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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> ... in essence forcing landowners to always use the land in a way which extracts the maximum amount of money from it ...

That incentive already exists, landholders typically use their land in a high-value way. If you cast your eye on Europe there are a large contingent of undeserving people who have generations of wealth that they secure through owning land, which does not degrade over time. The big win of a land tax is about breaking ultra-low-risk inter-generational wealth transfer. If wealth is transferred between generations there at least has to be some level of competent management demonstrated by each new layer of the family tree.

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The general incentive to make money always exists, yes, but if LVT is implemented, there would, I assume, be an almost insurmountable force compelling landowners to do so. I compared LVT with the idea of “fiduciary duty” with intentional precision; CEOs are also, in general, incentivized to make money, but the idea behind decrying the alleged fiduciary duty is that a CEO is supposedly more or less forced to do whatever makes the most money, regardless if they feel it would be bad in the long run, inhumane, or even unethical.

The same principle seem to apply to LVT: A landowner would, it seems, be forced, by the taxes extracted from them, to generate a matching (or larger) income by the land, regardless if they might feel that the community would be better served by using the land for something which would, incidentally, make less money for them personally.

If the object of LVT is to prevent inter-generational wealth transfer, I would assume that there would be vastly more effective ways to accomplish this more directly. Or there could at least be some carve-out which limits the effect of a LVT to those instances.

Fiduciary duty isn't that big of a deal compared to the general incentive to make money. When CEOs are hired they are screened to be the sort of people who want to make money. If I had a controlling share of a company and the CEO didn't want to make profitable decisions there isn't any special legal construct needed - he'd be gone and somebody new would be hired. Most shareholders are the same.

> ... regardless if they might feel that the community would be better served by using the land for something which would, incidentally, make less money for them personally ...

The community obviously disagrees with our landholder in this scenario, or the community can stump up the cash to pay the land taxes or hold the land publically.

It is just 1 more expense. It isn't like running a soup kitchen was ever free, someone is paying for the soup. Giving a donation of space is the same as giving a donation of time and materials.

There are incentives, but there isn't anything especially new here. It isn't going to be radically different from a mortgage in the short term, and in the long term the change is competent people will own land instead of old families.

In your first paragraph, you’re talking about actual fiduciary duty, but I was making an analogy not with what fiduciary duty actually is, but instead with the idea of it which people usually argue against. People usually say that fiduciary duty creates and even enforces thoughtless short-term greed, and argue that is bad for society and also the company in the long run. Regardless of what fiduciary actually is in reality, how is then LVT any different from creating the same short-term enforced greed?

The rest of your text can be summarized as “whoever has money deserves to have it, and should be trusted to make decisions which override any community which, in aggregate, have less money”. I believe this to be a somewhat controversial stance.

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