A land value tax seems like such an obvious solution to so much that ails our societies. Allowing legacy land owners to accrue vast sums of untaxed value due to the economic activity of everyone else in the vicinity of their land creates such perverse incentives.
A great example near me is in midtown Atlanta. For decades there have been empty lots that just sat empty and empty and empty until enough economic growth happened around them that their owners finally sold it for development. Even today, there are empty lots and vacant decrepit buildings in some of the most valuable locations for hundreds of miles because we are not taxing the value of the land these people are accruing.
I agree that a land value tax is great. But it won't, by itself, change how much development happens. That's the whole point of a land value tax: the opportunity costs between different land uses are unaffected by a land value tax, that's why it doesn't have any deadweight losses.
With or without a land value tax, if you don't use your land you lose the difference between leaving your land fallow and leasing it out to the highest bidder. The opportunity costs are exactly the same.
not a land value tax but an empty/vacant/unused property tax for areas where that is undesirable. if you own a property that has a dedicated use but you are not using it for that, then that should be taxed/punished/force sold, ...
Most states tax land at the time of sale and annually. It's just that the millage is low for raw land.
Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition. Why not tax people an imputed income tax based on what we thing a person's labor is worth? It makes more sense to tax money when money is actually made.
Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
I think your position is true - it does compel people to use their land for value creation (even if they don't want to). There is a positive trade-off though; a system that derives tax from rent-seeking activities can reduce the tax it levies on value-creating/facilitating activities.
"Value creation" is euphemism for making profit. It forces use of land towards the currently most profitable in an area, which is not necessarily what is socially valuable, because if you do not get enough money to pay for the hypothetical value you cannot do anything else. Eg in places where tourism is a prevailing source of making the most money it would mean that you cannot do anything else than short renting to tourists or stuff directed to tourists, which can be destructive for a lot of local businesses and communities (there are already problems and this would make it worse). Similar to other types of using land that may or may not be always attainable for every single piece of land even.
It also sounds like a mechanism to induce appropriation of property of small landowners to big corporations and interests, and not sure this furthering of concentration of land and wealth is great for local communities either. It basically gives more power to those who already have more power.
You're absolutely right about value creation being a euphemism for profit. A gaping hole in economic theory is that we don't have a general theory of value. Our so-called theories of value are in fact theories of price, and we don't actually know how to properly value things.
If you had such a theory, you would have a much easier time using taxes to reward things that society benefits from, and dissuade things that society suffers from. It's a complicated subject.
Holding raw land doesn't become a rent-seeking activity until it is sold. The owner could be waiting to accuse capital for development, waiting to purchase an ajoining property to expand, etc. A transfer tax fits this better than a land value tax.
On the other hand you could argue that someone who had a better strategy for accruing capital should instead have purchased that land. The opportunity cost of nothing happing on that land is there regardless of the users intended future development.
There'll definitely be people in that camp, with good reasons for holding on to land. Flipside, there are many other people that know the land value mechanic and take advantage.
A transfer tax is decent, but it can be sidestepped by just holding land and selling when the tax changes. Land holding is a long game.
The obscene limitation on freedom and liberty is the idea that a person can stake a claim to earth's productive power and deny everyone else the upside under threat of injury or death.
This makes no sense at all unless you believe that nobody should own property. The government is much more likely to be the one using threat of force to take your property for lack of tax payment than anyone else is for any other reason.
The value of land is only what people make of it. It's mostly hypothetical as to what you could use it for. The driving factor in land "value" is location, which is an artificial factor created by humans. That same empty lot in a city that everyone complains about needing to have a land value tax assessed against it is pennies on the dollar our in the county. Perhaps we should look at efficient use of resources and population distribution policies rather than focusing on the symptoms rather than the problem.
No, people should own property that they created or that someone else created and willingly sold to them. Land values are by definition neither of those things.
> The government is much more likely to be the one using threat of force to take your property for lack of tax payment than anyone else is for any other reason.
Physical coercion is much more common to enforce evictions than nonpayment of taxes. This is because landlords offloaded the responsibility of enforcement and security back to the peasants in exchange for having rule of law.
> The value of land is only what people make of it.
This entire paragraph is meaningless. More valuable land is more valuable because it's more productive. It is more productive not because of the actions of the owner of that land, but because of either 1) nature's productive power, or 2) the surroundings of that land (nearby amenities, infrastructure, employers, etc). In either case, the owner of the plot of land did not produce the value of the raw land. They are not entitled to upside they did not produce.
"No, people should own property that they created or that someone else created and willingly sold to them. Land values are by definition neither of those things."
Seems irrelevant as real property needs land to exist on and is just a vehicle for use. In the vast majority of the cases, the property is sold with the land and is preserved, meaning the land value is mostly inconsequential when already built on except in a small number of cases.
"Physical coercion is much more common to enforce evictions than nonpayment of taxes."
We were talking about seizing property. Renters do not own the property, the landlord does. That's an important distinction when talking about seizing property.
"2) the surroundings of that land (nearby amenities, infrastructure, employers, etc)"
Based on what people made it, just like I said.
"They are not entitled to upside they did not produce."
We live in a world with other people. Their tax dollars produced that infrastructure. They maintained their property. It's so odd to think that someone's else did your work for you, as if you never maintained property or paid taxes.
> meaning the land value is mostly inconsequential when already built on except in a small number of cases.
Literally false. In high-cost areas the land value is the bulk of the value of a property. Properties that would have a high LVT burden are almost definitionally those where the structure on top of the land is of little or negative value. Negative-value buildings are extremely common in high-cost areas today.
I struggle to believe you’re actually having a hard time understanding this point, but “the people” who produce high land values are not the people who capture those land values. That’s the point. Just because they’re both “people” doesn’t mean they’re fungible in the question of who earned what.
> Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition.
You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing.
> Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
Not at all. The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for.
"You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing."
It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
"The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for."
Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
> Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
Yeah, that's stupid and it's not how LVT works. The opportunity costs are the same.
> It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
Formulated like that, it sounds pretty silly.
Singapore has a system that works fairly well in practice and is pretty close to some form of theoretical optimal for this. Let me describe a cleaned up version:
Basically, the government owns all the land and leases it out for something like 30 years at a time to the highest bidder. No imputing, the auction sets the price. The winner pays up front in cash, so the government doesn't have to be in the business of judging creditworthiness. Leases are freely tradable while they run.
(The main way to optimise this further would be to held the auctions 10 years before the lease starts, so that the old leaseholder has enough time to make plans, and some other nice theoretical properties.)
And Ironically across the sea in UK, to a smaller extent Ireland (and I'm not sure perhaps may be elsewhere too). There's been a concerted social media push by some folks to reduce inheritance taxes and portray them as bad. One visible proponent was Jeremy Clarkson, you know the large farm owner, it's quite easy to see why he would benefit.
A land value tax is a lot more efficient. (But that's pretty unrelated.)
Even a bad old property tax is better than an inheritance tax. A property tax is probably a second best tax around for raising revenue with minimal damage to the economy, with land value taxes being the best.
The elites will go full throttle on "bullshit jobs" — after all, if unemployment hits 50%, who’s going to consume their crappy products? Give people a UBI? Hah! So they can start taking an active interest in politics? AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.
The only interest people will have in politics would be be around their UBI and other benefits. The old saying of once they know they hold the keys to the treasury they vote to direct it to themselves thing.
I don't think UBI is going to lead to significantly more interest in political involvement in an age where people are socializing less and spending hours a day scrolling algorithmic feeds.
