How much land does a man need? (1886)
online-literature.com
online-literature.com
Interesting piece by Tolstoy’s son on how big an influence George was: https://cooperative-individualism.org/tolstoy-ilya_leo-tolst...
> He went on in the same way for three years; renting land and sowing wheat. The seasons turned out well and the crops were good, so that he began to lay money by. He might have gone on living contentedly, but he grew tired of having to rent other people's land every year, and having to scramble for it. Wherever there was good land to be had, the peasants would rush for it and it was taken up at once, so that unless you were sharp about it you got none. It happened in the third year that he and a dealer together rented a piece of pasture land from some peasants; and they had already ploughed it up, when there was some dispute, and the peasants went to law about it, and things fell out so that the labor was all lost. "If it were my own land," thought Pahom, "I should be independent, and there would not be all this unpleasantness."
Yep can't see any sort of economic ideology regarding land ownership at play here.
I didn't say the story is about Georgism, I said its influence is reflected in the short story. It's "about" greed, but it's no coincidence that the greed is specifically greed for land and that it goes into such depth about specific ownership structures of land.
Property tax is definitely more preferable to the prol and even programmer wage slave, who can eek out low taxes on a larger leisure plot by not improving it and won't be forced to drill for oil or something to pay the George tax like it held a higher averaged common value.
In many senses property tax is progressivism while Georgism land tax is a hyper capitalist steamroller that cares not you've barely been able to improve the land with a decrepit mobile home and meanwhile taxes the baron with the gold plated loan shark palace the same.
Georgism aims to take the best aspects of capitalism (market-driven optimization) while restraining some of its worst qualities (speculative bubbles driving higher prices and rents which in turn strangle the economy).
Yet even HN is full of people dreaming of the proletariat revolution
That seems pretty much right on target for HN.
The only people who "lose" are speculative land bankers and exploitive landlords.
Everything I've read about LVT is that it would indeed hurt individual regular people home owners the most.
With LVT the tax assessor is free to declare that your plot of land would be a lot more profitable with a highrise apartment building on it, so now you're going to get taxed as if one existed there. Even if all you own is an old shack.
Those who do already have homes worth astonishingly high values.
Check out ant actual evaluation of LVT, such as Lars' Doucet's. Or places where it has been implemented (Vancouver pre 1970s, parts of Pittsburgh, etc.).
Since dropping the LVT, Vancouver has used restrictive permitting and extreme downzoning to keep homeowners very wealthy, but also keep a far larger number of people from having access to land in Vancouver.
In a normal city, you don't go from sprawl of single family homes to sky shapers, you have gradual addition of duplexes, then triplexes, then a smattering of small apartment buildings, and finally, only then perhaps, taller towers in a very tiny number of locations.
This is the reality of normal development that has not been restricted by zoning. That Vancouver has so restricts housing that a skyscraper is tenable in so many locations next to sprawl homes is an indictment of the lack of so many other options in between.
Certainly not a problem for a land value tax, that's a societal problem is a city ruined by exclusionary planning.
Now, I'm not opposed to taxes, but given the choice between taxes that increase prosperity and taxes that decrease prosperity, I'm picking the ones that make us all wealthier and remove rentierism.
If you think that all taxes are "in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer" I'm not sure you have a solid understanding of taxation.
If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT. It eliminates the rentierism that creates barons. It takes their land rents and redistributes them to productive uses. That's the entire point.
Can you post links to specific analysis work of these people?
> If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT.
That's difficult to believe. The consequence of LVT is to remove regular people from owning homes in order to transfer it to wealthy corporations who can afford major developments.
I continue to be curious how LVT is supposed to be benefitial for regular people but I've yet to see any evidence in that direction.
Over the whole country, you're right.
But let's be honest, the strongest advocates of LVT are not pushing to implement it in some sleepy village in the middle of nowhere just to lower taxes on the villagers.
LVT is always brought up as a solution in expensive areas as a tool to pull people out of their homes (because there is no way they could afford the taxes so they have to move out) and give the land to corporate developers to build big apartment buildings.
My political organization that advocates for LVT is also driving through bills for social housing, not for big corporate developers.
Where do these strange ideas come from?
Here is a link to a site that is promoting LVT, so any biases they have would be in favor of LVT.
https://www.progress.org/articles/the-implementation-of-land...
Quote:
"A third possibility is for the retired persons to move to a lower-rent neighborhood, as many anyway move to assisted living or to an apartment."
We can see that it is an accepted goal of LVT to pull poorer/fixed-income people out of their homes so developers can have the land.
Land value taxes attack both of these factors. The rental value is taxed away, and appreciation is also taxed away in the form of higher taxes on more valuable land.
