Re:Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to ...
by nwah1 on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @05:18PM
(#16424772)
Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and locations are the same.
If you did make an island off the coast of Manhattan, then you'd only be able to do so through the ownership rights of the location.
Titles are granted by the government, usually at a price, but sometimes as a handout to special interests. The US Federal Government leases the rights to deep sea oil rigs.
If you obtained such a handout to build an island off Manhattan, that would be a transfer from the commons into private hands... but not a net increase in locations.
Its not giving people money, its redistributing it. The total amount of money chasing land rents won't change by the full amount redistributed, so the whole amount won't go into increased rents. Who can rent how much will change, and that's pretty much (in the reductionist view you advance where all purchase of economic output amounts to land rent) the point.
> Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore.
This is false. Humans have been making new land for a long time, and aren't about to stop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation