3 ms·
If you make the assumption that PI is 3.14, that's going to work for a good while. But eventually you are going to need to build a circle that's bigger, and 3 s
by ItsMonkk 4y ago
If you make the assumption that PI is 3.14, that's going to work for a good while. But eventually you are going to need to build a circle that's bigger, and 3 significant digits will not cut it, and errors will start showing up. Our economies work in the exact same way. Capitalism started out improving on what came before it, but it has now grown to the level that errors are appearing more and more. We need to be more precise.
You've outlined very clearly one of those errors - housing. We know that housing values can not both be an investment and affordable long-term - those things are inherently at opposition. Therefore the best price for land is zero. The way to do that is to increase the tax on the market value of a house until the market value of the house is equal to the cost of the parts and labor needed to build that house. When you do this, you have what we call a 100% land value tax. It fixes all sorts of incentives, turns NIMBY's into YIMBY's, incentivizes the best use for the land. A land value tax is not just increasing the equivalent of PI from 3.14 to 3.14159, it's setting the correct value for land exactly equal to PI.
One of the amazing side effects of the land value tax is that now that you don't need a continually increasing housing values, the amount of debt in the world is going to start growing less quickly, as a large percentage of debt comes from mortgages. When you zoom in on how that works, and why it works, what you find out is that you want debt to only increase when real productivity increases. The flipside of that is also true - you want the currency to increase equal to productivity, this is why Bitcoin is fundamentally unstable long-term and why the gold standard collapsed. The reason the land debt is bad is because land is zero-sum. It can not be created or destroyed. Any debt that is created to buy a zero-sum good will eventually turn the economy into a Ponzi scheme. So while a LVT will fix a large portion of the problem, eventually some other zero-sum asset will arrive, and that too will need to be fixed. When all zero-sum debt no longer increases the money supply, the problems that you outline will be resolved.
Once you have a money supply that increases equal to productivity, suddenly retirees will be able to save their money and retire on it without threat of inflation. We used to have this in the middle ages, but that's only because we had a flat population with no productivity increases, so a stable currency was sufficient.
- TimPC 4y agoI argued for a gradual implementation of Georgist Tax Policies elsewhere in the thread so we are in agreement. I think transitioning to a LVT is a very hard problem that requires a great deal of thought and care. I'm convinced such a transition needs to be gradual because instantaneous is far too destructive. I'm also leaning towards government needing to compensate at least some of those who lose significantly in the transition. I'm open to being proven wrong about either point but the proposals I've seen from Georgists advocating instantaneous change seem woefully ill informed or quite naive about consequences.
- ItsMonkk 4y agoI'm a huge fan of instantaneous change, as it instantly sets the incentives, but am willing to have a large transition period. If we were to do an instant change, the best way to do that is to give everyone a tax credit equal to the value of their existing land, with retirees and others who need public support having a few more options to convert those tax credits to cash.
- TimPC 4y agoInstantaneous change with compensation is extremely expensive. I noted in another thread that it's quite possible for the costs of compensating affected parties to reach $30.5 trillion, the current size of the US national debt. This assumed compensation had a needs component to it and only half of the US property market was compensated. The basic issue is the current US property market is estimated at $33.6 trillion. If you assume 80% of that is land value you end up needing to compensate 26.88 trillion. On the other side of the market you have mortgages you put under water that people will walk away from. The mortgage market in the US is $17.6 trillion. If you assume 80% of mortgages are walked away from and the mortgages end up 70% underwater you end up having to compensate $9.856 trillion dollars. So solving the residential portion of compensation potentially costs $36.736 trillion dollars. If you have compensation in the commercial and industrial land markets as well that makes things even more expensive.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago