You make it sound as though multivectors being invertible is a special case, when the opposite is true. In 2D and 3D GA, every non-zero k-vector and versor has an inverse. In PGA, every non-zero, non-ideal plane, line, and point, and versor has an inverse. The inverse is used all the damn time when composing and applying transformations and performing projections and rejections.
As to which is more fundamental, I don't think it matters. You could argue that the dot and exterior products are more fundamental because the geometric product is their sum (for vectors). You could also argue that the geometric product is more fundamental because it is simply the Cartesian product of two multivectors, and you derive the dot, exterior and commutator products by filtering that product by grade. Both definitions are true, and "fundamental" is both a matter of perspective and irrelevant to any practical concern.
> In 2D and 3D GA, every non-zero k-vector and versor has an inverse.
Of course by definition every versor has an inverse. The invertibility of k-vector gets hairier for higher dimensions though. Even in 3D GA, some mixed-grade elements are not invertible.
> As to which is more fundamental, I don't think it matters.
It doesn't matter mathematically but it matters pedagogically. GA enthusiasts seem to advocate teaching GA to anyone that has learnt linear algebra. I believe it is more appropriate to stick to teaching tensor algebra and its quotient exterior algebra. Then it is up to you to learn Clifford algebra as a generalization of exterior algebra; especially if you are a game dev, a physicist, or a topological K-theorist.
I'm curious about your perspective on exterior algebra. So far I've mostly seen it as a special case of GA so my view is probably GA-tinted. I'm just curious how you even do any sort of transformations since the exterior product doesn't allow these sorts of things. It seems like it only gives you the "things" in your algebra with few ways to do anything with them. You seem to agree with the author of the article you linked to in that the most useful aspects of GA come from EA. I find this very hard to see, so maybe you can shed some light on it? E.g. how do you rotate a bivector in EA?
There is no equivalent notion of rotor in EA. I would say its most important use is that you need it to define differential form in which we can define exterior derivative and integeration in arbitrary differentiable manifolds. It also enables to define determinant elegantly.
Sorry I forgot to answer your question: To rotate a bivector of the form v ^ w, just do R v ^ R w where R is the rotation matrix. This is a linear map so you can extend the operation linearly to arbitrary bivector.
>Even in 3D GA, some mixed-grade elements are not invertible.
This paper [1] claims to have inverses for general multivectors up to a certain dimension, but I've never needed them and haven't dived into it. I'm curious what the applications would be for general multivectors, I've never come across them in practice.
we first establish algebraic product formulas for the direct computation of the Clifford product inverses of multivectors in Clifford algebras Cl(p, q), n = p + q \le 5, excluding the case of divisors of zero.
The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.
Your concern of theft is a dominent reason cited for not using bikes in wester countries. Interestingly, bike theft per capita is higher in bike paradise like NL and Copenhagen while ranking in the least concerns of those users.
That’s the x thing is higher in higher population areas problem. You have to calculate the probability of your bike being stolen if you have a bike. So not bike thefts per capita but bike thefts per bike owner.
"There's no evidence of that" often means that there's no money to be made in studying that thing: or, alternatively, that there's a lot of money being made and nobody wants to look for inconvenient answers.
Selection is acting on viruses as well. A virus that makes you very ill won't spread as well as one that makes you a little ill because there are only so many people you can infect while bedridden, and the trend among dominant strains reflects this.
Selection acts on viruses far faster than on humans. And this effect is observable to the naked eye at the population level, with multiple powerful examples in living memory. The comment to which you are responding is borderline nonsense in this respect.
How on earth can selection pressure a virus that kills long after it transmits? When increased severity can sometimes improve transmission? This is 1800s transmission-virulence tradeoff hypothesis nonsense.
The scientific thing to do would be to only use novel food additives when they have been proven to be safe, when they've been tested for toxicity, effects on the microbiome and the digestive tract specifically.
Geometric algebra was, for me, an easier on-ramp to more advanced topics in mathematics, leveraging the geometric intuition built into these objects. I learned vector algebra in university, so extending the idea of a direction with magnitude and orientation into areas and volumes with direction and magnitude was a manageable step. Projective algebras similarly allow the construction of points, lines, and planes with orientation and magnitude. Learning that you can generate transformations by dividing one object by another was also really neat. Then you can take the logarithm of that transformation to perform linear interpolation. Geometric algebra is a tool that I use to manipulate geometric objects as easily as I would manipulate real numbers.
The hard part was getting there amidst a host of confusing and conflicting source materials, as this post highlights, and as its author helps proliferate. I used Eric Lengyel's materials a lot in my journey, but I really dislike his decision to represent points as vectors. Notice how every transformation in his poster [1] uses the antigeometric product and antireverse? These operations are only necessary because he's defined everything in the point-based dual space and has to bring everything back to the plane-based space to perform transformations. But he has a wiki and posters, and I'm just here doing my own thing, so I guess that's that.
Alan MacDonald's two books [2] were great, and I would recommend them as an introduction to geometric algebra. Work through the examples and you will learn the material.
One limitation I have not seen discussed is LVT's self-defeating nature, and it's an important one to figure out if land value taxes are to succeed in practice.
