seems unfair to simply divide the produce in two? After all, it is only the first person that made improvements and worked on the land, and without their intervention, it wouldn't be as productive. On the other hand it also seems unfair, at least to me, to leave the late-comer at the mercy of the first and state that the first has no obligation to share the resources. In an extreme proprietarian setting we'd say that the first-comer has homesteaded the land and it now belongs to them and if they want they'd leave the late-comer to starve. Of course, if such a condition were to present itself in the real world, I suspect the first man would be all too happy to simply see another human being and he'd be more than willing to cooperate; but this is not the point of the experiment.

I believe Caplan is mistaken in his assumption of the georgist response. I, personally, wouldn't claim that the second person is entitled to the work of the first, they are only entitled to the land. If we assume that both men have equal rights to the land then the solution to the puzzle becomes more straightforward: the first-comer can surrender to them half of the land or, alternatively, pay a price to the late-comer (presumably in produce) that they agree on, in exchange for the exclusive right to continue managing all of the land (taking into account the land improvements made by the pioneer). If the late-comer agrees to work the land himself he will surrender a part of his produce to the first as payment for the improvements made by them in the past.

I am sure someone will think that it's impossible to perfectly divide the land in two equal parts as land is heterogeneous in nature. But we're not here to determine the "true" value of something (there is no such thing); the only real concern in this case is to divide the land in a fair way. This can be done easily, and indeed there are ways to fairly divide a resource between any n number of parties. The first person will divide the land in 2 part that they deem equal (as in, they do not prefer either one or the other), then the second person will decide how the two parts are to be assigned. The first cannot complain no matter what since they're the one that split the land to begin with, the second also has no complains since, if they thought that the division was unequal they would have simply assigned the better one to themselves.

Posts will be approve-only for a short while until Reddit can get on top of the recent spam we've been having. Tired of deleting posts every time I pull up reddit