I completely agree, I would love to see a monopoly based tax system. I consider property ownership just a special case of a monopoly, since you have a monopoly on that plot of land. The one question you didn't broach here though is how you set the tax rate. Current systems do this on property by looking at the sale price, but property value can change, so they use an appraisal process. That's no good, it's expensive and prone to political manipulation. I'd prefer to see a market based solution. Imagine this: at any time you can make an offer on a piece of property and submit that offer to the government, the owner of the property can either accept or reject the offer. Offers are binding, so if they accept you're required to pay. But whether or not they accept this offer becomes the new valuation of the property and they must pay taxes accordingly. This should give you a system where the taxes paid on a property are always relative to the value derived from it by the party that values it most. And property should in general wind up being owned by that party.

The same basic structure should work for other monopolies like Pharma and internet infrastructure monopolies.

So you get your buddy to make you a low-ball offer on your property that you'll definitely refuse so you can pay less taxes. Then you do the same for them.

Meanwhile, that person you don't like? Make a ridiculous offer on their property to either force them to move or suddenly have to pay absurd taxes.

You'd value the property based on the max offer the person had gotten, not the minimum.

This gives the person you don't like the option to take your ridiculous offer and stick you with the absurd taxes. Sure they have to move, but they now have the resources to do it.

How many people would accept a new tax system where rich people can arbitrarily force poorer people to move?

Do you mean the cost of the move will be the issue?

The Four Monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Tucker#Four_monopolie...

This gives no weight to subjective value, such as its sentimental because your grandparents are buried there.

One interesting idea I came across lately is to abandon taxes altogether and just print money as necessary. The inflation is the tax. This allows companies and people to pursue revenue without limit whilst also allowing for all public good/needs to be met. This approach coupled with a basic income could be a very powerful enabler. The difficulty will be in learning what the limits to and pitfalls of this system are as we don't have any practical experience implementing it.

Just buy gold/Bitcoin/anything to dodge inflation and taxes?

Just make the state a passive non-voting shareholder, with a stake of, say, 10%. It receives a dividend, just like any other shareholder, so interests are exactly aligned, and there's nothing management can do to avoid paying the state, while also paying shareholders.

The state would benefit from share price rises by existing capital gains tax paid by the individual shareholders when they realize the equity gain. This would prevent avoidance of dividends in favor of share price appreciation through buybacks.

It leaves the problem of cross-border flows, such as fradulent notional payments for intangible assets, such as licensing, which would still be able to move profits and dividends to other countries.

You start out strongly, but then this:

> Somebody appropriates for himself a valuable piece of land with oil deposits. He prevents others from utilizing that land. Let him pay for having that exclusive rights of use, since clearly the government is providing private property related services (police, courts and army to guarantee his property) for him that others (non-owners) are not getting.

If by "appropriates for himself" you actually mean "buy", then your position basically boils down to an "all property is theft" manifesto.

Note that when you "buy" land this is quite limited. For instance anything that happens sufficiently below it (e.g. subway tunnels, mining) or above it (airplanes), you have no say in it.

Similarly a state could say, you license (not buy) land for construction/agriculture etc. use. This license does not include extracting oil, which requires a separate license. The land remains property of the state, but for specific uses (e.g. housing) you have a guarantee that you can keep the license for 100 years and/or can renew it under similar conditions. This is for example what China does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_law

Is that reducing the personhood of companies? (I consider that a good goal.) Saying that you must be a company to drill oil, and companies can only buy leasehold, not freehold.

Land is extremely limited in supply. If there is one thing that should not be openly bought and sold in markets (apart from humans) it is land.

How do you recommend allocating it, then?

Difficulty: without murdering millions of people to make it happen.

IIRC what some states do is that you can not buy or sell directly. Instead it goes seller -> state, state -> buyer. To a large extent the allocation is then still done by the market on the buyer's side, but the state has some leeway for overriding, e.g. highways, natural resources, environmental protection, affordable housing only, zoning.

Same as the society solved allocating humans. Instead of them being bought and sold on slave markets, nowadays we have companies leasing humans in exchange for a salary. You can do the same with land - lease it instead of giving asay infinite time ownership rights.

Which gov gets the money and why ?

Well, they seem to do OK in Hawaii. Not perfect by any stretch, but it isn't gulags and cold borcht.

The flaw in your argument is in definition of land ownership. You own the rights to use some portion of land somewhere. The rights are provided by other people, ie. a community represented by state.

'Buying' land, ie. transfer of rights from previous owner to new owner is a transaction which excludes the actual provider of the service of land rights, which is other people who will respect the new 'ownership'.

Current system is equivalent to giving infinite land leases, or very long like 100 years.

The way to fix this is to either have a yearly 'land tax' system to collect percentage of the land value or simply provide the land leases for like 7 years for commercial and/or longer for residential.

Each 7 years you'd have a land lease auction. Similarly to having a electromagnetic spectrum auctions or how DNS should be organized - periodic auction to prevent domain squatters to hold premium domain name 'real estate' near valuable domains (using levenshtein distance).

How did the person he bought the land from acquire it?

Well probably they bought it to, but yeah if you go far enough back there is probably some shenanigans going on with the land much as when you pass money around in America sooner or later somebody gets cocaine on it.

This is a production tax:

"For example land taxation proposed by single-tax movement"

Land is an input to production, so this would be a production tax.

Land means 'land use rights', not the actual soil. Rights are provided by other people. The community agrees that they won't squat on the owner's plot of land. The community is not paid for providing these rights nowadays though. You could expect an uprising of unhappy people soon.

In my humble opinion, this has more to do with the tremendous, ever-growing cost of the EU and its member governments; as well as a lack of protective principles in their legal systems. These rulings seem to show them retroactively interpreting and applying laws which would be too vague to enforce in the U.S.

The EU's courts seem so abusive and vague that there is virtually no way to avoid running afoul of them if you do any profitable business, even completely within a reasonable interpretation of the rules.

I mean, your second sentence is not even remotely true. You’re implying that the chance of being sued by the EU is near 100% for every profitable business in the EU.

> You’re implying that the chance of being sued by the EU is near 100% for every profitable business in the EU.

I mean to say that you can be fully aware of a law, interpret it broadly, and comply with that broad interpretation to the fullest extent, and you still have a reasonably high chance of being liable for damages in a suit related to that law.

It’s a reasonable assertion, but it’s not backed up by any figures that I can imagine.