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Just a reminder that land is a limited natural resource that does not have a monetary value assigned to it except by political choice. We could assign zero dol

Just a reminder that land is a limited natural resource that does not have a monetary value assigned to it except by political choice. We could assign zero dollar value to land and allocate it democratically based on utility to the public and with an eye to preserving the environment. Allowing a market in land doesn't allocate it to the best uses (why do we have fancy hotels on the best real estate when there are homeless people?), just to the purposes of the people with the most money. If the people that own the construction equipment refuse to build when land is worth less, the public should step in and do it. For the liberals out there, if we did this a certain person would not be president and the country would be a better, more egalitarian place. Imagine having nearly everything you pay in rent back in your pocket instead of being progressively squeezed more and more each year and spied on (given the increasing installation of monitoring equipment that you do not control). If we could ban owning properties that you do not personally use, imagine how that would change the composition of cities. Gentrification would be vastly reduced. Shops, community centers, and other things that people love wouldn't get kicked out of town because the rent always increases. That would be revolutionary.

Aeolun 7y ago
> democratically based on utility to the public Ok, so I want to live in the center of the city, because there the walking distance is shorter. John wants to do the same thing, but he gets assigned a tiny plot somewhere miles outside the center. How will you make value judgements about people in this manner? You cannot assign randomly either, as everyone will hate the place they live.
- geofft 7y ago
  There are lots of ways to do it, but yes, whatever you do, you have to make that value judgment. I have trouble believing that the value judgment "Your parents were richer than John's parents" is anywhere near the top of the list of reasonable approaches. (I have real trouble believing that the value judgment "Your grandparents shared a race with the politically powerful, who refused to sell to John's grandparents" or "Your great-grandparents shot John's great-grandparents in the face" are anywhere except right at the bottom.)
  - 6nf 7y ago
    What about "I can afford to pay for the privilege because my father worked his butt off and made lots and lots of money" is that still ok?
    - geofft 7y ago
      Less bad, but still doesn't clear the "rational" bar for me—why does what your father did have anything to do with where you should live? (If anything, since you don't have any choice in which father you get and since an ineffective or even missing father affects your life in lots of ways, there's an argument that people without hard-working, diligent fathers should have extra support from society to make up for it. But it would be better to just address the root causes of why not having great parents puts you at a disadvantage in life.)
      - 6nf 7y ago
        What about "I worked my butt off for many years to be able to live here" is that ok?
        geofft 7y ago
        Yes, that crosses the threshold of rational to me. It doesn't seem necessarily optimal, mind you—there are some interesting cases like "John worked his butt off, too, but he's been doing coal mining for thirty years and those jobs are gone, and you graduated last year with a CS degree and got a nice signing bonus from Facebook"—but at least we can argue that society for whatever reason values being a junior dev at Facebook more than coal mining and if that's wrong we should address that at the root. The biggest practical problem is that it's very difficult to distinguish "I worked my butt off" from "My father worked his butt off" and "His father had generational wealth." Money is money, and the inheritance tax is far below 100%. So simply putting land access on the free market, if the market is denominated by money, does not effectively implement this proposal: it reduces in practice to the non-rational value judgments mentioned earlier, largely because very few people can earn enough salary to compete with