patrick.net

I kind of like the idea of a consumption tax. That's just me and it's not a well thought out opinion.

Also usually (not in this case) when I hear people bring up Georgism it's people bitter about rents and housing prices in places like CA. There are plenty of reasons for this phenomenon. Landlords out here aren't the cause.

just_dregalicious says

How many men own land vs. women? I suspect way more men.

Exactly.

But who likely makes more money?

All the men as Plumbers, Engineering, Surgeons, Welders?

Or all the women as social workers, practical nurses, cashiers working part time?

The guy is suggesting that income (for most, this is really a labor tax) taxes are a wealth transfer from Hardworking Dicks to Slutty Chicks.

So it's a wash then?

just_dregalicious says

So it's a wash then?

It's not a wash, since the government needs worker drone male taxes to pay for welfare queens.

Land taxes would pay for essential services, but if they went high enough to support a welfare and social state, people would literally revolt.

There's a lot more play with income (again, for most of the population this is mostly a tax on their labor) taxes.

Okay, I see your point.

HonkpilledMaster says

f they went high enough to support a welfare and social state,

I'm already revolting! haha

It might go super high. Agenda-21 conspiracy theorists think the ultimate goal is to shit case suburbia and get everyone into dense housing near rail. Those are the moves I see the CA govt making these days. That might, "move things along", so to speak.

just_dregalicious says

It might go super high. Agenda-21 conspiracy theorists think the ultimate goal is to shit case suburbia and get everyone into dense housing near rail. Those are the moves I see the CA govt making these days. That might, "move things along", so to speak.

My conspiracy theory is that Turd Worlders are more prone to the Patronage System and lesser standard of living, whereas pesky Whites have a history of Free Yeomanry.

Land tax % couldn't go superhigh because it would soak big holders and small holders equally. The company that owns all the shopping plazas, the guy with 10 apartment complexes, would freak out just as much as Joe Sixpack on a 1/10th of an acre with a single wide, because the land tax would be a fixed percentage.



Karl Marx's most hated alternative tax system.

Georgism sounds appealing on paper, but in reality has multiple problems that guarantee its inoperability / detrimental outcome for the masses in real life:

1. Land under houses/buildings do not transact in market place independently of the house/building, so the theoretical separation of land value is just that: theoretical, having almost zero basis in real life. If government bureaucrats have to be relied upon to calculate the value of land, then corruption/bribery is guaranteed. One of the buildings that I bought during the last crash came with a Section-8 family, and it took only a few years of inspection cycle for the inspector to come looking for bribes. That's when I recognized time to get the Section-8 tenant moved out, lest myself getting caught up in some kind of bribery scandal.

2. Real estate prices fluctuate. If say the average house price in the town is $600k, and on average 1/2 of that is structure value and the other land value; since structure is unchanged, a price down draft of 25% to $450k would keep structure value at $300k while leaving only $150k for land value. How are the town bureaucrats (and their "services") going to survive on a 50% cut in tax revenue?

3. Land under the overwhelming majority of houses/buildings today are not raw land, but significantly improved land (grading, retaining walls, etc. before we consider utility connections and roads that actually make land worth much of anything and "produce" land by making formerly unbuildable land buildable). In hilly places like SF, the cumulative spending on grading and building retaining walls may well exceed the current value of the house itself. If "land value" is to be arrived at by market value minus past construction expenses, then many lots in SF may well have negative land value. If implemented, it would only elicit fraudulently high priced new retaining wall construction and kickbacks from contractors.

4. "Land value" is really an intellectual invention trying to bridge the gap between market price (subjectively decided by two parties engaged in transaction) vs. "effort." It's actually very similar to the Marxian / Ricardian concept of price of any item being the cumulative labor cost (and everything above that they would consider "exploitation.") The idea has special appeal to the bookwormish mind that assumes some kind of steady equilibrium state, without recognizing that market is an information distribution process (through price discovery): if market were steady state, the market wouldn't exist simply because there wouldn't be enough difference between the buyer's and the seller's subjective valuations to pay for commission cost and other transaction costs. The biggest downside of formal education is that devaluation of entrepreneurship: assuming there is a "correct" price instead of realizing price changes according to entrepreneurial expectations (someone coming up with a new idea of how to use the same land more productively, either by modifying the land or even just modifying the use).

