Inheriting is the root cause of all corruption. We can never, ever, have a just society based on the principle of giving our children wealth that they did not earn nor deserve.
Even if I work my ass off, I won't be able to afford a house the same as my parents did. My only hope is that I inherit their house when they pass.
How do you figure? Are we out of land? I would argue we are not, at all.
I hate having to explain this to people, but a tax based on the value of something is called rent. Georgism is a system where the government owns all land and leases it out, but then the call the rent a "tax" to make it more palatable to people who are afraid of public ownership.
So, mission accomplished? The state already compels me to pay annual taxes based on the value of my titled real estate, my car, my income, my foreign assets, etc… I guess Im just renting it all from the state?
Mind you Im no John Birch-man here. I actually pay 42% of my income in taxes, and think real property _should_ be taxed more effectively here in AU. But jumping all the way to “ownership is theft, and taxes are double secret ownership” doesnt seem particularly useful.
You are trying so desperately to put those words in my mouth, but I will not say them as I don't know what they mean.
> taxes are double secret ownership
I'm not making an ideological point here, simply pointing out that the proposed systems are isomorphic in their objectives and execution. They both aim to increase the productive use of land by charging a periodic fee to the occupants of said land based on the market value of the land. There are two differences: the first is one of language (rent vs. tax), and the second on how the rate of this fee is determined. Under socialised land, the market price of land is the same as the fee charged. Under Georgism, the fee is charged by a bunch of politicians looking at the market price of land and trying to figure it out based on that.
Given that the two systems are essentially identical, but the second brings in undue political meddling, I see no reason to prefer it to the first solution outside of the practical situation that many people are afraid of public ownership and therefore would be more likely to vote for the worse option. Do you have any real argument for Georgism over public ownership?
You're conveniently glossing over issues like price discovery (auctions?), periodicity (annual?), and what I suspect are some pretty large inefficiencies implied by requiring continual re-bid/repurchase of existing real property vs a small proportional tax. Im an amateur, no graduate degree in economics here, but I would wager there's a reasonable amount of literature around the benefits of surety of title and depth of markets for efficient discovery to support a distributed, private, ownership & transaction model.
WRT "scary" ownership, as I said I live in Australia. I understand what crown land is, title, registry, and how we've transitioned through those ~3 times in 200 years. That's actually another example where some proclamations[4] don't quite hold up; Land ownership in Australia _is_ owned by the crown already. I merely hold (indefinite) title, so maybe 'government ownership' isn't quite the panacea? I do find our current real property and capital rate mechanisms deficient, and would appreciate something a lot closer to an annual LVT.
When you say "... the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. There is no advantage to privately owned land ..." don't act surprised if you get lumped in with those who argue against private ownership of real property.
[1] "The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing" [2] "a tax based on the value of something is called rent" [3] "Given that the two systems are essentially identical, but the second brings in undue political meddling" [4] "...the real solution has always been government ownership of all land."
You are incorrect to suspect that. The price must still be discovered in the Geogist system through market means, and the additional burden of rediscovering it to issue the tax means doing that work twice. You are on a software forum so I assume you understand computers well enough to appreciate that the effort required for this in practice is essentially zero. A system sufficient to serve an entire nation of people could be programmed by perhaps ten engineers.
> I would wager there's a reasonable amount of literature around the benefits of surety
You can't just assume someone else has made your point for you and expect me to buy that. The system of government ownership can provide any degree of surety depending on how its implemented, but in general the objective of both systems is to force people to sell land instead of hording it, i.e. to reduce the surety people have over their ability to occupy land indefinitely.
> a tax based on the value of something is called rent
This is not a redefinition of language, but a simple observation that the two things are identical in practice.
> don't act surprised if you get lumped in with those who argue against private ownership of real property.
I don't care how justified you feel in mischaracterising my views.
> so maybe 'government ownership' isn't quite the panacea?
Yes, clearly if you read my argument made thusfar it dictates that government ownership is only effective when it is leased back to people in a market fashion. "The government owns it but you have an indefinite lease with no charge" is another example of changing the language of something without changing the practice of it. In practice, you own that land.
Finally, I am going to ask that you no longer attempt to find differences between Gerogism and social ownership. When you look at the actual implementation of both systems, they are the same. Any policy in Georgism has a one-to-one equivalent policy under government ownership. In fact Georgism is equivalent to a government ownership system with the following setup:
1) Leases are indefinite.
2) A substantial upfront cost is levied against people who wish to acquire a lease, determined by the highest bidder.
