If people want to invest in stuff, let them invest wherever they want. A person with money has a better idea what to do with it than legislators & voters having no personal stake therein (or, worse, ulterior motives detrimental to the investor).
- there is such a thing as the commons;
- there is a cost to the government to protect your rights which is much higher for land than "virtual" assets and the cost to investors ought to reflect it.
Commons: I like that Singapore, for example, is taxing drivers around $90,000 per 10 years for the privilege of riding a car. The air is much cleaner and streets freer of traffic. Both of these were damaged by too many car owners. Similarly, the supply of land is limited whilst population can grow ad infinitum, creating ever upwards pressure on land prices.
Cost: in terms of individual rights, the army, police and justice defend your right to own that land free of damage, spurious lawsuits to drain your resources, land grabs by powerful men, and foreign invasion forces. This forms the basis of modern society and the implementation of your individual rights. The cost is proportional to land area but not as strongly correlated with company size in the equity case (you might have a few more problems but not proportionally to market capitalisation, and they involve court cases rather than policing, with most of the high costs - lawyers - born by private parties).
In theory, any land owners ought to be taxed, however, I make an exception for one's primary home (tax residence) considering that all citizen are naturally short housing (they need a place to live) and buying a home puts them in a housing neutral position and also has many positive effects on the commons (people are more invested in the future of their country if they own their home, less likely to move somewhere else, etc.).
Vancouver is a great example of citizen who have created ideal conditions for home ownership by participating in building a peaceful, prosperous economy which respects individual rights. Foreigners have accordingly swarmed to take advantage of the fact they were not charged for the benefits arising from ownership.
This has caused citizen - beyond the first generation of land owners - to be penalised for having built their own country up, as they end up unable to afford to live in it, burning up valuable income into paying high rents and house prices. A tax - which should offset what Canadians would pay elsewhere on productive activities, like income - is one of the best way to correct this imbalance, by charging the cost of enforcing individual rights to those who benefit from it.
To me the correct approach is to simply shift the tax burden higher onto investment properties, and expand the definition of "investment property" to include homes owned and occupied by able-bodied people who don't work for a living and never earned the kind of money that would be needed to afford such a home.
If you don't pay and never paid income tax, you don't need the tax exemptions that are given to homeowners.
That sort of means testing isn't required (and would be open to system-gaming / perverse incentive creation anyway). You just apply capital gains tax to all properties with the exception of one primary residence per person, and you could even cap the primary-residence exemption at the median value of a home in a particular area. So if you own property and rent it out rather than living there yourself, it gets taxed as an investment, period.
So that this cost isn't just passed on to renters, you should make the rental payments for your primary residence tax deductible, again perhaps capped at a median level so as not to perversely encourage higher rents.
I think you could construct a tax regime that was revenue neutral pretty easily this way.
Such an essay should show you that some level of regulation is required, or else the proposal will be easy to tear down.
Or, if I am wrong, it will become renowned for its content.
There are lots of essays about this and they claim it's realisable but the current power structures (such as state/government/central bankl) won't ever give away their power voluntarily.
I hear this argument often but in a free market the best (and not the perfectly informed) will perform best. Best here means the one making the best out of the given information which may still be very little.
Likewise, rationality helps but it's not at all a prerequisite. I wonder where people pick this up, I sincerely heard it often but I fail to see why one needs rational agents or perfect information.
I would appreciate an elaboration of your thoughts (that is, if you want to continue the discussion).
[Citation needed]
There are lots of investments that are either frivolous or actively harmful to others. You can't make this claim without a bit more reasoning.
In human slaves?
Many of the same moral justifications for prohibiting the ownership of humans applies to ownership of land and it's very profitable for similar reasons.
Of course, exclusive access rights are important for production and other reasons, so they usually would argue that landowners ought to be taxed in proportion to the land rights that they claim.
Places like Hong Kong have been able to forego income taxation in favor of collecting rent from land.