
A Philosopher’s Take on Global Basic Income: Fund It by Land Value Taxation - akvadrako
http://www.knowitwall.com/episodes/GBI_philosopher
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ctdonath
The despicable problem with land taxation is that it turns property from
_owned_ to _rented_. It allows for abuses of raising tax rates to drive people
off their property. It replaced true supply-and-demand with arbitrary choices
by under-informed bureaucrats, which never goes well. It is the core of
gentrification problems, driving people from long-occupied homes via taxation
because others pay a premium for neighbouring properties.

Never mind the core problem with UBI itself: funding inactivity by taxing
productivity.

People should be able to own land outright. Let the poor and elderly and
independent keep theirs, without being driven out by overwhelming taxes raised
to fund the poor and elderly.

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tomp
What?! Poor people can _always_ be abused by driving up taxation. You don't
need to tax their homes, you can just tax their food, water, electricity and
fuel.

I see a much bigger problem in land ownership encouraging concentration of
capital. We should be encouraging productivity, innovation, hard work, not
rent-seeking.

~~~
ctdonath
If you own land, without property tax, you can become completely self
sufficient: grow food, build shelter, produce power, collect water. I grew up
close to that, and could have done it 100% if needed.

Outright land ownership is critical to survival, independence, and
productivity. Property taxes are horribly destructive.

~~~
tomp
Even if you're self-sufficient you should still pay taxes, because the
government still protects your property by enforcement of laws by police.

~~~
ctdonath
If I have no income, how can I pay taxes? Bushels of carrots?

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kijin
The concept is simple and elegant on paper, but it's vulnerable to the same
problem that real-world policies that philosophers come up with often fall
prey to. It's going to be incredibly difficult to assess the "unimproved
value" of any parcel of land fairly.

Do you apply a flat rate per acre of land regardless of where it is, to the
detriment of rural farmers who own many acres? Or do you take the location
into account? Are we going to have an army of certified professionals whose
job is to assess the unimproved value of each and every parcel of land in the
country?

And if your formula makes any reference to the actual price at which land is
traded, how do you tell how much of it is the unimproved value and how much of
it is the value of all the improvements that went into it? There is hardly any
land in populated parts of the world where no improvement has ever been made
to it, so there's no reference point. If there are two parcels of land in the
same neighborhood but one is more desirable because it has a view of the
waterfront, does the waterfront view count as improvement or an intrinsic part
of the value of the land? Everything is going to be based on a series of
arbitrary decisions. Even the value of a dollar is based on a series of
arbitrary decisions.

Even worse, since it's all going to be an arbitrary benchmark with a lot of
variables that can be tweaked, everyone will try to influence it or abuse it
in a way that minimizes their own tax burden. Over time, these forces will
result in lower assessments for all land, reducing the overall tax revenue and
making the whole scheme unsustainable. Right now in the developed world, a
disproportionately large share of people's wealth is tied up in real estate,
especially for middle-class folks who read political philosophy. But this
won't last if the incentive structure changes.

I would much rather just bite the bullet and say yes, we're going to charge
tax on the fruit of your labor whether Mr. Nozick likes it or not. Oh, and
we're going to charge even higher rates on the fruit of non-human labor, i.e.
machines, since they have no rights anyway. Maybe if these machines produce
enough stuff, who knows, perhaps one day they'll contribute enough so that the
tax on humans can be reduced to zero?

~~~
akvadrako
_> Do you apply a flat rate per acre of land regardless of where it is, to the
detriment of rural farmers who own many acres?_

No, it's the market value of the land. Probably the price would be determined
in a manner similar to property tax.

It seems that in our current world, it's easier to fairly determine property
tax then what counts as someone's income, at least for the self-employed and
investment classes.

~~~
kijin
Market value is easy. The problem is that the author wants his tax to be based
on the "unimproved value" of land, rather than the market value that includes
buildings and other stuff that's on and around the land. He's aiming for a
kind of philosophical purity in order to be able to say that he's not going to
put a tax on human effort. That's where the complexity comes in.

~~~
akvadrako
I don't think it's about purity at all, but practicality. Land is the scarce
resource, not the buildings on it. Taxing scarce resources is what we must do
and also creates the right incentives.

You claim it'll be hard to judge it's fair market value and this is what I
disagree with. I mean, sure it'll be hard, but not harder than measuring
income.

If the land tax equals the land value, undeveloped plots should sell for about
$0. That's a natural benchmark to aim for.

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lwitt51
No pitchforks, but this has sentences straight up from wikipediea article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)

~~~
kijin
Hillel Steiner is a pretty well-known political philosopher, and this topic is
right up his alley. It's much more likely that whoever contributed those
sentences to Wikipedia borrowed them from Steiner and/or whoever he's quoting
from (whether knowingly or not) than the other way around.

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pcnonpc
Some populations practice having as many children as they can because their
belief system calls for it. They believe they will get more brownie points
from a supreme being for that.

So these groups will get more share of the basic income in the next generation
and more in the next and so on and so on...

~~~
akvadrako
The basic income should be on a sustenance level. So even without any
controls, having more children is not a way to get wealthy. It's basically
like now; if some of them succeed it may pay off, but it's anti-social and
usually doesn't work.

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amelius
This is interesting. Is there a dedicated forum where such new ideas in
economics are being discussed?

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chrisallenlane
I'll concede that I'm not as economically literate as I'd wish, but this
doesn't make sense to me. The "1%-ers" don't tend to store their wealth in
land, do they? How would this proposal even out the wealth-gap when it is
essentially blind to the mechanisms that the rich use to store their wealth?

If anything, this idea seems like it would only harm the (already struggling)
middle-class, who may have little equity beyond their home/hand.

~~~
chrisallenlane
Too late to edit, but: s/hand/land/

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codingdave
I get it. I like it. But man, would that piss off all the farmers in this
country.

~~~
akvadrako
Farmers are already paying property taxes and their land is hopefully not the
most valuable to begin with, so it doesn't seem like it will change their
finances much.

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reften
we are trying to tackle this problem by rewarding people for finding good
candidates for available jobs in the market (mostly tech jobs);
[https://www.ref10.com/](https://www.ref10.com/)