An upside and downside of LVT, depending on your perspective, is that the imposition of a LVT would seriously lower land values. The inverse is also true: removing an established LVT carries a significant upside for the affected landowners. Property that had been acquired for cheap under a LVT would be freed of its shackles and allowed to appreciate again. Some of this would be immediate, as thousands of dollars in taxes shift away from land and back onto labour, enterprise, and commerce, and some of it would be gradual as people resume buying land because land value always goes up (which causes land values to go up). This creates a powerful incentive to undo any progress that a LVT campaign might accomplish.
I doubt that anything short of a revolution would be able to overpower the wealthy landowning class who like their unearned rents and inflated asset values very much thank you, but you don't just need to beat them once, you need to be able to hold their political, economic, and intellectual influence at bay permanently or we end up right back where we started in a matter of years.
This comment is a bit surprising to me. Your point seems to be that strong policies which impose significant good will face significant resistance and so there's no point doing them.
I don't think that makes any sense. Workers rights, regulations around dumping waste, capital gains taxes... There are a lot of things that we already have which some people with power have a strong incentive to remove. We had to fight to implement and to keep these, but goddamnit is it worth it!
I don't see why we shouldn't be optimistic here because historically speaking things have gotten much much better! To me, a gradual and consistent ramping up lvt would be probably the most progressive policy a country could pass at this point :D
The problem (and for the record I favor LVT myself) is that many of the other things you mention -- the 8 hour workday, environmental regs, etc. -- have clear positive effects that an average person doesn't have to take action to benefit from. If you tried to take them away, people would notice and object.
For a typical homeowner, the effect of LVT would be pretty neutral, by design. Proposals I've seen advocate changing the _distribution_ of single-family home taxes between land and improvements, but not the _total_.
Yes, LVT would discourage speculators from buying land as an investment without improving it, which is a societal good. But it's not direct and short term like many of your other examples.
I think GP's point stands that rolling back LVT would be highly desired by big landowners (who could then return to do-nothing land appreciation and rents for their profits rather than be required to actually _do something_ with the land to earn over its taxed value), while the average Jane couldn't care less, because it wouldn't really impact her tax bill.
That sort of situation is not stable long term. To make it more stable, you'd need to set it up so that LVT lowered the average voter's tax bill. I'm not sure how feasible that is.
Alternatively, it would be easy to lower taxes in parallel with the increased revenue. The nice thing about taxes is that they are paid in dollars - meaning you can spend them all sorts of different ways ;)
Or if you want, "georgist" theory proposes lowering (improvement) property taxes/income taxes/capital gains taxes/sales taxes which introduce deadweight losses. A tax is fundamentally a disincentive so why are we disincentivizing working/building but not speculation? Plenty of room for improvement ;)
> which is a societal good. But it's not direct and short term like many of your other examples.
Excellent point! Reminds me of a certain climate-related topic ;) Again though - I think there is reason to be optimistic. Public awareness is gradually increasing[1], housing/zoning policy discussion is a hot topic these days, and young kids are volunteering/attending rallies at a higher rate than any previous generation[2]
> I think GP's point stands that rolling back LVT would be highly desired by big landowners (who could then return to do-nothing land appreciation for their profits rather than be required to actually _do something_ with the land to earn over its taxed value), while the average Jane couldn't care less, because it wouldn't really impact her tax bill.
I think the average person actually cares an incredible amount about property taxes, especially when it comes to local politics. Local news stations talk all the time about "property tax relief", and there's a general sentiment from just about everyone involved in local politics that property taxes are a useless drain. Which in some cases they are - property taxes really only "work" when they roughly approximate LVT, but it leaves suburbanites feeling overtaxed (because they are, compared to the value of their land) and they have massive political power.
I think that if LVT was simply touted as a "Property Tax Relief Plan", you could make it have massive, massive support. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could give eveyr single person a massive tax credit based on what LVT revenues would bring in, and make up for that tax credit with the LVT.
For example - if you lived in a city of 100,000, and total LVTs bring in $200,000,000, you could give every single person a $2000 "Tax Relief Credit" deductible from all city taxes. You change nothing about how much money is raised, only the distribution, and in a way where 95% of people visibly see their tax bill go down. Good luck getting rid of that!
>Local news stations talk all the time about "property tax relief", and there's a general sentiment from just about everyone involved in local politics that property taxes are a useless drain.
That is because they are not marginal, and they are not land value taxes.
You basically get rewarded for leaving a large piece of land undeveloped in the middle of an urban area. You do no work, and reap all the gains of appreciation while society around you does the work of making the place desirable to live, hence making the land desirable to buy.
You also get armed protection via military, police, and courts, and all of their salaries are disproportionately paid by everyone else doing work.
Earned income instead of property tax is the biggest and most perverse subsidy from working people (especially young) to non working asset owners (and older people) and hence collect rent.
On top of that, we give lower tax rates to capital gains, and on top of that, we let land owners indefinitely defer taxes via 1031 exchanges. Exactly the opposite of what a just society would want to incentivize. We take from laborers and give to owners (and their descendants). And then dream about becoming owners ourselves.
