Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

>I bought my house 55 years ago, and in the time that I’ve lived in it the city has grown up around me so that the plot of land that my house sits on is now extremely valuable.

Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place. They earn the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. Someone who has lived in a house for 55 years didn't watch its value appreciate, their lives made the area around them appreciate. The reason neighbourhoods get gentrified is because the residents made them attracitve. The reason neighbourhoods decay is because people don't invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don't invest in them at all because they want to get out.

The ostensible justice of taking this investment from people via high taxes is dispicably cynical. Only a bandit looks at what you have and tells you it's theirs. It makes common ground impossible.

This is an interesting post, But requires changes "to the system" that is a little too big for my small brain to think about. If I might diverge from a little as a thought I'm still figuring out:

It ends on the thought of "for a common good" which makes me think of that utilitarian ideal, one that I don't think is going to be approached by democratic processes of popular vote and the like*

So what then? if not "democracy" to get us looking after the common good, is the alternative autocracy, totalitarianism? being realised through monarch-ism or dictatorship?

There's a good video [1] about how fascism was able to be so prevalent in the 20th centry when politics became less individualised and more collective will, "Common good for US" etc in both communism and nazism. Fascism itself relies on having an "us vs them" approach - which, while old kingdoms also had, were perhaps less pronounced and pointed? (I don't know, I'm just imagining a kingdom wanting to keep to itself rather than invading europe)

So it leads me to think: is the only way we can get towards this "for the common good" is to fall in step behind a mono-government that we must be selective to ensure that no harm is done to those outside of "our" domain? or is this all just friviolovily and it's up to us to organise and look after those around us (smaller feudal states or such)

Not sure, interesting thoughts, happy for any corrections if I was wrong about something.

* There's an interesting approach to popular vote that I've found however, that might be of interest, being that "everyone gets to vote as many parties that they want" https://youtu.be/yhO6jfHPFQU

1: https://youtu.be/1T_98uT1IZs

The community creates the value but the land owners capture the value. This is just exclusively to the degree these are the same groups of people, invested to the same degree. While the scenario you describe could conceivably play out, so too could the opposite scenario, where the value is created by people who did not get in on the ground floor of the land ownership scheme but is captured by the people who did. In that case it would be the land owners who are the bandits.

In a world of increasing inequality and specialization, the latter scenario is going to be increasingly common. For many people, it is already here: the absentee slumlord who charges a king's ransom and can't be bothered to keep the toilets flushing is a staple of high-value locations. This person clearly isn't creating the value that drives people to put up with these circumstances, but by virtue of owning the correct deed they get to capture the value even as they do their best to unravel it.

> The 'can't put old widows out of their homes' scenario is why California's Prop 13 came to be

There’s a better way to handle this, though, than the Prop 13 approach of limiting taxes. You just allow a certain amount of property taxes to optionally go unpaid and accrue as a lien against the property that must be settled when the property changes hands. Old widows never get forced out of their houses, but they don’t get to leave them to their kids without paying the tax.

This criticism of gentrification ignores the sellers who are glad to take the money for what they invested, and the reason the industry moved to that area in the first place was to get access to the people who were there. The landowners are the community, provided that they are present and managing their investment. This is a fundamental cognitive divide as well, as the positions aren't reconcilable because it's a chicken/egg problem. One is as good a metaphor for either as the other.

I may even have a proof that people mostly migrate to where they can find stability, and away from where there is uncertainty and volatility. Long term residents are the stability.

When there is an imbalance between the sides, it needs correction, and advocating for the people who actually build these desirable streets and neighbourhoods that are so attractive for others to come to seems like the braver cause these days.