I don't think soldiers on the state's payroll are going to take much interest in political involvement in an age where they spend hours a day drilling and playing cards. — Petrograd, 1917.
People change what they do when they go from full-time work to UBI teaters. You could either argue that they will go further into the feeds or something else, but to assume statis is suspect. So you actively have to argue that.
Joe Beergut sits in front of the television (scene from 1995). Is it relevant that he worked hard from eight to five prior to that? Probably.
If you look at, for example, post-industrial regions of the Nordic countries where a good amount of people have been terminally on state benefits, they didn't start using all that free time for political involvement.
Good point, and I see where you are coming from. The difference compared to UBI would be that UBI is unconditional while “terminal state benefits” can require means testing.
Where they might intersect or not is that they are poor. Having time is one precondition for political engagement but having money also helps.
Overall I’m not a fan of UBI. Especially if it would create people who you indirectly describe in the way you do. I don’t want a society of the haves and the merely can-survivs.
But this feels disconnected. The “terminal state benefits” group have been viewed that way long before algorithmic feeds and before the socializing less part got really obvious. So which is it? Both, all of the above?
I wouldn't agree that having money is necessarily for grassroots political involvement. Perhaps the opposite: since the mid 20th century, skint students have been among the most active political forces in many countries. True, deep-pocketed figures often then step in and try to use their money to coopt those young people's political energy, but this is often a negative thing.
The elite won't need to sell anything to anyone. With lands, mines, solar energy what would they need people for?
I'm positive that the elite will soon only need a really really small number of people (especially in their vicinity) for their happiness. Robots will be able to provide food, safety, entertainment, health, in a self-sustaining manner.
I predict that if we let the elite do whatever they want, they would eliminate common people (actively or passively) because they wouldn't need them.
In my opinion the only thing that can stop this scenario unfolding is the government which currently has the power over the elite, and currently is governed by the people (more or less). I frankly don't think any other scenario is realistic (e.g. a number of Robin Hood terrorists appear, or the elite just wouldn't let people die because of their activities).
Currently I strongly support the idea of disempowering the elite: making it a law that a single person can have at most X amount of wealth. (For organizations and funds that would be wealth/member.) Also there need to be more guarantees that the government (the only holder of power) is controlled by the people and is working for the people.
As a country, I host a somewhat large and educated group of humans. Some of them are economists like you. They most certainly have heard about georgism before.
The current issue is not so much that they don’t have enough ideas, but that they can’t agree on which ones to apply.
I too once presumed that those people knew better than me and others. I can not stress how wrong I was.
I was so often flabbergasted at the incompetence and ignorance of those "in the know" that I now believe that their positions have nothing to do with being the best at what they do.
Some of it is Hanlon's razor read forward, but the rest is Hanlon's razor read backwards. Either way, it's terrifying for someone like me who doesn't think themselves as particularly intelligent.
Agreed. I was in France recently, and it's hard to overstate how much raw disagreement there is between the people there. You think left vs right is bad in the US, you haven't tried 4 or 5 different microshifted pov on either side, all completely in opposition with anything but their own candidate.
People there talk about needing a new constitution. Elections won't fix France, and neither will economic policy. The problem is fragmentation.
Funny timing. The NZ Election is coming up on the 7th of November, and there is a party campaigning on a Land Value Tax and UBI [0]. Despite never being in parliament before, they're polling at 5% [1], just above the threshold to make it in (but would have quite a lot of leverage over the next government.)
It will be very interesting to watch and see if this does get implemented.
> (If you’re wondering if you can skip the UBI and just have LVT, you can’t, otherwise farmers get screwed, and grandma living off her pension loses her home, and various other problems caused by only having LVT)
That's silly and ill-informed.
Farming as a business is unaffected: you have exactly the same opportunity costs as before. Farmers who lease their land won't even notice at all.
Singapore has something pretty much equivalent to an LVT (the government owns all the land and leases it out), and no UBI and we are doing just fine.
UBI might or might not be good idea for other reasons; but it's pretty independent of LVT, and we shouldn't unnecessarily mix up these two ideas.
Yes, land value tax has been advocated by many, but has any country implemented this and made it their main (or at least a major) source of tax income? Why not?
The UK tried it as part of the 1909 "People's Budget", coming into force two years later at an annual rate of 1p in the (pre-decimal) £, so about 0.4%.
There's an open question over whether anyone ever thought it would actually raise significant amounts of money, or if it was primarily intended as a tool to force a confrontation with the House of Lords. If the latter, it certainly did the job and helped establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the unelected Lords.
In terms of revenue generation, though, it was much less successful - at the time it was abolished in 1920, the costs of surveying and valuing land had outweighed the amount of income generated so it was a net negative overall.
A tax that prices 80 year old grandmas out of their homes and the whole area they've lived in all their lives is going to be extremely politicially unpopular.
Thing is the 80yo grandma may sit, alone, on a huge land. Meanwhile, young families are struggling to find a decent place.
Taxing/reducing the land can be perceived as unfair to grandma. Having young struggling more than previous generation and getting much smaller spaces can also be perceived as unfair.
Sure, but one unfairness is status quo, and the other a viscerally ugly proposed change. It's clear how that's always going to be spun by opponents to the change.
Well all know LVT is not proposed for single-owner homeowners who live in their own home. I know it and you do too. Why are you being disingineous or deliberately obtuse?
Which specific proposal out of dozens all over the world do you claim to know? And once you have one carveout, the next one is not far. I'm being "disingineous or deliberately obtuse" because that's how the spin doctors and lobbyists are going to paint it.
Singapore uses a system that is economically ~identical. Nearly all the land is owned by the state and leased to private parties on 99 year leases who pay "land rents" to the state.
An LVT is a way to produce the same economic effects without the starting point of "the state owns the land," which is hard to transition to from "the state does not own the land."
However, the government still has the power to tax you, and they have the power to seize your property if you don't pay your taxes. But note that this is not dependent on some (nonexistent) concept of higher landlord, because the government can seize things like your car under the exact same general taxation authority. None of it is predicated on "higher ownership" because higher ownership doesn't exist, it's "just" taxation.
You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want. It's uninteresting to me and everyone else, so perhaps save the HN comment board for something more substantive.
"You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want."
Nice strawman. Where did I say that?
The link you sent also states that it's alloidal title only to distinguish it from feudal title. The mechanisms are essentially the same - you must pay a sum to keep the land. There's still things like eminent domain and eschet. Don't forget that tenurial rights are roughly equivalent to zoning laws in concept. Similar mechanisms are there, but they're just named differently.
No, they’re not “named differently.” They are different things. The government does not own all the land in the US. They have completely distinct mechanisms to take ownership of land.
We just saw mass protests in Spain over an elderly lady that couldn't afford the new rent in her desirable City apartment. What do you think will happen in France when suddenly lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?
Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.
> Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.
Yes, most developed countries are overtaxed. They should get rid of nearly all of them and replace them with a high LVT. Near-zero regulatory complexity, paperwork, enforcement burden, or economic distortions.
Is LVT funding UBI or reverse mortgages? Seems like supporters think it can fund anything and everything.
"Near-zero regulatory complexity, paperwork, enforcement burden, or economic distortions."
This isnt true in the least. Land value calculations would be require all sorts of regulations and appeal processes to set true land value and prevent gaming the system. Just want until private equity figures out they can drive up property values in a residential area so they can use the tax on existing properties to force the owners to sell to them.
UBI is a very stupid idea, in large part because it will get funneled into land values.
> Seems like supporters think it can fund anything and everything.
