Why a land-value tax is inevitable

This story very much demonstrates that giving people jobs helping the community rather than just money is a better option. They were both productive and happier. So much so that they didn't want to stop.

I'm sure the nature of the job probably had something to do with it. If these jobs were in call centers for debt collectors they probably would have quit en masse and been happy about it.

Your argument states that empty land would be better served if it’s used for other human beings. The same argument if applied to a time scale rather than upon land resources, it is rational to conclude that our planet is better off if people had 1/2 surviving child per person until we hit carrying capacity.

If land owners should be taxed for owning land they don’t use, we should also have a child tax for future exponential growth of a certain set of genes who will monopolize the world’s population by over breeding.

Humans can continue to enjoy baby making(it’s not unlike some human beings enjoy owning vast tracts of land they dont put to use) but left to their own devices and without encouragement, if they are allowed to bear the full cost of raising the fruits of their loins, I think the numbers will go down dramatically.

If goods cost as much as it takes to make them..especially food which is grown at tremendous costs(not just monetary), we will realize that the abundance is a myth and scarcity is our reality.

Re: Your final point..people who own property don’t contribute to suburbs and rural sprawl. It is those who can’t make proper decisions personally and financially who make choices FOR themselves. Things like where to live, what job to do and what to study are easy choices. Inheriting illness, disabilities are choices we didn’t make, but was made by nature for us. We take care of vulnerable people who had no control over their deficiencies because we share as a species DNA with them.

That obligation and duty towards our collective humanity is entirely different than feeling responsible for personal decision making.

Sometimes people make terrible decisions for themselves because they are unable to make best decisions for themselves. In those cases, we have to make decisions for them if we feel responsible for them. These kind of things never end well as history as shown and is best avoided if possible. An example would be the mentally ill. Many refuse to take medications and their circumstances cause them to suffer. Those are tough decisions. But even then there is no need to penalize private property owners.

None of these issues are connected to each other. I doubt if anyone cares about urban sprawl. An easy target is private property owners and that comes from what I can only term as jealousy in simplistic terms.

In today’s world, we have managed to conquer crippling poverty even though there is much work to do. GINI co-eff fueled inequality makes villains out of the property owners. That is a dangerous path to take..once again, as history has shown us.

[..] The view of The Selfish Gene is that selection based upon groups and populations is rare compared to selection on individuals. Although supported by Dawkins and by many others, this claim continues to be disputed.[33][34] While naïve versions of group selectionism have been disproved, more sophisticated formulations make accurate predictions in some cases while positing selection at higher levels.[35] Both sides agree that very favourable genes are likely to prosper and replicate if they arise and both sides agree that living in groups can be an advantage to the group members. The conflict arises in part over defining concepts:

"Cultural evolutionary theory, however, has suffered from an overemphasis on the experiences and behaviors of individuals at the expense of acknowledging complex group organization...Many important behaviors related to the success and function of human societies are only properly defined at the level of groups".[34] In The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), the entomologist E. O. Wilson contends that although the selfish-gene approach was accepted "until 2010 [when] Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and I demonstrated that inclusive fitness theory, often called kin selection theory, is both mathematically and biologically incorrect."[36] Chapter 18 of The Social Conquest of Earth describes the deficiencies of kin selection and outlines group selection, which Wilson argues is a more realistic model of social evolution. He criticises earlier approaches to social evolution, saying: "...unwarranted faith in the central role of kinship in social evolution has led to the reversal of the usual order in which biological research is conducted. The proven best way in evolutionary biology, as in most of science, is to define a problem arising during empirical research, then select or devise the theory that is needed to solve it. Almost all research in inclusive-fitness theory has been the opposite: hypothesize the key roles of kinship and kin selection, then look for evidence to test that hypothesis." According to Wilson: "People must have a tribe...Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists have revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups, and then discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong." (pp. 57, 59) According to Wilson: "Different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness." (p. 61)[..]

The main thing to understand about HN is that we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... I'm not saying that other things aren't valuable, such as the considerations you're raising—they are. But we can't optimize for one thing without foregoing other good things.

We do ban and penalize some sites on HN. We ban the ones that are clearly off topic or spam, and penalize ones that are quite likely to be off topic, or whose popularity/interestingness ratio is too high (which is basically almost all major media sites). But even when a site is banned, when a particularly good article appears there, users can vouch for it and upvote it. All of this follows from what we're trying to optimize for.