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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36201 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Apparently the UK's entire net worth was £10.7 trillions in 2020 according to the ONS, their chief statistic agency. What's remarkable is that a whopping 60% of that is "non-produced, non-financial assets".

That's a fancy way of saying land. Why isn't this fact more well known? Should we expect it to be different for other countries? And why aren't more people talking about Georgism?

I made a top-level comment here a couple of weeks ago that tried to outline some of the major updates on the Georgism discussion in the ratsphere.

(Editing for less strawmanning.) I think that a lot of the problem is that Georgism strikes at the heart of fundamental value differences for folks. Many people seem to equate Georgism with Communism, or redistribution of wealth, which I don't find convincing.

For instance:

@bnfrmt:

LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale.

@Brannigan:

Georgism at heart is about identifying what is often the most precious possession a person can have, that most of the middle class has spent 30 years of their lives working to pay off, to render to their posterity, and stealing it from them despite the fact that they haven't really done anything wrong.

@laxam

"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".

@Westerly

This strikes me as rationalists rationalizing their own class self-interest. The same way EA just so happens to only support democrat politicians, rationalism coincidentally just so happens to work out extremely well for the types of people that are rationalists. Easy to be YIMBY when you are 25 and living in a rented apartment in San Francisco.

@naraburns

My concern with LVT is that I regard most kinds of property tax (as well as income tax) as fundamentally immoral

@The_Nybbler

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.

@MeinNameistBernd

Frankly advocating "georgism" is the "break out the guillotines" limit for me, because the victims are my people and the preparators are /r/neoliberal vampires.

These are not cherry picked responses - all of these had at least 10 upvotes, and in many cases 25+.

Some of the responses were less charitable, which has led to me getting heated on this topic, such as people literally calling me a vampire (and getting 15+ upvotes) for arguing for a type of land reform.

But isn't it rather distorting and unfortunate that people are "spending their whole lives investing in their homes" in the first place?

Agree LVT as you describe it would be very bad (although wouldn't it still be in a world w/o income tax and with 'investing in homes'?)

The point I was trying to make is - LVT or not - having a significant part of peoples' wealth be "in their homes" just seems strange? Like if you're designing an economy from scratch, nihilist governance or w/e, why would you have that? Whatever part of that isn't construction costs averaged across ownership duration just seems like misdirected economic attention, kinda? Econ 101 will explain how 'markets give efficient outcomes, which is good for all parties, so markets are good and we should have them everywhere'. How are high home prices and 'having value invested in your home' efficient, as a way of organizing the economy, vs having less expensive homes and investing in stocks or savings or smth?

The only thing I can think of is as a sorting mechanism where people use money to prove they're worth being around to other people with that much money, but surely that could be done more efficinetly.

Many, many people, who'd spent their whole lives investing in their homes, would see most of that value vanished in a puff of smoke.

Agreed, this would be a big violation of the property rights everyone signed up for. The cleanest solution I can think of (which I haven't seen mentioned by Georgists), is to pay everyone out the land value of their properties. Essentially a forced buyout of the LV part of the property.

With every property owner getting a massive tax-free cash windfall, the whole thing starts to look a lot more politically & ethically feasible imo.

It would be a painful transition, but remember the idea of Georgism is that we are constantly destroying massive amounts of value through the taxation of things we want more of (labor, capital, land improvements etc). If we've accepted this idea, we can expect a permanent boost to the economy once we've paid the ticket price. So there should be some clever financial engineering way of pulling back those expected gains into the initial payout.

I'm not sure "money-printing on an industrial scale handed directly to landlords" is all that politically feasible

It wouldn't just be "handed" to landlords, we would be buying something from them. This is how nationalizing assets generally works, you need to pay out the private owners.

Many, many people, who'd spent their whole lives investing in their homes, would see most of that value vanished in a puff of smoke.

Agreed! an instant switch from 0 to 100% LVT would be appallingly dehumanizing and unfair. I would argue for a measured approach of say ratcheting up a LVT 10% every 5 years or so, up until you hit the 60% or 80% benchmark. Hopefully this would lessen some of the burdens of transitioning while also letting us eventually reap the benefits.