I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!
> I like this angle... Focus first on the fact that I'm having to pay taxes to put a roof over my head while the developer down the road is driving up land prices by squatting on an empty lot while paying pennies!
As a resident of the northeast, I've only owned 2 homes in the suburbs of a city. For those, the value of the land comprised 63% and 57% of the overall value of the property. I imagine that ratio changes as one moves away from the city.
Depending on who you ask, LVT would ideally replace all taxes, including income, so the property tax bill would be the only tax you paid. In this scenario, getting rid of LVT would be a significant undertaking, and very noticeable.
This is no longer actually possible. LVT at 100% generates less revenue than all other methods of taxation combined across all levels of government. This was the original idea but government is now too large for it.
Joseph Stiglitz proved what he called the Henry George Theorem which shows basically that useful government expenses will always show up as increased land value that matches or exceeds the cost.
Unfortunately, it is true that a fair amount of government expenses are not useful. (i.e. do not constitute a public good in the economic sense)
The Henry George Theorem also requires the public good to be local. Military spending for example is a public good that doesn't show up in land value increases.
Also in some cases (often with environmental spending) there is an external downward pressure on land value that is offset by an increase but you don't necessarily get an increase from the original neutral value if the pollution didn't occur.
If you add up the value of all the land, how does it compare to the budget of the government.
If the budget is, say, 100% of the value of the land, you're stuffed? I mean, obviously you can set a tax rate as multiples of value but land almost immediately becomes worthless and all multiples of 0 are 0.
100% LVT isn't 100% of land value it's 100% of land rents. If the bare land would rent for $2,000/month the tax is $2,000/month. You can't realistically raise the tax beyond this amount because you'd effectively be making land economically unhabitable outside of cases where the improvements were so large that you weren't significantly hindered by having some of the improvement rent absorbed.
At a 100% LVT the price of land is $0 (or more accurately equal to the price of the improvements on it). Above 100% LVT the price of land is negative so building any improvement immediately loses money and a whole host of other negative consequences.
I only give away the land, not the property on it. I assume in the real world we'd get some financial engineering to holding companies and peppercorn rents and so on - but as with every other tax there is a simply an inflection point where receipts drop to zero (if you tax income at 100%, people will simply stop working).
If you give away the land to someone else, but still own the building on it, the person you gave the land to would have to pay land value tax and they would pass that onto you in rent.
The claim is that 100% of land rent in the US is smaller than income tax + sales tax + property tax + corporate tax. You can no longer replace every tax in the system with land rents unless you shrink the size of government.
If we eliminated all other methods of taxation, what do you think would happen to rents? Would they increase, decrease, or stay the same? How do you think this affects the amount collected through a Land Value Tax?
The value of the land is a function of the amount of money one could make off the land, which is a function of the overall economy. A coffee shop next to lots of office buildings can sell lots of overpriced coffee which affects the value of the land it occupies. If the economy gets bad the coffee shop will likely not make as much money, so the taxes off the land will be less as well.
I don't think you should read the above comment as a lack of optimism, but instead as warning that conviction is required to enact the optimistic vision.
Yes, strong policies which impose significant good will always face significant resistance because finite resources cause many to see the world as a zero-sum game. This is the progressive vs reactionary battle.
> I don't see why we shouldn't be optimistic here because historically speaking things have gotten much much better! To me, a gradual and consistent ramping up lvt would be probably the most progressive policy a country could pass at this point :D
This is probably more feasible than you think. A hybrid or split rate combining both land and property taxes is not only possible but apparently exists in practice in some cities, for example Pittsburgh.
Are you trying to say that any kind of discussion around ethics or values is pointless because it's possible for people to disagree?
I think it's much better to discuss actual policies rather than to question the point of even being able to have discussions around what people think would make for a better world.
I think they are pointing out that if the first principles are completely different, everything that follows after will be different also. What is good/bad determines what policies should be pursued, and those actual real-world police’s may be as different as night and day.
You need to fight for keeping any accomplishments you’ve got. US rolled back many child labor regulations, so we have 14 years old killed by sawmills again. It’s not like the US banned children from mines because it was economically more profitable.
How many 14 year olds getting a job even find a sawmill or a mine to apply to in the US?
Concerns over child labor when working at McDonalds or Walmart is one thing, but it's a real stretch to go straight to 14 year olds dying in sawmill accidents.
Saw mill, industrial lathe, or spot welder; I'm not sure it matters too much which one of these is killing desperate and poor children being abused for profit
Do you have any stats on how many children are actually dying in these ways, and whether it is in fact disproportionately hurting the poor?
I have a hard time believing many children are dying in this way in the US today but I'm happy to be wrong and learn something new if there is real data there.
Actually, that report includes a few examples of children killed on the job. Like a 16 year old who died while working in construction, he fell about 160 feet to the ground after trying to jump from a roof to a nearby powered lift. In Nashville. [2] (same link as [1])
It also details the rise in children being employed to do hazardous labor.
Killed in sawmills is a bit of hyperbole, but it's not far off from the truth it seems.
