Housing was guaranteed in the old Soviet Union, but if you didn’t cooperate, the housing was in the gulag.
Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it. Gold, for example, requires human labour to be dug up. Bitcoin requires humans to run machines. The Mona Lisa requires humans to paint. Land behaves differently.
> Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it.
I mean, not really. What about water or oxygen? What about carbon taxes insofar as they're related to the inherent value of the earth's climate? There are plenty of resources that don't require any human effort to produce, but that doesn't make them better suited to taxation. It just seems like an entirely arbitrary distinction to make.
In today's world, where access to a city can dramatically change one's earning potential far far more, they are even more relevant.
The issue is both about the scarcity of access to a resource, such as the economy of a city, but also about where that resource comes from. With urban land, that resource is not the product of the individual land owner, but rather all the other land owners that made the city so prosperous and with so much opportunity.
Yes, it is (or, at least important subsets of land are.) If it wasn't, it would have zero value. Nonzero market value requires, and therefore proves, scarcity.
This makes me wonder, do roads pay land tax? I think railway tracks do but I'm not sure about roads.
Personally I think more of the spectrum should be like 2.4GHz, 5 GHz (and soon 6GHz?). No auctions. No owners.
Rather, the tax on the land of the roads is an accounting mechanism to ensure that the land is being used for greater economic efficiency, rather than, say, a way forward wealthy people who live far away to get the public to subsidize the transport to their large mansions.
Obviously I'm assuming an equal monetary value of paintings vs land; my point is not about how many acres equal how many paintings but about the impact on other people that taking $1M of paintings vs $1M of land out of circulation has.
With respect to your second point, I think that taking each out of circulation has different effects. I would guess that most assets have a value of about what they're worth (i.e. the price mechanism works). I think Georgism is at least a valuable paradigm, and would be in favour of at least some pseudo-Georgist measures, such as only taxing land, to encourage higher-value uses rather than land+structures, and taxing all sorts of land at the same rate.
I'm not convinced; after all these collections are often already in public ownership. If there was something more beneficial to the public to be done with them, one would hope that would already be happening.
The point here is to maintain a society and some things must come first, namely material things which paintings are not. Of course, art history shows us time and time again the vital importance of material sustenance in creating and preserving works of art. If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible.
>"If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible."
I care about all the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that many paintings are worth a lot more than most 10k acres. The paintings also have the benefits of being able to contribute to shared experiences all over the world, and fulfilling more challenging needs.
Income tax can be shifted to capital gains, of corporation tax can be shifted to other domiciles etc.
I'm not sure that meshes with the way it's actually described in the article. They give examples of a small piece of land worth $2M and then another plot in a different location that's worth far less, purely due to proximity to other improvements on the land (i.e. being prime real estate in a city) rather than something inherent to the land itself (e.g. fertility/use for growing crops).
And even then, something like fertility isn't really all natural any longer, given how it's impacted by so many farming practices (fertilization, tilling/no-till, crop rotation/nitrogen fixing crops, etc.).
Resource extraction (e.g. oil) seems a lot closer, though the actual labor of it vs. the resources of it are another thing. I do see more reason there why the benefit ought to be largely public--and to some extent it is in, e.g., Alaska via the Alaska Permanent Fund.
But I think that labor, improvements and whatever the intrinsic value might be are a lot more tied together than seems to be accounted for by the theory. Otherwise why is the intrinsic value of Manhattan's land not measured in some number of beads, with everything else being due to improvements (including those made by neighbors)? And yes, I do realize that beads actually were money for a time due to a lack of actual currency, but still.
> All these advantages attach to the land. On this land — and no other — they can be utilized. For here is the center of population: the focus of exchange, the marketplace, the workshop of industry. Density of population has given this land productive power equivalent to multiplying its original fertility a thousandfold.… The most valuable lands on earth, those with the highest rent, are not those with the highest natural fertility. Rather, they are lands given a greater usefulness by population density.
