Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

loukidelis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 156 posts

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

#21

Post by kcb »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #4
cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

I see a different problem with the separation. In the modern day, the improvements may contribute more than 100% of the value of the land. In most cases the sole benefit of having land in a desirable city is that it is near other desirable things. This is unlike the agricultural model motivating Georgism, where the primary benefit of owning land is that you can grow crops on it. But taking the proposal literally that…

I still don't understand how Georgism makes any sense in a digital world. The biggest companies in the world require irrelevantly small amounts of land to operate. A person can make millions in a 10x10 box with a computer.

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

#22

Post by anamax »

Oh goody. Another group with an equation that they confuse with a complete picture of reality. (When you point out that reality comes up with different answers, they try to change or camouflage reality.)

Note that Georgists don't tell us HOW the value of this "land value tax" is determined. It certainly isn't uniform across the US, but where does it change and why?

In addition, Georgists insist that "public infrastructure" drives value. Ask the folks who own motels near Disneyland whether they'd have a business if Disney left.

Note also their assumption that "maximizing value" (as they define it) is the only important goal. It isn't.

That's why they go for insults for anyone who doesn't behave as they'd like.

For example, a "speculator", who Georgists hate and want to punish, is someone who says "hmm. There's more value in the future if I preserve things now." In other words, it's more reasonable to point out that Georgists are (at best) short-term maximizers.

Then there's the small detail that Georgists fundamentally believe that everything should be at the average/the same. If one apartment house is the highest value near a given location, they want to punish anyone who doesn't have apartment houses near that location.

You'd think that they'd get called on that by the "everything should be walkable/bikeable" folks, but I suppose there's some sort of tribal loyalty at play here.

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

#23

Post by pottertheotter »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

> 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. So…

At first I thought this comment was made by Marc Andreessen.

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

#24

Post by jjoonathan »

motohagiography wrote: post #20
swatcoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Gentrification isn’t an art project. It’s people with more wealth or income-opportunity coming in and buying up cheap stuff at the prices they can afford. That a…

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 ch…

> The landowners are the community, provided that they are present and managing their investment

That's a big, gigantic, huge, gnarly, completely unjustified assumption that is responsible in entirety for your conclusion. It's like saying "provided these people did good, they did good." Well, yeah. Duh. What if they didn't?

> This is a fundamental cognitive divide

Oh, I agree. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (or should I say rent / land value) depends on not understanding it.

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

#25

Post by pessimizer »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

> 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. So…

Why can't you make the same argument about not paying taxes on any accumulation of wealth? Everybody can come up with a way they "earned" it with a bar as low as this, where simply existing in your house is actually heroic work and value generation.

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

#26

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

The inhabitants don't lose.

Play your scenario out.

A bunch of poor people buy 100 acres of land for $1, and they turn it into a paradise.

It becomes cool, so rich hipsters wanna buy up chunks to Instagram it.

The first person sells a patch of land he bought for $0.01 for $1M. Suddenly, property tax on everyone's $0.01 parcels shoots up from $0 to $12,000 per year.

These people have no jobs, so they can't afford $12,000 in taxes per year, so they're all forced to sell their properties to other hipsters on Instagram for $1M, too.

Well guess what?

Now they're millionaires.

I mean, technically, not. They've got some taxes to pay. But you get the idea.

No owners "lose" from property values shooting through the roof. ESPECIALLY not leveraged owners (mortgage holders).

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

#27

Post by stickyricky »

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

> What gives?

It's a law. You can just put in exemptions.

- "Land tax increases shall not exceed X% if it is your primary residence."

- "Land tax shall not increase if you are over the age of 65".

- "You may deduct monies put into the improvement of a property from your land tax."

- "You may not pay more than 5% of your income in land tax".

I don't see the issue. We don't tax income at 20% with no deductions. We don't place a sales tax on all goods equally. We don't tax corporations the same way we do individuals.

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

#28

Post by 8note »

kodyo wrote: post #6
cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

There are some undefined variables. Did the people doing the improving own the land? Well, now they're no longer poor. Yay. Sell and get out of there before the Californians move in and turn it into a sewer. If they voluntarily improved somebody else's land under no contractual agreement with the owner, why do they think they're entitled to a share of the new value? If they voluntarily improved "public" land, good lu…

> If they voluntarily improved somebody else's land under no contractual agreement with the owner, why do they think they're entitled to a share of the new value?

Because property rights are garbage? If they improved it, they should gain ownership

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

#29

Post by jandrewrogers »

threatofrain wrote: post #10
kodyo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some undefined variables. Did the people doing the improving own the land? Well, now they're no longer poor. Yay. Sell and get out of there before the Californians move in and turn it into a sewer. If they voluntarily improved somebody else's land under no contractual agreement with the owner, why do they think they're entitled to a share of the new value? If they voluntarily improved "public" land, good lu…

> If they voluntarily improved somebody else's land under no contractual agreement with the owner, why do they think they're entitled to a share of the new value? > If they voluntarily improved "public" land, good luck extracting gratitude from the state after the fact. The bureaucrats are more likely to issue fines and send in bulldozers. I wonder if this is a fringe example as I imagine few people are radically imp…

A small version of this occurs in the Mountain West. Some well-maintained rural roads are actually maintained illegally across Federal land by the locals. The Federal government is responsible for maintenance but often doesn't do any for decades and so the roads go into severe disrepair. If you ask permission to repair the road out of your own pocket, you will have to file absurd amounts of paperwork and the Federal government charges you money for the right!

Some of the local illegal road repair crews are well-organized. They descend like a flash mob with heavy equipment when the odds of getting caught are near zero. The Feds are incurious about who is maintaining the roads illegally because it is kind of doing them a favor.

I first learned about this when I naively started jumping through the hoops to get permission to repair a remote road. One of the local ranchers heard about it, pulled me aside, and explained how things worked while admonishing me for ruining my plausible deniability. The whole thing was wild.

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

#30

Post by 8note »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

> 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. So…

Who says it's the land owners that are the people that made it more valuable? It could instead be the employees of nearby businesses or more likely renters.
Post reply on HN