A land value tax seems like such an obvious solution to so much that ails our societies. Allowing legacy land owners to accrue vast sums of untaxed value due to the economic activity of everyone else in the vicinity of their land creates such perverse incentives.
A great example near me is in midtown Atlanta. For decades there have been empty lots that just sat empty and empty and empty until enough economic growth happened around them that their owners finally sold it for development. Even today, there are empty lots and vacant decrepit buildings in some of the most valuable locations for hundreds of miles because we are not taxing the value of the land these people are accruing.
Most states tax land at the time of sale and annually. It's just that the millage is low for raw land.
Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition. Why not tax people an imputed income tax based on what we thing a person's labor is worth? It makes more sense to tax money when money is actually made.
Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
> Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition.
You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing.
> Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
Not at all. The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for.
"You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing."
It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
"The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for."
Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
> Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
Yeah, that's stupid and it's not how LVT works. The opportunity costs are the same.
> It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
Formulated like that, it sounds pretty silly.
Singapore has a system that works fairly well in practice and is pretty close to some form of theoretical optimal for this. Let me describe a cleaned up version:
Basically, the government owns all the land and leases it out for something like 30 years at a time to the highest bidder. No imputing, the auction sets the price. The winner pays up front in cash, so the government doesn't have to be in the business of judging creditworthiness. Leases are freely tradable while they run.
(The main way to optimise this further would be to held the auctions 10 years before the lease starts, so that the old leaseholder has enough time to make plans, and some other nice theoretical properties.)
And Ironically across the sea in UK, to a smaller extent Ireland (and I'm not sure perhaps may be elsewhere too). There's been a concerted social media push by some folks to reduce inheritance taxes and portray them as bad. One visible proponent was Jeremy Clarkson, you know the large farm owner, it's quite easy to see why he would benefit.
A land value tax is a lot more efficient. (But that's pretty unrelated.)
Even a bad old property tax is better than an inheritance tax. A property tax is probably a second best tax around for raising revenue with minimal damage to the economy, with land value taxes being the best.
I agree that a land value tax is great. But it won't, by itself, change how much development happens. That's the whole point of a land value tax: the opportunity costs between different land uses are unaffected by a land value tax, that's why it doesn't have any deadweight losses.
With or without a land value tax, if you don't use your land you lose the difference between leaving your land fallow and leasing it out to the highest bidder. The opportunity costs are exactly the same.
not a land value tax but sn empty property tax. if you own a property that has a dedicated use but you are not using it for that, the that should be taxed/punished/force sold, ...
Now apply your first statement to zoning and realize zoning in itself does the exact same thing (and also ruins a land value tax to some extent because zoning cuts off a huge swath of value due to potentially limiting land use from the most valuable use.)
To me zoning is the biggest unacknowledged flaw with a land use tax because, as an example, my land my be worth 1 million if it is limited to single family, or it may be worth 20 million if only my land is rezoned to build a high rise, or it may be worth 5 million if all the land is rezoned to allow highrises. I'm not convinced at all that the biggest problem or even the major problem is how we tax land, which could address a few marginal pieces of land, when literally all the land use is negatively affected by zoning. It feels a lot like complaining someone didn't trim their hedges when their house is on fire.
Yeah I agree zoning should be severely relaxed. That's not to say you should be able to build a big box store or chemical factory downtown, but i think a lot more mixed use high-density stuff being allowed where it currently isn't would be good.
imo, there should be maybe 3 zones and that's it: mixed use up to six stories (basically allows everything but regulates noise levels, chemical, etc outputs so you don't have pig farm/iron smelter levels of pollution/stink here. Obnoxious things light night clubs are allowed if they can limit their annoyance levels. Everything within the highly permissible zoning should be approved very fast, think a week at most, ideally a couple days). mixed use over six stories. This would allow everything in the previous zone but allow higher builds without rezoning and be fairly fast for approval. Then industrial zoning where you can build the stuff that can't keep itself within the pollution/noise/etc regulations of the first two (think pig farm, garbage dump, industrial factories).
Singapore uses a system that is economically ~identical. Nearly all the land is owned by the state and leased to private parties on 99 year leases who pay "land rents" to the state.
An LVT is a way to produce the same economic effects without the starting point of "the state owns the land," which is hard to transition to from "the state does not own the land."
However, the government still has the power to tax you, and they have the power to seize your property if you don't pay your taxes. But note that this is not dependent on some (nonexistent) concept of higher landlord, because the government can seize things like your car under the exact same general taxation authority. None of it is predicated on "higher ownership" because higher ownership doesn't exist, it's "just" taxation.
