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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

> Those people should be selling their land. We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. From the article as well:

If we have that attitude to people owning things, then the first thing should be wealth tax on jewelry, cars, boats, and other luxury items which if you can't afford to pay the tax then you should be forced to sell it. I remember how popular that concept where here in EU when refugees had their jewelry taken by the government in order to pay for expenses and basic living. People have this weird attachment to objects that defy rational thought.

I get the sentiment, but in term of winning popular support it has some distinct emotional drawbacks.

If we want to specifically address vacant lots within city boundaries, a tax on that seems fair. Not many low income home owners live in their property owned vacant lots located inside city boundaries.

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>If we have that attitude to people owning things, then the first thing should be wealth tax on jewelry, cars, boats, and other luxury items which if you can't afford to pay the tax then you should be forced to sell it.

That actually makes sense if you want to avoid price gouging and scalping over the short term.

If you tax wealth then people will try to reduce the amount of wealth they have which is undesirable over the long term. If you tax land, people will reduce the amount of land they use, which is exactly what you want in an urban environment.

We don't have a housing crisis because of scarce jewelry that isn't being put to use -- and the same is true of luxury boats, fancy cars, and other luxury items. The issue is precisely that land is not a luxury item; but it is being treated like one, in that it's being used as a store of value.

I don't think this necessitates having that attitude toward owning things in general. Owning scarce natural resources is very different than owning man-made resources that have an elastic supply that can be expanded through production. A coherent moral framework can support the former being taxed, while maintaining that the latter should not be.

Private ownership of the latter is both just, because the original owners comes to own it by producing it, and economically advantageous, because ownership incentivizes production, which leads to its supply increasing. With land, there is no moral justification for private ownership, as no private party created the land, and private ownership does not have the economic effect of leading to the supply of it expanding, since land cannot be produced.

I have a hard time distinguish between people owning gold and people owning land, and in this discussion, we are not just talking about owning land but people owning a house on that land. Similar in how gold is turned into a jewelry that people form emotional attachment to, a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to. In both cases we have a man-made resource, ie a jewelry and homes, and in both cases they got created from a scarce natural resources, gold and land. They are also both mental concepts that is a man-made product formed by using a natural resource.

Land cannot be produced but homes can be designed, constructed and built. If we want to tax land but not homes, and we want to tax gold but not jewelry, I would find that perfectly consistent. People rarely form attachment to unused land, similar to how people don't form attachment to solid gold bars or ingots. Incentivizes production of unused land and vacant properties is something I would support, while I am rather suspicious of taxing ownership of man-made resources.

Gold rarely appears in its valuable form in accessible natural settings. It is acquired through the costly process of mining, which increases its supply. So it is not like land with respect to either supply elasticity or the cost of initial acquisition.

>>a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to

I would argue people should be encouraged to not form an emotional attachment to a house, because the land it occupies is part of a larger society which may come to need it more than the person does.

You may have grown up in a house your grandfather built, but the neighborhood of that house may have changed from a sparsely populated district of a small city, to the densely populated economic core of a major metropolis and regional shipping/trading hub. The land needs to be repurposed to benefit the greatest number of people, and I don't think a perpetual land claim stemming from the principle of first possession should trump that imperative.

Gold is a finite resource, like any other natural resource. The cost of gold is partially formed by the land purchase of the mining company paid. One can not just start digging and increase the supply of gold. You need land first and it need to be one of a few special locations on earth where such mining is profitable.

I don't think the distinction being present are convinceing me. I can agree that undeveloped natural resources might need to be treated differently than developed resources, on that ground that undeveloped natural resources are inherently limited, scares and in general useless unless developed. Undeveloped land don't serve anyone except as an investment, and thus special rules might be needed.

I will also say that while I can agree that people should not form emotional attachments to objects, and I will include here any object, it is part of human behavior to do so. Be that a house, car, boat, jewelry, guitar, a sport players T-shirt, or what have you. For most people a house is just a house. For others it a family heirloom, built and maintained for hundred of years by the same family. We don't generally repurpose objects in order to benefit the greatest number of people, and I doubt there is a very strong support for that.

>>Gold is a finite resource, like any other natural resource.

For practical purposes, gold is not finite for the time being. We can keep mining it to expand supply for a long time to come.

Maybe for some elements, it would make sense to apply a usage tax to discourage under-utilization of the existing supply, but that day hasn't come for gold.

>>You need land first and it need to be one of a few special locations on earth where such mining is profitable.

There are many places where one can purchase mining rights, and profitably mine gold. It's just a matter of investing the resources to do it.

If gold were actually being hoarded in such a way that it prevented manufacturing, and cities and states were passing laws that prevented gold from being used for other purposes -- requiring a ten year approval process to melt a gold "historic heritage heirloom" -- then we'd need to talk about policies for gold; but we don't have that problem! No one seems to have the idea that the government should protect our emotional attachment to gold; but they do want government to protect our emotional attachment to land.

> No one seems to have the idea that the government should protect our emotional attachment to gold

Denmark had a law in place during the mass refugee crisis in Europe, where if a refugee owned valuables then they had to sell that first before they were allowed to receive government help. The idea was that people should first help themselves if they could, and by doing so helped the greater good since then the government could afford to help more people.

Ask people to sell their wedding rings and people get a bit upset, and so people compared it to Nazi Germany when they striped people of valuables. A lot of people wanted that the government should respect and thus protect peoples emotional attachments. Desperate people can't eat gold, and you don't want to force people to sell the last remaining object of emotional attachment that they own. I think even some refugees spoke on the news that they would rather die than sell off their heirlooms.

George's moral framework would align with taxing the ownership of gold - "land" is not just literal land but all unimproved natural resources. On the other hand we don't seem to have pressing problems with gold that is needed for productive purposes instead being hoarded as a store of value. Its main function is to be expensive, so we don't mind as much that it is.

Gold is not actually inherently scarce. Refined gold is scarce because it is costly to find, mine and refine it. So I do think those who do go through the process to acquire gold are morally deserving of ownership over it. Moveover, this ownership is economically advantageous because it incentivizes the costly process of mining gold that increases its supply.

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