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How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or the

How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or the government does. Its easy to see models where the government owns all the property as this exists in many places around the world such as Nigeria, China, and North Korea.

lukifer 7y ago
The ideas of Henry George [0] address this, without resorting to "Tragedy of the Commons" solutions of collective ownership. The short answer is a Land Value Tax [1], based only on "ground rent" (the usage value combined with the value of proximity to community), as opposed to taxing improvements, as most property taxes do currently. The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax". In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism [1] http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_the_vacant_lot_(cropped).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_...
francisofascii 7y ago
The best policy is a balance between total government control and total private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.

lukifer 7y ago

The ideas of Henry George [0] address this, without resorting to "Tragedy of the Commons" solutions of collective ownership. The short answer is a Land Value Tax [1], based only on "ground rent" (the usage value combined with the value of proximity to community), as opposed to taxing improvements, as most property taxes do currently. The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax". In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism [1] http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_the_vacant_lot_(cropped).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_...

francisofascii 7y ago

The best policy is a balance between total government control and total private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.