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Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn't provide any reasons why a property owner should want lower property taxes; why would you want to constrain prices and prevent speculation?

I don't own any property myself and am sympathetic to the idea of raising property tax, but many arguments for LVT/raising property taxes don't paint a convincing argument for why property owners should vote against their self interests.

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This is totally my personal bias, but I'm unsure that speculation has a positive value in the housing market, and I think governments should largely try to ensure that as many people as possible can afford homes, rather than ensuring that people can profit off the sales of their homes.

In the United States, people have long seen real estate as a path to wealth (unlike Japan, for example), so it's difficult to reason that people's primary homes shouldn't be their escape hatch into retirement (e.g. the dream of someone buying a house in 1980s Palo Alto and selling it in 2022).

There isn't one. Land, and thus real estate, is an inherently limited pie, so any market disbalance like what we have right now can only be corrected by taking some of the pie away from those who have too much of it. The only argument you can make to the former is that it's fairer that way. If they don't find it persuasive at face value, you can remind that, once enough people are sufficiently desperate to reach for torches and pitchforks, property owners would lose a lot more that any such tax.

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