Well yes, money can be used to fund "anything and everything." This is actually a key characteristic of money. If your implicit argument is that LVT can't produce enough money to fund reverse mortgages, you obviously aren't really thinking about the words you're reading. Because using LVT to fund a reverse mortgage with the purpose of paying the LVT doesn't require any money. It's simply exchanging the latent equity in a building for a reduced land value tax bill.
> This isnt true in the least. Land value calculations would be require all sorts of regulations and appeal processes to set true land value and prevent gaming the system
No not really. Land valuation is pretty much automatable now.
> lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?
I think exempting your primary residence from LVT (or capping it at the value of UBI, in that proposal) would not defeat the purpose of LVT, and would eliminate such problems.
That's only true for this one implementation. But that gets messy when you have home buessiness that may involve some rent-seeking aspect. This is especially true once businesses figure out you can home office people instead of paying the land tax.
These protests started because schools are falling in complete disrepair. And you want to reduce their funding further? Maybe students should study outside? Taught by AI, because human teachers are too expensive?
Fuck this death cult that is neoliberalism. We've been doing austerity for decades, and things keep getting worse and worse. How come we're unable to maintain what we had 50 years ago, while work has never been this productive? Tax the rich.
There's no amount of defunding that will satisfy the capital class. They will take everything, unless we stop them from bleeding us dry.
As I understand it, the point is that land rent is a large and stable rent, where taxing it has few supply-side side-effects, not that land rent is the only rent.
The second paragraph of the Georgism Wikipedia page mentions other rents,
> Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property).
Any time anyone says that complex societal issues can be solved with simple policy changes, alarm bells go off in my head.
By that I don't mean that simple solutions to complex problems do not exist, rather that getting them approved and implemented is often not so straight forward as some would like to think. Human societal systems are complex and very messy.
Watching the introduction of the embedded video gives me the feeling that the author is perhaps still studying economics and so it does come across quite hubristic to say to have a definitive answer in a early career paper that has yet to go through rigorous peer review.
Going to guess this is mostly about the housing problem that basically all modern societies are facing from Korea to Australia to Spain. There are two sides of this problem, cities where everyone wants to go and old towns where everyone is leaving.
Capitalism says buyers pay and when there are too many customers, the price goes up. This is what we are seeing, its that simple.
Some suggest to add some sort of tax to owners, but this wont help, they will of course just pass the cost onto their renters. Its pretty obvious owners dont care if you cant pay someone else will, its that simple.
The REAL problem is the concentration of living in big cities and the fact there are too many people. The same is also true of wages, wages dont go up because there will always be someone else who will do the job for the same or less be it actual wages or extra hours and other negatives.
The system is broken, we have to appreciate that all this centralisation of everything and anything is the problem. Slowly or maybe its quickly everything is becoming a monopoly of some kind.
Major cities are becoming the monopoly of employment and work, previoously it was spread across more places and more industries. Now its becoming concentrated. In Spain that means everyone wants to move to Madrid or Barca and the consequences mean too many people and too few homes. People want to live in certain places for their advantages, big cities also mean more commuting, and people want less travel time, but that means they pay more in rent. You cant win, if you have one then you lose on the other. THis is always the case in everything from commuting time, to rent, in the end most of the people lose most of the time.
What we are seeing is what happens when you have a monopoly. THe problem is people cant see who or what are the monopolies. THey think a monopoly must be a single company or person, they cant comprehend its something above that at the nationwide level, namely the structure of each country.
A perfect example is everyone in NZ is moving to Auckland, and then everyone in NZ also moves to Australia. Of course its not everyone but its alot and this affects the balance both in NZ and also in places like Sydney which grow even bigger.
The answer is to stop the centralisation, and break things up.
The passing costs on to renters is a bit of a fallacy. Rental price is market related, with the obvious question being, if a new tax would make them raise rents, why don't they just raise the rents right now and turn a larger profit?
Fact is that the rent is currently set at what the market is willing and able to pay, regardless of what the cost to the owners is.
They are raising the rent, its always creeping up, its never constant. There is no universal coordinated rental increase cabal. The monopoly here is the group, they might not communicate but they act as one in terms of raising rents.
Im not saying this is bad or good, im simply saying that we are seeing independent personalities act as a monopoly because countries themselves are devouring their towns and everyone is moving into the big city or cities.
BTW: Its not only rent, thats just one example, its everything, rent, food, entertainment, traffic, lines at your favourite venue...
Even though this paper has scarcity in the title, it doesn't seem to investigate how UBI affects scarcity of resources that are not labor. Natural resources and production volume are essentially finite when looking at a current timeframe. A UBI will increase prices as demand for finite resources stays the same or increases and the money supply to consumers increases.
Wasn't there another post a week ago talking about how UBI won't save us from automation? I was much more inclined to believe that one.
It's an interesting topic. So let's say many people get laid off as automation takes over. If we have UBI that covers mostly bare necessities (as an example), shouldn't supply and demand stay basically the same? Or demand even lowers if people can't afford what they previously did.
If people have more money (or population grows) so that demand grows while supply stays the same, prices will rise and find a new equilibrium where people can again afford less and therefore buy less.
I'm not sure if it's an option to just leave most of the population to starve either so what's the alternative to some kind of social security or UBI? Long ago, a factory called "nature" used to provide relatively more of our needs, but that's not feasible today. But this quickly gets philosophical and political, of course.
In any case, finite resources are finite regardless if we have UBI or not.
I'm pretty sure the issue isn't economic know-how, it's all politics. We're simply stuck with a hung parliament, and while each party keeps playing in their political interests, nothing will happen.
It will take a while until we get a functional political system (i.e. parliament needs to realize coalitions are absolutely necessary to do anything), so let's just hope the french economy doesn't collapse in the mean time and its debt doesn't blow up.
lvt is too ham fisted, what your really want to tax isinefficient land usage, eg your land is zoned for higher density or industrial etc and you fail to deploy it as such then you should pay a tax for that. this encourages investment and discourages land banking. moving that land into those who will deploy it and lower the overall cost of doing things overall
Your version would instead discourage zoning land for any productive use. Which is an issue in a democracy, where the same people being taxed elect the people who influence zoning
In a dictatorship your scheme would work, in a democracy it would just prevent even more economic activity
i agree with you that it wouldnt be perfect, but dont follow your logic? the gov designates zoning and collects the resulting taxes wouldnt it encourage in the worse case over zoning?
Good economic policy is largely context independent. It is almost always a good time to tax economic rents and deregulate starting/running a business. The basic formula for success has been well established for several centuries and even the Communists managed to figure it out a big chunk of that.
It is not surprising that the established government figures seem confused. If they've let the situation devolve to the point where there is a visible problem it is strong evidence that they just don't care about good economic policy. Not in the top 10 list of priorities. And to couple that with a forecast, that probably isn't going to change any time soon.
The paper seems stuck with the long debunked idea that all market actors are rational and centred on economic values, but that is utterly incorrect.
Similarly it states value comes from either work or land, but value can also be created out of thin air. It is called branding.
Especially for France and its luxury industry. You take two identical handbag, one is from LV, the other an unknown brand, one will cost 1,500$, the other 150$.
France needs to stop spending 57% of its GDP on public expenditure while experiencing virtually no economic growth. It needs to stop handing out massive pensions and generally treating pensioners like royalty.
The French government needs to stop spending money it doesn't have when it can barely keep the lights on. New taxes in a country where the GPD is already taxed at 45%, please, give me a break.
> And then the policy you want is simple: Tax the bad capitalism, don’t tax the good capitalism.
