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Georgism

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Re: Georgism

#121

Post by geofft »

oDot wrote: post #94
geofft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rich yet reserved people, who keep most of their money in the bank (which lends it) and are earning an income (=productive) ... will not penalized. This goes against just about every standard defense of the ability to be rich: that rich people are job creators, that they power the economy by buying things, etc. Why should we discourage them from employing people and buying things? I don't want a loan (that needs to…

An economy is driven by production, not consumption.

Sure. But the standard way of driving production is private consumption. Given that you have disincentivized the poor from consuming, what is the counterbalance that incentivizes the rich to produce?

(There are a couple of standard answers, including government consumption / public works projects, that can address this.)

Re: Georgism

#122

Post by rswail »

andrepd wrote: post #79
toohotatopic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. This can be true for one generation, but the next generation can choose another profession. People don't become farmers if they have to pay too much.

That would be true in a perfect world with 0 impediments to social mobility. A socioeconomic "frictionless vaccum" of sorts. In the real world, social mobility is far from perfect.

Assume a perfectly spherical farmer in a frictionaless socioeconomic vacuum... sounds like physics.

Re: Georgism

#123

Post by alexmingoia »

zozbot234 wrote: post #15
alexmingoia wrote: post #11

The problem with georgism is that “unimproved value” is a non-market price. It’s just made up by whoever is appointed assessor. Georgism conflates made up “value” with market “value”. Ultimately some person has to assess the value of the unimproved land, meaning someone anointed to write down whatever number they want. Value is subjective. There is no such thing as “unimproved land value”, unless you’re talking about…

Isn't that true of any assessment? With the ordinary property tax, you have to assess both the land value and the improvements. (There are of course ways of taxing property that don't involve that kind of outside assessment, but they're not commonly used.)

None of that changes the fact that there is no inherent value to land (improved or unimproved). Different people value the same piece of land (or any good) differently. This is just reality, regardless of whether someone is appointed to imagine a price for the purposes of taxation.

Re: Georgism

#124

Post by free_rms »

LVTfan wrote: post #114
free_rms wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the arithmetic for this tax scheme doesn't seem to remotely work out, ruminations on the nature of infinity aren't going to set me at ease with it. Here in the finite world, most of the money moving around is in services, while most of the land is disconnected from that economy. How are you getting 1-2 trillion in tax revenue from land without making, say, farming economically unviable? Will it just be riddled thr…

An acre of farmland might be worth $2500 or $5000, and that land has been improved by clearing, draining, fencing, etc. (improvements done by the current or an earlier owner or his tenant). LVT is based on the UNIMPROVED value of the land, so if there were an as-yet-uncleared acre nearby, it and the acre of farmland would be assessed at the same value. An acre in midtown Manhattan might be worth $250 million to as mu…

So it's all on the assessor to decide the 'proper' unimproved land values to raise enough revenue while not driving the wrong people out of business? At a national scale?

On that note, is the inherent land value of a lot in Bushwick way higher then 20 years ago now that they've gentrified? Is neighborhood desirability an 'unimproved' attribute?

I very much get where you guys are coming from in a philosophical sense, but I feel like there are a million wrenches in the works that everyone's ignoring because the theory is so nice.

Re: Georgism

#125

Post by em500 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #43
nabla9 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once you own land, it's yours. Idea that you can buy a monopoly is generally a bad idea.

Clearly people don't think so, as the vast majority do agree with private property exclusive ownership.

Ownership of land by individuals within any national border is always subject to local government power (taxation, eminent domain, police power, escheat). True exclusive land ownership is prohibitively expensive for individuals, since it would require military defense.

Re: Georgism

#126

Post by thechao »

tsimionescu wrote: post #97
thechao wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how non-private copyright & patents should work. That is copyright/patent "for hire" would be COST, with the rate of taxation increasing by a small amount each year until tax rate was 100%. This would given Disney the ability to keep the mouse for 120 years, but also free up less lucrative works for public enjoyment.

