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Comment by dimitrios1 | Hacker News Reader

America is 3,531,905.403 square miles large, and the majority of us choose to live in under 100,000 of it. Maybe that too also contributes to these issues. You may fashion yourself to be virtuous enough to not charge more when you so easily can, but we shouldn't assume everyone will be.

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Have you considered that people are more productive when they are working together? This higher productivity is what allows for rent to be high (the land is more productive), but that does not necessarily imply that the increased productivity should go into the hands of people who merely hold land and are not themselves producing anything on it.

It also does not imply the owners of that land - that had to take a risk in allocating their funds to acquire it - do not deserve to benefit from it (given they also very likely pay taxes on that ownership, which is true in the vast majority of the US; and property taxes are a very important government funding source in the US).

"Producing something on it" is a wholly subjective standard. I can just as well proclaim the opposite, that not producing anything on it is the standard that should determine ownership.

Thought experiment: What if that owner hadn’t acquired that land?

Turns out… it’s still right there!

> It also does not imply the owners of that land - that had to take a risk in allocating their funds to acquire it - do not deserve to benefit from it (given they also very likely pay taxes on that ownership, which is true in the vast majority of the US; and property taxes are a very important government funding source in the US).

the georgist's view is that the landowner does little to contribute to the area being nice/successful, but reap all the benefits.

> Take now... some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: "Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city—in ten years the railroad will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be any higher?" He will tell you, "No!" "Will the wages of the common labor be any higher...?" He will tell you, "No the wages of common labor will not be any higher..." "What, then, will be higher?" "Rent, the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession."

> [...] without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion, but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.

Is it a choice that a liberal homosexual doesn't want to live in Tennessee but moves to New York or California?

Unless there's a Khmer rouge regime in America that forces the intellectuals to move to the countryside at gun point most of the country will remain empty.

Yes, it is a choice borne of a deeply-seeded prejudice and fear which likely was reasonable once upon a time.

Right, we should build enough housing that the market takes care of keeping housing cheap.

Who is the “we” in that sentence that should allocate their money to something with a weak or non-existent promise of seeing a return on that money?

The "we" is everyone who wants to build dense, multi-unit housing based on their own assessments of how it will perform, but can't because of single-family zoning laws.

Expensive housing in many areas is a result of laws that keep would-be developers from increasing the supply, fueled by the toxic NIMBY mindset.

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