Hacker News Reader

Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds"

— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1797

View on HN

This is of course why Smith argued for a tax on the undeveloped value of the land. Sadly not easy to work out, but much harder to avoid and much fairer in the sense that the undeveloped value of your land is that part which benefits most from the services provided by the state.

People consume state services. Not land.

And people who own more valuable land benefit proportionally more from state services.

And they pay more property tax.

Yeah, that's correct.

But property tax also taxes improvements that the owner made themselves. This disincentivises improving land too much.

The whole thing with Georgists and a land value tax is that it's specifically unearned wealth due to increases in unimproved land value that are taxed more.

The idea is the more and better improvements your property has the more you can afford to pay. I figure 50% of the reason they want a permit for any little thing is to ensure the tax assessor has a fresh view of the current state of improvements!

Sure, and you can say the same for sports cars, stocks, cell phones, yachts, and basically anything that can be bought and sold.

You aren't permanently consuming a portion of the most important finite resource in a state (the land) by buying a cell phone or a sports car. You're certainly taking advantage of public resources and services on a global scale with those other purchases, which I also think is worth addressing. But in the case of land ownership the correlation is very local and easy to draw.

But it's not easy to draw the correlation between land usage and state resource usage. There is basically none because land doesn't use resources. People do.

Your argument confuses cause and effect. People that gain large benefits from the state do so because they are rich. And because they are rich they can afford expensive land.

The "land doesn't use resources" argument seems a bit out of nowhere, because we've been talking about people the whole time here - people's ownership of land. That's also why I mentioned valuable land and not large land. Land derives its value from proximity to other valuable things, and will be developed more densely the more desirable it is in that regard, putting proportional strain on public services and resources like utilities, roads, policing, etc. There's a clear cause and effect here in terms of land value and incentive to develop, and it's an advantageous route for taxation because it would be difficult to game.

Not just the services provided by the state. The unimproved value of your land also depends on the value of the properties / land around your land. Which is even more of a reason to implement a land-value tax.

In the United States, we call that “property tax”.

I think a lot of people, especially lifetime renters, don’t understand that. Between property tax and maintenance/improvements, land ownership is a burden in many ways.

Not really, property tax is based on the current value, which in theory includes all development.

"In theory" because in California there are strategies for doing renovations without triggering a reassessment.

So property taxes are even higher than land value taxes? Because they included land plus development.

Property taxes dissuade development, because the higher the value of that specific property the higher the tax.

Land value taxes encourage development because the tax is levied on the _unimproved_ value of the land, so you're incentivised to maximize the value of the improvements of the property.

At least that's the theory.

Yes, really. The property tax is a privilege tax paid in exchange for exclusive use of the land. That it is calculated on a basis that includes improvements is a truly meaningless distinction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com