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Sometimes people want to sit on underdeveloped-for-the-location land not because it's a low-effort way to ride capital gains but for non-economic reasons. Exam

Sometimes people want to sit on underdeveloped-for-the-location land not because it's a low-effort way to ride capital gains but for non-economic reasons. Examples include conservation projects and urban farms, but the big one is empty-nesters ageing in place (while the city has grown around them). If you've seen the start of the movie Up you'll recall that Mr. Carl Fredrickson owns a detached home which now has apartment towers going up on all sides. As a widower his house holds extreme sentimental value to him; he isn't selling. Under an optimal land tax regime, he'd be paying quite a bit of land tax reflecting the increased desirability of his location, and would potentially be forced to sell up as a result.

J_Shelby_J 3y ago
That sounds sad! Until you realize the reality writ large: The current tax scheme enables drives supply down and value endlessly up. So much so that most homeowners end up selling for more than the total lifetime cost of ownership. So the old man from 'Up' would be able to sell and recoup a lifetime of housing costs. Personal homeownership is just abstract landlording in that way. We have a myth in the western world that we own our homes. You can argue it's a natural right, but that won't matter to the government if you don't pay your taxes. So ownership is a social construct, just like copyright; we've decided as a society that it's most beneficial to let people "own" land. But the current system has, by destroying housing supply, increased housing costs by double (in HCOL areas) over what they would be if supply met demand. So renters and first time homeowners are subsidizing homeowners in a huge way. As a result, people are putting off having kids, or not having them at all, and taking a job they hate just to exist. It's abstract, but it's still feudalism; land owners extracting value from land merely from holding the social contract to it. So no, my empathy does not extend to sympathy for Mr. Carl Fredrickson. I'll save it for the people laboring to pay his fair share.
danShumway 3y ago
It's been a while since I saw Up, but isn't the moral of that movie that Carl is holding onto the past too tightly and that doing so has separated him from the outside world and the people around him and colored his perception of them? The emotional climax of the film is Carl throwing away all of his antique furniture that is metaphorically and literally weighing him down, and then the film ends by Carl dropping his house off of a blimp. I do have sympathy, it's a understandable position for someone to be in, but I'm not sure that Up in specific is the best analogy?
- aldonius 3y ago
  Yes, I think that's a fair interpretation of the moral. Note that Carl changes his mind about what's important to him over the course of the movie. First he lets go of the land (literally, by taking flight) and then later the house.
brigandish 3y ago
Other people value the land too, if he values it more than them he should pay for it, right?

J_Shelby_J 3y ago

That sounds sad! Until you realize the reality writ large: The current tax scheme enables drives supply down and value endlessly up. So much so that most homeowners end up selling for more than the total lifetime cost of ownership. So the old man from 'Up' would be able to sell and recoup a lifetime of housing costs. Personal homeownership is just abstract landlording in that way. We have a myth in the western world that we own our homes. You can argue it's a natural right, but that won't matter to the government if you don't pay your taxes. So ownership is a social construct, just like copyright; we've decided as a society that it's most beneficial to let people "own" land. But the current system has, by destroying housing supply, increased housing costs by double (in HCOL areas) over what they would be if supply met demand. So renters and first time homeowners are subsidizing homeowners in a huge way. As a result, people are putting off having kids, or not having them at all, and taking a job they hate just to exist. It's abstract, but it's still feudalism; land owners extracting value from land merely from holding the social contract to it. So no, my empathy does not extend to sympathy for Mr. Carl Fredrickson. I'll save it for the people laboring to pay his fair share.

danShumway 3y ago

It's been a while since I saw Up, but isn't the moral of that movie that Carl is holding onto the past too tightly and that doing so has separated him from the outside world and the people around him and colored his perception of them? The emotional climax of the film is Carl throwing away all of his antique furniture that is metaphorically and literally weighing him down, and then the film ends by Carl dropping his house off of a blimp. I do have sympathy, it's a understandable position for someone to be in, but I'm not sure that Up in specific is the best analogy?

aldonius 3y ago
Yes, I think that's a fair interpretation of the moral. Note that Carl changes his mind about what's important to him over the course of the movie. First he lets go of the land (literally, by taking flight) and then later the house.

brigandish 3y ago

Other people value the land too, if he values it more than them he should pay for it, right?