You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want. It's uninteresting to me and everyone else, so perhaps save the HN comment board for something more substantive.
"You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want."
Nice strawman. Where did I say that?
The link you sent also states that it's alloidal title only to distinguish it from feudal title. The mechanisms are essentially the same - you must pay a sum to keep the land. There's still things like eminent domain and eschet. Don't forget that tenurial rights are roughly equivalent to zoning laws in concept. Similar mechanisms are there, but they're just named differently.
No, they’re not “named differently.” They are different things. The government does not own all the land in the US. They have completely distinct mechanisms to take ownership of land.
Yes, land value tax has been advocated by many, but has any country implemented this and made it their main (or at least a major) source of tax income? Why not?
A tax that prices 80 year old grandmas out of their homes and the whole area they've lived in all their lives is going to be extremely politicially unpopular.
Well all know LVT is not proposed for single-owner homeowners who live in their own home. I know it and you do too. Why are you being disingineous or deliberately obtuse?
Which specific proposal out of dozens all over the world do you claim to know? And once you have one carveout, the next one is not far. I'm being "disingineous or deliberately obtuse" because that's how the spin doctors and lobbyists are going to paint it.
The UK tried it as part of the 1909 "People's Budget", coming into force two years later at an annual rate of 1p in the (pre-decimal) £, so about 0.4%.
There's an open question over whether anyone ever thought it would actually raise significant amounts of money, or if it was primarily intended as a tool to force a confrontation with the House of Lords. If the latter, it certainly did the job and helped establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the unelected Lords.
In terms of revenue generation, though, it was much less successful - at the time it was abolished in 1920, the costs of surveying and valuing land had outweighed the amount of income generated so it was a net negative overall.
People don't like land value taxes for the same reason the anti-property-tax movement is in the news these days: It reverses 100 years of pro-homeownership messaging, and it turns landowners into renters from the government.
Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices? Gambling, drugs, prediction markets, cash-sink "luxury" products, parasitic mobile games, etc.? I think it's fine by just about everybody if those particular industries -- the real "bad capitalism" -- become almost unprofitable by default.
The secondary layer of "bad capitalism" is in finance, speculation, and even legal services. There's no reason that those, also, cannot be much more heavily taxed.
At the same time, do the extremely smart thing that Asian economies -- China and Korea foremost among them -- have been practicing: Subsidize technical and industrial innovation, strategic industries, etc. Just cut the red tape and fund it.
The problem with taxing vices too heavily is that it incentives a black market to emerge... and all the crime that comes with it. Australia is a great example of a place where this is causing a lot of problems.
The point shouldn’t be to just raise money simply by taxing things that you personally think are ‘bad’. This is the sort of pointless politics that’s being going on for too long.
Instead, the approach should be to diagnose what is wrong with our economies (and maybe our societies) and then use the tools we have, including taxation, to address those issues. This is where people are with (variously) land taxes, or wealth tax, or others.
(Whole societies and economies aren’t struggling because of people gambling, smoking, and drinking.)
Australia is doing that with tobacco. It worked in that it has drastically cut smoking rates and deaths, but hasn't worked it has also made the market more lucrative for smugglers/organised crime. Illegal tobacco avoids the tax, so it can be sold at a lower price whilst still raking in the profits. Today 80% of tobacco in Australia is illegal, with a consequent 80% hit to tax revenue.
I'm pretty sure the issue isn't economic know-how, it's all politics. We're simply stuck with a hung parliament, and while each party keeps playing in their political interests, nothing will happen.
It will take a while until we get a functional political system (i.e. parliament needs to realize coalitions are absolutely necessary to do anything), so let's just hope the french economy doesn't collapse in the mean time and its debt doesn't blow up.
As I understand it, the point is that land rent is a large and stable rent, where taxing it has few supply-side side-effects, not that land rent is the only rent.
The second paragraph of the Georgism Wikipedia page mentions other rents,
> Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property).
Funny timing. The NZ Election is coming up on the 7th of November, and there is a party campaigning on a Land Value Tax and UBI [0]. Despite never being in parliament before, they're polling at 5% [1], just above the threshold to make it in (but would have quite a lot of leverage over the next government.)
