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Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

> China taxes land appreciation between 30-60%.

If you want support for your causes in the US, you probably don’t want to compare it to a communist regime that scares the crap out of people.

Unless this was sarcastic...?

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China does absolutely scare the crap out of both it’s own people and people abroad, but economically it’s clear they’ve done a lot of things right over the last 40 years. The US could learn a thing or two from the communists when it comes to Capitalism.

I don’t think they’ve done things right; they were granted access to the global trade network and had wages at pennies on the dollar from other countries. It would be almost impossible not to grow under those circumstances. Let’s see if their decisions are as effective when wages are more on parity and they are competing as peer economic levels.

> I don’t think they’ve done things right; they were granted access to the global trade network and had wages at pennies on the dollar from other countries. It would be almost impossible not to grow under those circumstances.

I’m guessing you don’t know that this was also true of America in the 18th and 19th centuries and a large part of how it became so wealthy. Especially when they kept using slaves long after it was banned elsewhere.

I think it's fair that comparing something to China doesn't win adherents, but just because China does it, doesn't mean that it's "communist". China has shopping malls — does that make shopping malls communist?

Also, a Land Appreciation Tax isn't really radically different from the status quo in the US today. Land appreciation is already taxed as capital gains, it's just that the capital gains tax is intentionally set to be low to incentivize investment. The argument here is that we should not only NOT incentivize speculation on land, we should deter it by carving out a "special" capital gains tax on land.

Depends who owns the shopping mall

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