That report basically includes a few anecdotes without data though, plus data that actually could go against the idea the regulations are the fix. If the stats are showing how many children are illegally employed it really has no basis on whether existing regulations or rollbacks made a difference, the employers and the kids weren't trying to follow the law.
It looks like there is a discrepancy between State and Federal law, so the employers may indeed be acting in a twisted version of good faith. Despite the fact that Federal law supersedes state law. [2] https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/all-things-work/child...
I'm not implying regulations are the fix, I just think it's a little fucked up.
it was indirectly more profitable. no child labor -> children would have no distractions for grade school -> more chldren graduate -> graduates tend to contribute more to the national economy.
At least that was the theory. Clearly private lobbyists and various interests groups who want to erode the country don't care about such factors.
Exactly: Child labor laws are more profitable for society; child labor is more profitable for a small set of individuals. Lobbying by interest groups is often pushing away from the former and towards the latter.
ETA: In line with this sub-thread, I'd say: There are and always will be private interest groups lobbying against the former and towards the latter; and so there will always need to be public interest groups lobbying against the latter and towards the former. That applies to LVT as much as environmental and labor protections.
AFAIK modern capitalism doesn't incentivise behaviours that cause broad economic growth over a long period without any short-term profit. That's what governments are needed for.
Child labour in mining is uneconomic though. You'd still get children here-and-there for whatever reason, but mining involves hugely expensive machines doing most of the work, or heavy lifting that a child can't do. If you're comfortable spending $10 million on a machine and putting a small child behind the wheel, odds are great you'll go bankrupt trying to run a mine.
I genuinely doubt 14 year olds are being killed on any mass scale by sawmills in the United States. That seems incredibly hyperbolic.
The closest thing I could find was a single 16 year old killed in Wisconsin last year. Very sad, but n=1, and the attribution to 'rolling back' child labour regulations seems spurious (did the previous regulations prevent 16 year olds from working?).
Edit: I'm noting the downvotes, but I stand by this. Just because something plays into your political preconceptions doesn't mean it's true. (We should all be doubly sceptical of spurious factoids that just so happen to perfectly align with our political views!)
--- Using data from the National Household Travel Survey, the fatal crash rate per mile driven for 16-19 year-olds is nearly 3 times the rate for drivers ages 20 and over. Risk is highest at ages 16-17.
--- Given that Risk increases as age decreases, 14-15 year olds are at a high risk of fatal injury while driving on the road. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/teenagers
This was with a few minutes of searching. You have to filter out child labor deaths abroad and other breaking news, but the deaths are there and they're increasing.
Note that for each death that results in a successful lawsuit, you should assume there are other deaths happening where the family either (1) couldn't afford to bring a case, (2) agreed to private settlement, or even (3) it just didn't get big enough to make the broader news.
- Washington: "Washington’s youth employment laws identify prohibited duties for workers under 18 years old. Rotschy had a student learner exemption permitting minors to do some work that is otherwise prohibited, but use of the walk-behind trencher was not part of the exemption."
-Alabama: "The department’s Wage and Hour Division found Apex Roofing illegally employed the teen in violation of a Fair Labor Standards Act child labor hazardous occupation order that prohibits workers under the age of 18 from engaging in dangerous jobs designated by the act, including roofing or construction operations."
-Iowa : I would like to see data that shows the crash rate for teens going to/from work vs general teen driving.
In half of the examples, the company was having the worker do prohibited work. If the company is breaking the law, how does the fact that labor laws were changed affect that?
Children are easier to convince or coerce to do work that is prohibited.
I'm not sure your intentions with trying desperately to convince yourself that it's safe and reasonable to have children work dangerous jobs.
14 year olds can work all sorts of jobs already, they can make money and learn skills.
There is obviously a reason these laws were passed. So the evidence you are so sure does not exist has been around for a century. These laws weren't vibe based.
Its interesting that the takeaway here is that teenagers are too fragile to do a job and must forego learning a new skill. Is the idea really that it's okay to die on the job as long as you are 18 or older?
Roofing companies shouldn't have anyone falling off the roof, there are OSHA regulations for a reason. 16 year olds being bad drivers has nothing to do with their employmwnt status. Using trenchers is dangerous no matter who you are, that isn't age related and if we are collectively concerned with how much damage they can do we should not use the machines.
Protecting and teaching kids is totally reasonable, but how far down the path of trapping them in a bubble do we really want to go?
As a global society we've generally agreed that if you are under the age of 18 you are not grown enough to make decisions that could put yourself or society at risk.
- You cannot sign up for the military, even though you might know how to aim and fire a weapon.
- You cannot vote in elections.
- You cannot purchase nicotine, alcohol, or other drugs. (In the USA this age is higher at 21)
So the takeaway is that yes, teenagers are too fragile and don't have the risk assessment capacity to work some of these dangerous jobs.
Yes, we have OSHA and other safety regulations. Still the jobs are dangerous. Adults are more likely to call this out or recognize when these regulations are being disregarded, but a 14 year old might not realize that what they are doing is more dangerous than it should be.
