I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes on buildings such as council taxes on houses, specifically to pay for municipal services, but not generally on land.
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
And I think that makes sense because residences impose costs on local services. However if I write a novel aged put it on my bookshelf, or if I paint a picture ad put it on my wall, I’m not imposing a cost on anyone just because these might have some theoretical value. How would their value even be measured?
IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.
So of I write a novel and never publish it, how should its value be calculated?
If what matters is actually revenue, well, revenue is already taxed when it’s incurred. Suppose there is no future revenue, do I get the tax back eventually?
If you never publish it, and it's never published after your death; objectively it produced no income and has a monetary value of $0.
With no offense to you or your novel; I would appraise an unpublished novel by an unknown author at something like $100, which might be too high. Some turn out to be worth much more, but most will be produce $0 or less for the author's estate.
How is that tax going to be assessed and by who? What constitutes a novel or a book over a set of well written notes? This whole idea is ludicrous, are we going to raid people's homes and audit their computers and notebooks to see if they've written anything that might be valuable? Just tax their income. We already do it.
McDonald's trademark is not a copyright, so that's a different process. The trademark is appraisable too, but it's trickier because trademark doesn't expire and the stream of payments may not end. You can look at the history of franchise payments as one measure, and consumer revenues as another measure, but you'll need to discount for the actual product. The corporation broadly accounts for the value of the trademark and other things in Goodwill on the balance sheet.
For a copyrighted work, you would examine the work, find similar works, what were the stream of payments for similar works. Take into account age of the work, the artist's other works, etc.
McDonald's does hold copyright in many things. But many of those are unlikely to produce significant income; training videos, promotional materials, etc don't tend to sell for much if at all.
If you needed to appraise a new song by a popular artist, you could do a reasonable job by looking at the stream of payments generated by their average song, and projecting future payments based on the general trends of payments for songs over time. You might also consider current popularity of the artist/song and how that impacts longevity; songs don't acheive many sales initially often hit zero sales and never come back, whereas songs that chart tend to have continued, if meager, sales for a long time.
Trademarks are IP; I thought we were taking about a generalized IP tax.
But, ok, copyright.
Who exactly is going to do these audits, find comparable works, etc? For every single copyright (500,000-ish registered in the US per year, far more unregistered but real copyrights)?
And you’d need to audit all existing copyrights… that song may have produced very little revenue, but then a big artist covers it, and the composition rights (but not performance rights) are suddenly worth a lot more.
It all seems like an exercise in applying engineering to law, which never goes well.
The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of intellectual property, from people who can't afford to pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are willing to pay.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
I think so, yes, or you could place the copyright in the public domain.
Your current situation is a prime example of the failure of current copyrights. You aren't incentivised to produce any new art, it was unearned as you weren't the author, and yet still the state enforces the copyright for you.
It's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to fairly value IP.
This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally.
These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
Profits from property sales are often tax as CGT. It's only a select few jurisdictions that don't tax property sales, often with both CGTs and stamp duties.
The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact that a piece of property's value can change over time. You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't independently wealthy already you will never be able to become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc. as you will have to declare their value quite low in order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from you for the low value you had to put on it because you couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond what the author could afford and profits from the movies rights and etc.
Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital gains on sold real property (this "often" of course varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may pay some if the conditions are right), when selling intellectual property you often (same proviso as before, only inverted) pay capital gains.
Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties, nor should it be.
That was a very different situation. The USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, and despite its huge losses still had vast reserves of labour in the countryside to tap. It was much more like the process of industrialisation in China that’s seen huge growth there over the last generation. Russia has already industrialised so it doesn’t have a catch-up growth opportunity in the same way. They are much more labour and resource constrained these days.
This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves). But leading up to WWII, they were transformed into educated, literate, laborers. Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
So while there was less labor, they were far more productive labor thanks to post-revolution, post-WWI measures
So one person says, USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, the other one says, they were far more productive... what is it? The whole argument still feels far-fetched at the very least.
