31–40 of 613 posts
There is something deeply wrong with the fact that you can buy-to-rent a property and immediately turn up a profit, essentially inserting yourself as a parasitic middleman in the process, providing no service, and extracting an economic rent.
Anyone who has been a landlord can attest "providing no service" isn't true at all.
Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.
In my mind, LVT only works properly when you've ripped out every other tax: income, sales, capital, you name it. Absolutely no more friction and warped incentives. Divide the government budget by the weighted land values and tax accordingly. But that could never work in our world. There would be too much temptation to add a small tax here for this other thing, and then it snowballs, and then we're back to where we st…
I'm very fond of self-declared valuations with enforced sale back to the commons if anyone is willing to front the value.
Add a tax free threshold a bit above the mean wealth so anyone can declare their 100k house is worth $1m or whatever without risking paying the costs of moving due to someone maliciously forcing sale.
There is something deeply wrong with the fact that you can buy-to-rent a property and immediately turn up a profit, essentially inserting yourself as a parasitic middleman in the process, providing no service, and extracting an economic rent.
Anyone who has been a landlord can attest "providing no service" isn't true at all.
There is something deeply wrong with the fact that you can buy-to-rent a property and immediately turn up a profit, essentially inserting yourself as a parasitic middleman in the process, providing no service, and extracting an economic rent.
If that were the case, why would someone else not bid $1 more to buy that house and rent it out? Then someone else would logically be willing to bid $1 more than that, until there was no easy profit left… I think the answer is that much of the landlord’s initial profit is more or less income from working a job (buying, insuring, readying, showing, screening, fixing, collecting, etc) as evidenced by the share that a p…
It can simultaneously be true that being a landlord is a bunch of work, and that is being parasitic middleman. That's because being a landlord is composed of two parts: providing access to the land, and building/maintaining a shelter that sits on top of the land. People generally aren't upset with the latter, but are with the former. Lars Doucet explains it more in depth:
>[...] don't landlords deserve compensation for their work? What about Ms. Nguyen, the nice lady who manages your apartment block and went the extra mile for you when your A/C went out last summer?
>I like Ms. Nguyen too, but let's contrast her with Mr. Slumlord, who owns the apartment block next door that's superficially identical, but who won't help you when your A/C goes out in the middle of summer.
>Ms. Nguyen charges higher "rent" for her much better maintained units because part of that "rent" is actually her justly compensated wages for her labor in managing them, as well as interest from returns on the capital she's invested in their ongoing improvement and maintenance. She also collects a good bit of true Georgian rent because she is, after all, a landlord.
>Mr. Slumlord puts in as little work as he can get away with and invests as little capital into maintenance as will keep the state off his back. His return is almost entirely rent. And the only reason he can charge rent in the first place is because of the valuable location – value the community produced, not him.
>And that's the real injustice of land rent – the community produces the value, but the landlord charges rent to access it.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that were the case, why would someone else not bid $1 more to buy that house and rent it out? Then someone else would logically be willing to bid $1 more than that, until there was no easy profit left… I think the answer is that much of the landlord’s initial profit is more or less income from working a job (buying, insuring, readying, showing, screening, fixing, collecting, etc) as evidenced by the share that a p…
> If that were the case, why has someone else not bid $1 more to buy that house and rent it out? Because capital is privatised and scarce, therefore a working-class family wishing to buy a home to live on cannot do so since they're outbid by those with capital. This leaves them with two choices: (1) pay rent to a middleman with capital, who buys the house, or (2) beg a private entity for a capital advance to be repai…
There is something deeply wrong with the fact that you can buy-to-rent a property and immediately turn up a profit, essentially inserting yourself as a parasitic middleman in the process, providing no service, and extracting an economic rent.
> providing no service Landlords are not parasites and provide a valuable service. I think a land tax would be great to curb speculation. Buying property, not providing any service (neither by renting nor capital investment in improvements), and just pocketing the appreciation, I agree, that's parasitic on the community. FWIW - I don't think a landtax would create a meaningful tilt towards more affordable home owners…
This would be a great way to destroy (privately held) farms and significantly, permanently raise food prices.
Not really stated in the article are three caveats: 1) Zoning laws have to change as well to actually allow development of the land being taxed toward more productive ends. 2) The land tax amount needs to be high enough that the pain of the tax effectively forces owners to improve what's on the land. A homeowner sitting on a million dollar piece of property in California taxed at ~1% is still unlikely to build an apa…
California needs a constitutional convention that gets rid of the stupid proposition law. Every random suburban town has a market worse than Manhattan because there is a fundamentally inequitable tax system.
Wait! We voted for more taxes on land owners not renters, why are the rents going up!?! Vox is a dumpster fire and the owners have been hyperbolic rage bait farmers for over a decade.