> You cannot sign up for the military, even though you might know how to aim and fire a weapon.
> You cannot vote in elections.
These two are both linked. In the US, military enrollment age was 20-45 (The Enrollment Act). Around the two world wars it was lowered to 18, primarily because they didn't have enough troops and most kids graduated high school at 18.
The 26th amendment set the voting age to 18 because that's what the draft age was already set to.
Neither had anything directly to do with developmental differences by age. The first followed social norms for schooling age and the second just followed along.
> You cannot purchase nicotine, alcohol, or other drugs. (In the USA this age is higher at 21)
There are many studies showing the risks of consuming these chemicals are much higher for people under the age of around 20. I don't know if those data were known before age limits were set, but there is a good reason to keep it today that has nothing to do with teenagers' ability to make decisions. Alternatively, I'd be just as happy seeing these also removed and us better teaching kids what the risks are so they can make their own decisions.
> As a global society we've generally agreed that if you are under the age of 18 you are not grown enough to make decisions that could put yourself or society at risk.
What "global society" is this? Most of the world by numbers doesn't seem to have signed on to this agreement. Well-off countries may have made child labor largely illegal, though some of it persists inside their borders, but this just moves most of it offshore. Not that the places where it lands didn't have child labor before, but the scale of their operations grow with exports and industrialization.
Car dependent suburbs where children spend 18 years at home, with no sidewalks to walk on and nowhere to walk to, and no public transport, only the schoolbus or their parents' car: fine.
Children banned from working in sawmills: "how far down the path of trapping them in an overprotective bubble do we really want to go?!".
We could do a lot to let children be more independent, interact more with the world, be able to walk or ride to school or to the shops or to friends' houses or to parks or to get jobs in various places to avoid bubbling them, first. The kind of company wanting to hire a 16 year old for its sawmill seems far more likely to be doing it for cheap labour than for the child's good.
Yes and for this exact reason, many argue for better gun safety regulations. I grew up before mass shootings became a daily occurrence (this is not hyperbole), but I still had at least one classmate in Junior High and HS die every year from gun related deaths. Either being shot and killed intentionally by a friend's parent or from suicide using their parent's gun.
We’re up to three terribly sad anecdotes. Even if we multiply that by a hundred to account for the shadow deaths you mention, we’re still nowhere near a mass epidemic in a country of over 300 million.
The claim, though, was that rolling back labour law has led to the situation deteriorating, so we would need statistics from today, to compare with statistics from the 1970s, 1950s, etc. Are children dying at work at a higher rate today than they did in 1950? 1970?
We don't need death statistics to know that children working with poverty wages to make rich people richer is bad.
Your argument is that unless we have thousands dying, it's fine?
I don't understand why people are even arguing this. Children working is never going to make society better. It might make more money for a few, but that's about it.
I honestly can't believe I'm seeing people arguing against child labor laws. I thought this was the kind of thing that you'd read in books and think "those were crazy times" but never witness it, yet here we are.
No. It's pretty much always a result of another system failing. We're not talking about a kid helping out in their mom and pop's shop. We're talking about kids working in meat plants because it's cheap labor.
If they have to work to help out with money, then our system has failed in providing an adequate environment for a kid to grow up.
If a child wants to learn a craft or pick up specific skills, that should not be done in a work environment that can put them in danger. Again, that's another failure of the system.
Most of us already have to basically work until death since they can't ever properly retire, so I see zero benefits in forcing humans that are still developing into that reality even sooner.
>> I honestly can't believe I'm seeing people arguing against child labor laws.
And where are you seeing these people, exactly?
My argument is that the claim “winding back labour law has caused a rise in workplace deaths involving children in sawmills” is unsupported by any statistical evidence, and very likely false. There are no statistics that support this claim.
False assertions are no way to debate about policy, provided we want good policy that is actually effective at keeping people safe. Such policy must be evidence based, and not vibes and feels based.
Okay, let's assume then all this thread is about being pedantic, and not because you're actually against child labor laws. My bad.
Still not sure how sending kids to work will increase their safety. You've mentioned evidence but I've never seen any evidence that supports it increases their safety. We've seen evidence it can decrease their safety since some are killed/injured, even if you dismissed it as not statistically relevant.
So in the end, this goes both ways: we don't have evidence that allowing kids to work improves their lives or society, making it a bad policy.
My guess these policies were based on greed, not "vibes". Clearly better, right?
I’m not saying sending kids to work will increase their safety, and - again - I’m honestly not sure how you’re getting that from what I’ve said. I would respectfully suggest reading the posts of others in good faith.
I’m saying there exists no evidence that the number of children dying in sawmills has dramatically increased as a result of changing labour laws. This is important, not pedantic, because it goes to the heart of the claim that modern labour law has changed in a way that harms children. If the data isn’t there, this claim is false. If this claim is false, we shouldn’t be rushing to revise labour law on the basis of it.
One person can claim that modern labour law kills children, another can claim it protects children. Until some statistics come in, all of this is noise.
Labour law exists to protect workers. It is too important to get wrong, such as by rushing into ill considered changes on the basis of vibes or feels. There may well be other reasons to adjust labour law - based on facts and hard evidence that it’s not working in some way.