Why is it a goal to allow the Disney corporation to keep the mouse to itself for 120 years? This notion of copyright has basically destroyed the idea of folklore in the last few hundred years, relegating it from one of the main areas of human expression to a corner of the internet. I think even 20 + 20 copyright is problematic. People should be free to use characters and stories while they are still relevant, and cre…

This is a pragmatic approach to the reality of the situation: Disney and other large copyright holders have historically been able to leverage their position to increase copyright universally to absurdly long levels. The idea of a COST based mechanism for copyright tries to address a few practical approaches to copyright:

1. Copyright that's not assigned value defaults to the public domain; this provides an avenue for copyright to devolve to public domain immediately which does not currently exist;

2. Copyright that's no longer maintained by its owner devolves to the public domain (similar to 1), taking it out of "copyright limbo";

3. Any group with sufficient resources can take a copyright into the public domain as a public good, e.g., "we" could buy Wolverine into the public domain;

4. Copyright can be maintained for very long durations for entities that choose to do so;

5. The ever-increasing cost means that eventually the copyright "buys itself out", that is, when the COST is assessed at 100%, the Fed has sufficient funds to simply buy the copyright outright (this is a choice, btw, the Fed could happily accept 130% of COST!); and,

6. Absurd copyright lengths no longer universally apply.

I think (but I've not completely thought this through) that such a system could help with patent litigation. Specifically, consortia of entities can buy out a patent if the patent is weaponized. Mind you, the patent holder can no longer "squat" on a patent for free: they must pay the COST of a patent portfolio! This naturally handles the asymmetry of costs between NPEs and regular old entities.

Re: Georgism

#127

Post by LVTfan »

NumberWangMan wrote: post #112
CydeWeys wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree that replacing property taxes with land-value taxes would make sense, so long as you can actually do the value assessments fairly and impartially. What doesn't remotely make sense to me is the suggestion that LVT should be the primary or even only tax, which you see others arguing for here in the comments.

I agree. I think the single tax was conceived in a time where most productive activities took the same amount of land. Nowadays, you have farms on the one hand, and something like tech companies on the other. It would be kinda crazy to tax them both based on the amount of land they use.

It isn't the AMOUNT of land they use, but the value of what they use. An acre of good farmland might be $2500. An acre in Manhattan might be $250 million and up. The rental value of the land is proportional to the value of the land.

And when the Single Tax was conceived, it was already abundantly clear that urban land values were far above rural land values, and rising much faster.

Few tech companies will want to locate where there isn't already broadband, good schools, cultural amenities, a range of interesting restaurants, and ready pool of the talents they need, not to mention infrastructure such was water, sewer, medical care, etc. And to the extent that they create jobs in such places, they will probably be quite welcome.

Re: Georgism

#128

Post by MiroF »

EGreg wrote: post #118
MiroF wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: funny, I am getting downvoted also, for agreeing with you If the parent was being downvoted for a certain view, why is this at all surprising?

Because downvotes are not supposed to be for disagreement. This is HN. The standard is to downvote low quality comments only.

Sure, but presumably if some people are using downvotes for a different reason, there's no reason it would be restricted to just one comment.

Re: Georgism

#129

Post by em500 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #16
yufeng66 wrote: post #9

The founding father of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was heavily influenced by Georgism. He believed all income derived from land, including appreciation of the land, should be heavily taxed. He incorporated it into three principle of the people, which is the cornerstone Kuomintang ideology. But nobody would argue Taiwan is a Georgism heaven right now. Why? Rich and political powerful people own the land. G…

Doesn't Taiwan (in common with other Asian countries) mostly allocate land to the private sector via long-term leases, as opposed to ownership of indeterminate duration? That would be enough to regard it as quite Georgist.

No, most of Taiwanese property is freehold. You might be thinking of Hong Kong and mainland China, where almost all private property is leasehold.

Re: Georgism

#130

Post by jl2718 »

andruby wrote: post #28
nabla9 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is brilliant way to solve it so that value and market-value meet. Keep the land always in market. It's called Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST). Land owner would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a tax on that value. The owner would be required to sell the asset to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price. If you value the land high for any reason and want to keep it,…

That would mean anyone who has enough money can buy the land that people live on just to harass them. It’s an interesting idea, and I like it in principal, but I also like living in my house on my land knowing that I need to give permission before someone can buy it.

It works if everybody puts up a defensive value because tax rates would drop for constant revenue. Also consider how much value would be assessed for all property, e.g. google.com.

In the US there is $16T currency, $38T stocks plus a roughly equal amount in corporate internal valuation, ~$30T small business, $33T houses, $17T commercial real estate, plus commodities, any other mark to market securities, vehicles, collectibles, intangibles like copyrights, patents, operating licenses, and really anything else that a court can adjudicate possession of.

I would expect somewhere around $250-500T with defensive valuation, so tax rates And it seems amazingly efficient. List and pay. If you like it, pay more. If you want to sell, just pay less and somebody will inquire. Market liquidity and order book depth transparency would be amazing. Capitalizations would be accurate for liquidation rather than estimated by float pricing.

The big monkey wrench I see is privacy. I believe this can be solved with zero-knowledge proofs. Maybe this is my next project.

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