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Comment by whakim | Hacker News Reader

IMO the biggest issue with property taxes, land taxes, or any other similar idea, is that they arbitrarily tax one kind of wealth over others. Why should a person who owns a house worth $500k (and perhaps has a mortgage on it) pay not only the exact same tax rate, but also the amount of tax as a person who owns a house worth $500k (and doesn't have a mortgage on it), but also has $5 million in other assets? (This isn't even getting into the fact that the wealthier you are, the less of your total wealth is likely to consist of land/property/etc.)

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Owning huge amounts of land is uniquely antisocial in a way that owning huge amounts of other stuff isn't. If Mr Moneybags buys ten thousand paintings, we can always produce more paintings (and the rising price of paintings will push more people to take up careers in art). But if Moneybags buys ten thousand acres, the rest of us are ten thousand acres worse off in a way that we can't really fix.

Those are ten thousand paintings which the public cannot experience or enjoy! In many ways, the paintings are more precious, as they could go on worldwide tours, and be experienced by millions of people; most land has virtually no uniqueness, and cannot be shared.

See: Owning huge amounts of land is uniquely antisocial.

The point here is to maintain a society and some things must come first, namely material things which paintings are not. Of course, art history shows us time and time again the vital importance of material sustenance in creating and preserving works of art. If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible.

You emphasize "antisocial", and I am not sure why. I looked it up to double-check, and the main definition is "contrary to the laws and customs of society; devoid of or antagonistic to sociable instincts or practices." Could you please explain what you mean by "uniquely antisocial"?

>"If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible."

I care about all the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that many paintings are worth a lot more than most 10k acres. The paintings also have the benefits of being able to contribute to shared experiences all over the world, and fulfilling more challenging needs.

I'll take the 10k acres, wherever it may be: meadow, forest, desert, wherever, and enjoy not only the ability to sustain myself, but the beauty and meaning that one can only find in nature. The same beauty and meaning that every artist from the first ape to feel artistry to now has tried, and failed, to fully capture.

Most paintings sit in museum storage and are hardly ever seen by anyone (maybe the occasional grad student specialising in that particular artist).

Obviously I'm assuming an equal monetary value of paintings vs land; my point is not about how many acres equal how many paintings but about the impact on other people that taking $1M of paintings vs $1M of land out of circulation has.

I completely agree with you regarding museums holding large collections which they do not exhibit; in fact, I think it highlights how a sort of 'George-ish' tax on paintings might be helpful!

With respect to your second point, I think that taking each out of circulation has different effects. I would guess that most assets have a value of about what they're worth (i.e. the price mechanism works). I think Georgism is at least a valuable paradigm, and would be in favour of at least some pseudo-Georgist measures, such as only taxing land, to encourage higher-value uses rather than land+structures, and taxing all sorts of land at the same rate.

> I completely agree with you regarding museums holding large collections which they do not exhibit; in fact, I think it highlights how a sort of 'George-ish' tax on paintings might be helpful!

I'm not convinced; after all these collections are often already in public ownership. If there was something more beneficial to the public to be done with them, one would hope that would already be happening.

the thing that is scarce is, depending on the country, not even really land itself but really proximity, connectedness in the graph of resources. price of land goes very high where there are lots of jobs and good schools....

So why not tax gold or bitcoin or the Mona Lisa if the main difference between taxable assets and non-taxable assets is scarcity?

Everyone needs a certain number of square meters to live, work, and grow food in (or indirectly, for others to grow food for them). The same isn't true for the assets you mentioned.

Fly over the US and observe that the place is mostly empty. Land is not the problem. Lack of economic opportunity and initiative are the problems.

It's almost entirely "used." The places that look "empty" are pasture, fields, private timberland and national parks, and the few remaining pockets of actual nature should probably be left the hell alone.

There are ten thousand small towns (like, say, Bird Island) whose population has been declining for decades, due to lack of economic opportunity. You don’t have to choose between a city and an isolated home.

The value of gold is mostly the cost of labour etc. to extract it; to the extent that it's just the value of the land that it was dug out of, sure, I'd support taxing it. Most Georgists support extending the land value tax to other kinds of economic land e.g. slices of radio spectrum. But physical land is the big one that affects society (particularly because everyone needs some land to live on), so it's the most important one to tax.

» Most Georgists support extending the land value tax to other kinds of economic land e.g. slices of radio spectrum.

