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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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One might equally say (and indeed Robert Nozick and others have said) that taxing income is slavery insofar as it forces people to do (fractional) unpaid labour, with the threat of force as ultimate guarantor. In both cases, I think it is a form of what Scott has called the worst argument in the world. If it did turn out that income tax was legitimately conceptually very close to slavery or LVT to Communism, it would be entirely reasonable to say, “huh, I guess at least one form of slavery/Communism is relatively unproblematic”.

Income taxes aren't slavery because they don't force you to work. A 100% land value tax really would be like confiscation of property-in-land.

Of course they force me to work. Without income taxes, I’d be already retired, instead, I have to work for couple more years.

Yeah, the income equivalent would be a... education-scaling poll tax, which would 100% be considered unacceptable by the exact same people pushing this. George Mankiw once trollishly proposed taxing height in a similar way, since it correlates so closely with earning potential.

The fact that human capital can't be easily taxed is pretty close to a grand unified theory of 21st century American politics, really.

The Georgist LVT is not fractional; it really is equivalent to the government owning all the land.

People keep bringing this up, but doesn't the government already own all the land? You have to pay property tax on it...

The distinction here is that the government is capturing the appreciation of land, or value not directly added by the landowner.

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