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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"Getting that 0.75 acres to turn over is exactly the point. Incentivizing them to leave (or better yet: subdivide and sell the land) is good for society."

I doubt the affected person feels it's good. Quite frankly, the land value tax ideas seem absurd to me. It's just another redistribution scheme - work hard, retire, get forced off your land via tax. It seems it's the government's and everyone else's desire to just drain people until they have nothing. Make other's lives harder to make your own easier, seems to be the motto of today. It feels like mob rule to me.

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You seem to be overlooking that in that scenario, your land has appreciated considerably. If you sell, you'll net a gain; if you don't want to sell despite the gain, you can borrow against the property to pay the tax.

Here's the thing to understand: anyone buying property now in a popular area, where prices have been increasing rapidly for the last two or three decades, is effectively paying an LVT. The thing is, they're not paying it to the locality, which could use it for infrastructure and services; they're paying it to the previous owner, because the higher purchase price means a higher mortgage payment. That's redistribution too.

It's not solely a redistribution scheme. It's based on the fundamental principle that the government is the ultimate owner of all land, and private individuals are simply renters. If you accept this to be true and good, then it makes perfect sense. If you are the type that wants to be non dependent on the government, it is deeply grating.

"If you accept this to be true and good oh, then it makes perfect sense."

One can accept that the government owns the land while simultaneously believing that the government can abuse that power, just like a bad landlord can.

I don't disagree, But I do think the idea that the government, not individuals, is the ultimate owner of the land is a fundamental assumption of LVT. Not all people believe this.

"ultimate owner" is too broad a brush. Long and detailed debates went on for generations over this. The origin of the USA is in the right of States to determine quite a lot of the details. Federal taxation is only a hundred years old here. Texas and the mid-west are different than California which is different than Florida.

Nevada for a short time had the option of getting allodial title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title#Nevada

Proper use of allodial title and homeowner's exemptions could go a long way.

I had never heard of this, super interesting, thanks.

The fundamental assumption of LVT is that society should be the owner of the land - i.e. that the land is commons. Government can be a manager of that land, but it only has such powers because the shareholders (everyone) vest that power in it.

The basis for this assertion is that land supply is fundamentally very scarce, so this is zero-sum game. If some have too much, others have little, and the former can extract substantial economic rent from the latter.

I don't think you can avoid the government ownership of land, at least within the US.

If its not the governments, it still belongs to the natives the government stole it from. The individual's legitimacy comes from the government's claims over the land

"it still belongs to the natives"

Even that could be debated. Some tribes also subscribed to the right of conquest, such as the Lakota. Not a pretty thought but just thought it was worth mentioning.

Why can't a government have a legitimate claim then sell it to an individual?

Your "fundamental principle" is fundamentally illegal in the US, at least according to the Fifth Amendment (leaving aside the fact that the Constitution is a dead letter).

>It's just another redistribution scheme

More starkly, it seems to me that it's a redistribution scheme that exists primarily to enrich those who already have abundant capital. Who's going to be building and owning those high density structures afterwards? Not the people who are getting displaced from their homes, I suspect.

In short, it feels as though we're being told that it is right and just that you should be driven from your own home, so long as there exists some millionaire who would like to tear it down and build an apartment building in its place.

People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived. They are pretty successfully standing athwart capitalism’s most powerful firms, going toe to toe with people who have hundreds of billions of dollars on the line (in terms of Silicon Valley’s capacity grow and add headcount, not just the real estate firms who would participate in that) and conceding a battle here or there but largely winning the war. At the same time their wealth increases tax free year over much more than a FAANG senior engineer or middle manager makes pre tax. These are not sympathetic underdogs.

> People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived.

This is about as far from true as it can get.

Ordinary working class people who just happened to buy a cheap house in a place that many decades later became a hot-spot of real estate development.. are still ordinary working class people. Often very poor, even.