This makes me wonder, do roads pay land tax? I think railway tracks do but I'm not sure about roads.

Personally I think more of the spectrum should be like 2.4GHz, 5 GHz (and soon 6GHz?). No auctions. No owners.

If we are going full Georgist, yes, even the government would pay taxes on its own land, which includes the land for roads and railways.

But it's important to note that this is a different question than if the roads have tolls on them. (Not that you implied that in any way, but it is a confusion that happens!)

Rather, the tax on the land of the roads is an accounting mechanism to ensure that the land is being used for greater economic efficiency, rather than, say, a way forward wealthy people who live far away to get the public to subsidize the transport to their large mansions.

This isn't connect to just the scarcity of the land. People can live without bitcoin and the Mona Lisa, but you can't live without land. If you want to take this to the extreme imagine if somebody owns the whole country. Housing is a human right.

It is? It’s “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, not life, <deleted> and purported happiness under socialism, where you are assigned housing and a job.

Housing was guaranteed in the old Soviet Union, but if you didn’t cooperate, the housing was in the gulag.

Your daily reminder that not everyone on the internet lives in the United States

Yes, those values are universal, unless the powers that be manage to convince people otherwise.

The post didn't use the word scarcity. Land isn't even scarce, most land is effectively uninhabited compared to the population densities most people live at. Humanity at large is not short of land.

Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it. Gold, for example, requires human labour to be dug up. Bitcoin requires humans to run machines. The Mona Lisa requires humans to paint. Land behaves differently.

For what it's worth, it's not uncommon for Georgists to also favor extraction taxes for natural resources like gold.

Land isn't scarce, but economically viable and productive land is scarce. Economic viability is a moving target, but for the most part pretty steady.

I agree 100%. Originally land taxes were conceived as a correction for a more subtle bit of economic inequality: productivity of fields.

In today's world, where access to a city can dramatically change one's earning potential far far more, they are even more relevant.

The issue is both about the scarcity of access to a resource, such as the economy of a city, but also about where that resource comes from. With urban land, that resource is not the product of the individual land owner, but rather all the other land owners that made the city so prosperous and with so much opportunity.

> Land isn't even scarce

Yes, it is (or, at least important subsets of land are.) If it wasn't, it would have zero value. Nonzero market value requires, and therefore proves, scarcity.

The post I was responding to makes the distinction between things we can't create more of (land) and things we can (paintings). I used scarcity as an (erroneous) proxy for this distinction, even though obviously there are scarce things that we can create more of.

> Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it.

I mean, not really. What about water or oxygen? What about carbon taxes insofar as they're related to the inherent value of the earth's climate? There are plenty of resources that don't require any human effort to produce, but that doesn't make them better suited to taxation. It just seems like an entirely arbitrary distinction to make.

One good reason to tax land is that its one of the few resources that we can't expand production of. Until traveling to other planets is cheap, land is a very limited resource so it is a major benefit to prevent the rich from hoarding it. For much of early Roman history, it was illegal for anyone to own more than a certain amount of land.

It also doesn't move!

Income tax can be shifted to capital gains, of corporation tax can be shifted to other domiciles etc.

Georgism makes a distinction between Capital (value produced by labor) and Land (value that existed before humans showed up). Rewarding owners of capital incentives people to make more, but rewarding owners of land benefits nobody other than the landowner.

That seems like a bit of a murky distinction, though, right? Taxing land disincentives economic activity a large component of which is in the land value (running a parking garage or hotel in downtown Manhattan, or a farm in a fertile region, etc.) but incentivizes other types of economic activity.

Do you think its murkier than things in life are, usually? Or are you comparing it to an abstraction in code.

Read this to understand the distinction: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

George goes to great lengths to distinguish these factors of production. They are fundamentally different.

This is roughly the point, though.

It doesn't _absolutely_ disincentivize these things unless they are operating at a loss. It certainly disincentivizes "economic activity" like opening an at-grade parking lot in a bustling city-center in order to minimize the property tax you pay while the land appreciates in value more than it disincentivizes opening a parking garage there (assuming there's actually enough parking demand to pay to build and maintain).

(I don't entirely disagree with you--it seems like this would shunt some investment away from investments that need expensive land. It's less clear to me whether that is good, neutral, or bad.)