I don’t understand why you seem to take such umbrage at the view that important safety laws should be made on the basis of actual data, so we can ensure they’re effective.
Yes, that sawmill incident was with 16-year-old, but there are more at other industries. E.g. WI regulations were relaxed to allow 14-years-old work 40 hour weeks as well part of the year. If there is not enough pushback fatalities are a matter of time.
It is probably a "rare freak accident" to be shot by a baboon but nonetheless it is illegal to to create dangerous situations like giving a loaded weapon to animals at the zoo.
You're (wilfully?) misunderstanding. No one is saying that laws somehow magically cease to apply to unusual events (wut?). The argument is that good legislative lawmaking is based on data and evidence. Rushing to make legislation to respond to (media coverage of) freak occurrences rarely leads to good lawmaking.
Try to engage in good faith. You don't really think that people don't know what child labour is illegal, and require a Wiki link to elucidate this obscure fact. You're just performing outrage. Why do so? What benefit does doing so bring you, or anyone else?
No, you literally wrote "it’s generally a bad idea to legislate for over a third of a billion of humans on the basis of rare freak accidents".
> Rushing to make legislation to respond to (media coverage of) freak occurrences rarely leads to good lawmaking.
I agree. Yet, laws against child labor already exist and they work as a "blanket" safety mechanism against all threats to children, regardless of what incident might happen.
> Try to engage in good faith. ... You're just performing outrage.
Please do not accuse other people of acting in bad faith.
> No, you literally wrote "it’s generally a bad idea to legislate for over a third of a billion of humans on the basis of rare freak accidents".
I genuinely have no idea what your point is. The most generous reading I can give this is that you took my words to be an assertion that we should abolish all laws relating to workplace accidents, but that is a farcical misinterpretation. Both on its face, but especially in the context of the wider discussion.
> I agree. Yet, laws against child labor already exist and they work as a "blanket" safety mechanism against all threats to children, regardless of what incident might happen.
Of course they do. I'm unsure why this requires explanation. What's the alternative? Non-blanket child labour laws? What would that even look like? Again, I have no idea what your point is.
> Please do not accuse other people of acting in bad faith.
This exchange began when you accused me, in a one line comment, of finding the death of children acceptable. If that was intended to be a good faith, constructive comment, I'm happy to hear how exactly.
More broadly, I reject your view that bad faith comments ought not be called out. Why not? In the best case, it helps a person become aware that they're not engaging constructively; alternatively, it's informative for others, and can help them from entering into a pointless discussion.
I would judge that someone falsely claiming that 14 year olds are being killed in sawmills as a result of policy changes they dislike is the one deliberately trying to derail the conversation more than someone who correctly claims "no, that is false".
The burden of proof is certainly on the person claiming there's an increase in child labor death. However just because they didn't provide proof doesn't make the claim "false".
The increase in child labor-related deaths is happening and will continue as child labor laws are rolled back in states across the US.
> The increase in child labor-related deaths is happening and will continue as child labor laws are rolled back in states across the US.
You’re accepting the claim because you already believe it to be true, but both you and the original person making the claim have no evidence for this. This is a very dangerous style of political argument. “Well, there are no facts here, but this claim reinforces my already existing beliefs, so the vibes check out!”
We want policy around workplace safety to be evidence based, not vibes and feels based, because the former will save lives and the latter will not.
I'm curious why you think these laws were enacted in the first place? Do you think there was not evidence back then which convinced a majority of people to want that big change?
They were based on mountains of data, collected methodically over a number of years to make an ironclad case for reform. That’s good law making! I support this!
However, data from 1910 is accurate for 1910, not for 2024. If children are dying en masse in workplaces today, it ought not be difficult to collate the data required to tighten the laws further. And yet, all I’ve seen is assertions, vibes, and vague conspiracy theories.
Policy making is a balancing act; we calibrate laws for the circumstances as they develop. The only way to do this intelligently, or even competently, is on the basis of evidence.
Fair. I am willing to wait for evidence that a 14 year old was killed in a sawmill as a result of these policy changes before cementing my conclusion that it was a false claim.
The use of hyperbole is actually misses the point and derails the conversation.
If a point is valid and clear hyperbole isn't needed. Concerns over children dying in job related accidents or being made to work extreme hours or in bad conditions is a fine point. Children falling into sawmills just muddies the waters and will draw in people who disagree that that is a concern at all.
You could make the same theoretical argument against most taxes though. If it were possible to unwind corporate taxes through raw political connections it'd have happened by now for example. Or capital gains tax in its entirety.
That is actually a great theoretical argument against taxes generally by the way - there'd be a lot more money in people's pockets if they didn't have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.
>there'd be a lot more money in people's pockets if they didn't have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.
people who say this need to remember what makes the most money vs. what are the actual most necessary goods for basic civilization. Sadly, most people would not fund the electric company to keep their lights on as they throw thousands at sport merchandise, including a new TV that they cannot power on.
There's definitely tons of corruption, but we do need someone with a wider scope to budget for the "boring" stuff.
