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Comment by orson2077 | Hacker News Reader

orson2077

I think your position is true - it does compel people to use their land for value creation (even if they don't want to). There is a positive trade-off though; a system that derives tax from rent-seeking activities can reduce the tax it levies on value-creating/facilitating activities.

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"Value creation" is euphemism for making profit. It forces use of land towards the currently most profitable in an area, which is not necessarily what is socially valuable, because if you do not get enough money to pay for the hypothetical value you cannot do anything else. Eg in places where tourism is a prevailing source of making the most money it would mean that you cannot do anything else than short renting to tourists or stuff directed to tourists, which can be destructive for a lot of local businesses and communities (there are already problems and this would make it worse). Similar to other types of using land that may or may not be always attainable for every single piece of land even.

It also sounds like a mechanism to induce appropriation of property of small landowners to big corporations and interests, and not sure this furthering of concentration of land and wealth is great for local communities either. It basically gives more power to those who already have more power.

You're absolutely right about value creation being a euphemism for profit. A gaping hole in economic theory is that we don't have a general theory of value. Our so-called theories of value are in fact theories of price, and we don't actually know how to properly value things.

If you had such a theory, you would have a much easier time using taxes to reward things that society benefits from, and dissuade things that society suffers from. It's a complicated subject.

Your concern is absolutely spot-on.

> we don't actually know how to properly value things

Nor should we! That would be like a formal theory for deriving all truth. It would be awful absolutism (and wouldn't actually be real).

Well, all moral truth, anyway. Wouldn't tell you much about physics.

Oof, agree. But we're in a fascinating time in history. In order to align AI, we'll need to formalise some idea about human values.

Holding raw land doesn't become a rent-seeking activity until it is sold. The owner could be waiting to accuse capital for development, waiting to purchase an ajoining property to expand, etc. A transfer tax fits this better than a land value tax.

There'll definitely be people in that camp, with good reasons for holding on to land. Flipside, there are many other people that know the land value mechanic and take advantage.

A transfer tax is decent, but it can be sidestepped by just holding land and selling when the tax changes. Land holding is a long game.

On the other hand you could argue that someone who had a better strategy for accruing capital should instead have purchased that land. The opportunity cost of nothing happing on that land is there regardless of the users intended future development.

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