My suspicion is no; state evaluation of land values for taxation already exists in various places, and it doesn't tend to value things very accurately.

This is probably the strongest argument against Georgism from a practicality standpoint. I believe that with modern technology, especially machine learning models, we can make land valuation far more accurate though. We simply need the political will to fund appraisers and assessors more, as well as care more about their accuracy. Right now in the U.S. especially their offices are an understaffed, underfunded joke. No wonder they aren't accurate.

Auction-based methods, on the other hand, are clearly designed for robots rather than people. Yes, I know, the system has a certain intellectual elegance, but if you actually tried it for real, people who aren't up on the latest housing-market trends would be getting screwed over constantly.

Ideally a profession of folks who advised people here would crop up, same as in many complex markets. Admittedly this gets a bit hazy, but I'd imagine we could figure it out and the market would eventually correct.

None of that matters, though, if we can't get there from here.

Do you still think this is true if we do a slow, decades based move to LVT?

I believe that with modern technology, especially machine learning models, we can make land valuation far more accurate though.

I feel like there would also be political resistance to "Well, the magic black box that no-one really understands says you need to pay twice as much rent this year due to circumstances outside your control." (and rightly so!)

If we raise the LVT by 10% every 5 years until it hits 80%, some quick math says this is equivalent to about a 50% instantaneous wealth tax. Which is still huge!

Specifically land wealth tax, but yeah I won't pretend that an LVT is not a tax on landowners. That is one of the main arguments for it.

So it's certainly possible, but if you want the transfer effects to be small, we're talking centuries rather than decades. Maybe that's a good idea?

It is definitely possible, I refuse to believe that this is such a hard problem. The government can do big projects and overhauls that work well, see Manhattan project, moon landing, etc. but only if there is strong political will. For transfer effects, I am fine with them being large. I'm convinced the current setup for the land market is directly disincentivizing improving land, and that has gigantic knock-on effects throughout the economy.

Thanks for pointing that out, I could definitely make my stance more clear. What I mean to say is that it is not total redistribution of wealth purely to make people equal.

Land value tax is not about getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with some totally egalitarian society, as is the goal in communism. The core point of Georgism is instead to make the land market function more efficiently, in a way Georgism is less communist than the current system, in which landowners are granted special privileges and can operate in a distorted market thanks to the State. Another way to put this is that the way we trade land is a form of crony capitalism, and Georgism aims to return a true capitalist framework to land, by using capital as a forcing function to use land efficiently.

That’s why when people equate it to Communism I find it facile and not giving Georgism a fair shake. Are you saying that any redistribution of wealth period, even if it makes markets function better, is equated with full blown Communism?

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If the principle is that taxing a thing implies granting government ownership over the thing, then why is it better to tax income than land? Frankly if I had to live in a quasi-communist state, I'd prefer the government owned all the land than all of the exchanges of value.

Putting it that way ... would you rather be a slave or a serf? I guess I'd choose serf. Though I'd prefer going back to an era when the government was small enough to be funded by alcohol taxes and tariffs. That way I'm just paying some protection money to the mafia.

So your argument against Georgism is premised on the assumption that the alternative is to abolish income tax and drastically shrink the government to a Lochner era libertarian ideal? It feels like a pretty big assumption.

What if we take that off the table, and consider the alternatives as between the actual status quo that we have today and a tax policy where tax incidence is weighted less toward income and more toward land? I think it's usually more productive to debate policy on the margins.

would you rather be a slave or a serf?

Definitely a serf. Are you suggesting that we're slaves right now?

I mentioned elsewhere I'm not really against Georgism.

I do think the OP gathered a bunch of angry responses because they didn't treat the policy change with the appropriate gravity.

I'd have preferred to start with Georgism. I'm not sure I'd like to "switch" to it, because I think in practical terms the government won't get rid of the income tax. So instead of switching we will just end up with another form of taxation.

