Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

> "The seeds of the Monopoly game were planted when James Magie shared with his daughter a copy of Henry George’s best-selling book, “Progress and Poverty,” written in 1879. As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone.

A PDF of this book is available at http://progressandpoverty.org/

View on HN

> but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone.

In effect, this means state ownership, which we've later learned to be very dangerous when taken to that level.

Interesting little snippet:

> Although both advocated worker's rights, Henry George and Karl Marx were antagonists. Marx saw the Single Tax platform as a step backwards from the transition to communism.[52] On his part, Henry George predicted that if Marx's ideas were tried, the likely result would be a dictatorship.[53]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

>In effect, this means state ownership, which we've later learned to be very dangerous when taken to that level.

I dunno. Sounds like a good idea to me. The government owns all the land and rents out 10 year leases to the highest bidder in the case of contention. Currently all that rent-seeking money goes to private individuals who do diddly-squat for the public good. Should society reward sitting on land rights? No, society should award work.

  The government owns all the land and rents out 10 year
  leases to the highest bidder in the case of contention.

So car company A leases some land for $x builds a factory at a cost of $5x. Good news, jobs for the local economy and whatnot. The factory can't be moved, and they want to operate it for 30 years.

After 10 years the lease comes up for renewal. Car company A wants to renew the lease for another $x. But car company B wants to fuck with their competitors, so they put in a bid for $3x. They know they won't win so they won't have to pay (car company A don't want to lose their $5x factory so they'll have to outbid) - they just want to raise their competitors' expenses.

That happens a few times and all of a sudden nobody wants to build factories any more.

Then you realise the same thing applies to your asshole neighbour's house...

How about a Dutch auction?

It still doesn't solve the root problem that it's possible to increase land's value and we want to encourage people to do it.

Land with a house on it is worth more than land without a house on it. Land that's been cleaned up is worth more than land that was contaminated in the past.

If, a few years after you increase the land's value, all that extra value goes to the state, why should anyone increase land's value?

How about the difference in rent from one term to the next is paid to the previous tenant? The goal, after all, is not to funnel money to the government, but to not award property rights squatting.

That's a good one. I don't think these problems are insurmountable, though. With enough thought, edge cases can usually be fixed. Proposal: In the event that a financial loss is suffered by the previous tenant losing the lease, the successor must compensate the previous tenant in full.

With enough of a time buffer between the auction and the transfer this might solve the problem.

A Dutch auction, as mentioned in another comment, is an interesting modification as well.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_Theorem

"In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, spending by the government on public goods will increase aggregate land rents by an amount equal to government spending on public goods. This result was dubbed by economists the "Henry George Theorem", as it characterizes a situation where Henry George's 'single tax' on land values, is not only efficient, it is also the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures."

For what it's worth, the experiment has been run in various contexts. Here's an example of Henry George's single land tax being independently arrived at in EVE Online, and fixing a problem with land speculation, as the theory predicts:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/1899...

If you want to reduce land speculation, just tax the profits made from it.

Giving ownership of all land to a small group of political elites and their politically well connected friends, what could possibly go wrong?

Land reform and allowing people to own their land is seen as one of the primary ways of helping the extremely poor bring themselves out of poverty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar#Main_th...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com