A Philosopher’s Take on Global Basic Income: Fund It by Land Value Taxation | Hacker News Reader

A Philosopher’s Take on Global Basic Income: Fund It by Land Value Taxation

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25 pointsakvadrako22 comments

The despicable problem with land taxation is that it turns property from owned to rented. It allows for abuses of raising tax rates to drive people off their property. It replaced true supply-and-demand with arbitrary choices by under-informed bureaucrats, which never goes well. It is the core of gentrification problems, driving people from long-occupied homes via taxation because others pay a premium for neighbouring properties.

Never mind the core problem with UBI itself: funding inactivity by taxing productivity.

People should be able to own land outright. Let the poor and elderly and independent keep theirs, without being driven out by overwhelming taxes raised to fund the poor and elderly.

How does that differ from property taxation?

It doesn't. Property taxation is property taxation.

What?! Poor people can always be abused by driving up taxation. You don't need to tax their homes, you can just tax their food, water, electricity and fuel.

I see a much bigger problem in land ownership encouraging concentration of capital. We should be encouraging productivity, innovation, hard work, not rent-seeking.

If you own land, without property tax, you can become completely self sufficient: grow food, build shelter, produce power, collect water. I grew up close to that, and could have done it 100% if needed.

Outright land ownership is critical to survival, independence, and productivity. Property taxes are horribly destructive.

Even if you're self-sufficient you should still pay taxes, because the government still protects your property by enforcement of laws by police.

If I have no income, how can I pay taxes? Bushels of carrots?

The concept is simple and elegant on paper, but it's vulnerable to the same problem that real-world policies that philosophers come up with often fall prey to. It's going to be incredibly difficult to assess the "unimproved value" of any parcel of land fairly.

Do you apply a flat rate per acre of land regardless of where it is, to the detriment of rural farmers who own many acres? Or do you take the location into account? Are we going to have an army of certified professionals whose job is to assess the unimproved value of each and every parcel of land in the country?

And if your formula makes any reference to the actual price at which land is traded, how do you tell how much of it is the unimproved value and how much of it is the value of all the improvements that went into it? There is hardly any land in populated parts of the world where no improvement has ever been made to it, so there's no reference point. If there are two parcels of land in the same neighborhood but one is more desirable because it has a view of the waterfront, does the waterfront view count as improvement or an intrinsic part of the value of the land? Everything is going to be based on a series of arbitrary decisions. Even the value of a dollar is based on a series of arbitrary decisions.

Even worse, since it's all going to be an arbitrary benchmark with a lot of variables that can be tweaked, everyone will try to influence it or abuse it in a way that minimizes their own tax burden. Over time, these forces will result in lower assessments for all land, reducing the overall tax revenue and making the whole scheme unsustainable. Right now in the developed world, a disproportionately large share of people's wealth is tied up in real estate, especially for middle-class folks who read political philosophy. But this won't last if the incentive structure changes.

I would much rather just bite the bullet and say yes, we're going to charge tax on the fruit of your labor whether Mr. Nozick likes it or not. Oh, and we're going to charge even higher rates on the fruit of non-human labor, i.e. machines, since they have no rights anyway. Maybe if these machines produce enough stuff, who knows, perhaps one day they'll contribute enough so that the tax on humans can be reduced to zero?

> Do you apply a flat rate per acre of land regardless of where it is, to the detriment of rural farmers who own many acres?

No, it's the market value of the land. Probably the price would be determined in a manner similar to property tax.

It seems that in our current world, it's easier to fairly determine property tax then what counts as someone's income, at least for the self-employed and investment classes.

Market value is easy. The problem is that the author wants his tax to be based on the "unimproved value" of land, rather than the market value that includes buildings and other stuff that's on and around the land. He's aiming for a kind of philosophical purity in order to be able to say that he's not going to put a tax on human effort. That's where the complexity comes in.

I don't think it's about purity at all, but practicality. Land is the scarce resource, not the buildings on it. Taxing scarce resources is what we must do and also creates the right incentives.

You claim it'll be hard to judge it's fair market value and this is what I disagree with. I mean, sure it'll be hard, but not harder than measuring income.

If the land tax equals the land value, undeveloped plots should sell for about $0. That's a natural benchmark to aim for.

No pitchforks, but this has sentences straight up from wikipediea article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Hillel Steiner is a pretty well-known political philosopher, and this topic is right up his alley. It's much more likely that whoever contributed those sentences to Wikipedia borrowed them from Steiner and/or whoever he's quoting from (whether knowingly or not) than the other way around.

Some populations practice having as many children as they can because their belief system calls for it. They believe they will get more brownie points from a supreme being for that.

So these groups will get more share of the basic income in the next generation and more in the next and so on and so on...

The basic income should be on a sustenance level. So even without any controls, having more children is not a way to get wealthy. It's basically like now; if some of them succeed it may pay off, but it's anti-social and usually doesn't work.

This is interesting. Is there a dedicated forum where such new ideas in economics are being discussed?

I'll concede that I'm not as economically literate as I'd wish, but this doesn't make sense to me. The "1%-ers" don't tend to store their wealth in land, do they? How would this proposal even out the wealth-gap when it is essentially blind to the mechanisms that the rich use to store their wealth?

If anything, this idea seems like it would only harm the (already struggling) middle-class, who may have little equity beyond their home/hand.

Too late to edit, but: s/hand/land/

I get it. I like it. But man, would that piss off all the farmers in this country.

If this law is applied evenly, I suppose farmers will just pass on the costs to their customers.

Farmers are already paying property taxes and their land is hopefully not the most valuable to begin with, so it doesn't seem like it will change their finances much.

we are trying to tackle this problem by rewarding people for finding good candidates for available jobs in the market (mostly tech jobs); https://www.ref10.com/

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