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Comment by whakim | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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 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.

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.

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