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

loukidelis.com

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

#151

Post by anamax »

salawat wrote: post #126
anamax wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A buy or sell offer system works pretty well for determining value. Georgists, which are the subject of this thread, explicitly say that taxes should not be NOT based on improvements, just the "land value". So if the improvements have significant value, buy sell doesn't work. I'll let you fight that with them. > Profitability (no matter whether your abstraction for ownership is property or political favour) as a fu…

Except Georgists determine your unimproved land value by looking at the improved land value of everyone around you. Otherwise, the proximity to Disney wouldn't mean squat in the post-upthread.

> Except Georgists determine your unimproved land value by looking at the improved land value of everyone around you.

How, exactly, do you get from improved land value to unimproved land value?

It's arguably possible to approximate the value of a hotel+land across the street from Disneyland. How, exactly, do you determine what fraction is hotel (improvements) and what fraction is land?

Looking at other hotels in the area just tells you (an approximation of) the difference between the hotel values. That's not enough to determine the absolute value of any hotel.

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

#152

Post by anamax »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #83
anamax wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A buy or sell offer system works pretty well for determining value. Georgists, which are the subject of this thread, explicitly say that taxes should not be NOT based on improvements, just the "land value". So if the improvements have significant value, buy sell doesn't work. I'll let you fight that with them. > Profitability (no matter whether your abstraction for ownership is property or political favour) as a fu…

>The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid. >To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free. That's pay. Profit is proportional to capital, not effort (even if it requires effort to materialise). Wage or earnings don't prodce the same pathological effects as profit, even if one person earns $500/hr and another earns $5/hr, t…

"exponentially increasing share of control"? "Exponential" has a meaning and the situation you're describing isn't consistent with it.

If there's an exponential at work here, it has a vanishingly small exponent.

People who don't get paid for access to their capital don't make said capital available to others.

Note that all capital starts as "I made x but I'm going to spend less."

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

#153

Post by anamax »

ethanbond wrote: post #97
anamax wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather that the value of the land is set ~exclusively by the things that happen not on that land You do know that that is not true, that the value of land often depends ON things that happen on that land, right? (It's not hard to come up with examples.) But, I do appreciate an example of something that I didn't mention, namely the propensity of Georgists to make claims that they find self-evident and profound but a…

The unimproved value of the land (I.e. the basis of taxation in a Georgist scheme) is definitionally exclusive of things that happen on the land. There are improvements that, especially over time, become inseparable from the land (e.g. irrigation, grading, etc.), at which point of full integration are just considered an intrinsic part of the land. This too sounds a little weird until you realize that again, this alre…

> The unimproved value of the land (I.e. the basis of taxation in a Georgist scheme) is definitionally exclusive of things that happen on the land.

Ah yes, "let's define away the problem."

> Of course some portion of the taxes go to Disney. Who do you think pays for the air travel system that brings people to Orlando or LA? Who pays for the freeway system that brings in the food?

The typical argument is that Disney doesn't pay enough for those things. No one thinks that such things are "money going to Disney", which just goes to show the absurdities that you have to accept when trying to paper-over the problems with Georgism.

> I am very curious to hear your examples of improvements/activities on land that become part of the unimproved value of land at a fast enough rate to matter?

Who said that "improvements/activities" are the only way for the unimproved value to change rapidly? The land around Disneyland is a counter-example.

As to your suggestion that there aren't examples that fit your absurd restriction, I'll point you to the super-fund sites where SV fabs used to be.

As I hinted earlier, having a cute equation is no substitute for critical thinking.

> Obviously the unimproved land has a market price $X and then the land + structures on it have a different price $Y.

The question is not whether they have prices, it's whether they can be determined.

It's reasonably easy to determine the market price for their sum. How, exactly, do you separate them?

BTW, you're probably assuming that improvements necessarily have non-negative value. That's actually wrong.

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

#154

Post by ethanbond »

anamax wrote: post #153
ethanbond wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unimproved value of the land (I.e. the basis of taxation in a Georgist scheme) is definitionally exclusive of things that happen on the land. There are improvements that, especially over time, become inseparable from the land (e.g. irrigation, grading, etc.), at which point of full integration are just considered an intrinsic part of the land. This too sounds a little weird until you realize that again, this alre…

> The unimproved value of the land (I.e. the basis of taxation in a Georgist scheme) is definitionally exclusive of things that happen on the land. Ah yes, "let's define away the problem." > Of course some portion of the taxes go to Disney. Who do you think pays for the air travel system that brings people to Orlando or LA? Who pays for the freeway system that brings in the food? The typical argument is that Disney d…

It’s getting hard to label all these straw men!

1) I don’t know what “typical argument” that Disney pays too little you’re referring to. I find it completely believable that Disney pays too much, but haven’t run the numbers to figure that out. More important than how much they pay is why they pay it, as the latter controls the nature of their incentives.

2) Of course it’s not true that “no one” thinks public services that benefit private entities should be considered tax dollars doled back out to those entities. You’re talking to at least one such person right now, and I strongly suspect there are others.

3) No, I do not believe that all improvements have positive value, which is why I said no such thing and is also why your superfund example is not that tricky. If an improvement incurs negative value and cannot be easily separated from the land (such as pollution), then it becomes, effectively for all purposes (not just taxation) a feature of the land itself. In this case that would, as is reasonable, yield a reduced land value and thus a reduced tax basis. In cases where the negative improvement is easy to remove, the reduction would be less or nonexistent — as would be reflected automatically in the market price for that plot.

4) Yes we agree that determining the exact $ value separation between land and improvements is nontrivial.

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

#155

Post by Schroedingersat »

anamax wrote: post #152
Schroedingersat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid. >To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free. That's pay. Profit is proportional to capital, not effort (even if it requires effort to materialise). Wage or earnings don't prodce the same pathological effects as profit, even if one person earns $500/hr and another earns $5/hr, t…

"exponentially increasing share of control"? "Exponential" has a meaning and the situation you're describing isn't consistent with it. If there's an exponential at work here, it has a vanishingly small exponent. People who don't get paid for access to their capital don't make said capital available to others. Note that all capital starts as "I made x but I'm going to spend less."

d/dt(wealth) = a * wealth - constant

This is the definition of an exponential and the definition of profit. If under your system you can profit in terms of proportion of a real, finite commodity which is essential for life (ie. control more land in proportion to how much land you control on average with a known strategy available to anyone) then your system definitionally has runaway wealth inequality and will necessarily end in violent collapse or totalitarianism.

The inclusion of the constant prevents entry to the system by people with less than a threshold level of wealth and skews the benefits towards wealth levels where the constant is small. The result also holds as long as the term on the right is polynomial or larger.

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

#156

Post by TimPC »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #143
TimPC wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgists generally believe that everyone has an equal right to all land and all natural resources. This makes the correct scale for a CD global if possible and national if not possible. The CD is a poor tool for keeping up with the cost of living when it's not highly localized. But localizing it is a form of neo-feudalism where people have wildly different entitlements based on where they are born.

I'm pretty sure you can have both if the tax bubbles up. You pay the local tax. That tax money then goes and pays the city tax. The city tax pays the state tax, the state tax pays the country tax, the country tax pays the global tax. You are responsible for the improvements on your land, and you pay for the unimproved value of that land that comes from all higher levels. The local government on the other hand is resp…

Paying CDs at multiple levels of government means that not everyone has an equal share of all land and resources. If I live in a poor part of the US I am entitled to far less in land and resources from my CDs. Many Georgists view this as neofeudal.
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