Comment by sdthjbvuiiijbb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdthjbvuiiijbb | Hacker News Reader

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>A land tax means that you don't own property but rent it.

A few comments:

1) we already have property taxes so I don't understand the objection; a land value tax is just a property tax with a different way of assessing value.

2) I don't think this idea of "not owning property, only renting it" is actually that crazy if you take a long term view over it. Land is a finite, shared resource. We already acknowledge that you don't have absolute rights over land that you own in the same way you do over, say, a toaster. We place all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with it, we tax its ownership, we have eminent domain laws, etc.

The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.

>Land is a finite, shared resource.

Everything is a finite shared resource.

That's the point of ownership.

>The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.

The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.

> The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.

Yup. And despite the claims made that it's a solution for the common folk, the people who "own" and can make decisions about the land will be the megarich, so it will be feudalism, with rent due on the land you own.

No, some resources aren't shared (for example, human capital: things that I know how to do aren't shared, since nobody can 'borrow' my knowledge) or are effectively infinite (for instance, you can travel arbitrarily far into outer space and not run out of space).

What do you think an income tax is? Its the shared resource from human capital. It doesn't have to be homogenous or even equal to be shared.

> Everything is a finite shared resource. > That's the point of ownership.

I think the point is that (up to a limit that we're a long way from reaching) we can make more toasters to satisfy any additional demand that arises for toasters. But we can't make more land to satisfy any additional demand that arises for land. So we have to share the land in a way that we don't have to share toasters.

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