This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.
A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature. One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same. In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land. Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both). Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values). And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference. But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value. (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)
Georgism is just communism by another name. And it is theft of workers wages. It assumes create land value isn’t work. But I can find expensive land a mile away from free land in many major US cities.
What Georgism is; it’s a solid internet gospel for a certain group of people.
Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital. If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise. People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents. Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.
Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen. Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them. It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work. Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.
At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.
I just don’t deny that real estate people create value. It’s not some zero deadweight costs thing. Building communities which is what real estate developers do creates value and that is largely captured thru land appreciation.
There are people who just get lucky in the stock market too. Then there are security analysts that get capital to the right firms and hold management accountable. Just because some people are free riding doesn’t mean the people doing good work aren’t creating value and deserve to be compensated.
Most the people who are Georgists seem to be in tech. And there’s a lot of zero productivity going on there. People focused on making products more addictive, bitcoin, HFT etc. Zero sum games for the most part.
And ideally you would tax that too. A sophisticated version of Georgism would include pigouvian taxes on behaviors with negative externalities, or natural monopolies, intellectual property, and other economic niches with fixed supply that one person snatching up deprives others of being able to do.
It's just that land is the easiest to assess and the most high value, and the most reasonably confident that most of its value is not created by the owner. Even if say, 5% of land value is created by real estate developers on their own property, that would mean 95% is not, either inherent to the land itself or created by other people nearby. So even if land value taxes are not entirely costless (although the more zealous Georgists pretend that they are), they're still one of the least bad taxes possible (only being beaten out by pigouvian taxes which disincentivize negative behaviors like pollution)
Even if I assume your assumptions are correct (I don’t) that remaining 5% is extremely important. It’s literally the entire incentive to build. No 5%. No cities.
I think you're missing distinction between base land value and capital improvements. You don't tax the buildings themselves, or the entire property value, you set the tax rate according to the underlying value of the land itself (which can be assessed separately from the building's value, and real estate agents do this all the time). Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff. Whatever value a property has from invested capital improvements contained within itself is exempt from the land value tax. If done properly, the incentive to build is the same as the incentive to invest money in any other form of capital (and the same the vast majority of people have when they build in the current system): you can either extract money from it over time, (which is not taxed in a full Georgist system), or sell it for a profit, which people are willing to buy because they can then extract money from it over time. In fact, people are more incentivized to build with land value taxes, because it's becomes the only way for a landlord to earn profit. You can't just buy a piece of land and sit on it as it appreciates in value, or extract rents based on its favorable location that everyone wants to be in. You have to build and upkeep structures that create value such that people are willing to pay to live there, or useful buildings that earn profit, above and beyond the taxed land rent value.
I understand the difference. Base value a developer couldn’t make any money off of. If it costs 50k in capital improvements then a Georgists tax would mean the building can be sold for max 50k. No compensation for development.
Fully understand Georgist. Just think it’s wrong and is basically just another form of communism but this time one group decided another group specifically was bad. It might make sense in some land poor area. But America isn’t land poor. There’s land everywhere.
IMO sitting on land and waiting for it to appreciate can be extremely efficient. Neighborhoods grow up over time. They now build 80-100 stories in my neighborhood. They were building 50 stories a decade ago. 20-30 years ago it was 20-30 stories. Sitting on land kept them from building smaller buildings and now that the neighborhood can support massive structures they build that.
More options
Context Copy link
The land value is not "entirely externalities from other nearby stuff", unless you arbitrarily set it that way, which results in weird things like total land value going down as the result of consolidating multiple improved parcels.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If we ignore the stuff about the workers creating the value (which makes this real labor-theory-of-value communism, not just Georgist land communism), the issue is that one landowner improving his land increases the land value of adjacent parcels. But then if you look again, you see that typically multiple landowners have improved their land, and each is providing a positive externality to all the others. Georgism proposes to tax away not only all the positive externalities, but also all the value the landowner contributed to their own land. It's hard to see how this is better for the landowner than just losing the value of the externality!
We want people to create positive externalities. Which is why Georgism doesn’t work. You don’t want to tax good things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link