Definitely a serf. Are you suggesting that we're slaves right now?

https://fee.org/articles/the-tale-of-the-slave/

Yes I'm suggesting that we're slaves right now. We are all owned by the state. Our labor is theirs, for a time when I was younger I owed them my life if I was drafted. I'd also rather be a serf. But as I said above I don't believe income taxes are going away. So I'd rather be a slave with some additional land owning privileges than a slave with fewer land owning privileges.

would you rather be a slave or a serf?

And of course being a employee who rents on a month-to-month basis is even better. If you assume we can't all be lords (and we can't, because useful land is scarce), everyone a free tenant is the next best thing from a pro-freedom-and-equality perspective. This is roughly the relationship between citizen and state under pure Georgism.

When you try to discuss a serious economic initiative and get met with mostly value based responses, or have people literally calling you a vampire (and getting 15+ upvotes), it's hard to feel like folks are willing to discuss Georgism rationally.

It sounds like you believe that discussing a proposal rationally must involve decoupling values from policy?

As I understand it, Georgism is a particular type of tax policy. As such, it is trying to achieve a particular end (funding government) via a particular method (land value taxation). There are many possible approaches to evaluating policy; because of the particular field, I'll start with what a professor of mine called "tax logic." It states that the overarching goal of a scheme of taxation is to maximize revenue while minimizing nth-order disruptive effects. (This is why you get so-called "tax loopholes;" it's an attempt to achieve a better fit between revenue-extraction and tolerance for revenue-extraction.)

However, the "nth-order disruptive effects" that we're trying to minimize covers a ridiculously broad field of types--we're looking at everything related to tax-tolerance, from the direct and mechanically obvious (taxing everyone at 100% of wealth crashes the system pretty immediately) to the squishy, intuitive, values-laden metrics of "taxing [activity A] at triple the rate of [activity B] seems unfair; double the rate might be justifiable, but triple is excessive." The whole point of measuring against tolerance is the insight that tax systems operate most efficiently with a high rate of buy-in; unless a high percentage of people find the overall system generally acceptable (with low-level grumbling), you're going to lose more from enforcement costs than you gain via enforced compliance.

Values-based evaluations of tax policy are essential, because if a policy does not adequately map to the values of those taxed, you don't get that buy-in, enforcement costs skyrocket for less and less return, and your shiny theoretically-perfect tax policy collapses in ruin. Tax logic is exceedingly pragmatic, and one of its cornerstones is recognizing that optimized tax policy evaluates for the society you have, not the one you want.

Interesting point, I hadn't heard of tax logic laid out in this manner before. It's not something I have thought much about, I am attracted to Georgism more on the economic basis. The idea of a tax without deadweight loss etc.

That being said I think if you take a look at the political will of the people in the U.S., with regards to land ownership, there is a growing clamor and need for housing reform. I don't know if Georgism will fix the problems we have, but it certainly seems useful enough to try. Landowners are a powerful political bloc though, so your point makes sense.

That being said I think if you take a look at the political will of the people in the U.S., with regards to land ownership, there is a growing clamor and need for housing reform. I don't know if Georgism will fix the problems we have, but it certainly seems useful enough to try. Landowners are a powerful political bloc though, so your point makes sense.

So much of that is a problem of zoning and environmental laws. Which don't seem directly related to a Land Value Tax.

Environmental laws are one thing, which leads to a whole different rabbit whole.

I'd argue that restrictive zoning laws are often the result of strong blocs of landowners, aka NIMBYs, lobbying against changes to zoning that would lower their property value. Thus creation a vicious circle.

Upzoning single-family-residential land would radically increase the price of individual lots. Under restrictive zoning a developer could only build a 0.60 FAR single-family-home with a white picket fence and a back yard for a golden retriever on that lot. Upzoned, that lot can now hold a much larger apartment building, with each unit renting for less than the house would have, but exceeding the value of the house in total.

What upzoning does is drastically increase the pressure on single-family-home owners to sell, and subject those who want to stay in the area to increased density, traffic, sight-lines into their yards and homes, loss of green space, strain on existing schools and other public services, and, to be blunt, the presence of people not rich enough to be able to afford a single-family-home in that neighborhood. Some of these worries are more morally-acceptable than others, but all of them are real, and unrelated to greed.