> value that existed before humans showed up

I'm not sure that meshes with the way it's actually described in the article. They give examples of a small piece of land worth $2M and then another plot in a different location that's worth far less, purely due to proximity to other improvements on the land (i.e. being prime real estate in a city) rather than something inherent to the land itself (e.g. fertility/use for growing crops).

And even then, something like fertility isn't really all natural any longer, given how it's impacted by so many farming practices (fertilization, tilling/no-till, crop rotation/nitrogen fixing crops, etc.).

Resource extraction (e.g. oil) seems a lot closer, though the actual labor of it vs. the resources of it are another thing. I do see more reason there why the benefit ought to be largely public--and to some extent it is in, e.g., Alaska via the Alaska Permanent Fund.

But I think that labor, improvements and whatever the intrinsic value might be are a lot more tied together than seems to be accounted for by the theory. Otherwise why is the intrinsic value of Manhattan's land not measured in some number of beads, with everything else being due to improvements (including those made by neighbors)? And yes, I do realize that beads actually were money for a time due to a lack of actual currency, but still.

You’re right. When Henry George introduced the land value tax, he made it clear that in urban areas he wished to capture the value which is created by the community while the landowner sits and collects increasing rents, not value that existed naturally (https://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp19.htm):

> All these advantages attach to the land. On this land — and no other — they can be utilized. For here is the center of population: the focus of exchange, the marketplace, the workshop of industry. Density of population has given this land productive power equivalent to multiplying its original fertility a thousandfold.… The most valuable lands on earth, those with the highest rent, are not those with the highest natural fertility. Rather, they are lands given a greater usefulness by population density.

This is a great question.

Land taxes are great because there is less of a deadweight loss. Governments need money to operate. All else equal, we should get governments the money they need without wasting people's time to comply with complicated tax laws.

Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea. Rich people should pay more to fund the government. Rich people own a lot of land, so they'd pay a lot of land tax. Poor people generally don't own any land and wouldn't be subject to this tax. Land taxes align well with what a lot of people think is fair.

> Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea.

Fairly bold assertion. I'd say most humans don't even really know what progressive taxation means.

> Rich people should pay more to fund the government.

A static tax regime (i.e., taxes calculated by a simple fixed percentage of wealth or income) leads to the same outcome. E.g., in a 10% fixed tax regime, someone making $10k/a pays $1k in tax and another person making $1mm pays $100k in tax, meeting your desire to have the rich pay more--no progressive taxation required.

I’d like to add here that the biggest fallacy is assuming rich pay income tax at all, which leftists across the world all seem to universally believe.

I would argue that in 21st century the definition of rich is actually „achieves most of his income through sources which are not subject to income tax”.

Progressive income tax mostly hurts well qualified proffessionals nowadays (people actually working for that income) and as such is detrimental to economy at large.

This isn't true. If you define "income" as the sum of an individual's income from capital plus income from labor, it is only in the top 0.1% of the distribution that capital income dominates labor income. (This percentile threshold changes slightly based on country; in countries such as the United States it'll be a bit higher.)

And? Due to power-law distribution that 0.1 % holds disproportional amount of riches.

I really don’t get that people talk about rising income inequality all the time, but actually noticing it (i.e. very strong minority holding many assets) suddenly doesn’t make sense.

No one is denying that income and wealth are distributed very unequally. But my point is that well more than 99.9% of individuals primarily earn money via labor and are therefore subject to an income tax, and so it isn't correct to assert that income taxes don't hurt the rich. They don't hurt the absolute richest individuals - but most people aren't defining "the rich" as only the top 0.05%.

Then I’d like to hear alternative definition of rich and see whether it is sound.

"Rich" is an ambiguous term; there clearly isn't a single definition. That being said, I think most people would agree that an individual who earns a salary of $500k a year (~99th percentile in the United States) is clearly "rich."

The question I'd put back to you is why it's useful to have a single, universally agreed-upon definition of "rich"?

It comes down to the purchasing power. If you tKe $100 from someone with only $1000, it affects their ability to live more than taking $100M from a billionaire

Another key factor is enforcement cost. Enforcing a land tax is really easy for a government. You just... Go there and get it. There's no moving the land offshore or having complex relationships or offsets. If someone won't pay the government just assigns the ownership to someone who will and goes on.

Compliance costs with many other taxes are quite high.

>the government just assigns the ownership to someone who will

...and physically evicts the previous tenant.

Wouldn't a land value taxes be regressive for condos as the more expensive ones are on higher floors and would pay the same rate as people on lower cheaper floors?

