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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32850 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.

Land value taxes are good because they're extremely efficient and minimize deadweight loss in the tax system (intuition: Taxing something means you have less of it because you're causing a marginal decrease in the supply of that thing, whether it's labor, capital, or consumption goods. New land is not generally produced, so taxing land value minimizes the loss from that decrease in supply).

100% land value taxes are no more just than 100% taxation on anything else and are a form of paternalism at the end of the day.

100% land value taxes are no more than 100% taxation on anything else and are a form of paternalism at the end of the day.

Could you clarify this?

"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".

"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?

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