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Unearned rents? Do you consider the salary you work for an unearned social benefit?
by randunel 2y ago
Unearned rents? Do you consider the salary you work for an unearned social benefit?
- kaibee 2y agoI inherited three properties. I pay a property management company to do everything on them, all I get is a regular check in the mail. Please explain how I have earned this?
- pulvinar 2y agoYou haven't earned it, your ancestors did. But your inheritance of this property is only a small fraction of your unearned benefits. Ask a dung beetle how fair life is.
- chii 2y agohow did you get the cash to pay said property manager? How did your ancestor get to own the property in the first place? Nothing is unearned, except perhaps gov't welfare.
- Kbelicius 2y ago> how did you get the cash to pay said property manager? He said he'd give them a cut of the rent. > How did your ancestor get to own the property in the first place? So his parents earned it, not him.
- vintermann 2y agoOr they took it by force, or stole it. Doing genealogy, one of the most interesting ancestors I have actually got mentioned in a discussion in parliament for his real estate shenanigans. His wife had inherited some small but vaguely defined land from her first husband. He then became mayor and land assessor, and drew up ridiculously generous borders (and low tax assessments) for that land. No one thought to stop him. At one point during a sale, some officials had commented that they couldn't find that he had title to this land, but they didn't follow up. By the time they complained about it in parliament, it was two generations and many land transfers ago so they didn't think it was worth it to try to unwind it.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoHis parents worked hard and earned it so they could do with it what they like - such as benefiting their children. Nothing wrong with that.
- asib 2y agoThe trouble with this is it's a playbook for huge inequality. If there is very little cost to holding onto land, then as soon as someone accrues some, it never leaves their family tree. For example, do you believe that the Duke of Westminster should be the beneficiary of his aristocratic ancestors? He is literally living off of land accrued hundreds of years ago.
- poincaredisk 2y ago>So his parents earned it, not him. Doesn't this mean that the problem is inheritance, not (only) land ownership? But I imagine taximg inheritance is very unpopular with everyone.
- intelVISA 2y agoNothing is earned, except perhaps the fruits of one's labor.
- huygens6363 2y agoLife is uneven like that. Try to make the best of it. I am completely healthy while some are born into wheelchairs. I did not earn any of it.
- fgd135 2y agoYour health isn't a limited, shared resource
- huygens6363 2y agoNo, but this matters how? It’s just an example of life being unfair.
- scott_w 2y ago> Please explain how I have earned this? You didn't answer the question.
- huygens6363 2y agoJust saying that’s life. Earning is a useless question.
- scott_w 2y ago"Earning" something is not a useless question. As someone who's had things stolen from me before, a large part of the anger comes from feeling like someone took something that you earned through hard work. It's a big reason we criminalise and punish things the way we do as a society.
- afiori 2y agoI think it is important not to take a moralistic lens to these topics but rather a more systemic approach.
- jonasdegendt 2y agoSure, but when people propose a land value tax it's because morally, they've come to the conclusion that the current system is unjust. Systemic changes need to originate somewhere, right?
- Lichtso 2y ago> Systemic changes need to originate somewhere, right? Yes, but that does not need to be morals, values, ethics or ideology. Instead I prefer Kant´s idea of the categorical imperative whereby the question only is if a society following specific rules would satisfy its members long term. It is more pragmatic as it shifts the question from should/shouldn't to does it work out.
- kaibee 2y agoLVT satisfies the categorical imperative. If I didn't know whether I'd be born as a landless serf (very high chance) or born to inherit wealth (low chance), then I should prefer to be born into a society with an LVT, since the LVT distributes the land rent to everyone.
- jnordwick 2y ago> they've come to the conclusion that the current system is unjust you want a dictatorship? that's how you get a dictatorship.
- afiori 2y agoI am not going to speak for others, but one can argue for LVT as a more functional system https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-...
- randunel 2y agoDidn't the previous owners want you to to inherit their properties? As long as they did, you must have done something to have earned this inheritance, with or without you being aware (e.g. being born to or adopted by them). If they didn't want you to inherit them, presumably they would have done something about that.
- willis936 2y ago>you must have done something to have earned this inheritance Just admit that the world isn't fair and that some people are lucky and you don't live in a meritocracy, please.
- jnordwick 2y agothen live to your own standards and give it away. This all just virtue signaling until you actually so something with your (not very strongly held) values. Luck is part of part -- in economics we call it risk. And without risk there is no economic development. Somebody in your past took a risk and passed profits from that risk down to you. Trying to take the ability to pass that down is both immoral and bad economics.
- dukeyukey 2y agoSomeone earns a salary by working. By when land appreciates in value, it's not usually because of the work _you_ put in, but the work others did. Like, if I found a tech startup that grows big in a small town, homes in that town will increase in value because people want to work at my company. The landowners did nothing for that value.
- at_compile_time 2y agoThe value of land is the result of the productivity of society and the bounty of nature. Would you consider the massive growth in property values over the last 30 years an earned benefit? What have landowners done to deserve this bounty besides owning an irreproducible asset? An empty lot held out of productive use will appreciate just as much as the same land put to productive use as the city around it grows and technology advances. >Do you consider the salary you work for an unearned social benefit? On the contrary, I consider the wages of labour and the return on capital to be the actual earned benefits. Yet these are the things we tax. So the wealthy claim no income, hold their assets, and never realize capital gains, and multinationals play accounting games and pretend that all of their profits happen in the lowest international tax jurisdiction. Sales taxes and personal income taxes end up being the majority of government revenue. Land value taxes are much harder to avoid, they reward investment by not taxing it, and they promote efficient use of the land, which is the one thing that you need to do anything and the only thing that we can't get any more of.
- glompers 2y ago"David Ricardo [1772-1823] introduced the term 'rent' in economics. It means the payment to a factor of production in excess of what is required to keep that factor in its present use." After additional economic theory development, "People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena." "But why do economists use the term “rent” [for a market benefit that is being sought outside the market mechanism]? Unfortunately, there is no good reason." [all] https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html Once those two terms are understandably conflated, and a commenter showed you their example of inheriting the right to some rental real estate, the terminological clarity in the discussion is more or less gone.