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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32852 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.

LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale. If the state fairly compensated the current owners for what was taken, it would be so mind-bogglingly expensive no-one would suggest it.

Sure, all taxes involve the state taking some amount of property that was previously private. A full LVT, though, is a 100% wealth tax on one particular type of wealth; it's like the state deciding to arbitrarily bankrupt anyone with brown hair.

If that's the case then income tax is like the state siezing humans and taking rent from their labour.

When income taxes were introduced did they compensate the owners of human capital for reduced future income streams?

Yes, yes it is.

Suppose, as some LVT proponents suggest, we replace income taxes with a full LVT. This returns a huge amount of human capital to young people, who are now free to work for themselves. They'd planned around paying tax on their earnings, so now they get to retire young.

To compensate, it seizes a huge amount of actual capital from old people, who already did the work, bought a house, and now lost most of what they paid for it. If their retirement plan didn't involve paying rent on a house they thought they owned, they're out on the street.

Perhaps you think this arrangement is perfectly fine? You can see how it seems a little self-interested, though.

Yes 100% woukd be a wealth transfer. I think the current system has gone the other way, young people have to work many more years to transfer wealth to the old.

So.. we should aim to even it out a bit. Let's haggle on the percent and timelines

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