Land owners usually clamor the other way. They want their land value to appreciate, as it does when society progresses, technology advances, and land values remain largely untaxed. As much as I favor it, land value taxation has a self-defeating quality to it. After enactment, land values fall because land ownership would be benefit and obligation in equal measure. Suddenly, every land owner has a direct incentive to get the tax repealed so that their property value can reinflate. It's one of those collective action situations where we can't have nice things because everyone wants what is better for them and worse for everyone.
I'd much rather be taxed for my land usage than my income and spending, and not spend the majority of my working life indebted to a bank because land, one of the necessities of life, is a non-depreciating asset with considerable rental value, prone to speculative bubbles. I would rather be incentivized to use my land well by a tax rate that doesn't care what I do with it, than be punished for development through property taxes that go up if I try to use the land better (not that I could if I wanted to, but restrictive zoning bylaws are a separate problem).
Any transition to LVT would need to be done gradually to prevent our finance/insurance/real-estate-based economy from cratering. This would require collaboration and collective force of will far beyond what our ossified society is actually capable of. It's more than just tax policy, it's the idea that land appreciation belongs to the landlord rather than to the society that caused it. I'm convinced that we would sooner collapse than transform something so fundamental.
- Under the premise that a land tax should extract all value from the land leaving the improvements to the owner, it would expectedly be very high land tax near urban centers and very low taxes in rural areas. In order to maximize the return on urban plots, the builder is incentivize to build the smallest units possible in the greatest quantity. This is great for young professionals who dig living in studios, but would make family-sized housing of multiple bedrooms extremely expensive.
- What do you do for all the people who will see a massive increase in taxes? Force them to sell? I'm pretty sure that's political suicide for any politician. Or do some sort of exemption like Prop 19 al la California? Now we're back at square one.
- Who decides what the productive value of the land is? Presumably someone will need to set it, as there is no objective way to determine it (like there is with the value of raw land). Nor would it stay static over time, since improvements around a property, increase the productive value of the land. That's a huge opportunity for politics to come into play to game the valuations, and create special exclusions to buy votes.
And if you think about it, we have a quasi-land tax already in place. In CA, the tax rate is static, and most of the value of a house is in the land anyways. So owners (ignoring Prop 19) are paying a property tax based on the value of the land. I do recognize it's the market value of the land, which is different than Georgism which is the productive value of the land.
And no, Prop 19 is not effectively a land tax, it in fact yields the exact opposite effect which is appreciation in the land does not impact a landowner’s tax bill. Under LVT, fluctuations in land price directly affect the landowner’s tax bill.
* Should healthcare payers (whether private, through regulations on private insurance, or public, e.g. Medicare) be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for life-extending care for the terminally ill in great pain, thus inflicting responsibility for those rising costs on the rest of society?
* Should the elderly be spared from rising property taxes on the mostly-empty houses where they raised their families, so that they won't be forced to move, thus making housing shortages worse?
* Should we prevent employers from firing people from jobs which are no longer needed, like gas station attendants, so that those workers will have guaranteed employment, thus preventing consumer prices from falling?
And we all know that a man needs at least 160 acres and maybe two or three times this area if the lands are marginal. Pahom's first lot was 40 acres. His second lot was 135 acres, still smaller than he would have received in the US or Canada. His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
> His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
Balance in life might be the pathway to happiness and fullfillment. You need health, family & friends and of course some wealth. Not too small and also not to big. Balancing my efforts between these pillars is sometimes hard when the general attitude often is to maximize wealth. It comes down to me leaving early at work to spend time with my family or do sports while other colleagues stay and work longer hours. But in the long run, I feel like this is the right way for me.
The fact that Tolstoy was a (no disrespect meant, but I'll use the modern term: ) 'nepo baby', born and raised into nobility on his own estate with all the trappings, and then in turn begat his own large brood of noble-born nepo babies (who by-the-way were paid a special allowance by their government in order to maintain the family estate, following Leo's passing - quite the opposite of the elsewhere-mentioned Land Value Tax, then), is somehow a sad indictment of the way humanity trumpets it's hard won wisdom either during, or after, doing the opposite themselves.
That said, he was also a very good writer, and an intelligent and accomplished person in many ways.
And no worries, once you can detach the work from the creator you are qualified to judge the work. Automatically. :)
(however, they say the cynics in Chelyabinsk are such tough cookies, that they merely install big metal flaps over their tubs to keep the snow off: https://cdn-media.tass.ru/width/1020_b9261fa1/tass/m2/en/upl... )
I now, truly will never know how much Land does a man need :(
Footnote #3: The brick oven in a Russian peasant's hut is usually built so as to leave a flat top, large enough to lie on, for those who want to sleep in a warm place.
It is explained in the footnotes on the linked story.
> A lot.
Spoiler: the true answer is the last sentence in the short story.
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