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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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If you are in a market where the land value is going up, you do not have an incentive to build on it, you have an incentive to hold it. What if you build something on the land and can't recoup your investment? Also, which is easier - holding land to sell it for a profit later, or trying to make use of the land?

Every year that the land sits idle imposes the opportunity cost of the rent you could have charged by leasing it out. If you think the value of land is going to go up, then if anything that reduces your worry that you may not recoup your costs of developing the land, because higher land value implies higher demand, which implies that you'll be able to rent it once it's developed.

I believe those incentives are too low by the fact that land speculation exists in the first place, I think it should be extremely rare and/or nonexistant for someone to sit on a vacant lot.

In areas with high land values, this is pretty rare. Apartments rent quickly, houses sell quickly, and vacancy rates are low. Undeveloped lots get developed quickly, because each month they sit undeveloped carries a high opportunity cost in the form of lost rent.

Also in terms of diverting consumption from residential lot size to goods and services, Georgism is actually widely believed to encourage high density housing, as renting property units is usually one of the most profitable things you can do with land.

Rents will have to rise too, though, since in a competitive housing market all of the incidence of the land tax will fall on the renter in the form of higher rents. I'm not sure why Georgism would result in more renting. The distortion seems to be in the direction of less land usage. I agree that it's likely to result in densification, at least in high demand areas. In low demand areas, it may just result in more abandoned lots.

Land value tax is largely believed to be the only tax that doesn't suffer from deadweight loss, or in other words it does not reduce economic activity. This is because deadweight cost comes from the difference between production price and sale price, and land has no production price.

Deadweight loss comes from any distortion of behavior from its efficient allocation. For example, some companies are well suited to have a remote workforce, and others are well suited to have employees gather in person. Raising taxes on land will encourage those in the latter camp to try to force themselves into the former camp, which will make those companies less effective. We'd probably end up with a lot fewer restaurants, since they are famously low margin businesses where a big proportion of the cost is in their real estate, and raising their menu prices will result in people dining out less. Do we want fewer restaurants? I don't know why we would, but that's a distortion that Georgism would create.

Also, another major benefit is that land value taxes are extremely difficult to avoid in practice, unlike income tax.

They're easy to avoid in practice if you're able to shift your consumption away from land and toward goods and services.

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