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I definitely agree with respect to income, estate, and property taxes. Consumption-based taxes are fairer than so-called "progressive" tax schemes implemented

• harshreality 14y ago
  Property tax encourages those who aren't using a property to sell it. Real Estate ownership is already tracked (you can argue it shouldn't be, but that would upend the real estate system). And unlike cash sitting in a bank account, it's already fairly common to tax real estate. If someone wants to keep 5 houses and leave 4 of them empty at any given time, as a status symbol, shouldn't they be taxed punitively? Real estate is not an unlimited resource. Occupation of any sort would disqualify the taxation; this could be verified easily in most cases by data from utility companies. Pure libertarians tend to argue that rational individuals will not let assets go unused. I think rationality as a model for human behavior has been thoroughly debunked. And if they don't let their real estate go unused, if they invest, lend, rent their property to others, taxes under the described system wouldn't apply. Some of these arguments can be applied to hoarding other assets (like cash), but it would be an uphill battle to tax cash (not cash inflows -- as in the income tax -- but static cash). One place to start might be cash held by public corporations, which have no privacy interest.
  • akadien 14y ago
    > If someone wants to keep 5 houses and leave 4 of them empty at any given time, as a status symbol, shouldn't they be taxed punitively? No.
    • deleted 14y ago
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