5. The "sitting on land waiting for it to appreciate" argument seems to be neglecting the fact that the owner would be passing up all the opportunity cost during those years when he sits on land. If government bureaucrats are paid salaries to stop people from developing (zoning rule enforcement, urban planning, etc.), and government bureaucrats and their corporate allies are paid even more money to "create space" and "reduce density" in the cities by building parks or conservation land . . . why should private individuals be penalized when they achieve the same result for the community at the cost of their own forfeited opportunity cost? The fact that nobody has offered the owner enough money to buy him out seems to indicate that the development potential of the plot is not worthwhile until there are changes in technology and/or zoning law changes.

6. Departing from individual responsibility on land tenure (aka "private property") to bureaucratic land ownership/management, regardless whether "all land belongs to the people/soviet" or "tax away all their unearned gains" would only result in land mismanagement and corruption . . . just like either approach would do to industrial capital. Competitive entrepreneurial decision making is what brings vitality to the economy and corrects human errors. Entrepreneurial decision making is work and the most productive work: just like designing a pair of good shoes is far more important and far more productive than a newbie laborer turning a good piece of leather into shreds regardless how much "effort" the newbie puts into making his alleged "shoe"; or for that matter the old very experienced soviet factory churning out Lada's worth less than the steel and leather going into them. The idea that labor / "effort" deserves more pay than entrepreneurial decision making is very SJW, and bears the hallmark of having spent too much time in the academia and not enough time in real life market place. Both Karl Marx and Henry George belong to that category.

7. Taxing a 10-story apartment building and a two-story single-family the same because they both sit on 1/2 acre of land each . . . would obviously benefit the big corporate landlords at the expense of the average American families. The long-term result may well be similar to what happened to Hong Kong (a place that actually implemented a form of Georgism for over half a century): enormously expensive tiny condos for the masses. The high cost of land (due to taxation) creates drastic market concentration on the supply side of housing units.

8. Sure, Karl Marx may not have liked Henry George, but that's not much different from Stalin disliked Trotsky (and vice versa) so much that he had him killed, or Hitler and Stalin not liking each other. All of them have terrible ideas. Ideas that often had tremendous appeals to the residents of academic ivory towers (especially the uncreative ones not living up to the expectations of their academic careers) . . . just like Plato's original Academy held sway over generations of intellectuals for hundreds years with his totalitarian ideas about the "Philosopher King." The over-educated mind seems to have a penchant for worshiping selfless saints in bureaucratic costumes . . . whereas in reality, everyone has self-interest, and those pursue bureaucratic careers tend to be the most uncreative and mendacious, hence guaranteed to be extremely corrupt over time as they try to keep up with the Joneses.

IMHO, feminized socialism is a result of academia churning out tons of over-educated youths with no marketable skills. The large volume of graduates guarantee that none of them can fetch the market price that they had hoped for when entering higher education. Coddling by parents and schools further convince them that they deserve rewards just for their effort.

That's why all SJW's put so much emphasis on "effort" and "labor" instead of product/service quality itself or market pricing due to supply/demand.

Very happy that Georgism is getting a bit more attention.

I really think it is the best possible form of taxation. Of course people who are sucking blood out of the economy via mere land ownership don't like it at all.

HonkpilledMaster says

This is something folks don't get about Georgism. It's not a property value tax - the tax is the same whether it's a vacant lot, or an SFH, or a drive thru coffee stand, or a 30-storey skyscraper. If you're going to live prime downtown real estate as a vacant lot, your speculation keeping the land out of use will probably cost you. If you're using it to build the Trump Tower, your rents will no doubt compensate for the land value.

Thanks for pointing that out. Most people misunderstand immediately and it is impossible to explain to them the difference between land (taxable) and the building on the land (not taxable) for some reason.

Or they think farmers would be put out of business, which is entirely false, except, say, for people who attempt to farm in Manhattan or San Francisco.

except, say, for people who attempt to farm in Manhattan or San Francisco.

