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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I'd really like to see non-US residents putting money into real estate pay a huge tax, to discourage purchase of condos and single family homes. There's no reason, to purchase these items and leave them empty, as a hedge against whatever is going on in their country. I'm not exactly sure where to draw the line, but if you send a kid to the US for school, and they live in your condo/house, that's fine. But, do we want speculators from outside the country purchasing and leasing back to US residents? Seems like a bad recipe.

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Not sure why "speculators from outside the country" are worse than those from inside the country. Personally, I would prefer we encourage efficient land use by everyone, regardless of their nationality.

One elegant taxation system to accomplish that is the land value tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

isn't the most efficient land use just letting the free market work without taxation? if land is best used as a store of value for someones money then thats what it is.

Land is required for things necessary to human existence and it's not really possible to make more of it so if the market determines that the "best" use of it is for storing money society should probably step in and overrule the market.

Uh huh.

That's all well and good until someone decides to apply that reasoning to something else, like, say....the Internet.

You really think all that wireless spectrum is finding it's best use sharing cat videos? High-bandwidth video emojis?

They aren't making any more RF spectrum either.

One man's "common sense solution" is another man's "free market distortion".

And there is PLENTY of land to go around....so.....bad example. You could give nearly every single person on the planet plenty of room to live in Texas. That's without going vertical into multi-story buildings.

Ultimately the best use of people's labor is whatever they want to do with it. If that's buying houses, great. Beanie babies, faberge eggs, gold ingots, whatever.

Do you really need all that crap you own?

Sure you can "nearly every single person on the planet plenty of room to live in Texas" but they would be devoid of infrastructure and it would be incredibly expensive to service people's homes if they're spread out across the states. It's a cop out to say 'there is plenty of land' when it requires a hell of a lot of work to bring it modern services. If you think your simplistic land argument is a good one you should revisit other beliefs as well.

I am not aware of any ways in which wireless RF spectrum is required for humans to survive.

The rest of your post is non-sequiturs that I'm not going to bother engaging.

Radio announcements of hurricane warnings and other natural disasters for example.

Does the amount of required spectrum for this rise with a higher population or does it remain constant?

RF spectrum is highly regulated, by the way.

Less than you might think.

It's treated like real-estate with RF "zoning rules".

But very wide swaths of the RF spectrum are essentially a free -for-all. You could argue that the most valuable parts (UHF) are used for stuff that could only be described as "non-essential" e.g. cat videos.

A main issue of leaving these things to market is capital accumulates and centralises. We see this today with the ongoing mega merges and in days of old where (in many countries) a handful of people owned all land. Whether or not you care about this is your political ideology but this is the long term history and likely future of unregulated markets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation

Well, we have this whole problem with free-market speculation and its fairly dramatic impact on peoples' ability to buy a home.

"free market" is the most efficient land use for capitalism (value). There are precedents that suggests the free market might maximize value while minimizing human life.

Not necessarily. The problem with land is that you can’t make more of it, and owning it allows monopolistic use, and thus rent seeing behavior from landlords and deadweight loss. The LVT if properly implemented will capture the dead weight loss given to landlords.

Well, there is already high tax on real estate in Switzerland and it doesn't stop wealthy foreigners from buying condos/houses and keeping them empty. Not if the place is nice enough.

"There's no reason, to purchase these items and leave them empty, as a hedge against whatever is going on in their country."

Not even as a hedge against whatever is going on in their country?

I think the point was there is no reason that would benefit US citizens.

On that point I mostly agree, though I'm sure there are some small benefits that accrue - almost certainly cancelled out by the disadvantages though.

Since ~1/3 of American wealth is in homes, I’d imagine that most homeowners are not for a scheme that would cause their wealth to decrease (or restrain its rise)

Anybody who owns real estate isn't concerned with foreign buyers. They help keep prices for real estate higher which amongst real estate owners creates additional wealth. For people who don't own real estate, those higher prices make it more difficult for them to get into a home so there are positives and negatives in this.

That said, I think the old "unoccupied houses" thing is way overblown. It presents the most ugly side of foreign real estate ownership so that people who are priced out of the market get angry at all of the foreigners buying property. Even if you removed every unoccupied SFH (single family home) from the market, prices, generally, would still be rising.

It's sort of like saying that the reason that a car costs so much is because the demand is high based on too many families owning more cars than they need. It gives people a target for their dissatisfaction with current auto prices but really isn't the main issue and even if you solved for that issue it wouldn't dramatically impact auto prices.

But having a target for your anger is a wonderful way to distract people.

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