I think there has been a philosophy in urban planning, and a desire by urban planners to control things that has led to zoning. Land owners might sometimes perpetuate it, but mostly bureaucrats control zoning in cities.

I’d say that bureaucrats introduced it but landowners are the ones that perpetuate it. Anecdotally I’ve spoken with many bureaucrats in municipalities, many of them hate zoning laws but can’t change anything due to local politics, which are typically dominated by home owners.

Responses like "LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale." are not knee-jerk emotional responses, and they are light, not heat. That when this light is shed on Georgism, it becomes obviously (to most) a bad thing is a problem with Georgism, not the comments.

they are light, not heat

I disagree.

Here are some actual arguments against a LVT:

  • A LVT will force people to sell their homes, because people are cash-constrained

  • A LVT will force people to sell who have lived somewhere for decades, and the anxiety this creates among everyone (whether or not they are forced to sell) is a huge cost that outweighs the benefits

Arguments like "LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale" are just examples of the worst argument in the world. They're not careful analysis of values or cause-and-effect. They are simply trying to get you to associate the connotations of one idea (the government seizing property) with another (the government taxing property) with no critical analysis of the connection.

For instance, it is plainly obvious that a sales tax on cigarettes is dramatically different than a state seizing all cigarettes. Like, do I even need to state the differences? It is equally obvious that a LVT on a house is different than the government seizing the house - we already impose LVT on houses, we just bundle them with an additional tax on improvements and call it a "property tax".

Argument by analogy is, imo, usually a bad and lazy way to think and write. At best its value is as a brain-storming idea generator; definitely not as a finished thought. Alas, it is also one of the most common ways to "argue" on this very forum.

Arguments like "LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale" are just examples of the worst argument in the world. They're not careful analysis of values or cause-and-effect. They are simply trying to get you to associate the connotations of one idea (the government seizing property) with another (the government taxing property) with no critical analysis of the connection.

No. The 100% tax on imputed land rents that Henry George advocated is equivalent to the state seizing all land and renting it back at market rates. It is not similar in some contorted way, it is not an analogy; it is economically the same thing.

Really, this is just another way the quoted post is terrible.

A LVT is not equivalent to the 100% tax advocated for by George. Equivocating between the two is yet another shortcoming of the critique.

My guess is the majority of people who self-define as Georgists favour a land tax close to 100% (80% of the rent attributable to land and normal income tax rates on the part of the rent attributable to improvements is what I would favour in dath ilan, but in the real world I am not a full-on Georgist and favour incremental moves towards higher land taxes and lower other taxes).

If you accept the basic libertarian arguments that unavoidable taxes are confiscatory, and that non-sovereigns can "own" land the same way they own chattels, then full-on Georgism is indeed a confiscation of land (but not improvements), and a Georgist-inspired shift towards higher land taxes and lower income taxes is a partial confiscation of land. In fact, of course, you only ever "owned" the land at the pleasure of the State* and Georgism is a change in the terms under which the State allows you to continue "owning" it. Land taxes no more violate the property rights of landowners than Uber violates the property rights of taxi medallion owners.

  • At this point I am only making this as a factual argument, although I think it is more right than wrong as a moral argument.

How is changing the way land is taxed equivalent to the government seizing all land? None of the anti-Georgists have been able to explain this to me.

An LVT does not have to be 100%, and besides even if it is people still own the improvements aka buildings on the land. What's really being taxed is the 'locational' aspect.

To me this argument is the equivalent of saying "income tax is the state seizing all work" which I just don't find reasonable.

Income tax is the state claiming ownership over work.

Think of it this way ... for any given tax, what would it take for a private non-government actor to implement that "tax". If I was a private actor and I wanted to charge someone rent for getting to use a parcel of land ... then I would need to own that land.

If I was a private actor and I wanted to take a cut out of all the money that someone gained, then I would have to own that person like a slave.

The power to regulate is also a form of ownership.