> Sadly, most people would not fund the electric company to keep their lights on as they throw thousands at sport merchandise, including a new TV that they cannot power on.
People fund it with their electric bill every month. If the business isn't viable and can only stay open through massive government subsidies that's a much more fundamental problem.
Why does the government get to decide what is best for people to spend their money on? If consumers really would prefer to spend money in TV and sport merchandise, well it's their damn money to spend and none of the government's concern.
> Sadly, most people would not fund the electric company to keep their lights on as they throw thousands at sport merchandise, including a new TV that they cannot power on.
But people are funding it. They're not the ones borrowing from Macquarie, but they are the ones paying them back. Is there a more direct way to do this, is the question.
> If it were possible to unwind corporate taxes through raw political connections it'd have happened by now for example. Or capital gains tax in its entirety.
But this has more or less been done for the most powerful, e.g. corporate income tax exists but Apple doesn't pay it, capital gains tax exists but is deferred until you sell the shares and then rich people don't do that. So then Rockefellers don't pay the tax, but you do as an ordinary peon who has a good run messing around on Robinhood, or when you start making withdrawals from your IRA. Meanwhile we can't get rid of the tax which now only applies to the middle class because people claim that you're trying to give a tax cut to the billionaires who aren't actually paying it.
> there'd be a lot more money in people's pockets if they didn't have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.
It's really an argument for tax simplification.
As far as I can tell the way tax policy works is that rich people hire lawyers and PR firms to cast the forms of taxation they would actually have to pay as regressive (e.g. consumption taxes, because you can't register the Rolls Royce without paying the tax and you can't sell into the jurisdiction without collecting VAT) and the forms they can avoid through shell games and accounting tricks as The One True Way To Tax The Rich (e.g. "profit" taxes, because profit is fuzzy around the edges and has high inter-region liquidity), which the rich then weasel out of and leave only the middle class paying the tax.
I looked for some reliable numbers on Apple's tax payment and didn't find any, so I won't comment on that, but I do want to say some things about...
> capital gains tax exists but is deferred until you sell the shares and then rich people don't do that
This gets pretty quickly into the philosophical what-are-we-doing-here-exactly of taxes, but:
1) Shares don't do very much on their own, so there isn't really a problem with that. I mean, dude owns a billion in shares - if they earn income dude will pay tax, if they don't the only true to get to the value is to sell them.
I imagine there are some gaping loopholes involving charities and debt, but that isn't anything to do with the deferment of the tax.
2) Because of inflation - and asset inflation is markedly higher than CPI - CGT is effectively a wealth tax because fairly quickly most of the value of an asset is the inflationary component. I've got gold bars where I allegedly am making a 100-and-something% return and that just flies in the face of the inert reality of the metal itself. The tax is markedly unfair, anyone trying to be a responsible saver ends up paying much more of their income in tax than someone who just spends it on the day and it effectively becomes a wealth tax that stops anyone in the middle class moving up over time. Moving wealth between assets is catastrophic to your financial health once CGT is a factor.
There are a bunch of quirky distortions in the tax system. CGT might even be one of the contributing factors to why people don't tend to have savings (although the biggest factor is probably psychology). Rationally speaking saving is quite an inefficient use of money if you end up paying CGT.
> 1) Shares don't do very much on their own, so there isn't really a problem with that. I mean, dude owns a billion in shares - if they earn income dude will pay tax, if they don't the only true to get to the value is to sell them.
Are you aware of the "buy, borrow, die" strategy? In short, you can borrow against the value of appreciated assets to get income during your lifetime, then pass the assets (and the debt) on in inheritance, and your heirs don't have to pay any capital gains tax because of cost-basis step up when they sell the assets to pay the debt. You effectively avoid any taxation on the appreciation.
You don't need shares for this - you can be mortgaged up to the hilt and pass on the house to your heirs when you die, and they sell the house to pay off the mortgage.
But all the money you borrowed needs to have been spent, or it's subject to inheritance tax (or paying back the debt it came from), and all that spending needs to be on things that are taxed with VAT, with employees providing services you buy who are paying income tax, and the businesses you're buying from paying corporation tax, etc etc. Tax is never avoided; it's just paid through other means.
But this is kind of my point. Capital gains tax is a dumb tax, it mostly screws middle class people and creates several perverse incentives, and we'd be better off to use a simple consumption tax instead. The argument against this is supposedly that "rich people" are the ones who pay capital gains tax, but in practice "rich people" are the ones in the best position to avoid paying it using fancy accountants and cross-border shenanigans. The middle class people actually paying it wouldn't be any worse off with a consumption tax that lacks all of those perverse incentives, and might even end up paying less because then the super rich would pay the same rate as they do instead of a lower one.
Consumption tax screws the working and middle classes the absolute most because they consume the most as a % of their income.
There's a reason it was pushed mostly by billionaires.
LVT is the most egalitarian tax. It's completely unavoidable for land owners, renters pay nothing at all, it skews highest on the biggest landowers and it doesnt disincentivize productive investment or productive work.
> Consumption tax screws the working and middle classes the absolute most because they consume the most as a % of their income.