It will be very interesting to watch and see if this does get implemented.
lvt is too ham fisted, what your really want to tax isinefficient land usage, eg your land is zoned for higher density or industrial etc and you fail to deploy it as such then you should pay a tax for that. this encourages investment and discourages land banking. moving that land into those who will deploy it and lower the overall cost of doing things overall
Even though this paper has scarcity in the title, it doesn't seem to investigate how UBI affects scarcity of resources that are not labor. Natural resources and production volume are essentially finite when looking at a current timeframe. A UBI will increase prices as demand for finite resources stays the same or increases and the money supply to consumers increases.
Wasn't there another post a week ago talking about how UBI won't save us from automation? I was much more inclined to believe that one.
It's an interesting topic. So let's say many people get laid off as automation takes over. If we have UBI that covers mostly bare necessities (as an example), shouldn't supply and demand stay basically the same? Or demand even lowers if people can't afford what they previously did.
If people have more money (or population grows) so that demand grows while supply stays the same, prices will rise and find a new equilibrium where people can again afford less and therefore buy less.
I'm not sure if it's an option to just leave most of the population to starve either so what's the alternative to some kind of social security or UBI? Long ago, nature used to provide relatively more of our needs, but that's not feasible today.
In any case, finite resources are finite regardless if we have UBI or not.
We just saw mass protests in Spain over an elderly lady that couldn't afford the new rent in her desirable City apartment. What do you think will happen in France when suddenly lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?
Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.
That's only true for this one implementation. But that gets messy when you have home buessiness that may involve some rent-seeking aspect. This is especially true once businesses figure out you can home office people instead of paying the land tax.
> lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?
I think exempting your primary residence from LVT (or capping it at the value of UBI, in that proposal) would not defeat the purpose of LVT, and would eliminate such problems.
These protests started because schools are falling in complete disrepair. And you want to reduce their funding further? Maybe students should study outside? Taught by AI, because human teachers are too expensive?
Fuck this death cult that is neoliberalism. We've been doing austerity for decades, and things keep getting worse and worse. How come we're unable to maintain what we had 50 years ago, while work has never been this productive? Tax the rich.
There's no amount of defunding that will satisfy the capital class. They will take everything, unless we stop them from bleeding us dry.
Good economic policy is largely context independent. It is almost always a good time to tax economic rents and deregulate starting/running a business. The basic formula for success has been well established for several centuries and even the Communists managed to figure it out a big chunk of that.
It is not surprising that the established government figures seem confused. If they've let the situation devolve to the point where there is a visible problem it is strong evidence that they just don't care about good economic policy. Not in the top 10 list of priorities. And to couple that with a forecast, that probably isn't going to change any time soon.
Going to guess this is mostly about the housing problem that basically all modern societies are facing from Korea to Australia to Spain. There are two sides of this problem, cities where everyone wants to go and old towns where everyone is leaving.
Capitalism says buyers pay and when there are too many customers, the price goes up. This is what we are seeing, its that simple.
Some suggest to add some sort of tax to owners, but this wont help, they will of course just pass the cost onto their renters. Its pretty obvious owners dont care if you cant pay someone else will, its that simple.
The REAL problem is the concentration of living in big cities and the fact there are too many people. The same is also true of wages, wages dont go up because there will always be someone else who will do the job for the same or less be it actual wages or extra hours and other negatives.
The system is broken, we have to appreciate that all this centralisation of everything and anything is the problem. Slowly or maybe its quickly everything is becoming a monopoly of some kind.
Major cities are becoming the monopoly of employment and work, previoously it was spread across more places and more industries. Now its becoming concentrated. In Spain that means everyone wants to move to Madrid or Barca and the consequences mean too many people and too few homes. People want to live in certain places for their advantages, big cities also mean more commuting, and people want less travel time, but that means they pay more in rent. You cant win, if you have one then you lose on the other. THis is always the case in everything from commuting time, to rent, in the end most of the people lose most of the time.
What we are seeing is what happens when you have a monopoly. THe problem is people cant see who or what are the monopolies. THey think a monopoly must be a single company or person, they cant comprehend its something above that at the nationwide level, namely the structure of each country.
A perfect example is everyone in NZ is moving to Auckland, and then everyone in NZ also moves to Australia. Of course its not everyone but its alot and this affects the balance both in NZ and also in places like Sydney which grow even bigger.
The answer is to stop the centralisation, and break things up.
> And then the policy you want is simple: Tax the bad capitalism, don’t tax the good capitalism.
Tax isn’t punishment. Imagine a company which has a thousand trucks. The trucks themselves are ethically pure EVs. They pay the land value tax for the parking lot and the auto shop. But they don’t indirectly pay taxes for the use of the roads? That’s a massive wear on the road infrastructure.