That's exactly what governments do with the tax money. Check out the government-subsidized urban farming in Tokyo and Hong Kong, as well as the Clinton and Obama presidential libraries.

That's what we get after transferring decision-making from individual profit/loss responsibility to bureaucratic (mis)management. The general population is good at voting with their own wallets and voting with their feet, but terrible at voting inside the ballot booths regarding someone else' resources. After warehousing the masses in stacked bird-cages for a few decades, they will vote for government-subsidized urban farming.

The way to affordable housing is sprawl (so more land is "produced" / brought into market by connecting utility lines and roads), not higher taxation on land. The more you tax something, the less you get of it. Georgism in practice is the quickest way to oligopoly on housing, as evidenced by places like Hong Kong: a few billionaire mega developers, and masses of extremely expensive tiny condos.

Consumption taxes are the worst form of base taxation there is. Precisely when needed, they fail, such as in a War or Depression.

Taxes on a fair return for labor are also bad, since your wages/salary is really just an even (poor, really) exchange of irreplaceable lifetime and labor for money. Naturally, people with lots of land and capital prefer taxing labor.

Especially since they can recycle some of the wages they pay via their money back to themselves. Government Office Rent, Office Supplies, big standing Armies, benefit money holders since they own the land and businesses supplying those. Even HUD benefits Slumlords as it sets a floor for basic housing and HUD never misses or is late with a payment; YUM! Brands loves Food Stamps, as does 7-11 (7&I Holdings), all of which are paid via WIC and EBT programs.

Reality says

The way to affordable housing is sprawl

Density is even better. We don't say the main solution to aggregate computing power is to build one million more 386 machines from the 1995, but to replace existing 386s with new "dense" Modern Architecture CPUs.

Reality says

IMHO, feminized socialism is a result of academia churning out tons of over-educated youths with no marketable skills. The large volume of graduates guarantee that none of them can fetch the market price that they had hoped for when entering higher education. Coddling by parents and schools further convince them that they deserve rewards just for their effort.

The articles states that the Expansive Welfare State makes degrees like Social Work and Grievance Studies plausible, along with the huge expanse of Government Workers. But an expansive welfare state can not subsist on a Georgist Tax Base.

HonkpilledMaster says

Consumption taxes are the worst form of base taxation there is. Precisely when needed, they fail, such as in a War or Depression.

Wars are not funded by taxation in countries that have central banks. That's precisely why / the advantage of Bank of England was established in 1694: as a way of funding government war effort by lending to the government during war time.

Keynesian government spending during Depression is not funded by tax revenue either: that's the whole point of Keynesianism: justifying government deficit spending during Depression (as a sort of war by choice; hence one of the biggest Keynesians of our time, Paul Krugman, advocated war on imaginary Space Aliens as a way of getting out of the last depression.)

Taxes on a fair return for labor are also bad, since your wages/salary is really just an even (poor, really) exchange of irreplaceable lifetime and labor for money. Naturally, people with lots of land and capital prefer taxing labor.

Income from labor is not an even exchange, just like no mutually willing exchange is an even exchange but every such exchange is a pair of inequalities: the buyer thinking the goods/service being worth more than the money he is paying, and the seller thinking the opposite. Otherwise, Nobody would want to go to work after commute cost and taxes.

Typical landlords in 1913 had nothing to do with the imposition of Income Tax; after all, tenants coming home with less after-tax pay would have less money available to pay rent. Income tax was put in place as a way of making the other 1913 creation the Federal Reserve printing of paper money worthwhile: so that there is a general market demand for the paper, as eventually everyone working would have to pay the tax. Prior to that, the primary federal revenue was import duties. As you can see, the most convenient way of collecting taxes has always been on the money flow; therefore Income Tax was chosen because it's a tax on the money flow in the economy and something that could be levied against a burgeoning sheep population created by modern industries. Landlords have to pay income tax on rental income, just like everyone else; if there is an additional federal tax on capital (on land or house) then capital would shift away from the housing sector to some other sector that does not tax capital itself in addition to taxing the income generated by capital.

