3 ms·

When you start instructing landowners what to do with their property, that’s infringing upon property rights especially if failure to do so results in penalizin

When you start instructing landowners what to do with their property, that’s infringing upon property rights especially if failure to do so results in penalizing them. Your argument states that empty land would be better served if it’s used for other human beings. The same argument if applied to a time scale rather than upon land resources, it is rational to conclude that our planet is better off if people had 1/2 surviving child per person until we hit carrying capacity. If land owners should be taxed for owning land they don’t use, we should also have a child tax for future exponential growth of a certain set of genes who will monopolize the world’s population by over breeding. Humans can continue to enjoy baby making(it’s not unlike some human beings enjoy owning vast tracts of land they dont put to use) but left to their own devices and without encouragement, if they are allowed to bear the full cost of raising the fruits of their loins, I think the numbers will go down dramatically. If goods cost as much as it takes to make them..especially food which is grown at tremendous costs(not just monetary), we will realize that the abundance is a myth and scarcity is our reality. Re: Your final point..people who own property don’t contribute to suburbs and rural sprawl. It is those who can’t make proper decisions personally and financially who make choices FOR themselves. Things like where to live, what job to do and what to study are easy choices. Inheriting illness, disabilities are choices we didn’t make, but was made by nature for us. We take care of vulnerable people who had no control over their deficiencies because we share as a species DNA with them. That obligation and duty towards our collective humanity is entirely different than feeling responsible for personal decision making. Sometimes people make terrible decisions for themselves because they are unable to make best decisions for themselves. In those cases, we have to make decisions for them if we feel responsible for them. These kind of things never end well as history as shown and is best avoided if possible. An example would be the mentally ill. Many refuse to take medications and their circumstances cause them to suffer. Those are tough decisions. But even then there is no need to penalize private property owners. None of these issues are connected to each other. I doubt if anyone cares about urban sprawl. An easy target is private property owners and that comes from what I can only term as jealousy in simplistic terms. In today’s world, we have managed to conquer crippling poverty even though there is much work to do. GINI co-eff fueled inequality makes villains out of the property owners. That is a dangerous path to take..once again, as history has shown us.

yellowapple 6y ago
> When you start instructing landowners what to do with their property Nowhere is anyone instructing anyone else. Requiring landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they externalize onto everyone else is not unreasonable. > If land owners should be taxed for owning land they don’t use They should be taxed for land period, whether they're using it or not, since all land ownership inherently entails the externalization of opportunity costs on everyone else. And if they're using it for something productive, they'll have a much easier time paying that tax. > we should also have a child tax That's already built into a land value tax. Land's value - like the value of anything else - is a function of supply and demand. The supply of land is fixed, and demand is a function of population (more people in the world = more people needing places to live and work and play = more demand for land). So, as more humans enter the world, the value of land goes up, and therefore so does the tax on that land's value. > people who own property don’t contribute to suburbs and rural sprawl. They literally do, be it by owning the land encompassing that sprawl or by owning the land within urban centers and refusing to develop it into denser residential spaces. This is the mathematical reality. If you want a reduction in humanity's carbon footprint, a land value tax is one of the most effective levers to drive that reduction.

yellowapple 6y ago

> When you start instructing landowners what to do with their property Nowhere is anyone instructing anyone else. Requiring landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they externalize onto everyone else is not unreasonable. > If land owners should be taxed for owning land they don’t use They should be taxed for land period, whether they're using it or not, since all land ownership inherently entails the externalization of opportunity costs on everyone else. And if they're using it for something productive, they'll have a much easier time paying that tax. > we should also have a child tax That's already built into a land value tax. Land's value - like the value of anything else - is a function of supply and demand. The supply of land is fixed, and demand is a function of population (more people in the world = more people needing places to live and work and play = more demand for land). So, as more humans enter the world, the value of land goes up, and therefore so does the tax on that land's value. > people who own property don’t contribute to suburbs and rural sprawl. They literally do, be it by owning the land encompassing that sprawl or by owning the land within urban centers and refusing to develop it into denser residential spaces. This is the mathematical reality. If you want a reduction in humanity's carbon footprint, a land value tax is one of the most effective levers to drive that reduction.