patrick.net

nosimpsonsneedapply says

Mick Russom says
You are a crap parent, then. Simple. Family suffers the more you gecko types try and pretend you can take over the world with anything other than luck or theft.

I don't know this guy Mick but I know your intent. I had a guy that owed me on a mortgage. One of my rentals. One day he had me on one phone and a guy on another line from his work. He was going on and on about how much he made last week. Talking about 25k or 30k. All the time this guy is 3 months behind on making his payments to me. I'm sitting there going what the fuck is this bullshit with this stockbroker fuck anyway. Hes behind on me and he's behind on one of my other friends he had 2 rentals with. WTF. Christ I even thought hey fuck I'm tempted to. Then again. I've known to many guys like him. Your right that entire movie Wall Street was to get people interested. More importantly the swindel the stock market is took off not long after that movie. Its nothing but paper with no asset attached.

ArtimusMaxtor says

Its nothing but paper with no asset attached.

Nothing is worth any more than what we all (or at least one buyer and one seller) agree it is worth on any given moment in time. That holds true for paper or tulips or gold coins or brick and mortar.

Have house prices dropped 50% or more in some markets in the last 6 years?

Seems to me if a house was built in 2005 and sold in 2006 it would be the same house in 2012 - just selling @ half off.

YMMV of course.

Good question. Henry George would say you should not tax any capital (things created by people) but instead tax only land, which no one created.

But maybe a small tax on certain kinds of capital is also good, perhaps with an exemption up to the median amount of capital owned. So you'd pay no tax on the first $100K of asset or something like that.

Sales tax is a tax on transactions, not assets. Sales tax discourages commerce in the same way that income tax discourages work.

What you really want to discourage is non-productive rent-seeking.

George had some very good points.

I think, however, we must be careful to consider what productivity we gain by forking over too much to government. Government is, in its most basic form, nothing more than concentrated force. After all, everything government does can be done voluntarily through free association and liberty. What government provides is a stick of enforcement for a prevailing wisdom -- or a connected political body / beneficiary class. The latter tends to dominate government, keeping much of the benefits for itself, while placating the masses just barely enough to avoid being overthrown.

Not that I have a problem with George's land value tax ideas, though.