Especially since they can recycle some of the wages they pay via their money back to themselves. Government Office Rent, Office Supplies, big standing Armies, benefit money holders since they own the land and businesses supplying those. Even HUD benefits Slumlords as it sets a floor for basic housing and HUD never misses or is late with a payment; YUM! Brands loves Food Stamps, as does 7-11 (7&I Holdings), all of which are paid via WIC and EBT programs.

Good points, but they have little to do with why income tax was imposed. The various welfare programs listed came about in the late 1960's, more than half a century after the imposition of federal income tax.

BTW, not all landlords like Section-8. I tolerated the Section-8 tenant that came with a building purchase at the bottom of the last collapse only because it would be against the law to evict them. Eventually I had to pay them to leave, and make money back in the subsequent year from higher rent in the normal market place so that I could avoid the bribe-seeking bureaucrats. The government bureaucrats are the real economic rent-seekers.

Density is even better. We don't say the main solution to aggregate computing power is to build one million more 386 machines from the 1995, but to replace existing 386s with new "dense" Modern Architecture CPUs.

Cities are where birth rates collapse. Big city life brings out the worst in female hypergamy and narcissism. Population density may help commerce (e.g. Silicon Valley firms locating close to each other) but drastically increase monopolistic power of local suppliers of basic necessities (e.g. convenient stores and neighborhood grocery stores have much higher prices than big box stores such as Costco and Walmart SuperCenter do). Density is the reason why landlords can collect much higher rent in cities than in the country side for comparable housing; transferring that local monopoly/oligopoly power to government bureaucrats (via either nationalization of housing stock or Georgist high taxation) would only further concentrate that power. Instead of just paying high rent, you might end up literally having to bend over and let the local government housing office boss fuck you or your daughter/son, just to have roof over your head, just like in some former soviet block countries at the height of their socialist experiments.

The articles states that the Expansive Welfare State makes degrees like Social Work and Grievance Studies plausible, along with the huge expanse of Government Workers. But an expansive welfare state can not subsist on a Georgist Tax Base.

The welfare state is not subsisting on any tax base. It subsists on money printing. Government workers vote too, as do welfare recipients.

HEYYOU says

But what about unregulated Free Market Capitalism which is without flaws?

Excellent question. Unlike Communism and Socialism promising Heaven on Earth, Free Market Capitalism doesn't promise such perfection.

Fundamentally, it is the people who make mistakes: so long as there are people, there are bound to be mistakes; Free Market Capitalism is only an error correction mechanism allowing other people the freedom to make better choices than what the political "leaders" want. In Communism and Socialism, in order to maintain the cult of perfection, the leaders' mistakes have to be covered up, and corrections rejected by force.

I do see two systematic "flaws" common to Free Market Capitalism and the prosperity that it brings:

1. As the society becomes more wealthy under relatively free market conditions, parents want to give their own kids a leg up on other kids by sending them to schools for formal education (mistakenly observing that in an earlier time, when only a small minority could afford formal higher education the high IQ of students back then made the graduates into high achievers, to be a correlation between higher education and later achievement mistakenly assuming equal IQ among all students and non-students). Consequently there is an over-supply of over-educated mediocre IQ people similarly "educated" therefore commanding no pricing power for their alleged "skills."

2. If at the same time, the successful are into amassing easily transferrable wealth for wealth's sake, then there is a highly volatile situation of high reward for robbery through "revolution." It's a little like piling up tinder waiting for fire. Once in a few generations, the intensity of fueled fire / revolutionary zeal can be so severe as to quickly burning down the society as a whole.

In a way Marx was correct in observing that Capitalism breeds its own tomb diggers; however, the tomb diggers are not the working class, but the "over-educated," unmarketable and severely disappointed intellectuals, who might just be pissed off enough to join the religious death cult of building Heaven on Earth (through robbery then quickly followed by mutual killing among comrades).

Reality says

Wars are not funded by taxation in countries that have central banks. That's precisely why / the advantage of Bank of England was established in 1694: as a way of funding government war effort by lending to the government during war time.

