On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

You can come up with ways to replace property taxes, without a doubt. There's nothing necessary about any particular tax. The question is just whether it's the best way to do things.

Water and sewer would work fine without it, I agree. A bigger problem, I think, is roads. Highways are mostly funded from gas taxes but local roads are not. It's not practical to directly charge for use of local roads.

You could compensate with other taxes, but now you're taxing (and thus somewhat discouraging) productive activity.

The scenarios you paint don't necessarily seem bad to me. Unfair to the owners, perhaps, but it doesn't seem to benefit everybody else as you say. You correctly infer that property taxes encourage productive use of land and discourage allowing it to sit fallow, but isn't that a good thing? If we make the strong but at least partially true assumption that money is a proxy for value, land that produces enough money to pay for its taxes is producing more value than land that does not. Someone sitting on prime farmland and not actually farming it is a net negative to society unless they're getting more value out of that land than a farmer would.

I don't mean to go all Ayn Rand here and start acting like nature, parks, and anything that's not economically productive is valueless. But still, I think there is value to be had in encouraging land owners to put their property to some actual economic use.

I'd be more upset if property taxes were higher, perhaps. Here, for example, they're about 1%, which is not much. If you can't afford 1%, then you have an enormous amount of money tied up in your property without much money outside of it. It's hard to fit right into a spot where you could afford to maintain your property, but can't afford the taxes. For the vast majority of property owners, the mortgage is by far the major question when it comes to losing one's house or land because they don't have money. Pay off your mortgage and have some savings and you are nearly safe from losing it due to property taxes.

A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration.

It's a common natural phenomenon responsible for much of what we see in nature.

In political and economic systems you often get stable attractors - systems which aren't specifically designed but where behaviors and interests align in ways that are mutually reinforcing. Sadly often with deleterious consequences.

Another way of looking at it is the Wisdom of Crowds viewpoint. Large groups of individuals making small individual decisions based on limited information have collective effects which can be seen as a computer, where regulations and restrictions on the decisions they can make become the programming. The more people making up the system the better the machine is in making collective decisions that achieve its goal.

The core program of our system is interest on capital. This underlies everything in our economic system. It's a simple concept but our markets are built around it, our government funding is built around it. Our lives, pensions, mortgages etc are built around it.

The machine that is our economy with such a large number of people it's very effective at returning interest on capital. As capital is owned by a dwindling percentage of people it's not surprising that this leads to a concentration of wealth. Basic arithmetic shows that in a system where all capital flows through a machine returning interest on capital it eventually becomes more and more concentrated in those who started out with the most capital. Without redistribution of wealth downwards through taxation and policies this is inevitable.

As the author says. Therefore decision making becomes more concentrated in the owners of most of the nation's capital.

Long story short this is an inevitable feature of the capitalist system. It's not a criticism of it per se. If you look at the advocates of capitalism from the beginning they've assumed that government and policy will place regulation and restriction to prevent the overconcentration of capital through this mechanism.

Unfortunately part of the stable attractor at work in the US is the confluence of money and politics. More than any other western nation the US political system is heavily influenced by money, and as a result once capital becomes sufficiently accumulated we get regulatory capture in the financial sector.

No conspiracy. The author doesn't suggest a conspiracy. Just a stable attractor. Which is in itself far more nefarious because it's far harder to remove from the equation.

Of course, that means nothing other than that I'm dumb sometimes, which was a known fact.