> This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves).
This is incorrect. Serfdom in Russian empire was abolished in 1861, long before the revolution. Peasant literacy rates, while still poor, had been gradually improving after that.
> Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
What? Not only Ukraine was controlled by Bolsheviks at the start of WW2 its territories have also been extended with parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Soviets between the start of WW2 and the so-called "Great Patriotic" phase of the war.
The whole way the Judicial system in the US is beholden to politicians, and is thoroughly politicised looks completely horrific to me in the UK. Even the election officials responsible for overseeing voting are politicians.
Combined with this elected King George III presidential nonsense (not just king in general either, specifically the powers George III had in the 1780s) and I despair sometimes. Get yourselves a decent parliamentary system. If you avoid proportional representation it works fine. Unfortunately the US population is somehow convinced the current US system is modern and up to date. They'll probably still think that in another 200 years.
We can't "proportionally" represent a constituency which returns a single individual
So, if you want PR you have to either: Have two distinct classes of MP: Some were directly elected and represent an area, others are just to make the up proportions - but obviously these are just worse right? Second class MPs.
OR Abolish the constituencies entirely, now nobody represents your area and its particular concerns, or everybody does, which as we know amounts to the same thing because of how dilution works.
Unlike other electoral reforms a PR system has deeper implications far beyond the elections themselves. Historically the UK actually didn't have a single electoral system for every constituency, and that was fine†, indeed it works fine in the US today, the thing which needs to be coherent is what happens after the election and PR meddles with that.
† Well, not "fine", this is the era of the famous "Rotten Boroughs" but the fact that the system varies from one place to another wasn't key there.
It also means that people are voting for party lists, not individuals, and the lists are controlled by the parties. In a proper parliamentary system the parliamentarians directly represent their voters, and have a mandate from them. Parties do not have that, only MPs have that. By passing the mandate from the representative to the party, and the party having list control, that puts far too much power over parliamentarians in the hands of unelected party functionaries that draw up the lists and have no mandate themselves.
That's way less bad than it appears, because in a proportional system you will have more than 2 parties. In practice, every election is an election of those invisible bureaucratic hands, instead of some heads on display.
Party affiliation is already a problem, List systems make that worse.
Years ago two of my friends lived in Vauxhall in London. That spy building in central London where James Bond works? That's in Vauxhall (and it is really for spies, though real intelligence agents do not look like James Bond), they lived like 10 minutes walk from there.
Vauxhall is pretty far left even for a city borough, but they ended up with Kate Hoey as their Labour MP. Kate - despite being a representative of a left party was nevertheless pro gun rights, pro fox hunting, and pretty luke warm on LGBT issues, she was also, which led to her finally be thrown out by her local party, pro-Brexit.
But the people of Vauxhall weren't really voting for Kate Hoey the woman who likes fox hunting and isn't too bothered if they make abortion illegal again, and who is supporting Brexit even though they don't want it - they were voting for Labour, a centre left party and Kate had Labour's endorsement.
Maybe under PR Kate ends up finding a home in some party that more closely tracks her personal beliefs, but, equally maybe not. And so people end up voting for something they don't really want.
I think that given simply counting is apparently too untrustworthy in our post-truth world, we might as well do something more sophisticated like Instant Run-off or Approval, but I don't approve of Proportional as a goal.
The brain actually has specific neurological system that compartmentalise reasoning contexts in different social contexts, so we operate according to different sets of assumptions and rules of behaviour and reasoning in different kinds of situations.
The the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) both play roles in this. Not a neuroscientist, just going on my own reading.
True. I really don't know enough about it, but it may well be these functions are still there, after all I expect the relevant neurological systems are still there, but the impact on social cognition from autism render their effects basically irrelevant.
His father who oversaw his education and possibly both parents, and Bentham that played a role in his education as well, would have known either Greek, or Latin or both as they were considered essential to a rounded education at the time.
We all get legal protections for our property.
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