Keynesian government spending during Depression is not funded by tax revenue either: that's the whole point of Keynesianism: justifying government deficit spending during Depression (as a sort of war by choice; hence one of the biggest Keynesians of our time, Paul Krugman, advocated war on imaginary Space Aliens as a way of getting out of the last depression.)

Even with Central banks, paying back those loans & bonds happens only two ways: Inflating the debt away (attacking savers), an after the event taxation increase or severe cut to normal spending.

Reality says

Income from labor is not an even exchange, just like no mutually willing exchange is an even exchange but every such exchange is a pair of inequalities: the buyer thinking the goods/service being worth more than the money he is paying, and the seller thinking the opposite. Otherwise, Nobody would want to go to work after commute cost and taxes.

It is. In fact, it is a horrible exchange: Lifetime is limited. So you are giving up not only labor, but irreplaceable time for which there is little to no substitution. There are only 24 hours in the day, and about 70+ years in a modern human's lifetime, of which perhaps 50 are good for labor.

Reality says

Typical landlords in 1913 had nothing to do with the imposition of Income Tax; after all, tenants coming home with less after-tax pay would have less money available to pay rent.

Remember there is a dual Argument here: Landlords and Bankers. Bankers have every incentive for a government to take out loans and issue bonds, with the P&I repaid by income taxes.

Landlords have an incentive to have a high consumption tax and/or income tax --- taking the tax weight off landowners. See California.


Reality says

Good points, but they have little to do with why income tax was imposed. The various welfare programs listed came about in the late 1960's, more than half a century after the imposition of federal income tax.

Federal Spending jumped very shortly after the introduction of the income tax - much of it was WW1, but it never went back down to pre-1910s levels.


Inbetween tasks... more later.

MisdemeanorRebel says

With only land (and anything else that meets the economic definition of land like natural resources and the electromagnetic spectrum) getting taxed in this system, it puts a ceiling on government spending.

I just finished reading an abridged version of Henry George's "Progress and Poverty".

I think he's clearly right that no matter how much labor or capital produces, rent will increase to suck away most of the increase. This is exactly why rents are so high in the Bay Area, for example. Rents rose to suck away higher salaries, so that people who literally produced nothing at all, but merely owned land, got much of the benefit.

He's also clearly right that income tax and sales tax are government mandated fines which penalize citizens for being productive. A land value tax penalizes only land ownership, which is utterly non-productive anyway.

And that the vast infrastructure which sucks income and sales taxes out of us has to tax us extra to support that infrastructure itself, so the government taxes more than it even receives.

I think he's right that there should be a single tax: a tax on land value (not the building or any improvement to land, which would be completely untaxed).

But he doesn't seem to say exactly how that tax would be set, or what happens if people can't pay it. A hard-core Georgist I met once said that all you have to do is sell land according to who will pay the highest tax rate. The land will go to them.

And as for the Prop 13 argument that you would be forcing the poor elderly out of their houses by property tax, well, you could just let the elderly defer the tax and take it out of the value of the property after they die. Though maybe they could actually owe more than the property is worth.

If I could nail down all the details, I might become a committed Georgist myself.

just_passing_through says

I'll tell you what if I get hit with taxes on my rental properties I will be passing that along to renters. Mine are in Texas and I treat them well. For instance I have a tenant that has taken good care of the yard. He's one of those contract mercenaries the government uses in Afghanistan. He may lose his job as he just failed to qualify running some distance in some time - I forget. He get's one more chance.

They've been there 3 years and I've never raised the rent. I don't get much out of Texas houses but they're new. Just paying down the mortgage. Just last week I spent nearly 1K power washing the concrete areas and repainting the deck. I'm about to ask them if they want another 1-year lease at the same rate.

All of this changes if I get hit with higher taxes.

Anyone who thinks landlords are unproductive and make money passively has never been a landlord or tried to be a good / fair one.

Besides. I don...

This - good landlords look for responsible stewards of their property. It's a give and take. If the tenant maintains or materially increases the value of the property, then the tenant should be rewarded.

I've been a tenant for poor and rich landlords. Poor landlords are the worst - it's all about the $$. Better-off landlords are more concerned with property stewardship. If you're a renter, but you have skills, and can make the landlord's job as easy as possilble, you need to be rewarded - i.e., don't raise the rent.