As a country, I host a somewhat large and educated group of humans. Some of them are economists like you. They most certainly have heard about georgism before.
The current issue is not so much that they don’t have enough ideas, but that they can’t agree on which ones to apply.
Agreed. I was in France recently, and it's hard to overstate how much raw disagreement there is between the people there. You think left vs right is bad in the US, you haven't tried 4 or 5 different microshifted pov on either side, all completely in opposition with anything but their own candidate.
People there talk about needing a new constitution. Elections won't fix France, and neither will economic policy. The problem is fragmentation.
I too once presumed that those people knew better than me and others. I can not stress how wrong I was.
I was so often flabbergasted at the incompetence and ignorance of those "in the know" that I now believe that their positions have nothing to do with being the best at what they do.
Some of it is Hanlon's razor read forward, but the rest is Hanlon's razor read backwards. Either way, it's terrifying for someone like me who doesn't think themselves as particularly intelligent.
Any time anyone says that complex societal issues can be solved with simple policy changes, alarm bells go off in my head.
By that I don't mean that simple solutions to complex problems do not exist, rather that getting them approved and implemented is often not so straight forward as some would like to think. Human societal systems are complex and very messy.
Watching the introduction of the embedded video gives me the feeling that the author is perhaps still studying economics and so it does come across quite hubristic to say to have a definitive answer in a early career paper that has yet to go through rigorous peer review.
France needs to stop spending 57% of its GDP on public expenditure while experiencing virtually no economic growth. It needs to stop handing out massive pensions and generally treating pensioners like royalty.
The French government needs to stop spending money it doesn't have when it can barely keep the lights on. New taxes in a country where the GPD is already taxed at 45%, please, give me a break.
The paper seems stuck with the long debunked idea that all market actors are rational and centred on economic values, but that is utterly incorrect.
Similarly it states value comes from either work or land, but value can also be created out of thin air. It is called branding.
Especially for France and its luxury industry. You take two identical handbag, one is from LV, the other an unknown brand, one will cost 1,500$, the other 150$.
> (If you’re wondering if you can skip the UBI and just have LVT, you can’t, otherwise farmers get screwed, and grandma living off her pension loses her home, and various other problems caused by only having LVT)
That's silly and ill-informed.
Farming as a business is unaffected: you have exactly the same opportunity costs as before. Farmers who lease their land won't even notice at all.
Singapore has something pretty much equivalent to an LVT (the government owns all the land and leases it out), and no UBI and we are doing just fine.
UBI might or might not be good idea for other reasons; but it's pretty independent of LVT, and we shouldn't unnecessarily mix up these two ideas.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadA great example near me is in midtown Atlanta. For decades there have been empty lots that just sat empty and empty and empty until enough economic growth happened around them that their owners finally sold it for development. Even today, there are empty lots and vacant decrepit buildings in some of the most valuable locations for hundreds of miles because we are not taxing the value of the land these people are accruing.
Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition. Why not tax people an imputed income tax based on what we thing a person's labor is worth? It makes more sense to tax money when money is actually made.
Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
You don't need to impute anything. There are ways to get the valuation of land without imputing.
> Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.
Not at all. The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for.
It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
"The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for."
Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.
Yeah, that's stupid and it's not how LVT works. The opportunity costs are the same.
> It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
Formulated like that, it sounds pretty silly.
Singapore has a system that works fairly well in practice and is pretty close to some form of theoretical optimal for this. Let me describe a cleaned up version:
Basically, the government owns all the land and leases it out for something like 30 years at a time to the highest bidder. No imputing, the auction sets the price. The winner pays up front in cash, so the government doesn't have to be in the business of judging creditworthiness. Leases are freely tradable while they run.
(The main way to optimise this further would be to held the auctions 10 years before the lease starts, so that the old leaseholder has enough time to make plans, and some other nice theoretical properties.)
A land value tax is a lot more efficient. (But that's pretty unrelated.)
Even a bad old property tax is better than an inheritance tax. A property tax is probably a second best tax around for raising revenue with minimal damage to the economy, with land value taxes being the best.
With or without a land value tax, if you don't use your land you lose the difference between leaving your land fallow and leasing it out to the highest bidder. The opportunity costs are exactly the same.
more on this issue in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566791
To me zoning is the biggest unacknowledged flaw with a land use tax because, as an example, my land my be worth 1 million if it is limited to single family, or it may be worth 20 million if only my land is rezoned to build a high rise, or it may be worth 5 million if all the land is rezoned to allow highrises. I'm not convinced at all that the biggest problem or even the major problem is how we tax land, which could address a few marginal pieces of land, when literally all the land use is negatively affected by zoning. It feels a lot like complaining someone didn't trim their hedges when their house is on fire.
