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Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

Emotions about the unfairness of profiteering companies aside. How would you even define those properties. "quick buck", "over people's backs", "contributing real value", "to society"?

It's easy when you have a nebulous and noble goal, but you have to define it in terms that make sense and can be quantified and defined. Otherwise you'll just create a "Ministry for Company Fairness Contributions" filled with angry people that will abuse their powers for any number of reasons falling on the "evil/noble" scale.

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Increased property taxes on non-resident owners.

That tilts the housing market (ie. buying/selling houses, rather than leases) to favor resident owners, but it makes it even more expensive for people who have to rent because the tax ends up being passed onto the renters.

In theory, if it's implemented as a true land-value tax (only taxing the value of the raw land, not the improvements/buildings), that doesn't happen.

But, yeah, somebody with a stronger economics background (than my undergrad degree, which I've never used professionally) would have to do some calculations on whether preventing mass corporate ownership via taxation would be a net positive for the market as a whole.

I tend to suspect it would be positive.

Rents and speculation or any activity that allows someone to siphon off the productive gains of society that they had no hand in producing.

For example, a company in nowhere-ville develops Mr. Fusion (home edition) and needs to expand rapidly. Rents and land prices double overnight which results in the cost of labor rising which slows expansion.

There are many opportunities for rent extraction in capitalistic systems and some degree of rent and speculation are necessary to establish a market but when society allows for excessive rent taking and speculation it becomes dead weight on productive investment.

For example the “billion dollar industry” for sand that makes computer chips (https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pu...) is an example of companies with little or no investment in the technology around chips who were able to extract large sums of money simply by controlling a sand pile.

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