once-modest savings that have been invested for generations. (And money persists across the years, so if society ever mis-valued something in the past, correcting that valuation now does not affect money that's already in people's hands. I guess that's the case for reparations in a nutshell, hm.) One potential approach is to require that access to land involve the ongoing payment of money that dwarfs the one-time purchase cost (if there even is one), which approximates giving land access to those who are presently doing valuable things for society and not those who just happen to have money. If you're currently working your butt off, even if you're young, you can keep affording it; if you are relying on savings or generational wealth, it's going to run out. It occurs to me that this is approaching the Georgists' land value tax, though from a different direction.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  We could just make value judgments on people based on how much money they have. /snark. Really to be serious I would say that your concern is valid, but we shouldn’t be comparing this idea to perfection, because today we certainly don’t have perfection. Yes you are right that determining who gets housing is nontrivial. But who said collaborating across society was simple? Abstracting it all away to markets is far from ideal, don’t dismiss other proposals simply because they may not be easy.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I don’t dismiss other proposals. I dismiss this one in specific. Our current housing market isn’t perfect, but like democracy it’s the best we’ve been able to come up with so far.
karamazov 7y ago
Do you not consider yourself a liberal? You’re proposing a socialist redistribution of land, which is far to the left of any major political party. (I’m pointing out an inconsistency in your political labeling, not commenting on your suggestion.)
- tehjoker 7y ago
  This is a bit late. I was rhetorically appealing to liberals but consider myself a socialist if that helps.
- azernik 7y ago
  "Liberal" means center-left (ie into free markets). In European discourse "liberal" parties are centrists, and US socialists use the term exclusively to refer to centrists Democrats.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  The left movement since even before Marx was generally very critical of liberalism - that is, the political philosophy based on the concept of rights (in theory rights conferred to all humans but in practice only very rarely so), property rights, and the idea that the only valid way to make changes in society is to vote. Somehow the term "liberal" in the US (though also in some other parts of the world) came to be associated with progressives, who are yet still usually differentiated from the Socialists and other "far left" ideologies. Most of the academic socialist, communist, radical feminist and anarchist work is strongly critical of liberalism, even its metaphysics and epistemology. Indeed, Marx himself started (if his early texts are anything to go by) as a liberal in that sense. The key turning point for him was his critique of liberalism in his On The Jewish Question. From SEP: >Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.
solidsnack9000 7y ago
We could assign zero dollar value to land and allocate it democratically based on utility to the public... How is central allocation according to some metric actually democratic? Just a reminder that land is a limited natural resource that does not have a monetary value assigned to it except by political choice. Land's value is nominally derived from the income it can generate. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith walks us through the connection between the price of farm land and the value of the crops that could be grown on it.
petre 7y ago
Why ban? In Switzerland you pay the same amount of property tax if you rent, live in or keep your property empty. The tax is adjusted every six months with the medium rent values.
vorg 7y ago
Once upon a time in the West only property-owners could vote in national elections. Then they changed the law to give all citizens (over 18) the vote, regardless of whether they owned property or not. They should have changed the law so all citizens owned the property they lived in -- and thus given the vote to every citizen that way.