Curious, as I dont want my cynicism to creep in...
An LVT is a way to produce the same economic effects without the starting point of "the state owns the land," which is hard to transition to from "the state does not own the land."
The US has alloidal land ownership (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title). If you own the land in the US, you are the actual owner of that land.
However, the government still has the power to tax you, and they have the power to seize your property if you don't pay your taxes. But note that this is not dependent on some (nonexistent) concept of higher landlord, because the government can seize things like your car under the exact same general taxation authority. None of it is predicated on "higher ownership" because higher ownership doesn't exist, it's "just" taxation.
You can go ahead and do the whole "all taxation is theft" song and dance if you want. It's uninteresting to me and everyone else, so perhaps save the HN comment board for something more substantive.
Nice strawman. Where did I say that?
The link you sent also states that it's alloidal title only to distinguish it from feudal title. The mechanisms are essentially the same - you must pay a sum to keep the land. There's still things like eminent domain and eschet. Don't forget that tenurial rights are roughly equivalent to zoning laws in concept. Similar mechanisms are there, but they're just named differently.
We Italians should be taking some notes as well... :)
There's an open question over whether anyone ever thought it would actually raise significant amounts of money, or if it was primarily intended as a tool to force a confrontation with the House of Lords. If the latter, it certainly did the job and helped establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the unelected Lords.
In terms of revenue generation, though, it was much less successful - at the time it was abolished in 1920, the costs of surveying and valuing land had outweighed the amount of income generated so it was a net negative overall.
Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices? Gambling, drugs, prediction markets, cash-sink "luxury" products, parasitic mobile games, etc.? I think it's fine by just about everybody if those particular industries -- the real "bad capitalism" -- become almost unprofitable by default.
The secondary layer of "bad capitalism" is in finance, speculation, and even legal services. There's no reason that those, also, cannot be much more heavily taxed.
At the same time, do the extremely smart thing that Asian economies -- China and Korea foremost among them -- have been practicing: Subsidize technical and industrial innovation, strategic industries, etc. Just cut the red tape and fund it.
Instead, the approach should be to diagnose what is wrong with our economies (and maybe our societies) and then use the tools we have, including taxation, to address those issues. This is where people are with (variously) land taxes, or wealth tax, or others.
(Whole societies and economies aren’t struggling because of people gambling, smoking, and drinking.)
Australia is doing that with tobacco. It worked in that it has drastically cut smoking rates and deaths, but hasn't worked it has also made the market more lucrative for smugglers/organised crime. Illegal tobacco avoids the tax, so it can be sold at a lower price whilst still raking in the profits. Today 80% of tobacco in Australia is illegal, with a consequent 80% hit to tax revenue.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-29/expensive-cigarettes-...
It will take a while until we get a functional political system (i.e. parliament needs to realize coalitions are absolutely necessary to do anything), so let's just hope the french economy doesn't collapse in the mean time and its debt doesn't blow up.
The second paragraph of the Georgism Wikipedia page mentions other rents,
> Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
It will be very interesting to watch and see if this does get implemented.
[0]: https://www.opportunity.org.nz/tax-reset [1]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics_election-2026/2035492/ne...
Wasn't there another post a week ago talking about how UBI won't save us from automation? I was much more inclined to believe that one.
If people have more money (or population grows) so that demand grows while supply stays the same, prices will rise and find a new equilibrium where people can again afford less and therefore buy less.
I'm not sure if it's an option to just leave most of the population to starve either so what's the alternative to some kind of social security or UBI? Long ago, nature used to provide relatively more of our needs, but that's not feasible today.
In any case, finite resources are finite regardless if we have UBI or not.
Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.
I think exempting your primary residence from LVT (or capping it at the value of UBI, in that proposal) would not defeat the purpose of LVT, and would eliminate such problems.
Fuck this death cult that is neoliberalism. We've been doing austerity for decades, and things keep getting worse and worse. How come we're unable to maintain what we had 50 years ago, while work has never been this productive? Tax the rich.
There's no amount of defunding that will satisfy the capital class. They will take everything, unless we stop them from bleeding us dry.
Good economic policy is largely context independent. It is almost always a good time to tax economic rents and deregulate starting/running a business. The basic formula for success has been well established for several centuries and even the Communists managed to figure it out a big chunk of that.
