Thread 512260158

Land value taxes obliterate the ability of landlords to extort your hard earned wages.

This is not a property tax. Property taxes tax the value of the building and disincentivize growth. Land value taxes only tax the land value.
When real estate prices rise, is it because the buildings got magically better? No, it's because the land value increased.
That land value is the wealth generated by the productivity of the country and belongs to everyone, but landlords capture that value through extortion.

For example, take a landlord with a sharecropping farm. The landlord extorts the hard earned wealth that the tenants create. What gives him this power? Private ownership of land values.
If the landlord was taxed at exactly the amount he could lease his land to the tenants, then he can no longer make any money from extortion. He cannot pass the tax onto his tenants, because then they'd leave due to being unable to afford to live on the land.
That tax revenue can then be redistributed as UBI.

Sharecropping never ended. Today, people either rent or own their housing. When you rent, you pay the land rent to your landlord every month. When you buy, you pay an enormous land value sum to the previous owner for the right to extort rent on the land - even if you never rent it out. You're already paying the land value tax, it just goes to the landlord instead of society.
If land rent values are taxed at (ideally) 100%, then people will no longer be enslaved by modern sharecropping.
This is why no matter who you vote for, nothing gets better. Land values keep rising, and so rent rises, then land gets owned by an ever decreasing amount of people. The landlords extort out all the wealth the country generates.

Henry George developed Georgism, which describes this new system. Singapore is one of the best examples of his ideas being put into practice. They're not fully Georgist, but much of their economic policy is inspired by Georgism. It's a big reason why they're so wealthy.

Great point Anon.
I'll make a note about Land Value Tax > Property Tax.
I have heard of Georgism before but haven't looked into it.
Is it a long read? I already have a massive backlog.

Nevermind he's against patents and intellectual property in general.
I'm just going to read up on LVT and leave it at that.

>>512260158 (OP)
Taxing work, even progressively is fucking retarded. Taxing wealth makes the most sense.

We should if anything be subsidising work. Work makes the world great. Maintaining wealth costs work. Hearing from doctors, "I'd work more, but I'd have to pay more taxes". Instead of spending time working, they're thinking about what to invest in, it's all so tiresome.

Taxes go up, rent goes up.

Banks and Jewish Leftists go mushugana!

>>512260569
Progress and poverty - Henry George's main book - is a bit long.
There's lots of shorter resources on Georgism, along with some news websites.
This website has a book review of progress and poverty. It's somewhat long, but readable in an hour or so.
https://gameofrent.com/content/progress-and-poverty-review

>>512260905
Of course it's an American defending landed gentry. Why did you even rebel in 1776, if you were just going to speedrun 18th century British politics in the 20th/21st century.

>>512260875
The land rent you pay is a tax on work, but it goes to your landlord instead of society.
Taxing land rents and returning them to the people as a UBI is giving the wealth the people created through their work back to them.
Landlords can still make a profit if they provide a valuable service, such as running an apartment complex. They can no longer make money through extortion.

>The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.
- Adam Smith, wealth of nations

>Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public con-science, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!
- Winston Churchill, https://landvaluetax.org/comment/blog/history/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can/

>>512260905
Rent goes down because now people cannot hoard land hoping for a better sale price. Land will be put to a productive use, or else it will have to be sold because of the tax. It becomes far easier to build housing, particularly when combined with YIMBY initiatives.

>>512260158 (OP)
>nooo the government shouldn't be able to seize your property
>just let it seize your land, with your property on it, instead!
Land value tax is marginally better than property tax but still garbage tax system for protecting the right to own property. It still allows government to arbitrarily raise your taxes past the point of your ability to pay them, then seize your home for lack of payment.
A much fairer system is progressive consumption taxes. It even manages to make taxation voluntary if you only tax luxury goods, allowing people to avoid taxes by not over-consuming.
From the perspective of pro-liberty, which is *supposedly* the thing that libertarians care about, this makes more sense.

>>512260158 (OP)
Property tax taxes land value also dumbass.

>>512264510
It is an issue with land value taxes, but generally assessment is done by the county, not the federal government, so there's a lot less of an ability for the government to just choose to take your property.
There's also variations of land value taxes that attempt to compensate property owners for any lost value, possibly by increasing the dividend to pay back construction costs.
In any case, a land value tax system is far superior to what we have now. People lose their homes all the time due to defaulting on their mortgage. This would be basically eliminated with LVTs. Homelessness would be basically gone.

The problem with other tax systems is that they don't address the land extortion problem. If you don't fix land, then any wealth unlocked by fixing other economic policy will just be extorted out of the workers and into the hands of the landlords.

>>512264649
Property taxes do have a land component, but the tax rate is far too small. They also tax improvements, which is horrendous if you want good infrastructure and plenty of housing.
A 100% land value tax would result in the market price for land (not property) being 0. People would buy land according to how much tax they're willing to pay, rather than by how much wealth they can extort from the community.

I love discussions on forms of taxation as it reveals a lot about government and confused understandings of its purposes.

Interesting scenario:
>a private company buys a large, undeveloped island and builds basic infrastructure. The company invites people to live on the island permanently. The company will protect the islanders from bandits, keep order, and encourage prosperity through various initiatives.
How should the company charge the islanders to pay for these things?

You're making it too specific. Georgism per se is anachronistic in today's world. But the gist is correct: tax scarce resources only. That means taxing land ownership, oil extraction, access to waterways, etc.

>>512265223
The company can take out a loan to pay for the initial costs. Then the company can charge rent to the tenants for its services. The rent will initially include the loan payments, possibly spread out over decades.
The company will have to pay a land value tax on the island, this will come from the rent the tenants pay. Then the LVT will be redistributed to everyone living on the island.
If the company was a nonprofit or fully owned by the people living on the island, then the LVT may be unnecessary.

There have been corporation-towns that worked this way as an attempt to create a Georgist society. One notable example is Fairhope, Alabama.