Tax isn’t punishment. Imagine a company which has a thousand trucks. The trucks themselves are ethically pure EVs. They pay the land value tax for the parking lot and the auto shop. But they don’t indirectly pay taxes for the use of the roads? That’s a massive wear on the road infrastructure.
Denmark has a land tax (grundskyld) and Estonia taxes land only, not buildings. Both real, both modest rates though, nowhere near the full rent capture Georgists want. Pennsylvania towns did split-rate too with mixed results.
People don't like land value taxes for the same reason the anti-property-tax movement is in the news these days: It reverses 100 years of pro-homeownership messaging, and it turns landowners into renters from the government.
Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices? Gambling, drugs, prediction markets, cash-sink "luxury" products, parasitic mobile games, etc.? I think it's fine by just about everybody if those particular industries -- the real "bad capitalism" -- become almost unprofitable by default.
The secondary layer of "bad capitalism" is in finance, speculation, and even legal services. There's no reason that those, also, cannot be much more heavily taxed.
At the same time, do the extremely smart thing that Asian economies -- China and Korea foremost among them -- have been practicing: Subsidize technical and industrial innovation, strategic industries, etc. Just cut the red tape and fund it.
“ it turns landowners into renters from the government.”
With the caveat that “the government” should somehow represent the will of society (I know, basic democracy seems like a big ask today), this seems like how it should be. The land belongs to us humans together, and if someone wants to control it exclusively, there should be something in return for the rest of us.
> With the caveat that “the government” should somehow represent the will of society
I'm going to ask you a genuine, non-rhetorical question: When was the last time this was the case? Athens, and not for long? Surely not Republican Rome, any other period in Rome's history, Feudal Europe to the 20th C., dynastic or warlord-ruled Asia, or the United States of America, though perhaps it came close for a brief period in the 18th century.
It's certainly not the case now. Feudalism is the form of government that is most natural to man, just as it is most natural to bees and ants. An LVT would be a step in the direction of feudalism again, with professional politicians and bureaucrats as the tyrants who know that they de facto own all of the land, and can charge whatever rents they like.
No, it is a matter of degree, it is not a binary thing. It is a measure we can put on government. It is not the only thing which matters, but there are differences between governments today. One is not the same as the other, just because none of them are ideal.
A land value tax would also tax the poor -- it's not only fat cats who own land -- and strip of some value a vast number of presently-poor people hoping for a property inheritance.
In fact, it would tax the industrious poor with little recourse.
Vices, on the other hand, don't have to be engaged in, and should absolutely be discouraged.
The homeownership rate in France is >60% and a large fraction of those -- possibly the largest fraction -- consists of (a) people who bought small houses for their own use, to live in them (not an "extremely valuable thing," but nevertheless,) and (b) people who inherited properties or small farms.
Most of these people are middle class, many are cash-poor.
Property developers are a stark minority, you know...
Because LVT = site value x rate. Unless the rate on low and medium-value sites is kept very low -- too low to raise much revenue -- the average landowner would suffer from a significant new tax burden. (France already has property taxes, but they're very low.)
...And, again, without recourse. Nobody has to gamble or buy a yacht. But whether renter or owner, everybody needs a house to live in. Everybody would have to pay the LVT, one way or another, no matter how rich or how poor.
For the average landowner, the LVT is actually a sort of tax on sober industriousness or fortunate inheritance, the very opposite of a vice tax.
Wouldn't it also screw over poor people in gentrified neighborhoods who had no control over the situation? People would be forced to sell early or risk all their savings drying up and then being forced to sell anyhow.
Assuming an efficient lending market, they can take out loans with the land as collateral. As long as the land value continues rising they can continue taking out bigger and bigger loans. Only when growth slows they are forced to sell
This shifts the optimal point for sale, but if there is explosive growth they theoretically still aren't forced to sell early, they can still capture all that growth
What this scheme prevents is them holding onto the property forever after the neighborhood gentrified. Which the author likely considers a good thing in their framework, because the land generates more economic value in other hands. The original land owner gets a payout and is forced to move. Just like a renter would be forced to move, just that the land owner gets a big payout from the land value increase
Australia is doing that with tobacco. It worked in that it has drastically cut smoking rates and deaths, but hasn't worked it has also made the market more lucrative for smugglers/organised crime. Illegal tobacco avoids the tax, so it can be sold at a lower price whilst still raking in the profits. Today 80% of tobacco in Australia is illegal, with a consequent 80% hit to tax revenue.
The point shouldn’t be to just raise money simply by taxing things that you personally think are ‘bad’. This is the sort of pointless politics that’s being going on for too long.
Instead, the approach should be to diagnose what is wrong with our economies (and maybe our societies) and then use the tools we have, including taxation, to address those issues. This is where people are with (variously) land taxes, or wealth tax, or others.
(Whole societies and economies aren’t struggling because of people gambling, smoking, and drinking.)
The problem with taxing vices too heavily is that it incentives a black market to emerge... and all the crime that comes with it. Australia is a great example of a place where this is causing a lot of problems.
The explosion in KYC over the past ~20 years means that a lot of digital vices simply can't meaningfully exist in black market form. Online gaming, prediction markets, predatory financial speculation, etc., are vices that only exist because they're tolerated.
You and I can theorize how black market analogs might somehow exist, but they wouldn't have 1% of the reach they currently enjoy.
I also think that conspicuous consumption in the form of yachts and $40,000 handbags is, in truth, a vice -- and one that can generate a lot of tax revenue, and only be black-marketed away with severe difficulty.
> Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices?
Buy a pack of cigs in New York (I think it's almost $20, now). Most of that is tax. People vape, a lot, here. I know that pre-rolled cigarettes have been heavily taxed in many countries, for decades, so they sell loose tobacco and rolling papers.
Gambling also tends to get taxed a lot.
There's lots of folks that think prostitution should be legalized, so it can be taxed. The same argument was made for pot. I'm pretty sure that legal pot is heavily taxed. I have heard that illegal pot is cheaper.
It's not an easy solution. If it was easy, it would have been done, a long time ago.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
A land value tax seems like such an obvious solution to so much that ails our societies. Allowing legacy land owners to accrue vast sums of untaxed value due to the economic activity of everyone else in the vicinity of their land creates such perverse incentives.
A great example near me is in midtown Atlanta. For decades there have been empty lots that just sat empty and empty and empty until enough economic growth happened around them that their owners finally sold it for development. Even today, there are empty lots and vacant decrepit buildings in some of the most valuable locations for hundreds of miles because we are not taxing the value of the land these people are accruing.
I agree that a land value tax is great. But it won't, by itself, change how much development happens. That's the whole point of a land value tax: the opportunity costs between different land uses are unaffected by a land value tax, that's why it doesn't have any deadweight losses.
With or without a land value tax, if you don't use your land you lose the difference between leaving your land fallow and leasing it out to the highest bidder. The opportunity costs are exactly the same.
not a land value tax but an empty/vacant/unused property tax for areas where that is undesirable. if you own a property that has a dedicated use but you are not using it for that, then that should be taxed/punished/force sold, ...
more on this issue in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566791
Most states tax land at the time of sale and annually. It's just that the millage is low for raw land.
Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition. Why not tax people an imputed income tax based on what we thing a person's labor is worth? It makes more sense to tax money when money is actually made.
Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
I think your position is true - it does compel people to use their land for value creation (even if they don't want to). There is a positive trade-off though; a system that derives tax from rent-seeking activities can reduce the tax it levies on value-creating/facilitating activities.