It is not surprising that the established government figures seem confused. If they've let the situation devolve to the point where there is a visible problem it is strong evidence that they just don't care about good economic policy. Not in the top 10 list of priorities. And to couple that with a forecast, that probably isn't going to change any time soon.
Capitalism says buyers pay and when there are too many customers, the price goes up. This is what we are seeing, its that simple.
Some suggest to add some sort of tax to owners, but this wont help, they will of course just pass the cost onto their renters. Its pretty obvious owners dont care if you cant pay someone else will, its that simple.
The REAL problem is the concentration of living in big cities and the fact there are too many people. The same is also true of wages, wages dont go up because there will always be someone else who will do the job for the same or less be it actual wages or extra hours and other negatives.
The system is broken, we have to appreciate that all this centralisation of everything and anything is the problem. Slowly or maybe its quickly everything is becoming a monopoly of some kind.
Major cities are becoming the monopoly of employment and work, previoously it was spread across more places and more industries. Now its becoming concentrated. In Spain that means everyone wants to move to Madrid or Barca and the consequences mean too many people and too few homes. People want to live in certain places for their advantages, big cities also mean more commuting, and people want less travel time, but that means they pay more in rent. You cant win, if you have one then you lose on the other. THis is always the case in everything from commuting time, to rent, in the end most of the people lose most of the time.
What we are seeing is what happens when you have a monopoly. THe problem is people cant see who or what are the monopolies. THey think a monopoly must be a single company or person, they cant comprehend its something above that at the nationwide level, namely the structure of each country.
A perfect example is everyone in NZ is moving to Auckland, and then everyone in NZ also moves to Australia. Of course its not everyone but its alot and this affects the balance both in NZ and also in places like Sydney which grow even bigger.
The answer is to stop the centralisation, and break things up.
> And then the policy you want is simple: Tax the bad capitalism, don’t tax the good capitalism.
Tax isn’t punishment. Imagine a company which has a thousand trucks. The trucks themselves are ethically pure EVs. They pay the land value tax for the parking lot and the auto shop. But they don’t indirectly pay taxes for the use of the roads? That’s a massive wear on the road infrastructure.
As a country, I host a somewhat large and educated group of humans. Some of them are economists like you. They most certainly have heard about georgism before.
The current issue is not so much that they don’t have enough ideas, but that they can’t agree on which ones to apply.
Sincerely, France.
People there talk about needing a new constitution. Elections won't fix France, and neither will economic policy. The problem is fragmentation.
Just watch tomorrow.
I was so often flabbergasted at the incompetence and ignorance of those "in the know" that I now believe that their positions have nothing to do with being the best at what they do.
Some of it is Hanlon's razor read forward, but the rest is Hanlon's razor read backwards. Either way, it's terrifying for someone like me who doesn't think themselves as particularly intelligent.
Any time anyone says that complex societal issues can be solved with simple policy changes, alarm bells go off in my head.
By that I don't mean that simple solutions to complex problems do not exist, rather that getting them approved and implemented is often not so straight forward as some would like to think. Human societal systems are complex and very messy.
Watching the introduction of the embedded video gives me the feeling that the author is perhaps still studying economics and so it does come across quite hubristic to say to have a definitive answer in a early career paper that has yet to go through rigorous peer review.
The French government needs to stop spending money it doesn't have when it can barely keep the lights on. New taxes in a country where the GPD is already taxed at 45%, please, give me a break.
You might the organisation as the USA military.
Notice the US debt is approximately equal to the US military budget spent since WW2.
Similarly it states value comes from either work or land, but value can also be created out of thin air. It is called branding.
Especially for France and its luxury industry. You take two identical handbag, one is from LV, the other an unknown brand, one will cost 1,500$, the other 150$.
> That’s a somewhat heavy macroeconomics theory paper, so here’s one analogy of what we have developed: we split “capitalism” into two
> - Good capitalism: Returns from capital that come from real growth, development, innovation.
> - Bad capitalism: Returns from capital that does not develop and improve the economy. The academic term is economic rent and rent seeking.
Also, I don't think it says anywhere that value comes from work or land.
That's silly and ill-informed.
Farming as a business is unaffected: you have exactly the same opportunity costs as before. Farmers who lease their land won't even notice at all.
Singapore has something pretty much equivalent to an LVT (the government owns all the land and leases it out), and no UBI and we are doing just fine.
UBI might or might not be good idea for other reasons; but it's pretty independent of LVT, and we shouldn't unnecessarily mix up these two ideas.