An alternative interpretation, is that the state doesn't own the things it taxes, it is instead just stealing. The libertarian refrain "taxation is theft" is along these lines. But that is what it boils down to, either the state has ownership, and thus the right to determine how the thing they own is used, or they don't have ownership and they are just constantly stealing.

Thank you for explaining the libertarian view - I understand where those folks are coming from. I suppose I find it disingenuous because it seems that people who aren't full libertarians and are on-board with other taxes seem to have knee-jerk responses when it's a tax on land rather than something else.

Maybe I'm incorrect, and everyone saying the government is stealing our land really is a full out libertarian that doesn't support any taxes. I will ask next time, but it doesn't seem likely.

There are also people who realize that what the government is doing through taxation is basically theft, and their response is something like "Ok yeah taxation is theft, but the theft is for a good cause. Plus its not like a lot of other theft, and the word theft has some negative baggage, so you are just using the association to say that taxation is bad". That is sort of Scott Alexander's response if I remember him correctly.

It can be both a massive theft and the correct thing to do. But if it is a massive theft and you are treating it as just a minor adjustment in policy then that might lead to you misunderstanding the anger coming your way.

If I was going to justify a land value tax I would start with requiring the income tax to be abolished. And that the land tax would explicitly exist as a way of funding defense of that territory. There is a massive amount of tyranny and injustice around the income tax, and the idea that the value of people's work is literally being stolen from them on a nation wide scale. Returning people's freedom over the money they earn through work seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for taking away the ability to meaningfully own land. But thats not how this discussion started out.

I can get behind that framing, and I know many other Georgists argue for that. My issue with that promise though is I think an LVT should be phased in gradually. If you do that it becomes much harder to immediately wipe out income tax.

You could set them to ratchet down over time as an LVT increased which I think makes sense, but is far less appealing to the masses than “I’ll wipe out income tax and replace it with something else!”

All that said, interesting framing on the taxation is theft. I think we have common ground in that the main draw of the LVT is that it’s more fair and less game-able in theory.

Based on the implementation of previous tax schemes it would be highly unlikely for the income tax to be ever fully phased out. Its not like the US really got rid of any other taxes once it had income taxes. For a while they got rid of alcohol taxes by banning all alcohol, but thats about it.

Having income taxes and LVTs seems terrible.

More comments

Would you call yourself a minarchist?

If any government is to do anything, it generally needs to pay for it. If it's going to have the money to pay out, it needs to have some method of collecting money. What would you define as the valid parameters around "government collecting money"?

Anarcho-capitalist. Though I get along well with minarchists and try to avoid arguing with them.

I think even for people who are not minarchists/anarcho-capitalists that it is useful to recognize what government is doing. Governments collect money either by owning everything and charging rent, or they are stealing stuff from people. The government can own everything or steal things, because they have a monopoly on the use of force.

It is worth noting that under anarcho-capitalism, you can't own except to the extent that you can defend it. Much like feudalism really - in fact feudalism evolves from the anarcho-capitalism that existed briefly after the fall of Rome as the competing protection agencies (Knights, a word which derived from the old Saxon word for bandits) established local monopolies (Lords), set up the hierarchical system of arbitration between neighbouring protection agencies that David Friedman advocates (Kings), and cut a deal with the local influencers to propagandise for maintaining the system (the Church).

Under feudalism, the effective tax rate on non-warriors who wish to occupy land was also close to 100%.

Would you say that some level of tax collection is a necessary evil, rather than both unnecessary and evil?

I assume that various tax schemes would fall on a gradient of more-to-less offensive, depending on the details; what type of taxation (if any) would generally be on the less offensive end of the spectrum?

If you want to have a government, yeah taxation in some form is probably necessary.

And yeah the badness of taxation is on a gradient, and not all forms of taxation are evil. The problem is that the less offensive forms of taxation are often not as good at raising massive amounts of revenue.

I think certain use taxes are often ok-ish. Like docking taxes that pay for dredging of waterways. Other use taxes seem pretty messed up, especially when the government has an enforced monopoly on the service. The more necessary the service and the more those taxes are used to pay for random other things the more messed up it is.

