Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Like here, just to make the point, here is a quote I saved from a Scott Alexander Substack discussion of Georgism. I liked this so much I saved it in Notion, sorry I don't have the commenter's name. If you read a lot of Georgism stuff, you'll notice that they call literally everything 'speculation'- if you want to, you know, live in your home, that's greedy 'speculation' that an LVT will stamp out:

"A greedy land speculator (middle class home owner) refuses to develop a vacant parking lot (refuses to sell to a McMansion developer) because he can let land appreciation pay for his refusal to develop (let him stay in his home).

Since the villainous speculator and the heroic homeowner are economically the same, any consistent LVT has to essentially force the home sale. That is the entire point of the LVT"

That's a strawman. The difference in the taxes paid by a middle class homeowner under standard property tax schemes and LVT is much less than the difference in taxes paid by the parking lot owner. In practice LVT is usually set up so that a typical single family home owner pays about the same amount under either scheme. The person who will pay a significantly higher rate under LVT is the parking lot owner, who has a much less emotional argument for retaining their property, and at the expense of that one rentier the entire community benefits from encouraging more productive use of that land.

I don't think that this is a correct model of how a high LVT would work. But more importantly, let's say it did- now you don't get any of the supposed 'efficiency' gains.

I think LVTs are a great idea for a brand new society, and they certainly would work- by making land too valuable for SFHs, so that it has to be used for its highest & best usage. But if you're not forcing homeowners to do that, you're not capturing any of the efficiency gains, so LVT just becomes another tax. It's either forcing landowners to develop apartment buildings on valuable land or it isn't- you have to pick one

Ahh yes, the “Trump Argument”. No thanks.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/19/donald...

And? This is basically an argument for preserving the status quo of housing. The status quo sucks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com