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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

Cases get caught up in court because for the most part government agencies try to rip up contracts without paying and they often lose. Most Farmers have a price that they willingly pay to give up their Perpetual water rights.

In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.

Similarly, it looks unfavorably on taxing someone out of business to avoid buying their property. This is because it's essentially a workaround for the former. If the state want's mike_d's house, They cant impose a 200% property tax on to force him to sell

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> In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.

For the poor: Civil Asset Forfeiture "We'll take what we want, when we want, without trial."

For the rich: "Sorry sir, here's a blank check, how much do you want to get paid to not waste water?"

I don't like civil asset forfeiture either, but it is the exception not the rule.

We should work to get rid of asset forfeiture, not work to normalize arbitrary seizure

No, you're right, CAF is the exception, the rule is that poor people are too poor to own perpetual exclusive property rights so they have to pay the rich people who do own those rights whatever they can get away with asking.

And your solution is CAF for all people and all assets?

What are you trying to say?

Do you think a legal system where the government can simply take anything it wants on a whim will end up better or worse for the poor and powerless?

A system where land can’t be owned by an individual but instead pay an annual rent based on the unimporoved value of that land, acknowledging they commons is owned evenly by every citizen

Said around bong rips in the dorm. This will never happen unless you’re willing to die for it.

this is a complete non-sequitur, But even in a gerogist land-value tax system doesnt solve the problem of government seizure.

Somone can be paying the full rent unimproved value of their land, and the government might decide to void their lease and turn over all of their land, improvements, and work to someone else.

The only thing that stops this is if governments respect the contracts they enter into, be they established property rights (in our system), or land lease contracts (in a Georgist system).

Perhaps you're not yet familiar with the Urban "renewal" effects on ethnic families and the destruction of generational wealth transfer on those same families. Emminent Domain>Apropriate compensation doesn't work as you imply. Tl;dr They were kicked out of the gentry by having to accept below market compensation for the homes they rightfully bought and owned which consigned them to renting thereafter.

[1]https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-residents-discuss-lasting-in...

[lots more]https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=urban+renewal+eminent+domai...

It happened, but primarily in the 1950s-1980s. Thankfully, racist use of eminent domain has drastically decreased since.

Now you have more garden-variety free market development corruption, where "We buy ugly houses" companies transfer ownership en mass to enable gentrification or capture value from unannounced city infrastructure improvements.

Unfortunately, the obvious solution (strengthening property rights) effects its own drag on city improvement by empowering one-asshole-with-the-last-necessary-parcel.

>willingly pay to give up their Perpetual water rights.

Why would any farmer in California, making bank because they have basically free water, give that up, for ANY single payment?

Why would any farmer in California ever sell their land (to which the water rights are linked) for ANY single payment? Or, really, why would any landowner anywhere, getting money from rent, would give that up for ANY single payment? Of course, there is a price for that.

Even a truly perpetual guaranteed income stream is worth a certain finite single payment, that's how rates of return work given the standard assumption that future money is worth less than cash in hand now.

Because you can offer more money than expected future value.

Say a farmer with free water can make $1m a year from his farm, working hard on it.

So offer him more than $1m a year. Buy it outright for $100m and they'll start to jump on it. Index funds on that would return more than $1m a year with no digging.

> In general, the US legal system legal system does not allow forced taking without appropriate compensation.

Nothing is being taken away. It is closing a loophole.

> If the state want's mike_d's house, They cant impose a 200% property tax on to force him to sell

Because laws can't target individuals, only classes of behavior which a tariff would.

Nothing is being taken away from Mike_D, we are just closing the loophole where he had a house. We're not targeting Mike D the specifically, just the behavior of living at his address.

More generally, these aren't loopholes. They're often clear and explicit laws that specify exactly who has the right to water. They are often explicit contracts signed by the government. Some are as explicit as you have purchased the right to use 100% of the water from this River for all of time, or you are guaranteed x amount of water at y cost for a hundred years.

Sellers remorse is not the same as a loophole.

At some point in the history of Mike D's hypothetical property, the government acknowledge the private land grant. The law has written and interpreted acknowledges the transfer of property from owner to owner overtime. Changing the law to unwind property rights is an example of ex-post recontracting.

The same is true with water rights codified and law and case law

Imposing a protective tariff on goods that are against our interest to sell isn't at all comparable to a 200% property tax

It depends on the interest.

If the interest is "we want their water so that we can use it instead" then it very much similar. This is very different than if the purpose of the alfalfa tarrif was somehow National military security, and cities getting more water was simply an unintended a side effect, not the primary purpose

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