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Comment by arvinsim | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think one of the greatest mistakes of capitalism is to make property an investment asset.

I think we really need to limit how many one can own. Start taxing very very very heavily for anything beyond a second home for individuals and and anything beyond another number based on statistics for a company. Also add attitional tax for every two months a property is owned but no one is living in it or using it for business. This should cut down on hording and incentivize companies and people to get rid of any property that is just lying there waiting for prices to go up.

Just institute high Land Value Tax and you kill these birds and their tax evasion schemes, with one very simple stone.

Land tax is horrid. A person should be able to live off the land if they choose, self sufficiently. This is impossible when the government demands yearly cash payment just for having your own place to farm.

A person who removes land from the common good should have to do something productive with it, give it back to the common good, or simply pay a fee to the commons for having kept it from productive use. A person absolutely should not be able to keep several blocks of downtown Manhattan off the market so they can run a private farm for themselves.

In practical terms, anywhere a person would want to do such a thing, the land would be cheap enough that LVT wouldn't really matter anyway.

They do pay a fee to the commons for removing it; it's called sales tax. They are also doing something productive with it, by living on it and using it.

If we are to keep trespassing laws, there must be ways to own land permanently and without further cost. There must be a way for man to survive without participating in government enforced labour. All land is owned by some entity; he can't live in the woods owned by the government or someone else; even after buying land and being entirely self sufficient, he cannot simply live, but must pay the government in their currency which he can only get through participating in the labor economy. There is literally no legal way to live freely by your own means. This is a form of slavery that the ancients would find absolutely intolerable.

Increase the price of land or the sales tax, limit the ownership a single person can have, levy inheritance tax, but an indefinite land tax is inhumane.

Huh... who does enforce trespassing laws? I'm 99% sure that's the state, and for good reason. Are you supposing that the unlanded should pay for the protection of the landed's assets, but that the landed doesn't need to?

> A person who removes air from the common good should have to do something productive with it, give it back to the common good, or simply pay a fee to the commons for having kept it from productive use. A person absolutely should not be able to breathe several kilos of downtown Manhattan oxygen off the market so they can continue their private lives.

Is this meant to be a counter argument? Because yes, if air in a given area were a strictly finite resource that everyone needs for survival (like land), one person should not be able to just indefinitely own enough of it for millions of people to live on.

Nobody made it an investment asset, it just happened as certain pieces of land grew more valuable for practical reasons. This is unavoidable unless you make it so you can't sell property, which would also mean you can't buy property - the government would need to manage peoples' needs based on family size and do the maintenance of maintaining property to the same level as landlords.

Ending up in a monopoly.

This is not true. We did make it an investment asset around the advent of agriculture. And there is a way to avoid it without freezing the market, which is called the Land Value Tax. As far as I know, no serious economist (from any ideological perspective) seems to actually dispute the functional fitness of this tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax?wprov=sfti1

Bad money (like inflationary fiat currency) creates the need to use other assets to preserve wealth, which creates bubbles in those assets.

Bitcoin advocates say good money (Bitcoin) will return the value of all other assets to their utility value because the best passive store of value will be the money itself (which due to a fixed supply would be deflationary).

In that world, people would rather sell assets they don't use to accumulate bitcoin (or money x) because only useful activities will produce more yield than the money itself. This frees up housing, land, precious metals,... and all other resources that are artificially scarce due to hoarding for wealth preservation.

I've heard people estimate, under a Bitcoin standard, the actual utility value of a house would be approximately 5-10% of current prices.

This is hilarious.

Feel free to share if you have any criticism of this view.

It might not work in practice, but it is certainly a big factor behind using housing as an investment mechanism.

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