3) The charge on a lease is determined by some fraction of the upfront cost on surrounding leases of buildings.
Having observed this, we can see that it could be improved by removing the upfront cost, and instead have the lease determined by the leases on surrounding buildings when those buildings are vacated and the lease is put back up for auction. Forced renewal of leases is not necessary under a government ownership system as the increase in lease prices should be enough to naturally remove under-performing businesses. However the opportunity to renew a lease gives you a positive advantage over a Georgist one: if you feel your rent is too high, you can subject it to market scrutiny by voluntarily ending the lease on the property and offering the highest bid in the resultant auction.
A home is where people feel safe and secure with their family, or by themselves.
I reject the premise of your re-definition of owning a home.
Renting gives you that power too
> how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use?
This question is why I consider the solution of a limit on ownership stupid. A person can reasonably use however many houses which they can afford to rent. It isn't up to me to decide what counts as reasonable use. It is simply a question of whether other people would be willing to pay more for some other purpose. Suppose someone wishes to purchase an entire abandoned town and can do so at a relatively low rate due to it being abandoned, I see no reason to deny them them this, yet a limit on home ownership would do precisely that.
One should also note that a land tax is another inferior solution to the problem. It is effectively a government lease on land which doesn't allow the rent charged to be determined by market forces. What makes total government ownership of land the most practical solution is that it most closely follows market principals. Usage of land is contingent on productive revenue from that land in excess of the revenue generated from alternative usages. Any other solution will fall short of the optimal allocation of resources which the market provides.
They have that in China. How's that working out for them?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
Maybe take the BS elsewhere?
https://english.www.gov.cn/services/investment/2014/08/23/co...
Point being, it's not as simple as it's made out to be and it's not dissimilar to many other countries that have a notion of underlying ownership, seperation of surface and mineral rights, cave outs for eminant domain, etc.
In this specific context it's not especially clear what the GP's "how's that working out for them" is meant to convey.
>In general, rural collectives own agricultural land and the state owns urban land. However, Article 70 of The Property Law allows for ownership of exclusive parts within an apartment building, which endorses the individual ownership of apartments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China
>Individuals cannot privately own land in China but may obtain transferrable land-use rights for a number of years for a fee.
https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china-real-...
Moreover, the devil's in the details:
( In China, your maint.loc.gov ) According to the 2007 Property Rights Law, when the term for the right to use land for residential purposes expires, the term will be automatically renewed
Both countries are more complicated than you sweepingly make things out to be.
That's why we have wealth taxes to even the playing field and encourage children of the have-nots to putting their effort in work and contributing in the system instead of on way to murdering the children of the haves for their stuff.
It's sort of protection tax the wealthy have to pay to live in a safe society that benefits them since their wealth comes from the work of the poor.
However my point is that there's a huge difference between demanding a wealth tax and the "inheriting is the root cause of all corruption" approach. Former is a measure to preserve status quo, latter is a dangerous utopia.
In a bit more details, the wealth can be created, preserved, redistributed and destroyed (i.e. failed to be preserved). Obsession with fair redistribution harms the creation and preservation of wealth, in the end there's nothing left to distribute. We saw that happen IRL.
In my view, creation and preservation of wealth is more important to get right. At least you'll have something to redistribute in the first place. And within that framework, inheritance is a good way to preserve wealth because passing it to the state inevitably destroys part of the value due to bad governance. Inheritance is also a very good incentive to create wealth, I personally wouldn't work 12 hours a day if I didn't have kids to set up in a new country where they have nothing.
So while inheritance is only a part of the whole system, I argue that it's not only humane part but a necessary one. Live country-wide experiments seem to confirm this so far.
Just checked and in argentina there is no federal tax gift, and in some provinces it's just much lower. We also have a wealth tax so that may address the gen wealth issue in another manner.
Tax is like that different in every country and hard to compare apples to apples.
The way the ultra-wealthy manage to make it entirely taxless; super evil for sure. Even so, it's not really the root - maybe a very large branch of it.
If you dig deeper and deeper at this point, your argument will eventually come to a halt, before even getting at crazy theoretical mutations.
The former does not apply to heirs, and the latter only weakly applies.
As it turns out, some of the most unique and interesting things I observe in the public sphere are owned by trust fund babies who took a different path to development (or just inefficiently left some ancient thing alone to decay). Either way, personally I appreciate this diversity in ownership of the world around me and this observation has changed the way I view the transfer of wealth through generations.
I would suggest reading more about the history of development and ask yourself why we used to make prettier buildings, but generally no longer do. Rich people have not changed.