Hacker News Reader

Comment by ultra_nick | Hacker News Reader

Housing inequality could be fixed with a land tax. A land tax makes nimbyism significantly more expensive, so they're more willing to sell property to high density housing developers.

Places like Texas, with a property tax and little zoning, would handle a concentration of wealth better. Although, it'd be even more optional with a land tax instead of a property tax.

View on HN

Austin certainly isn't handling it well.

We had affordable housing in California in the past without any pie-in-the-sky stuff like land-value taxes.

The older I get the more I think we should drop the income tax (and probably others) in favor of a wealth tax.

This idea is DOA because it always results in human interest stories on the local news with an 80-year-old grandma who lived in the house for 40 years suddenly not being able to afford her taxes. And then you get Prop. 13 to prevent that.

It's not wrong to be concerned about that in a property market where values can double in a decade.

In fact it would be foolish to buy property in such a market unless you are rich or something limits tax increases.

Just to note, Texas already has a high property tax on account of no state income taxes.

It is unclear how a land tax would specifically affect NIMBYs and not everyone. It seems more akin to a plan for almost total divestment of private land ownership.

You're talking about raw communism, whether or not you know it. It is immaterial whether or not land is forcibly taken or the (I assume federal) "land tax" is raised to the degree that no one can afford land except government subsidized high density housing developers. With this being the intent of raising the tax to whatever level it falls.

You may as well just confiscate the land and dispense with the pretense.

Before you begin confiscating land, try proving that inequality issues can be solved with parallel yet less potentially damaging measures. As a test run. For example, begin with educational outcomes. What have been the quantitative results of massive funding toward eliminating educational inequality? Metros like DC have some of the highest per student public school funds in the Nation.

The housing parallel is the failed social history of high density urban "projects". Which no one likes to live in nor to be around. And which have been a disaster for urban areas, with few exceptions.

I would say this is unfair to communism. State ownership of all land is actually totally compatible with capitalism.

How is this unfair to communism? The elimination of private land ownership and housing choice are core methods of Leninism. The only others being forced culture cleansing and imperialism.

Explain how government forced divestment from single family private land ownership is capitalism. Other than communism, you seem to be thinking of a potential action inherent within fascism.

In several of the hyper-capitalist developmentalist East Asian states, all land is merely leased from the government:

Singapore - https://stackedhomes.com/editorial/land-ownership-in-singapo...

Hong Kong - https://www.landsd.gov.hk/en/resources/land-info-stat/land-t...

Some of this might have been because of the impression Georgism had on some of the Chinese revolutionaries, including Sun Yat-Sen himself:

https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=8&post=13799&unitname=E...

It's also because, by coincidence, U.S. State Department official Wolf Ladejinsky was influenced by Georgism. He was certainly no fan of communism, as he was a Ukrainian refugee from Bolshevik rule!

https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/10uzddk/the_georg...

Incidentally, while Taiwan does not have exclusive government ownership of land unlike Singapore, Hong Kong, or mainland China, it is a very successful example of land reform (which involved confiscation):

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

https://asianometry.substack.com/p/how-the-kmt-achieved-land...

https://cooperative-individualism.org/medaille-john_taiwan-a...

It's amusing to consider that among some adherents to Henry George's theories (which largely undergird the concept of the land tax), there is a narrative that Marxist communism was a plot by neo-aristocratic parasitic monopolists to diminish the capitalist classical economics of Smith and Ricardo by sidelining Georgism (which they view as compatible with classical economics) while pushing neo-classical theories. See the work of Mason Gaffney:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23211692

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17832005

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467553

People fleeing SF are currently fucking up the Austin housing market, and it's having the same effects on Austin as it did on SF.

So don't dismiss that tech workers are a proximate cause here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com