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Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

There is a loose analogy between Domain parking and land speculation (though it's not perfect -- you can make more domains, but you can't make more land).

Another approach you can try instead of a formal complaint department is to apply a universal "use it or lose it" tax to the asset at risk of speculation, as economist Ramin Shokrizade famously did in EVE Online to oust speculators and solve problems with recessions:

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189...

What's hilarious is that in doing so, he unwittingly rederived Henry George's Land Value Tax from first principles.

Applying a properly sized tax that disincentives holding assets for speculation can actually reduce the price overall, because speculators stop jacking the price up knowing they can HODL forever.

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The book Radical Markets proposes the following tax (to replace most other taxes), quote:

Every citizen and especially corporation would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a roughly 7% tax on these values and be required to sell the assets to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price.

This is a horrible proposal. Do I have to put a price on my family's home? And if I price it just right, be forced to sell to some speculator who wants it just because he has more money than I do?

Maybe can work for some types of assets one doesn't use, like parked domains

In your example, you could also say "I have to put a price on our cat, and...?" Or your glasses, or your jeans and underpants. But the proposal probably didn't have such things in mind

Another way to think about it is, that you adjust the price continuously. If a speculator offers you money, you are in the position to take the offer or raise your own valuation and pay the increased tax. At some point a sensible person would be like: screw this, I am moving out of the city because the offers are so high, resulting in very high taxes, which is the intended effect.

Or wealthy people buy up a ton of land and get the law changed.

Which is essentially what the current reality is, since such a law does not exist.

Or not, because the law would force them to pay taxes on that ton of land, but maybe something like a $200,000 personal exemption would help.

Basically, their answer is yes.

First, under this system, long-term speculation is not really viable, due to the high tax. So the buyer must have some reason for paying higher than the price you set, which you don't see, i.e. you under-utilize the asset. Google/Facebook ads work this way - every slot is always up for auction. Also similar dynamics in partnership agreement's "shotgun clauses", etc.

Second, you can always factor in your sentimentality into your price, then the buyer will buy your neighbor's house instead. But you have to pay for it in the form of a higher tax. This is like a penalty for obstructing economic efficiency.

Third, this system pretty much does away with the strict idea of private property, into what they call "partial common ownership". It's basically a way to have shared ownership (as in communism) without the central planning, i.e. in a way that might actually work. (In fact, it quite reduces the role of government.)

I'm not advocating for this system, but I think it's fun to think about.

A bit on the pedantic side, but you can make more land; there are dozens of artificial islands around the world, some of which have resulted from the need for more land.

The costs, of course, as well as other considerations (legal...) are of a different scale.

Two responses to this: Georgists classify “land” as both territory and all natural resources (really nature itself) so the “new land” the Netherlands makes is classified as an improvement to the pre-existing sea bed.

You might reasonably say this isn’t what most people mean by “land” to which the reply is, the amount of “new land” you can make in this manner is pretty limited and usually the reserve of states or state owned enterprises.

Comparatively, nothing stops you from tripling the number of domains overnight.

TIL about Georgists, thanks.

Regarding whether it's "pretty limited", yes and no, imo:

Yes, compared to, say, the size of a continent, the amount of new land is tiny.

However, new land is usually made in highly sought-after (high-density, high-value etc) areas [citation needed]. So it would make better sense to compare the surface of the new land to the surface of the adjacent area.

For example, the polders in the Netherlands significantly augment the country's surface. The artificial islands in Tokyo Bay significantly add to the real estate of the harbour. The artificial islands in Dubai and Bahrain significantly add to the coastline.

I think that this is enough for OP's analogy between domain parking and land speculation to reasonably stand.

Land in this context is more of a mathematical concept: yes, you can make more land, but the surface of the oblate spheroid that we call "Earth" has a finite surface area, and it's that finite supply that gives land its population-proportional value.

Even if we're willing to stretch into a third dimension, that oblate spheroid has a finite volume, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of it is inaccessible to meaningful possession/occupation; you can only dig so far down or build so far up.

Sounds exactly like the empty homes tax in Vancouver!

The LVT is this but... more. The idea of a full land-value tax is based on a principle related to universal basic income. In both cases, the argument is that by applying the tax/income to every stakeholder indiscriminately, it removes bureaucratic complexity and motivation to "cheat" the system.

Since the effect is the same no matter what, we don't need a huge statute listing what does and does not apply as X.

> The idea of a full land-value tax is based on a principle related to universal basic income.

And tangentially: seeking a minimal state that exists solely to collect LVT (and possibly Pigovian and severance taxes) and distribute the proceeds evenly as UBI is the basic idea around geolibertarianism.

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