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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32879 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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"We know better than you how you should use your land", is roughly analogous to, "We know better than you what you should put in your body".

They're not analogous at all because what you put in your body, by and large, mostly affects you only. The finite nature of land is such that poor land use punishes everyone. And LVT doesn't stop anyone from using their land in the manner they chose, you just don't get to leech off the rest of the community, who are the reason your land is worth anything in the first place.

If the community takes on any responsibility at all for healthcare (as pretty much every government on the planet does), this isn't true. What you put into your body effects the costs the community may need to pay in the future for the support of your health.

"We know better than you how you should use your land"

Georgism doesn't require the government know how anyone should use any land.

That's pretty much what the 'highest value use' terminology is about.

In my understanding, under a Georgist framework the land market determines what the value is - the government is not doing any sort of communist style seizing and redistributing.

Tax based nudging isn't really market based decision making.

It's not a question of seizing and redistributing. The government has to determine what it believes the "highest and best use" of the land would be in order to determine the value of the land itself. Once the government has made that determination and levied a punitive tax on that land, use of the land for anything other than the purported "highest and best use" is nothing but downside risk, so no-one will do it.

The government has to determine what it believes the "highest and best use" of the land would be in order to determine the value of the land itself.

No way, I would not support that in any fashion. The value of the land would still be decided by the market, the government would have no say in terms of what the land is used for. Why do you think the government has to come in and determine a specific use for the land before it can be valued on the market?

Because if you set a land tax at 100% of the "land value," then the market is going to price that in. Either you declare before-hand what you think the "value" is, or people who want to make money speculating on land will find ways to attribute value to assets/improvements and away from land, wrecking your signal.

So someone cant put a peanut selling stand on a piece of super prime real estate and pay peanut stand rates while the market appreciates. If the government is never going to check, then all of my properties are actually churches and church gift shops (churches dont pay property tax).

HBU is really just a component of appraising the land's value, if there's a value in the potential for a business in X location even if the current owner doesn't intend to realize that value directly, it still increases what the property is worth.

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