I’m sympathetic to the view that having millions of dollars “doesn’t count” when they’re all tied up in living in an ordinary home. But then we would have to apply the same cost of living adjustment to tech workers, which most people think is ridiculous. (“I’m not rich, you see, there is no money left after I have spent it all.”) They have the option to walk away with millions. They choose not to. That is a form of spending. These millions are both absolutely larger than what “high income” workers can accumulate, and from a higher-class source (investment and politics vs. labor).

> are still ordinary working class people

I don't agree. If you own an asset worth a million dollars you are not working class. You may choose to work, but you are not forced to. IMO working class means you need to work to live. Choosing not to sell you home is not being forced to work in order to afford necessities.

And the trillion-dollar real-estate investment firms who will happily extract rent from an enormous, new, permanent rental class, in perpetuity?

I’m sure they appreciate your support.

I hope they do. They're great. I make sure to work with these firms and not local families for my own residential needs because I don't want to put money in the pockets of evil people playing anti-social strategies. It is stomach-churning to know that many of the same people who line up at the microphone on Wednesday night to block development would then call me back on Thursday morning to respond to my inquiries on their rental listings. With the corporates I am at least paying someone to fight against entropy to bring homes into existence, not just to maximize what they can extract from what they bought in the 70s.

> People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived.

If you imply "all" then I simply need to find one counter example to prove your statement wrong. I know people who have sold their homes in the middle of a city to make way for high density housing and they are not "the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived".

The end game of these LVT policies is that we will all be living in apartments and paying rent in perpetuity. When we die our kids will take on the burden of that rent. This is how it works in Switzerland today. All apartment buildings are owned by private investment firms. A key feature of the USA is the ability to build generational wealth through land ownership.

The affected person doesn't feel it's good when an apartment building gets built next door to their single family if the land isn't theirs either. NIMBYism around density gives us the situation that we're in now - where low density can't support city services and no one wants to allow higher density.

> work hard, retire, get forced off your land via tax.

That’s not how it works. The more you get paid, the more you can pay land owners.

When demand is higher than supply prices rise to capture all excess income.

Do you have an argument against redistribution that isn't "I disagree with what the public wants"?

The masses are asses. We shouldn’t just do things because the most people want it. Thats called tyranny by the majority.

I personally believe it'd be great if people like you could completely divest themselves from nation-states. You don't want to contribute to a commonwealth, that's fine, you can rough it over there and live a sad, cold, hungry existence.

The vast majority of the comforts of modern life are afforded specifically and only because other people contribute to the common cause. You reject your responsibility to contribute to same but gleefully consume the benefits which are allocated to you. What an ass.

Everyone wants to believe they'd be great survivalists. Very few appreciate the level of knowledge and skill needed to do it alone. Even fewer can ever gain all that knowledge and all those skills. There's a reason humans organize into packs: division of labor is nothing less than a paradigm shift in productivity for groups of people. Civilization today is that same basic concept scaled up to support your consumptive ass along with the rest of humanity.

I personally feel it’d be great if people like you could stop thinking that all property is inherently society’s property and that I should be thankful society allows me to reside on it.

We are all in it together, but we will all be better off when others stop trying to appropriate everything from me and give it to others just because they want it.

I work hard for what I have. I shouldn’t have to have it taken away if I don’t continue to work (add value) into perpetuity.

> I shouldn’t have to have it taken away if I don’t continue to work (add value) into perpetuity.

You continue to derive value in perpetuity (from living in a society where we collectively pitch in to make it nice); why should you not continue to contribute to it?

If you want to stop working, save enough to cover your future obligations.

Land cannot actually be personal property. Why should it be? You didn't make it. Is it fair that whoever got there first gets to use this limited resource in perpetuity? Even under feudalism you got to keep your land under certain conditions like sharing some of your crop in taxes and contributing to the common defense. Unless you're strong enough to be a sovereign state, land ownership has always been more like a license than something you actually own.

"you can rough it over there"

Over where? Organizations (gov, corp, etc) always grow and want more power. There is no place free of it or opt-in only.