Full disclosure - I'm renting.

stereotomy says

Full disclosure - I'm renting.

How dare you !

stereotomy says

If the tenant maintains or materially increases the value of the property, then the tenant should be rewarded.

I think the most common case by far is that if the tenant increases the value of the property, the tenant is thoroughly punished with higher rent.

And this is central to Henry George's argument that work is disincentivized by the fact that landlords can effectively steal the result of that work, and in fact can steal wages from whatever labor is going on in the area. This makes the whole society poorer.

Corruption does the same thing. In many countries, if you bother to create anything of value, the ruling mafia family will simply take it from you. So no one even bothers.

People need to feel secure that they can reap the results of their own labor before they will work hard. Landlords create insecurity for labor.

I used to think it politically impossible to implement Georgism, but on reflection, there are probably a lot of rich people who would prefer a high land value tax with zero income tax to a low land value tax but a high income tax. Maybe they could be recruited to the cause.

More advantages of Georgism (aka Geoism):
- land cannot be hidden, so there is less opportunity for evasion
- land tax records are usually public, so you can see how much each bit of land is paying
- the blessed relief of never having to file an income tax return
- the blessed relief of not having to constantly add on sales tax, or for any business to collect it

Ceffer says

stereotomy says

Full disclosure - I'm renting.

How dare you !

Patrick says

stereotomy says

If the tenant maintains or materially increases the value of the property, then the tenant should be rewarded.

I think the most common case by far is that if the tenant increases the value of the property, the tenant is thoroughly punished with higher rent.

And this is central to Henry George's argument that work is disincentivized by the fact that landlords can effectively steal the result of that work, and in fact can steal wages from whatever labor is going on in the area. This makes the whole society poorer.

Corruption does the same thing. In many countries, if you bother to create anything of value, the ruling mafia family will simply take it from you. So no one even bothers.

People need to feel secure that they can reap the results of their own labor before they will work hard. Landlords create insecurity for labor.

I us...

@Patrick - points taken. I just happen to live in a less desirable area of the country that has a history of mom & pop rentals.

Maybe I've been lucky in that I didn't happen to rent from money-grubbing psycho landlords. They just wanted me to maintain their property, until the mythical progeny would return to be near and dear to the family homestead.

Then again, I'm pretty direct. Scammers think I'm an asshole, while based people know I understand what's real.

stereotomy says

This - good landlords look for responsible stewards of their property. It's a give and take. If the tenant maintains or materially increases the value of the property, then the tenant should be rewarded.

I've been a tenant for poor and rich landlords. Poor landlords are the worst - it's all about the $$. Better-off landlords are more concerned with property stewardship. If you're a renter, but you have skills, and can make the landlord's job as easy as possilble, you need to be rewarded - i.e., don't raise the rent.

Full disclosure - I'm renting.

I'm renting too. I'm also going to rent when I move back to Texas in ~6 weeks. I DO take care of my properties, they are nothing like what you get in CA. That tax increase this year though whew! I passed it along to the tenants. One house is a couple and they sort of freaked out about it. Theirs was only $100 the rest were more.

I let them think over the new lease for a week fully expecting them to leave - because they can't afford it but they didn't. They really should get an apartment or a much cheaper house. Next year I'll likely be raising again, then what?

Not my fault if people are morons. They had it good for 4 years with no increases and are surprised when they finally get one. (They got a small one last year but very small)

Also word to the wise if you're a landlord: Force a new lease every year instead of letting things go month to month. That way you're either renewing or re-leasing during the season when people are looking to move. If someone decided to move out of a month to month in early December you're screwed. So I force a new lease this time of year every time.

The only time I let it go month to month is if my initial lease was off season.

Commit or GTFO!

HunterTits says

1. LTV is not the same as property tax.

No shit Sherlock

2. Their is a natural limit you can raise your rent to before your tenants move out.

No shit but people have to live somewhere

Patrick says

https://patrick.net/post/1381874/2024-08-14-bots-brides-of-the-state

Getting a new political system is up there with abolishing electoral college or worldwide nuclear disarmement. I.e. it's not habbening.