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Comment by verall | Hacker News Reader

And this can be solved with real estate taxes - a disincentive from just holding land.

One of the difficulties with this is the question of how you tax an asset whose value you don't necessarily know for certain, because real estate is not fungible and its market price is only really known when that specific parcel is changing hands between unaffiliated parties. Perhaps you could apply the tax as a lien, set as a percentage of an unknown value, and deferred until it is next sold, and have the government take back ownership of the land if that percentage reaches 100%. But even this might only encourage people to trade land between agents at suppressed prices, just to pay off the tax, and then flip it at its "real" price shortly thereafter.

Every local government in America has basically figured out how to value real estate for taxation, although it's not perfect - I think that loans against a property should be limited to it's tax value as a first step, and ultimately land-value rather than improvement value should be taxed based on who else is trying to purchase the land.

For real estates, but not for other assets classes. Unless you tax the ownership of every asset.

That begs the question, is even more regulation really the best solution?

> For real estates, but not for other assets classes. Unless you tax the ownership of every asset.

Other assets are (supposedly) productive - investing in companies lets them do research, pay employees, etc, investing in property improvement (as opposed to land) gives more people nicer homes.

> That begs the question, is even more regulation really the best solution?

Even more than what? These regulations would improve things. Which particular regulation do you feel is harmful?

To summarize the thread so far, we need to create more money in circulation in order allow for more economy activity, and penalize preserving wealth in the form of capital.

Allegedly, "if you want to preserve wealth - it's easy just buy wealth (stocks, real estate, land)."

In other words, this is intentional to push people towards preserving wealth in the form of assets. But this creates issues where assets become over-valued - and some assets (real estate and land) are necessary to survive.

Your proposal is to tax the ownership of assets (i.e. the preservation of wealth) in order to ... push people back towards capital (i.e. for the preservation of wealth)?

This doesn't really compute.

You've phrased it well, especially because taxes are (to first order) deflationary, as the negative of government spending; tax revenue is effectively taken out of circulation and deleted from the economy, while government spending is (effectively) money that is printed anew.

The point is to push people towards productive assets - investments in people building things - and to generally limit wealth preservation. Unlimited wealth preservation = dynasties, which is not a goal.

Inflation is a sort of (not very effective) flat wealth tax. But inflation is necessary because in a deflationary system the best investment is holding cash, which makes everything freeze up.

Wealth should be (minimally, progressively) taxed, mainly to prevent serious distortions when someone has $1B in the bank and most have $10K.

Taxes, regulations, and subsidies on assets needed to survive (shelter, utilities, food, medicine) are necessary to keep these items available to everyone, because the market tends to break down in these situations.

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