"Everyone wants to believe they'd be great survivalists."

I think this is a gross misconception. I doubt most people want to be survivalist. It's possible they just want less government telling them what to do, especially in their private life. You could have a minarchist government where people want to contribute to their government/community. We see this to an extent in rural areas.

"Less government" still has taxes, so I'm not sure how your comment is connected to the one from the previous commenter.

Not OP, but speaking for myself: I want to contribute to a commonwealth, but any modern nation-state is a very perverse construct that doesn't really deserve that word. There's no commonwealth without a true democracy, and voting for people who supposedly represent you every few years isn't that.

> We shouldn’t just do things because the most people want it.

I actually agree. "Should" is such a terrible word that I don't think we should use it at all. But we do do the things that most people want, because that is by construction the primary desire on a societal scale. You are part of a bigger machine, whether you like it or not.

> Thats called tyranny by the majority.

Really funny that American neo-con reactionaries have introduced such a concept. Anywhere else, it's just called "democracy".

>>> Thats called tyranny by the majority.

>Really funny that American neo-con reactionaries have introduced such a concept. Anywhere else, it's just called "democracy".

Your bias is showing... "Neo-con reactionaries" didn't introduce the concept. John Quincy Adams first did in 1788. It was popularized by John Stuart Mill in 1859.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Most democracies have some mechanism in place to prevent majorities to change too much at one and prevent abuse of minorities. One example many share is a constitution that needs more than a majority to change.

Do you? Because depending on the country, the "public" are existing home owners and those wanting reform the minority.

I am having trouble finding statistics on the proportion of homeowners in any given country. The available statistics I can find are based on "owner-occupied homes" which is not comparable.

What do homeowners want? Well, they don't want higher home prices if no one is around to support the local economy. So clearly they want some level of distribution of access.

Looks like about 86M owner occupied homes out of 141M total housing units. So likely more than half depending on the distribution of household members.

"What do homeowners want? Well, they don't want higher home prices if no one is around to support the local economy. So clearly they want some level of distribution of access."

I'd imagine that only applies for a small area (SV, NYC). Outside of that area, it's not a real issue (people don't talk about that in the areas I have lived).

I mean in a literal sense, hoarding all the goods means no one will be able to produce anything for your consumption. Unless you set up a serfdom, that is.

"Do you have an argument against redistribution that isn't "I disagree with what the public wants"?"

I'm a part of the public, and I don't want it. I imagine there is a sizable number of others that don't want it too.

We could just force people to do whatever we want because a majority wants it, but that's no different than mob rule.

So far I haven't heard a compelling argument that this approach would solve more issues than it causes. The precise implementation would influence this greatly, but it isn't well defined. If we want to control housing prices in specific locations, I think a better approach is to cap the number of jobs in an area based on its carrying capacity. This would also provide more even distribution thorough out the state/country, reduce infrastructure concerns, and reduce property prices. But good luck convincing the politicians - they already like attracting jobs/companies by offering tax breaks, zoning variances, etc.

> We could just force people to do whatever we want because a majority wants it, but that's no different than mob rule.

That's not mob rule, that's simple majority rule. We have access to other forms of consensus algorithms, but so far simple-majority seems to be the most anyone can stomach. That is very unfortunate.

> would solve more issues than it causes.

That's not the metric though, right? The metric is: are things better under that system vs this one? We want to measure whether B(enefits)2 - C(osts)2 >= B1 - C1, not whether B2 - C2 >= 0.

I strongly agree with what I think you're implying, which is that we need more metropolitan areas, but I think we are not going to get very far with limits. You will get a lot more participation and a lot less tumult (not to mention orders of magnitude less bureaucratic overhead) if you offer carrots rather than sticks. People management is a real consideration: people are not identical particles subject to the continuum hypothesis.

No, I think the affected person is happy making a killing on their real estate investment. Property taxes are linked to property values, if the value of your home goes up so high that property taxes are unaffordable then their must have seen significant gains in their real estate values.

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