"Value creation" is euphemism for making profit. It forces use of land towards the currently most profitable in an area, which is not necessarily what is socially valuable, because if you do not get enough money to pay for the hypothetical value you cannot do anything else. Eg in places where tourism is a prevailing source of making the most money it would mean that you cannot do anything else than short renting to tourists or stuff directed to tourists, which can be destructive for a lot of local businesses and communities (there are already problems and this would make it worse). Similar to other types of using land that may or may not be always attainable for every single piece of land even.
It also sounds like a mechanism to induce appropriation of property of small landowners to big corporations and interests, and not sure this furthering of concentration of land and wealth is great for local communities either. It basically gives more power to those who already have more power.
You're absolutely right about value creation being a euphemism for profit. A gaping hole in economic theory is that we don't have a general theory of value. Our so-called theories of value are in fact theories of price, and we don't actually know how to properly value things.
If you had such a theory, you would have a much easier time using taxes to reward things that society benefits from, and dissuade things that society suffers from. It's a complicated subject.
Your concern is absolutely spot-on.
> we don't actually know how to properly value things
Nor should we! That would be like a formal theory for deriving all truth. It would be awful absolutism (and wouldn't actually be real).
Well, all moral truth, anyway. Wouldn't tell you much about physics.
Holding raw land doesn't become a rent-seeking activity until it is sold. The owner could be waiting to accuse capital for development, waiting to purchase an ajoining property to expand, etc. A transfer tax fits this better than a land value tax.
On the other hand you could argue that someone who had a better strategy for accruing capital should instead have purchased that land. The opportunity cost of nothing happing on that land is there regardless of the users intended future development.
There'll definitely be people in that camp, with good reasons for holding on to land. Flipside, there are many other people that know the land value mechanic and take advantage.
A transfer tax is decent, but it can be sidestepped by just holding land and selling when the tax changes. Land holding is a long game.
The obscene limitation on freedom and liberty is the idea that a person can stake a claim to earth's productive power and deny everyone else the upside under threat of injury or death.
This makes no sense at all unless you believe that nobody should own property. The government is much more likely to be the one using threat of force to take your property for lack of tax payment than anyone else is for any other reason.
The value of land is only what people make of it. It's mostly hypothetical as to what you could use it for. The driving factor in land "value" is location, which is an artificial factor created by humans. That same empty lot in a city that everyone complains about needing to have a land value tax assessed against it is pennies on the dollar our in the county. Perhaps we should look at efficient use of resources and population distribution policies rather than focusing on the symptoms rather than the problem.
No, people should own property that they created or that someone else created and willingly sold to them. Land values are by definition neither of those things.
> The government is much more likely to be the one using threat of force to take your property for lack of tax payment than anyone else is for any other reason.
Physical coercion is much more common to enforce evictions than nonpayment of taxes. This is because landlords offloaded the responsibility of enforcement and security back to the peasants in exchange for having rule of law.
> The value of land is only what people make of it.
This entire paragraph is meaningless. More valuable land is more valuable because it's more productive. It is more productive not because of the actions of the owner of that land, but because of either 1) nature's productive power, or 2) the surroundings of that land (nearby amenities, infrastructure, employers, etc). In either case, the owner of the plot of land did not produce the value of the raw land. They are not entitled to upside they did not produce.
"No, people should own property that they created or that someone else created and willingly sold to them. Land values are by definition neither of those things."
Seems irrelevant as real property needs land to exist on and is just a vehicle for use. In the vast majority of the cases, the property is sold with the land and is preserved, meaning the land value is mostly inconsequential when already built on except in a small number of cases.
"Physical coercion is much more common to enforce evictions than nonpayment of taxes."
We were talking about seizing property. Renters do not own the property, the landlord does. That's an important distinction when talking about seizing property.
"2) the surroundings of that land (nearby amenities, infrastructure, employers, etc)"
Based on what people made it, just like I said.
"They are not entitled to upside they did not produce."
We live in a world with other people. Their tax dollars produced that infrastructure. They maintained their property. It's so odd to think that someone's else did your work for you, as if you never maintained property or paid taxes.
> meaning the land value is mostly inconsequential when already built on except in a small number of cases.
Literally false. In high-cost areas the land value is the bulk of the value of a property. Properties that would have a high LVT burden are almost definitionally those where the structure on top of the land is of little or negative value. Negative-value buildings are extremely common in high-cost areas today.
I struggle to believe you’re actually having a hard time understanding this point, but “the people” who produce high land values are not the people who capture those land values. That’s the point. Just because they’re both “people” doesn’t mean they’re fungible in the question of who earned what.
It seems you have already made up your mind. Good luck in life.
> description of verifiable economic facts
> "It seems you have already made up your mind. Good luck in life."
have a good one amigo
> Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition.
You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing.
> Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
Not at all. The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for.
"You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing."
It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
"The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for."
Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
> Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
Yeah, that's stupid and it's not how LVT works. The opportunity costs are the same.
> It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
Formulated like that, it sounds pretty silly.
Singapore has a system that works fairly well in practice and is pretty close to some form of theoretical optimal for this. Let me describe a cleaned up version:
Basically, the government owns all the land and leases it out for something like 30 years at a time to the highest bidder. No imputing, the auction sets the price. The winner pays up front in cash, so the government doesn't have to be in the business of judging creditworthiness. Leases are freely tradable while they run.
(The main way to optimise this further would be to held the auctions 10 years before the lease starts, so that the old leaseholder has enough time to make plans, and some other nice theoretical properties.)
Tax policy was never about "freedom and liberty", it's about collecting revenue for government and guiding economic development.
Yet people have to vote for the policies, and it's highly unlikely they would vote for tax policies that so forcefully reduce freedom.
At the same time, it's a tax policy that would improve the housing supply in desirable locations.
And Ironically across the sea in UK, to a smaller extent Ireland (and I'm not sure perhaps may be elsewhere too). There's been a concerted social media push by some folks to reduce inheritance taxes and portray them as bad. One visible proponent was Jeremy Clarkson, you know the large farm owner, it's quite easy to see why he would benefit.
Inheritance taxes are inefficient, yeah.
A land value tax is a lot more efficient. (But that's pretty unrelated.)
Even a bad old property tax is better than an inheritance tax. A property tax is probably a second best tax around for raising revenue with minimal damage to the economy, with land value taxes being the best.
The elites will go full throttle on "bullshit jobs" — after all, if unemployment hits 50%, who’s going to consume their crappy products? Give people a UBI? Hah! So they can start taking an active interest in politics? AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.
The only interest people will have in politics would be be around their UBI and other benefits. The old saying of once they know they hold the keys to the treasury they vote to direct it to themselves thing.
I don't think UBI is going to lead to significantly more interest in political involvement in an age where people are socializing less and spending hours a day scrolling algorithmic feeds.
I don't think soldiers on the state's payroll are going to take much interest in political involvement in an age where they spend hours a day drilling and playing cards. — Petrograd, 1917.
People change what they do when they go from full-time work to UBI teaters. You could either argue that they will go further into the feeds or something else, but to assume statis is suspect. So you actively have to argue that.
Joe Beergut sits in front of the television (scene from 1995). Is it relevant that he worked hard from eight to five prior to that? Probably.
If you look at, for example, post-industrial regions of the Nordic countries where a good amount of people have been terminally on state benefits, they didn't start using all that free time for political involvement.
Good point, and I see where you are coming from. The difference compared to UBI would be that UBI is unconditional while “terminal state benefits” can require means testing. Where they might intersect or not is that they are poor. Having time is one precondition for political engagement but having money also helps.
Overall I’m not a fan of UBI. Especially if it would create people who you indirectly describe in the way you do. I don’t want a society of the haves and the merely can-survivs.