Why would they pay the same rate? From my understanding, the condo corporation would receive the tax bill. It would then be up to them to determine how they should charge the individual units.

Do people on the lower floors pay for lift maintenance?

Generally speaking no. When there needs to be major maintenance, each condo unit owner pays N% of the cost where N% is defined as your ownership stake (also your voting weight) in the condo. N is roughly your unit's square footage / the sum of every unit's square footage.

This question is out of the scope of land value taxation. The overall tax burden would fall on the institution running the condo (HOA/company/whatever). How they decide whom to charge and how much, etc. would be a separate question government by different rules and laws.

Which is not to say that the outcome would be fair, but whether it is or not would depend upon how these organizations are regulated and run.

I don't think it is out of scope though because wether the government or your HOA/whatever is deciding how to appropriate the LVT is at the whims of someone else. I'm mostly for LVT but it gets supper messy with multiple ownership properties on land.

Also, LVT don't fix zoning as the value of your land is based on what you can make from it. If your land is zoned for only single floor parking, nobody is going to buy it for more than they can earn through single floor parking so the land won't be that valuable thus it won't have a high land value tax.

eh, what? The tax on $500K worth of stock or gold is zero. Also, home ownership is disincentivized by property taxes but also incentivized by the mortgage interest deduction, one of the largest non-corporate tax subsidies in America. And rental property is taxed very differently from property you live on.

I think it's better to say that land is sort of a one-off that is treated differently from every other asset than to try to compare it to other kinds of wealth.

Taxes aren't an objective truth handed down from on high; so, in some sense, all taxes could be considered arbitrary. In this case, taxing one kind of wealth more than another is a lever the state has to (dis)incentivise certain behaviours and thus create a better society (although in some cases, you may fairly ask - better for whom?).

>IMO the biggest issue with property taxes, land taxes, or any other similar idea, is that they arbitrarily tax one kind of wealth over others.

In theory. IMO the practical biggest issue with property tax is that it is usually spent locally, keeping rich neighborhoods well funded and poor neighborhoods poor.

That sounds like you want a tax on communities, not a tax on land. Inasmuch as this is due to a location/group-based "neighbourhood value-add", it seems better to tax the neighbourhood as an organization than to tax the ground they happen to be on.

Not at all. I'd just prefer more redistribution.

>IMO the biggest issue with property taxes, land taxes, or any other similar idea, is that they arbitrarily tax one kind of wealth over others.

Exactly. They tax wealth created by nature and/or the community rather than wealth created by individuals. The land Trump Tower sits on isn't valuable because Trump owns it. It's valuable because all of New York surrounds it.

A $5 million fleet of cars is wealth (mostly) created by human hands. Those human hands ought to decide what happens to them. Right?

There's also raw materials, but they would be subjected to a georgist tax too.

> Exactly. They tax wealth created by nature and/or the community rather than wealth created by individuals. The land Trump Tower sits on isn't valuable because Trump owns it. It's valuable because all of New York surrounds it.

Yeah, but pretty much all private wealth is built on top of thousands of years' worth of accumulated community knowledge. The startup you founded wouldn't be worth anything if not for electricity, computers, and the internet.

If I buy a hamburger should the sales tax depend on my wealth? The property tax should be based on the value of the property, period. If you want to tax mythical wealth do it via some other means. And whether the person owns the property outright or borrowed money shouldn't have any bearing on the value of the tax.

I have felt for awhile societal fees/fines should be tied to income.

A wealthy man gets a $270 red light ticket. (This is the one where turning right on a red light is illegial. It seems like they arbitrarily decide which intersection to enforce?). The wealthy man casually mentions it over din din. Goes to sleep, and has the help drive his spawn to private schools. Yea--I live in a county filled with rich people, and they are obnoxious on so many levels.

To the poor man it might be part of his rent.

So yes--if I ran things; The wealthy would pay more at DMV, bail, patent fees, incorporation fees, etc., and especially property taxes. You want a third mansion so you don't have to look at your neighbors---get ready to pay Zuck.

I would love to see Jay Leno pay a $100,000 speeding ticket.

(I believe they are trying this in Sweden?)

> I believe they are trying this in Sweden?)

No... They aren't "trying" anything; it's been standard practice for decades, probably over half a century. Not just for speeding tickets, but many fines in general. And not just Sweden, but most of the Nordic countries, plus Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

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