Aeolun 7y ago

> democratically based on utility to the public Ok, so I want to live in the center of the city, because there the walking distance is shorter. John wants to do the same thing, but he gets assigned a tiny plot somewhere miles outside the center. How will you make value judgements about people in this manner? You cannot assign randomly either, as everyone will hate the place they live.

geofft 7y ago
There are lots of ways to do it, but yes, whatever you do, you have to make that value judgment. I have trouble believing that the value judgment "Your parents were richer than John's parents" is anywhere near the top of the list of reasonable approaches. (I have real trouble believing that the value judgment "Your grandparents shared a race with the politically powerful, who refused to sell to John's grandparents" or "Your great-grandparents shot John's great-grandparents in the face" are anywhere except right at the bottom.)
- 6nf 7y ago
  What about "I can afford to pay for the privilege because my father worked his butt off and made lots and lots of money" is that still ok?
  - geofft 7y ago
    Less bad, but still doesn't clear the "rational" bar for me—why does what your father did have anything to do with where you should live? (If anything, since you don't have any choice in which father you get and since an ineffective or even missing father affects your life in lots of ways, there's an argument that people without hard-working, diligent fathers should have extra support from society to make up for it. But it would be better to just address the root causes of why not having great parents puts you at a disadvantage in life.)
    - 6nf 7y ago
      What about "I worked my butt off for many years to be able to live here" is that ok?
      - geofft 7y ago
        Yes, that crosses the threshold of rational to me. It doesn't seem necessarily optimal, mind you—there are some interesting cases like "John worked his butt off, too, but he's been doing coal mining for thirty years and those jobs are gone, and you graduated last year with a CS degree and got a nice signing bonus from Facebook"—but at least we can argue that society for whatever reason values being a junior dev at Facebook more than coal mining and if that's wrong we should address that at the root. The biggest practical problem is that it's very difficult to distinguish "I worked my butt off" from "My father worked his butt off" and "His father had generational wealth." Money is money, and the inheritance tax is far below 100%. So simply putting land access on the free market, if the market is denominated by money, does not effectively implement this proposal: it reduces in practice to the non-rational value judgments mentioned earlier, largely because very few people can earn enough salary to compete with once-modest savings that have been invested for generations. (And money persists across the years, so if society ever mis-valued something in the past, correcting that valuation now does not affect money that's already in people's hands. I guess that's the case for reparations in a nutshell, hm.) One potential approach is to require that access to land involve the ongoing payment of money that dwarfs the one-time purchase cost (if there even is one), which approximates giving land access to those who are presently doing valuable things for society and not those who just happen to have money. If you're currently working your butt off, even if you're young, you can keep affording it; if you are relying on savings or generational wealth, it's going to run out. It occurs to me that this is approaching the Georgists' land value tax, though from a different direction.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
We could just make value judgments on people based on how much money they have. /snark. Really to be serious I would say that your concern is valid, but we shouldn’t be comparing this idea to perfection, because today we certainly don’t have perfection. Yes you are right that determining who gets housing is nontrivial. But who said collaborating across society was simple? Abstracting it all away to markets is far from ideal, don’t dismiss other proposals simply because they may not be easy.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I don’t dismiss other proposals. I dismiss this one in specific. Our current housing market isn’t perfect, but like democracy it’s the best we’ve been able to come up with so far.

karamazov 7y ago

Do you not consider yourself a liberal? You’re proposing a socialist redistribution of land, which is far to the left of any major political party. (I’m pointing out an inconsistency in your political labeling, not commenting on your suggestion.)

tehjoker 7y ago
This is a bit late. I was rhetorically appealing to liberals but consider myself a socialist if that helps.
azernik 7y ago
"Liberal" means center-left (ie into free markets). In European discourse "liberal" parties are centrists, and US socialists use the term exclusively to refer to centrists Democrats.
claudiawerner 7y ago
The left movement since even before Marx was generally very critical of liberalism - that is, the political philosophy based on the concept of rights (in theory rights conferred to all humans but in practice only very rarely so), property rights, and the idea that the only valid way to make changes in society is to vote. Somehow the term "liberal" in the US (though also in some other parts of the world) came to be associated with progressives, who are yet still usually differentiated from the Socialists and other "far left" ideologies. Most of the academic socialist, communist, radical feminist and anarchist work is strongly critical of liberalism, even its metaphysics and epistemology. Indeed, Marx himself started (if his early texts are anything to go by) as a liberal in that sense. The key turning point for him was his critique of liberalism in his On The Jewish Question. From SEP: >Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.

solidsnack9000 7y ago

We could assign zero dollar value to land and allocate it democratically based on utility to the public... How is central allocation according to some metric actually democratic? Just a reminder that land is a limited natural resource that does not have a monetary value assigned to it except by political choice. Land's value is nominally derived from the income it can generate. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith walks us through the connection between the price of farm land and the value of the crops that could be grown on it.

petre 7y ago

Why ban? In Switzerland you pay the same amount of property tax if you rent, live in or keep your property empty. The tax is adjusted every six months with the medium rent values.

vorg 7y ago

Once upon a time in the West only property-owners could vote in national elections. Then they changed the law to give all citizens (over 18) the vote, regardless of whether they owned property or not. They should have changed the law so all citizens owned the property they lived in -- and thus given the vote to every citizen that way.