But this feels disconnected. The “terminal state benefits” group have been viewed that way long before algorithmic feeds and before the socializing less part got really obvious. So which is it? Both, all of the above?
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I wouldn't agree that having money is necessarily for grassroots political involvement. Perhaps the opposite: since the mid 20th century, skint students have been among the most active political forces in many countries. True, deep-pocketed figures often then step in and try to use their money to coopt those young people's political energy, but this is often a negative thing.
The elite won't need to sell anything to anyone. With lands, mines, solar energy what would they need people for?
I'm positive that the elite will soon only need a really really small number of people (especially in their vicinity) for their happiness. Robots will be able to provide food, safety, entertainment, health, in a self-sustaining manner.
I predict that if we let the elite do whatever they want, they would eliminate common people (actively or passively) because they wouldn't need them.
In my opinion the only thing that can stop this scenario unfolding is the government which currently has the power over the elite, and currently is governed by the people (more or less). I frankly don't think any other scenario is realistic (e.g. a number of Robin Hood terrorists appear, or the elite just wouldn't let people die because of their activities).
Currently I strongly support the idea of disempowering the elite: making it a law that a single person can have at most X amount of wealth. (For organizations and funds that would be wealth/member.) Also there need to be more guarantees that the government (the only holder of power) is controlled by the people and is working for the people.
Dear Wilson,
As a country, I host a somewhat large and educated group of humans. Some of them are economists like you. They most certainly have heard about georgism before.
The current issue is not so much that they don’t have enough ideas, but that they can’t agree on which ones to apply.
Sincerely, France.
I too once presumed that those people knew better than me and others. I can not stress how wrong I was.
I was so often flabbergasted at the incompetence and ignorance of those "in the know" that I now believe that their positions have nothing to do with being the best at what they do.
Some of it is Hanlon's razor read forward, but the rest is Hanlon's razor read backwards. Either way, it's terrifying for someone like me who doesn't think themselves as particularly intelligent.
Agreed. I was in France recently, and it's hard to overstate how much raw disagreement there is between the people there. You think left vs right is bad in the US, you haven't tried 4 or 5 different microshifted pov on either side, all completely in opposition with anything but their own candidate.
People there talk about needing a new constitution. Elections won't fix France, and neither will economic policy. The problem is fragmentation.
Just watch tomorrow.
Funny timing. The NZ Election is coming up on the 7th of November, and there is a party campaigning on a Land Value Tax and UBI [0]. Despite never being in parliament before, they're polling at 5% [1], just above the threshold to make it in (but would have quite a lot of leverage over the next government.)
It will be very interesting to watch and see if this does get implemented.
[0]: https://www.opportunity.org.nz/tax-reset [1]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics_election-2026/2035492/ne...
Sadly their more spicy policies are optional if asked to form a coalition.
> (If you’re wondering if you can skip the UBI and just have LVT, you can’t, otherwise farmers get screwed, and grandma living off her pension loses her home, and various other problems caused by only having LVT)
That's silly and ill-informed.
Farming as a business is unaffected: you have exactly the same opportunity costs as before. Farmers who lease their land won't even notice at all.
Singapore has something pretty much equivalent to an LVT (the government owns all the land and leases it out), and no UBI and we are doing just fine.
UBI might or might not be good idea for other reasons; but it's pretty independent of LVT, and we shouldn't unnecessarily mix up these two ideas.
Yes, land value tax has been advocated by many, but has any country implemented this and made it their main (or at least a major) source of tax income? Why not?
The UK tried it as part of the 1909 "People's Budget", coming into force two years later at an annual rate of 1p in the (pre-decimal) £, so about 0.4%.
There's an open question over whether anyone ever thought it would actually raise significant amounts of money, or if it was primarily intended as a tool to force a confrontation with the House of Lords. If the latter, it certainly did the job and helped establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the unelected Lords.
In terms of revenue generation, though, it was much less successful - at the time it was abolished in 1920, the costs of surveying and valuing land had outweighed the amount of income generated so it was a net negative overall.
Singapore has a pseudo LVT in the form of property taxes with land value capture.
Taiwan.
A tax that prices 80 year old grandmas out of their homes and the whole area they've lived in all their lives is going to be extremely politicially unpopular.
Thing is the 80yo grandma may sit, alone, on a huge land. Meanwhile, young families are struggling to find a decent place.
Taxing/reducing the land can be perceived as unfair to grandma. Having young struggling more than previous generation and getting much smaller spaces can also be perceived as unfair.
Sure, but one unfairness is status quo, and the other a viscerally ugly proposed change. It's clear how that's always going to be spun by opponents to the change.
The grandma collateral is real
Well all know LVT is not proposed for single-owner homeowners who live in their own home. I know it and you do too. Why are you being disingineous or deliberately obtuse?
Which specific proposal out of dozens all over the world do you claim to know? And once you have one carveout, the next one is not far. I'm being "disingineous or deliberately obtuse" because that's how the spin doctors and lobbyists are going to paint it.
Is this just theory? Are there thriving societies that do this?
Curious, as I dont want my cynicism to creep in...
Singapore uses a system that is economically ~identical. Nearly all the land is owned by the state and leased to private parties on 99 year leases who pay "land rents" to the state.
An LVT is a way to produce the same economic effects without the starting point of "the state owns the land," which is hard to transition to from "the state does not own the land."
Even in the US the government owns the land. You just have title of deed. Failure to pay your fealty (property tax) results in seizure.
You are incorrect.
The US has alloidal land ownership (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title). If you own the land in the US, you are the actual owner of that land.
However, the government still has the power to tax you, and they have the power to seize your property if you don't pay your taxes. But note that this is not dependent on some (nonexistent) concept of higher landlord, because the government can seize things like your car under the exact same general taxation authority. None of it is predicated on "higher ownership" because higher ownership doesn't exist, it's "just" taxation.
You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want. It's uninteresting to me and everyone else, so perhaps save the HN comment board for something more substantive.
"You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want."
Nice strawman. Where did I say that?
The link you sent also states that it's alloidal title only to distinguish it from feudal title. The mechanisms are essentially the same - you must pay a sum to keep the land. There's still things like eminent domain and eschet. Don't forget that tenurial rights are roughly equivalent to zoning laws in concept. Similar mechanisms are there, but they're just named differently.
No, they’re not “named differently.” They are different things. The government does not own all the land in the US. They have completely distinct mechanisms to take ownership of land.
Might want to edit that wiki article then
The entire Wiki article is a description of how alloidal ownership is not a lease from a higher owner. You are profoundly confused.
We just saw mass protests in Spain over an elderly lady that couldn't afford the new rent in her desirable City apartment. What do you think will happen in France when suddenly lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?
Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.
1) LVT suppresses rent growth
2) LVT can fund reverse mortgages
> Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.
Yes, most developed countries are overtaxed. They should get rid of nearly all of them and replace them with a high LVT. Near-zero regulatory complexity, paperwork, enforcement burden, or economic distortions.
Is LVT funding UBI or reverse mortgages? Seems like supporters think it can fund anything and everything.
"Near-zero regulatory complexity, paperwork, enforcement burden, or economic distortions."
This isnt true in the least. Land value calculations would be require all sorts of regulations and appeal processes to set true land value and prevent gaming the system. Just want until private equity figures out they can drive up property values in a residential area so they can use the tax on existing properties to force the owners to sell to them.
UBI is a very stupid idea, in large part because it will get funneled into land values.
> Seems like supporters think it can fund anything and everything.
