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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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The recent Georgist uprising in the rat-sphere seems to be spreading outward, and gathering steam if anything. Lars Doucet, who wrote the original ACX post that blew up, is now releasing a book called Land is a Big Deal which summarizes his writings thus far.

There was also a major takedown of Detroit land assessment practices by a major land parcel data collector, ReGrid that dropped a few days ago. Major takeaways:

  • Property tax assessment is widely variable - some houses have *double* the tax burden of identical houses literally across the street.
  • Landowners tend to have far better valuations (i.e. pay less taxes) than homeowners, probably because they have more time/incentive to protest valuations.
  • Poor taxing and tax foreclosure in Detroit are likely a large part of why the city has fallen on such hard times in recent years.

In addition, some fairly mainstream political candidates such as Chloe Brown who's running for Mayor of Toronto, seem to be gaining steam. Land value tax is a large plank in her platform.

I got interested in land reform through the original series of ACX posts, and frankly I'm surprised how interesting the problem is and how overall neglected the topic seems to be. Even extremely intelligent and well read folks I talk to about it are surprised when they learn that land value is usually just pulled out of thin air - the industry standard is to just take 25% of the purchase price and not give a shit about location or any other factors, which seems bizarre upon a critical review.

I've seen some discussion about Georgism/LVT here, but curious if anyone else has been following this?

Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.

Edit: For those new to this idea, a Land Value Tax in it's most basic form simply says we should tax away the value of the land, and only let people who sell land profit off of the 'improvements' they make, such as buildings, restorations, etc. For instance if you bought a piece of land and tried to sell it 1 year later off pure speculation, doing nothing to the land, you would not receive any profit.

Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?"

Still low-effort is "it's communism, but only with land". But given how bad communism has turned out, I think it's sufficient. The Georgist LVT is equivalent to the government owning all the land and leasing it out to the highest bidder.

The Georgist LVT is equivalent to the government owning all the land and leasing it out to the highest bidder.

You say that like it's a bad thing, but shouldn't we want land to be controlled by the people who can create the most value on it? How is that different to landlords owning all the land and leasing it out to the highest bidder?

but shouldn't we want land to be controlled by the people who can create the most value on it

No more than we should want cars to be controlled by the people who can create the most value using them.

Why not? I think it would be better for cars to be controlled by say, families, or people with long commutes, as opposed to students or people living in cities, who would get less use out of them. This isn't a hard principle - I'm sure there are plenty of individuals in either situation who might get more or less value out of owning a car, depending on their circumstances.

By definition it's best for things to go to the people that will best use them. But there are issues with the distribution process as well as vast second-order effects. A few problems off the top of my head:

  1. Who is distributing these cars and what is their criteria? What kind of overhead does the distribution process have? Surely there will be many mistakes made if we know anything about the government.

  2. What are the effects on incentives? Many people only work because they want to buy nice cars. How will economic productivity and mental health be impacted?

  3. What are the effects on existing markets? Vast markets (dozens of billions of dollars) exist just to get people from place to place--Uber, doordash, taxis, etc. Not to mention car companies who are now basically selling cars to the government rather than to people.

  4. Is there potential for corruption? Why spend a billion dollars on marketing when you can spend $100 million bribing the right official for 10x the effect?

Anyways there's a VAST difference between wanting a particular state of affairs, and wanting a government policy that you believe will lead to that state.

I didn't say anything about government policy.

Oh, come on man. The context is obvious, and earlier you were talking about the government specifically leasing land out, so it's not exactly a logical leap. Nobody's going to take the fight to your motte that "people who will use resources best will use resources best."

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