Countries with No Property Taxes Where You Own Your Home | Hacker News Reader

Countries with No Property Taxes Where You Own Your Home

nomadcapitalist.com

6 pointsNoRagrets13 comments

I'm not sure why he is so mad at property taxes. Just buy land with an abandoned building on it in the US and demolish the building and watch your property tax bill drop while the value of the land goes up and you end up displacing any potential resident.

Oh, right because the biggest problem the guy writing this is facing taxes on his many properties.

UK and Australia don't count? You pay stamp duty, but that is up front. And council taxes / water and sewage, but they are utilities not taxes on the property per-se and are relatively small compared to the property price.

"council taxes / water and sewage"

The immediate question that comes to mind: Can you opt out of those to do your own thing?

If not, then imho they're taxes.

Good question. Quick research says looks like you can’t. So yes it is a necessary tax for owning a property. In the UK a tenant would pay it which makes it more like a tax on the person. But then these are countries with sales taxes too so looks like the old saying about taxes might be true. Unavoidable. In most countries that is.

A truly prosperous country should give its citizens free energy and utilities, provide infrastructure and law/order, basic services etc without taxation.

Interestingly, it has only been achieved by a handful of middle eastern countries because they have the natural resources to support its population.

I think a close second is Singapore where no one is left behind. But I classify it as a very desirable benevolent dictatorship.

So basically only dictatorships and monarchies can truly take care of its population. Looks like it’s a failure of democracy. Communism has proven to be a failure.

A tax should be imposed on the resources from the commons and redistributed to everyone. Taxation of human beings/human capital/private property is perverse. That seems to be possible in monarchies and dictatorships. Where do we go from here?

Both monarchies and dictatorships also transfer huge amount of the wealth to the autocrats. So perhaps by giving the resources to someone to exploit?

Singapore seems to be not doing that for a benevolent dictatorship. Neither are the oil producer middle eastern countries. Every citizen get a check from the sovereign fund that invests it for future returns.

That's one out of hundreds kingdoms and "democratic republics". I don't think it's possible to base a strategy on that, it seems to be an enormous outlier of extreme historical significance.

Agree. It was just wool gathering/hypothetical

Recognize that energy and utilities have both real value and real costs and discard the initial assumption.

Energy should be free. Electricity..for example..is basically like traffic passing through a street. The real cost that is our electricity bill is for wages and pensions and buildings that house employees etc.

Same with water. We have public utilities because we are no longer allowed to dig wells for potable water.

The cost of most public services is really the wages of public sector employees and costs associated with these jobs.

A thought experiment: It should be possible to provide public housing, free medical, education, utilities, basic city administration for a flat tax rate. Each city with a capped population can obtain superior standard of living by increasing taxes or reduce population if taxes aren’t sufficient.

Property tax is the fair share you pay for the value of the property, that it only has because of the society surrounding it.

Property tax is how the government makes sure that no one fully owns property.

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