Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

The transportation could be done via electric vehicles. The lighting and electronics could itself be powered by greener sources. Maybe not for the first new solar farm constructed, but over time as the infrastructure was built out. And the tax would incentivize the building of that infrastructure.

Let me ask: do you think it's possible in a literal sense for society to emit greenhouse gases?

If it's not possible, your argument makes sense to me. But if it is possible, we should financially reward people who make greener choices.

> If I understand it correctly, LVT would allow people to state what they think their property is worth and pay taxes accordingly. They could put down any value but anyone could buy it from them at that value.

That's one approach. Another is for property appraisers to determine the land value - something which is already pretty commonly done.

> How could you even say the property is yours?

It never was. All land "ownership" consists of borrowing a portion of a nation-state's sovereign territory. LVT makes that explicit, requiring land "owners" to pay what's actually due to society (rather than a tiny fraction thereof as is the status quo).

Well the private property rights you buy when you buy land include the state's ability to tax it. As for why it's an issue of distributive justice, that's simple. Ethically speaking, everyone has a right to use land, limited only by the equal rights of others. The rental value of land is the differential value of what one land plot can offer compared to what is available for free, aka "differential rent". That differential is a free gift of nature. As a matter of simple justice, paying those excluded from using land is the ethical position.

Meanwhile, taxing people's labor is a way of collectivizing people's labor, which violates the right to self-ownership.

As for the 'payment of services', this is simply a narrow view of the services land provides.

"The consumption tax that best fits Smith’s criteria is on that of spatial services. A tax on spatial services also best applies the Ramsey rule of taxing inelastic items. Space does not get used up, but space generates a flow of site services over time that do get used up, and is measured as the implicit market rent. For example, suppose the rental of a house includes a back yard. The yard offers a continuous flow of service as a place to enjoy the outdoors. The user consumes that flow over time. Though the space remains, every hour of yard service is an hour of spatial service that is gone as soon as that time passes. As a flow, the spatial service is simultaneously generated and consumed. It has been well known by economists since the classical economics of Ricardo that the taxation of land rent does not affect the economic rent. Since the supply of land, within some jurisdiction, is fixed, a tax on land rent does not alter the amount of land. Since a tenant does not care who gets the rent, the tax on land rent does not change the demand, i.e. the quantity of land demanded at various amounts of rent." https://sor.senate.ca.gov/sites/sor.senate.ca.gov/files/Fina...

Whether you personally use a service or not is irrelevant. If the land provides a service and you choose not to use that service, you are still depriving others from enjoying that service.

Amusingly, levying a land value tax alongside the Wright Irrigation Districts in California is what broke up the large landholders who were monopolizing access to water. This was widely viewed as an enormous success in policy, even as the large landholders screeched that it wasn't fair that they should have to pay for the water whether they were using it or not. https://www.henrygeorge.org/caldes.htm

A private lump sum payment is simply a private tax. How we treat land ownership is ultimately an ethical question, without the state your title to land means nothing.

"THE TREATMENT of rent as public revenue is part and parcel of an organic theory of the State.

In the contractual theory, government is a kind of business which extends services to landowners. They only need pay for benefits received, which are construed in the narrowest possible terms.

In the organic theory, landowners hold title to land as a privilege. In return, they owe the State - acting on behalf of the community - certain obligations. The entire value of land is regarded as a benefit received from government. This is in keeping with the definition of land as "Public Value" offered by Alfred Marshall, the distinguished Victorian economist.

Land and its value is the joint product of at least three things:

• nature, which created it;

• government, which acquired it from other sovereigns and protects it from other powers and extends public works for the public's benefit; and

• synergism, which is the increment to value that spills over from social and economic activity in the neighborhood of each parcel of land. Value stemming from all these elements is regarded as unearned by the individual landowner. It is the product of outside forces and therefore a fit object of taxation."

https://masongaffney.org/publications/G44Philosophy_of_Publi...

You're welcome to believe otherwise of course, but trying to dispute the ethical position of land value taxation is like trying to argue against the laws of physics.

>>But of course destroying wetlands to build your house was entirely reasonable.

* No. I didn't build it, I bought it already built, and no wetlands were damaged, it's 100' away, and thev'e got strict measures in this town. And if you think that a single family home outside the buffer zone has the same impact as 300 units in five buildings built ON the wetlands has the same impact, that's ummm, some next-level ignorance.

The strict conservation zoning measures apply to any work - just replacing a porch footing 20 inches inside a zone requires several permits. Planning, work & expense. Everyone here incurs those costs to maintain a standard of living.

>>In other words, "let them eat cake"

Not even close

The point is that destroying value that exists, and value that people have worked significant parts of their lives to create, is a very bad idea.

It is a nonstarter because the ppl that worked to create & maintain those standards vote in far greater numbers than the people complaining. Just a relevant fact. (And threating "f around and find out" is great performance but zero votes - in how many elections have you voted?)

Accusing the people who own nice properties of being motivated by selfishness and greed is not only offensive to the people whose votes you need, it is also exactly 100% wrong.

If they were actually selfish & greedy, they would not be putting in large extra work & expense to maintain standards, they'd be tearing down zoning to build as much as they could on every square foot of their lot to extract maximum value.

They are not. I watched a town where I lived vote out zoning for just such considerations. It was driven by developers, but a lot of it was "why should I have to get permission to build a barn or an in-law apt?".

The same town voted a few years later to restore even stronger zoning.

The FACT of the matter is: while unrestrained development may initially create more units, it actually sucks, badly, for everyone but the fly-by-night developers.

Which means that the article's argument is wrong. People are spending sweat and money to actively NOT get the maximum dollar value out of their homes, because building quality of life is more important.

If you want to go after the real problems, it is not zoning, any more than it's young people having Netflix subscriptions.

A good place to start is with the problem of rental units for "passive income", for running AirBnBs, and housing being purchased by hedge funds and the like. Heavily tax anything that isn't a primary residence, and you'll get a lot of units back on the market fast, and at good prices.

> First, that incentivizes treating property as an appreciating asset.

The capital gain tax can't be both very high and very low and you seem to have agreed that very high is the wrong incentive.

So what remains?

A low capital gain has the benefit of making it easy to sell so more people will sell. Not perfect, perhaps, but an incentive to keep unused/unwanted properties on the market is better than pushing people to hold on to them forever which a high capital gain tax will do.