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>Income from land is thus completely unearned and thus any income gained from land ownership should be completely taxed at 100%. That pretty much sums up the a

• SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Could you explain why it's a horrible idea? Merely asserting it isn't the same as refuting the article (which lays out some arguments) and doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
  • Jtsummers 9y ago
    Income from idle land is certainly unearned. But little idle land can earn anything (grazing land, I suppose, but then you still may have some maintenance or security you provide). Anything else will be earning income not from the land, but things built on the land, grown on the land, etc. A house that I have built (or maintain) isn't land, it's a house. It requires land to sit on. So when I rent it out, what percentage of that income is because of the land and what percentage is from the house? If it's farmland, what percentage of the income is because of the labor and materials put into the land? Taxes on land certainly make sense, but as written this essay's suggestion is to have a 100% tax on landholders income from land. So how, then, do they make money? Does this only apply to people who rent land but have done nothing to improve it? If I have a family farm that I want to hold onto, but rent out 100 acres to a lumber company does that mean I can't earn anything from that rent because I'm not the one doing the work? This essay needs some work to produce anything approaching a reasonable solution.
    • TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      The number one way of earning money from idle land is just to wait for its value to increase. That doesn't apply to all land, but it does apply to all land in areas that have a housing affordability problem.
      • Jtsummers 9y ago
        By this proposal, can you even make money off the sale of land? Wouldn't that, also, be taxed 100%?
        • TheCoelacanth 9y ago
          Presumably yes, since the explicit purpose of this proposal is to prevent all profit from idle ownership of land.
• tps5 9y ago
  It's not a horrible idea. It's an old idea that's been popular with various economists including (gasp) Adam Smith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax (I don't know enough about this subject to have a strong opinion either way, but I feel pretty confident saying that this isn't a terrible idea)
  • true_religion 9y ago
    Isn't saying that it isn't terrible an opinion of itself? Also pointing out that hsitorically people thought certain something isn't enough on its own to show that it is the least bit reasonable in the modern era.
    • tps5 9y ago
      Some pretty highly regarded economists in the past century have backed up the idea of a land value tax. Does that alone make it a great idea? No, but I think it makes the parent comment seem pretty silly. I certainly have an opinion, but (like I said) it's not a strong one. I don't understand all the moving pieces and all the incentives involved here, but I'd be interested in seeing some more knowledgeable people talk about the LVT.
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > It's not a horrible idea. It is, for a wide array of reasons. Assessment for ad valorem, as-is, taxation of land is highly contentious as it is, but there is at least some coherent basis for such assessment since there are usually reasonably comparable referents involved in actual marker trade on which to base an assessment. LVT inherently relies on assessment of the unimproved value of improved lots, which means you need to assess something for which there will rarely be comparable examples in trade. That's a practical concern. There's a deeper theoretical concern that the fundamental basis of LVT (that land in the conventional sense represents the ultimate source of all extractions from the commons, such that an LVT represents a generalized tax on the use of the commons) is fundamentally flawed. While land holding can be viewed as a kind of use of the commons which should be taxed, wealth more generally itself (and moreso the farther that wealth is beyond that which one could personally supervise with one's inherent bodily facilities) represents such a use in any system with public enforcement of property rights, as do resource extraction and pollution generation. > It's an old idea that's been popular with various economists including (gasp) Adam Smith Adam Smith also thought that the landholding class was inherently the only class that could be trusted with government, since the business-owning class (Smith wrote early enough in the feudalism-capitalism transition that the fact that the latter class would subsume the former was not obvious to him) would favor interests that were distinct from the common interest, while the working class, which like the land-holding class would have interests aligned with the common interest -- would inherently be too ill-informed to understand or politically pursue their own interest. Smith is an important and often insightful figure in the history of political economy, but, especially when it comes to the relationship of land-holding to capitalist and post-capitalist economies, not exactly a source where "he thought X was a good idea" is a particularly strong endorsement.