It doesn't _absolutely_ disincentivize these things unless they are operating at a loss. It certainly disincentivizes "economic activity" like opening an at-grade parking lot in a bustling city-center in order to minimize the property tax you pay while the land appreciates in value more than it disincentivizes opening a parking garage there (assuming there's actually enough parking demand to pay to build and maintain).
(I don't entirely disagree with you--it seems like this would shunt some investment away from investments that need expensive land. It's less clear to me whether that is good, neutral, or bad.)
George goes to great lengths to distinguish these factors of production. They are fundamentally different.
Land taxes are great because there is less of a deadweight loss. Governments need money to operate. All else equal, we should get governments the money they need without wasting people's time to comply with complicated tax laws.
Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea. Rich people should pay more to fund the government. Rich people own a lot of land, so they'd pay a lot of land tax. Poor people generally don't own any land and wouldn't be subject to this tax. Land taxes align well with what a lot of people think is fair.
Compliance costs with many other taxes are quite high.
...and physically evicts the previous tenant.
Which is not to say that the outcome would be fair, but whether it is or not would depend upon how these organizations are regulated and run.
Also, LVT don't fix zoning as the value of your land is based on what you can make from it. If your land is zoned for only single floor parking, nobody is going to buy it for more than they can earn through single floor parking so the land won't be that valuable thus it won't have a high land value tax.
Fairly bold assertion. I'd say most humans don't even really know what progressive taxation means.
> Rich people should pay more to fund the government.
A static tax regime (i.e., taxes calculated by a simple fixed percentage of wealth or income) leads to the same outcome. E.g., in a 10% fixed tax regime, someone making $10k/a pays $1k in tax and another person making $1mm pays $100k in tax, meeting your desire to have the rich pay more--no progressive taxation required.
I would argue that in 21st century the definition of rich is actually „achieves most of his income through sources which are not subject to income tax”.
Progressive income tax mostly hurts well qualified proffessionals nowadays (people actually working for that income) and as such is detrimental to economy at large.
I really don’t get that people talk about rising income inequality all the time, but actually noticing it (i.e. very strong minority holding many assets) suddenly doesn’t make sense.
The question I'd put back to you is why it's useful to have a single, universally agreed-upon definition of "rich"?
I think it's better to say that land is sort of a one-off that is treated differently from every other asset than to try to compare it to other kinds of wealth.
In theory. IMO the practical biggest issue with property tax is that it is usually spent locally, keeping rich neighborhoods well funded and poor neighborhoods poor.
Exactly. They tax wealth created by nature and/or the community rather than wealth created by individuals. The land Trump Tower sits on isn't valuable because Trump owns it. It's valuable because all of New York surrounds it.
A $5 million fleet of cars is wealth (mostly) created by human hands. Those human hands ought to decide what happens to them. Right?
There's also raw materials, but they would be subjected to a georgist tax too.
Yeah, but pretty much all private wealth is built on top of thousands of years' worth of accumulated community knowledge. The startup you founded wouldn't be worth anything if not for electricity, computers, and the internet.
A wealthy man gets a $270 red light ticket. (This is the one where turning right on a red light is illegial. It seems like they arbitrarily decide which intersection to enforce?). The wealthy man casually mentions it over din din. Goes to sleep, and has the help drive his spawn to private schools. Yea--I live in a county filled with rich people, and they are obnoxious on so many levels.
To the poor man it might be part of his rent.
So yes--if I ran things; The wealthy would pay more at DMV, bail, patent fees, incorporation fees, etc., and especially property taxes. You want a third mansion so you don't have to look at your neighbors---get ready to pay Zuck.
I would love to see Jay Leno pay a $100,000 speeding ticket.
(I believe they are trying this in Sweden?)
No... They aren't "trying" anything; it's been standard practice for decades, probably over half a century. Not just for speeding tickets, but many fines in general. And not just Sweden, but most of the Nordic countries, plus Germany.