Well yes, money can be used to fund "anything and everything." This is actually a key characteristic of money. If your implicit argument is that LVT can't produce enough money to fund reverse mortgages, you obviously aren't really thinking about the words you're reading. Because using LVT to fund a reverse mortgage with the purpose of paying the LVT doesn't require any money. It's simply exchanging the latent equity in a building for a reduced land value tax bill.
> This isnt true in the least. Land value calculations would be require all sorts of regulations and appeal processes to set true land value and prevent gaming the system
No not really. Land valuation is pretty much automatable now.
> lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?
I think exempting your primary residence from LVT (or capping it at the value of UBI, in that proposal) would not defeat the purpose of LVT, and would eliminate such problems.
Nothing. Because LVT is never proposed for non-rent seeking homeowners who live in their own home.
That's only true for this one implementation. But that gets messy when you have home buessiness that may involve some rent-seeking aspect. This is especially true once businesses figure out you can home office people instead of paying the land tax.
If you're rent seeking in your own home you can pay LVT.
These protests started because schools are falling in complete disrepair. And you want to reduce their funding further? Maybe students should study outside? Taught by AI, because human teachers are too expensive?
Fuck this death cult that is neoliberalism. We've been doing austerity for decades, and things keep getting worse and worse. How come we're unable to maintain what we had 50 years ago, while work has never been this productive? Tax the rich.
There's no amount of defunding that will satisfy the capital class. They will take everything, unless we stop them from bleeding us dry.
It is not at all clear to me that taxing land equals taxing the rent seeking portion of the economy.
As I understand it, the point is that land rent is a large and stable rent, where taxing it has few supply-side side-effects, not that land rent is the only rent.
The second paragraph of the Georgism Wikipedia page mentions other rents,
> Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
> And then the policy you want is simple
Any time anyone says that complex societal issues can be solved with simple policy changes, alarm bells go off in my head.
By that I don't mean that simple solutions to complex problems do not exist, rather that getting them approved and implemented is often not so straight forward as some would like to think. Human societal systems are complex and very messy.
Watching the introduction of the embedded video gives me the feeling that the author is perhaps still studying economics and so it does come across quite hubristic to say to have a definitive answer in a early career paper that has yet to go through rigorous peer review.
Going to guess this is mostly about the housing problem that basically all modern societies are facing from Korea to Australia to Spain. There are two sides of this problem, cities where everyone wants to go and old towns where everyone is leaving.
Capitalism says buyers pay and when there are too many customers, the price goes up. This is what we are seeing, its that simple.
Some suggest to add some sort of tax to owners, but this wont help, they will of course just pass the cost onto their renters. Its pretty obvious owners dont care if you cant pay someone else will, its that simple.
The REAL problem is the concentration of living in big cities and the fact there are too many people. The same is also true of wages, wages dont go up because there will always be someone else who will do the job for the same or less be it actual wages or extra hours and other negatives.
The system is broken, we have to appreciate that all this centralisation of everything and anything is the problem. Slowly or maybe its quickly everything is becoming a monopoly of some kind.
Major cities are becoming the monopoly of employment and work, previoously it was spread across more places and more industries. Now its becoming concentrated. In Spain that means everyone wants to move to Madrid or Barca and the consequences mean too many people and too few homes. People want to live in certain places for their advantages, big cities also mean more commuting, and people want less travel time, but that means they pay more in rent. You cant win, if you have one then you lose on the other. THis is always the case in everything from commuting time, to rent, in the end most of the people lose most of the time.
What we are seeing is what happens when you have a monopoly. THe problem is people cant see who or what are the monopolies. THey think a monopoly must be a single company or person, they cant comprehend its something above that at the nationwide level, namely the structure of each country.
A perfect example is everyone in NZ is moving to Auckland, and then everyone in NZ also moves to Australia. Of course its not everyone but its alot and this affects the balance both in NZ and also in places like Sydney which grow even bigger.
The answer is to stop the centralisation, and break things up.
The passing costs on to renters is a bit of a fallacy. Rental price is market related, with the obvious question being, if a new tax would make them raise rents, why don't they just raise the rents right now and turn a larger profit?
Fact is that the rent is currently set at what the market is willing and able to pay, regardless of what the cost to the owners is.
They are raising the rent, its always creeping up, its never constant. There is no universal coordinated rental increase cabal. The monopoly here is the group, they might not communicate but they act as one in terms of raising rents.
Im not saying this is bad or good, im simply saying that we are seeing independent personalities act as a monopoly because countries themselves are devouring their towns and everyone is moving into the big city or cities.
BTW: Its not only rent, thats just one example, its everything, rent, food, entertainment, traffic, lines at your favourite venue...
Even though this paper has scarcity in the title, it doesn't seem to investigate how UBI affects scarcity of resources that are not labor. Natural resources and production volume are essentially finite when looking at a current timeframe. A UBI will increase prices as demand for finite resources stays the same or increases and the money supply to consumers increases.
Wasn't there another post a week ago talking about how UBI won't save us from automation? I was much more inclined to believe that one.
It's an interesting topic. So let's say many people get laid off as automation takes over. If we have UBI that covers mostly bare necessities (as an example), shouldn't supply and demand stay basically the same? Or demand even lowers if people can't afford what they previously did.
If people have more money (or population grows) so that demand grows while supply stays the same, prices will rise and find a new equilibrium where people can again afford less and therefore buy less.
I'm not sure if it's an option to just leave most of the population to starve either so what's the alternative to some kind of social security or UBI? Long ago, a factory called "nature" used to provide relatively more of our needs, but that's not feasible today. But this quickly gets philosophical and political, of course.
In any case, finite resources are finite regardless if we have UBI or not.
That's typically where needs-based determinations come in - direct the resources to those who qualify based on needs instead of universally.
> France needs to read my paper
We Italians should be taking some notes as well... :)
I'm pretty sure the issue isn't economic know-how, it's all politics. We're simply stuck with a hung parliament, and while each party keeps playing in their political interests, nothing will happen.
It will take a while until we get a functional political system (i.e. parliament needs to realize coalitions are absolutely necessary to do anything), so let's just hope the french economy doesn't collapse in the mean time and its debt doesn't blow up.
lvt is too ham fisted, what your really want to tax isinefficient land usage, eg your land is zoned for higher density or industrial etc and you fail to deploy it as such then you should pay a tax for that. this encourages investment and discourages land banking. moving that land into those who will deploy it and lower the overall cost of doing things overall
Your version would instead discourage zoning land for any productive use. Which is an issue in a democracy, where the same people being taxed elect the people who influence zoning
In a dictatorship your scheme would work, in a democracy it would just prevent even more economic activity
i agree with you that it wouldnt be perfect, but dont follow your logic? the gov designates zoning and collects the resulting taxes wouldnt it encourage in the worse case over zoning?
It should be prohibited to create youtube voice-over videos with annoying and distracting background music.
Since we're stating the obvious today...
Good economic policy is largely context independent. It is almost always a good time to tax economic rents and deregulate starting/running a business. The basic formula for success has been well established for several centuries and even the Communists managed to figure it out a big chunk of that.
It is not surprising that the established government figures seem confused. If they've let the situation devolve to the point where there is a visible problem it is strong evidence that they just don't care about good economic policy. Not in the top 10 list of priorities. And to couple that with a forecast, that probably isn't going to change any time soon.
The paper seems stuck with the long debunked idea that all market actors are rational and centred on economic values, but that is utterly incorrect.
Similarly it states value comes from either work or land, but value can also be created out of thin air. It is called branding.
Especially for France and its luxury industry. You take two identical handbag, one is from LV, the other an unknown brand, one will cost 1,500$, the other 150$.
