5 ms·
Non citizens should not be able to own property they never personally occupy.
by Grakel 5y ago
Non citizens should not be able to own property they never personally occupy.
- nickthegreek 5y agoAt least an upper bound on how much they should be able to own would be nice.
- Grakel 5y agoYeah, as much as they can occupy. Every bedroom they have to personally sleep in for a month. :)
- rank0 5y agoWhat about a foreign business? Or even a domestic business owned by non-citizens?
- Apocryphon 5y agoYou know, why not? Why shouldn't local jurisdictions and communities have claim to that property and land that's laying fallow.
- warrenm 5y agoWhy shouldn't they? Because that's communism - where the state owns everything
- Apocryphon 5y agoThat's just eminent domain.
- lukifer 5y agoMany of the OG "classical liberals" had a much more nuanced take on privatizing land, supporting something more like usage rights, rather than fee-simple or alloidal land titles (private enclosure of land beyond subsistence was associated with aristocracy): "All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition." - Benjamin Franklin "Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed." - Thomas Jefferson There is a wide range of middle-ground between the extremes of carving up the earth into micro-fiefdoms of absolute ownership, vs. all land being controlled by apparatchiks in the State Politburo. One of the most moderate is a tax on "ground rents", as proposed by Ricardo, Paine, and many others [0], to compensate the community for their exclusion, and fairly return the profits from "proximity value" (services and infrastructure that makes land more desirable). Even Milton Friedman referred to Land Value Tax as the "least worst tax" [1], with drastically reduced (if not zero!) "deadweight loss", compared to taxes on income or sales. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_rent [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7Jb58hcsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7Jb58hcsc
- gutitout 5y agoHow about a vacancy tax?
- brink 5y agoHow about we stop trying to solve everything with more taxes? This kind of solution tends to hurt the less wealthy. The weight placed on the backs of the taxpayers is heavy enough.
- munk-a 5y agoVacancy taxes tend to only hit the wealthy. There are certainly regressive taxes we should examine (like sales tax on staple goods) but vacancy taxes tend to target high earners pretty effectively. Taxes are generally a good thing since they allow society to function well.
- nathanvanfleet 5y agoRicher people own more property than poor people. You're using an old saw that says taxation is worse for the poor but it's not. It's also simple to give breaks for purchases under x dollars or redemptions or for family homes that are occupied etc.
- pessimizer 5y ago> an old saw that says taxation is worse for the poor Is there one? Consumption taxes on are of course worse for the poor, but taxes on fiefdoms?
- HWR_14 5y agoVacancy taxes exclusively hurt the wealthy who aren't renting out their land. That should help the less wealthy who don't have idle land.
- triceratops 5y agoAre there a lot of poor people leaving property they own vacant?
- warrenm 5y agoWhy not?
- 908B64B197 5y agoWho should be able to buy this vacation house: Markus, Swedish born foreigner who moved to America with his wife to work at an academic research lab or Liang, born in Saipan thanks to birth tourism (so a natural born US Citizen), using the money his parents managed to get out of China to grab as much real estate as he can.
- __turbobrew__ 5y agoI think that goes too far, there should simply be a tax on any real estate not personally occupied by the owners — citizens and non citizens alike.