Sin taxes are annoying and paternalistic, but I wouldn't call them evil.

Import tariffs that are applied universally on all goods (and not used for protectionist schemes) seem ok as well.

Head taxes feel a little less evil than income taxes, simply because they don't require a massive administrative state to look into everyone's incomes.

If poll taxes were the only tax I would consider them fully reasonable.

How is changing the way land is taxed equivalent to the government seizing all land?

The value of land is the future present value of the cash flows it generates. Those cash flows are what Georgism seizes.

As one site puts it "Land Market Value is the land rental value, minus land taxes, divided by a capitalization rate." If land taxes are equal to land rental value, the land market value is zero, and the entire value of the land has been seized.

Yes, an LVT does not have to be 100%. But the Georgist land tax is, and the relatively small reductions from 100% modern Georgists accept to try to get around practical problems don't really change much. If you're talking about a much smaller LVT, you're not talking about Georgism.

In my experience most Georgists I’ve talked to prefer a 60-80% land tax, to make up for practical problems in the implementation. Maybe those aren’t the ones that write books etc.

I guess the fundamental difference for me is that I find the land market to be inherently flawed due to the fact that nobody creates land and it cannot be created, only improved.

I find the land market to be inherently flawed due to the fact that nobody creates land and it cannot be created, only improved.

The Netherlands would like a word with you.

Land on the seabed is still land - they are simply improving it. Making land on the seabed usable and able to be built on is an improvement, this argument has been tossed at Georgism for over a century.

Under the Georgist framework all of the ocean is still 'land,' if that makes sense.

this argument has been tossed at Georgism for over a century

Why do you suppose that is? The colloquial meaning of "land"--let's say, "the patches of dirt that are not submerged beneath rivers, lakes, or seas"--makes claims like "nobody creates land and it cannot be created, only improved" clearly false. So when Georgists say "land," they apparently have a technical definition in mind that goes beyond what people think when they hear Georgists say "land."

That sets the whole discussion up for failure straight out of the gate, because you're either being deliberately or inadvertently obtuse about the central subject of discussion. In the United States today, the physical coordinates over which people claim ownership are often the least of what their "real property" (as we call owned land) entails. On the prevailing "bundle of rights" view, in addition to the physical coordinates you own, your "property" also includes things like a right of quiet enjoyment, a right of access, a right against trespass, and so forth. Those are real rights, and often they are not the kind of right that you can really put a fair dollar value on.

There is a school of legal thought, "Law and Economics," which holds roughly that the purpose of law is to facilitate efficient economic exchange. Its founder, Richard Posner, has broadly disclaimed its universal applicability. Much of the law is concerned with economic exchange, yes--but not all of it. Individuals have important interests that should not be violated, not even if the majority says so, not even if the majority would benefit. Just as "land" on your view can also mean "the sea," "real property" means much more than spatial coordinates over which you happen to have dominion. Whatever its effects on markets, Georgism fails to appropriately account for its effects on people.

More comments

Didn't seem like people even tried to charitably understand what Georgism is.

Generally, "I want to take something from you" should not be understood charitably.

And you're not even saying that those are wrong; you're just objecting to the spin.

Generally, "I want to take something from you" should not be understood charitably.

So do you think we should never try to understand taxation charitably?

"Generally" isn't "always", but I'd say "not in most situations where it comes up in live politics".

It also depends on what you mean by "charitably"--charitable in the sense of "do they really mean it sincerely" is different from charitable in the sense of "are they well-intentioned towards, and not engaged in motivated reasoning about, the people they are taking things from".

In the linked thread you said many valid objections were raised and you will think more deeply about LVT:

Idk, I'll have to go back to the drawing board on some of the Georgist stuff. Getting a lot of good objections from this post.

But now you return and instead of refuting arguments, you sneer at them.

I did think more deeply about the raised critiques, after realizing that my own understanding of Georgism was flawed. After addressing those issues and discussing some of the objections, looking back I do not think they are very strong.

That's a good point though - at the time I felt differently. This issue is near and dear to my heart so I'll edit the post to be less inflammatory.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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