He calls that "bad capitalism":
> That’s a somewhat heavy macroeconomics theory paper, so here’s one analogy of what we have developed: we split “capitalism” into two
> - Good capitalism: Returns from capital that come from real growth, development, innovation.
> - Bad capitalism: Returns from capital that does not develop and improve the economy. The academic term is economic rent and rent seeking.
Also, I don't think it says anywhere that value comes from work or land.
France needs to stop spending 57% of its GDP on public expenditure while experiencing virtually no economic growth. It needs to stop handing out massive pensions and generally treating pensioners like royalty.
The French government needs to stop spending money it doesn't have when it can barely keep the lights on. New taxes in a country where the GPD is already taxed at 45%, please, give me a break.
Says the American that spends $1T defending private and business property of the mega rich ?
You might the organisation as the USA military.
Notice the US debt is approximately equal to the US military budget spent since WW2.
I'm French, mon ami.
:)
LVT and UBI, magical solutions to everything, seem to be new opium for intellectuals masses these days.
All capitalism is bad.
> And then the policy you want is simple: Tax the bad capitalism, don’t tax the good capitalism.
Tax isn’t punishment. Imagine a company which has a thousand trucks. The trucks themselves are ethically pure EVs. They pay the land value tax for the parking lot and the auto shop. But they don’t indirectly pay taxes for the use of the roads? That’s a massive wear on the road infrastructure.
Denmark has a land tax (grundskyld) and Estonia taxes land only, not buildings. Both real, both modest rates though, nowhere near the full rent capture Georgists want. Pennsylvania towns did split-rate too with mixed results.
People don't like land value taxes for the same reason the anti-property-tax movement is in the news these days: It reverses 100 years of pro-homeownership messaging, and it turns landowners into renters from the government.
Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices? Gambling, drugs, prediction markets, cash-sink "luxury" products, parasitic mobile games, etc.? I think it's fine by just about everybody if those particular industries -- the real "bad capitalism" -- become almost unprofitable by default.
The secondary layer of "bad capitalism" is in finance, speculation, and even legal services. There's no reason that those, also, cannot be much more heavily taxed.
At the same time, do the extremely smart thing that Asian economies -- China and Korea foremost among them -- have been practicing: Subsidize technical and industrial innovation, strategic industries, etc. Just cut the red tape and fund it.
“ it turns landowners into renters from the government.”
With the caveat that “the government” should somehow represent the will of society (I know, basic democracy seems like a big ask today), this seems like how it should be. The land belongs to us humans together, and if someone wants to control it exclusively, there should be something in return for the rest of us.
> With the caveat that “the government” should somehow represent the will of society
I'm going to ask you a genuine, non-rhetorical question: When was the last time this was the case? Athens, and not for long? Surely not Republican Rome, any other period in Rome's history, Feudal Europe to the 20th C., dynastic or warlord-ruled Asia, or the United States of America, though perhaps it came close for a brief period in the 18th century.
It's certainly not the case now. Feudalism is the form of government that is most natural to man, just as it is most natural to bees and ants. An LVT would be a step in the direction of feudalism again, with professional politicians and bureaucrats as the tyrants who know that they de facto own all of the land, and can charge whatever rents they like.
Spain during the revolution?
No, it is a matter of degree, it is not a binary thing. It is a measure we can put on government. It is not the only thing which matters, but there are differences between governments today. One is not the same as the other, just because none of them are ideal.
> Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices? Gambling, drugs, prediction markets
That's just taxing the poor.
A land value tax would also tax the poor -- it's not only fat cats who own land -- and strip of some value a vast number of presently-poor people hoping for a property inheritance.
In fact, it would tax the industrious poor with little recourse.
Vices, on the other hand, don't have to be engaged in, and should absolutely be discouraged.
What "industrious poor" people are you thinking of who own extremely valuable land but don't do extremely valuable things upon that land?
The homeownership rate in France is >60% and a large fraction of those -- possibly the largest fraction -- consists of (a) people who bought small houses for their own use, to live in them (not an "extremely valuable thing," but nevertheless,) and (b) people who inherited properties or small farms.
Most of these people are middle class, many are cash-poor.
Property developers are a stark minority, you know...
So why would they have a high LVT burden?
Because LVT = site value x rate. Unless the rate on low and medium-value sites is kept very low -- too low to raise much revenue -- the average landowner would suffer from a significant new tax burden. (France already has property taxes, but they're very low.)
...And, again, without recourse. Nobody has to gamble or buy a yacht. But whether renter or owner, everybody needs a house to live in. Everybody would have to pay the LVT, one way or another, no matter how rich or how poor.
For the average landowner, the LVT is actually a sort of tax on sober industriousness or fortunate inheritance, the very opposite of a vice tax.
Wouldn't it also screw over poor people in gentrified neighborhoods who had no control over the situation? People would be forced to sell early or risk all their savings drying up and then being forced to sell anyhow.
Assuming an efficient lending market, they can take out loans with the land as collateral. As long as the land value continues rising they can continue taking out bigger and bigger loans. Only when growth slows they are forced to sell
This shifts the optimal point for sale, but if there is explosive growth they theoretically still aren't forced to sell early, they can still capture all that growth
What this scheme prevents is them holding onto the property forever after the neighborhood gentrified. Which the author likely considers a good thing in their framework, because the land generates more economic value in other hands. The original land owner gets a payout and is forced to move. Just like a renter would be forced to move, just that the land owner gets a big payout from the land value increase
> more heavily tax voluntary vices
Australia is doing that with tobacco. It worked in that it has drastically cut smoking rates and deaths, but hasn't worked it has also made the market more lucrative for smugglers/organised crime. Illegal tobacco avoids the tax, so it can be sold at a lower price whilst still raking in the profits. Today 80% of tobacco in Australia is illegal, with a consequent 80% hit to tax revenue.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-29/expensive-cigarettes-...
The world is a complicated place, no solution is perfect. Not sure people like yourself think that an idea or movement must be perfect.
The point shouldn’t be to just raise money simply by taxing things that you personally think are ‘bad’. This is the sort of pointless politics that’s being going on for too long.
Instead, the approach should be to diagnose what is wrong with our economies (and maybe our societies) and then use the tools we have, including taxation, to address those issues. This is where people are with (variously) land taxes, or wealth tax, or others.
(Whole societies and economies aren’t struggling because of people gambling, smoking, and drinking.)
The problem with taxing vices too heavily is that it incentives a black market to emerge... and all the crime that comes with it. Australia is a great example of a place where this is causing a lot of problems.
The explosion in KYC over the past ~20 years means that a lot of digital vices simply can't meaningfully exist in black market form. Online gaming, prediction markets, predatory financial speculation, etc., are vices that only exist because they're tolerated.
You and I can theorize how black market analogs might somehow exist, but they wouldn't have 1% of the reach they currently enjoy.
I also think that conspicuous consumption in the form of yachts and $40,000 handbags is, in truth, a vice -- and one that can generate a lot of tax revenue, and only be black-marketed away with severe difficulty.
Interesting, care to elaborate?
> Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices?
Buy a pack of cigs in New York (I think it's almost $20, now). Most of that is tax. People vape, a lot, here. I know that pre-rolled cigarettes have been heavily taxed in many countries, for decades, so they sell loose tobacco and rolling papers.
Gambling also tends to get taxed a lot.
There's lots of folks that think prostitution should be legalized, so it can be taxed. The same argument was made for pot. I'm pretty sure that legal pot is heavily taxed. I have heard that illegal pot is cheaper.
It's not an easy solution. If it was easy, it would have been done, a long time ago.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
-H. L. Mencken