This is the rich corporation PR that I'm talking about.
So here's Richie Rich not spending most of his income, but also not selling any shares unless he wants to buy something. In fact, he doesn't sell shares even then, because instead he borrows money to buy things, so there are never any capital gains. Without a consumption tax he pays no tax at all.
But you're saying we need this tax, whose practical effect is to tax middle class people on the inflationary component of asset price increases, because they spend more of their income. Instead you want to tax middle class people on their income. But then what benefit do they receive by using an income tax which immediately taxes all of their income?
LVT ignores that there are other resources that may be hoarded. In particular, companies can hire all the employees with the skills necessary to build a competitor and have them do busy work to avoid having to innovate or compete on the merits of their products.
This is essentially the same thing as buying up land and leaving it fallow, but with human resources instead of land. In some ways this is worse, as society has already invested in training those workers.
Employees are not a finite resource. Pay enough to hire half of the chartered accountants and that will drive the creation of more. Demand follows supply.
Land is finite. Buy half of all the land and that won't exactly drive the creation of more land will it? It'll just drive up the price of existing land.
This is in a nutshell why some things in America are dirt cheap (e.g. electronics, clothes) while houses keep getting more and more absurdly priced.
> It's completely unavoidable for land owners, renters pay nothing at all,
In this world, renters pay all of the expenses incurred by land owners via a payment we call "rent".
Note that LVT discourages diverse development. You see an empty piece of land that should be filled with condos. I see an open space that lets me see something other than condos.
In this world renters already pay a 100% land value tax. Levy a land value tax on landlords and renters will neither pay more nor less. It's already baked into market rent.
There is law, economic or otherwise that a business has to make a profit. With an LVT you cant profit from land speculation only providing a good, well maintained property which uses space efficiently.
LVT does not discourage diverse development. It only discourages land hoarding and inefficient use of land (e.g. San Francisco's one family homes).
The argument/discussion about taxes has to start by discussing what functions and services we want to be handled by the state.
There are taxes that are there to nudge people and encourage certain things, but all in all the point is to finance the state.
In most developed countries the state, in one form or another, has taken on many functions and services and that implies that taxation has to be significant. So before discussing cutting tax we need to think about what the state should offload (if anything) first.
I would love to have that discussion, as I agree instinctively, having worked with local and national government bodes in the UK - it does seem as though the current way is very expensive. But what could we chop off without making it much worse?
I think its a bit different. In other scenarios like income, capital gains or even sales tax, its tied to the taxee gaining something. Its the price of doing business and an evaluation can be made by the taxee. Incentives are pitted against each other and chalked up to the price of doing business.
An LVT feels like pure downside to the taxee. There are no beneficial _direct_ effects. Its psychologically very different, especially for residential land.
Meh, the only cogent argument against taxation is "I like the Mad Max franchise so much I'd vacation there". Everything else is just trying to find someone else's pocket to pick to pay for the services one enjoys. Anyway, we're currently pretty damn close to having unwound corporate taxes. Check this out:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-corpor...
Roads are approximately 0% of GDP. In fact a quick check suggests that the US annual deficit is larger than road construction spending [0] so funnily enough it is probably feasible to get rid of all taxes in the US and reduce the deficit and still have roads.
People love bringing up roads in this sort of topic for some reason but they really aren't a big enough spending target to be worth it.
I'd say it is more that if you pick any real line item that taxes are spent on (topics like welfare, warfare, debt and medicine) you start hitting highly political topics where there is usually a good argument that the taxation and spending is making things worse on net.
So people have to pick trivial examples to try and brush aside that all the realistic ones are actually up for debate.
Neither is rampant pedantry. Either you grasp the concept that government services and institutions literally make society possible and cost money or you don't.
The easiest answer to this is a very slow phase in. LVT doesn't need to be 100%. You can start it at 1% and have it set to increase slowly over time. This means that, for currenty owners, it will come into effect so slowly that it doesn't matter. You can even phase it in so slowly that on the timelines that they might want to sell it, it doesn't matter too much. And, at every point along that phase in, you get incremental improvements.
It's not an argument not to do it. I'm just pointing out that it isn't enough to make the world a better place, you need to have a plan ready for how to keep it that way or we just get captured again.
No you don’t because no plan survives first contact with reality. You simply have to keep plugging the benefits and make it politically infeasible for MPs/Congress/Etc. to undo it.
SIdenote: this is the case right now in Netherlands (and 2 or 3 other European countries) and has been for decades. They tax capital value instead of capital gains value.
So, if you bought $100K of bitcoin, then 10 years later the value of bitcoin drops by 50% you not only lost $50K you also paid taxes just for possession of the bitcoin? That seems awful. It'd also incentivize a lot of people to get "hacked" and lose their bitcoin.
Let's say you invest 100k in Bitcoin and 10 years later it's 1M. In a capital gains system you would pay 252000 EUR in taxes on that (assuming 28% capital gains tax, which at least 1 country in Europe actually has).
In the capital tax system you would have paid between 15.000 and 100.000 EUR of taxes on that over the same 10 years. Which is... much less.
So you could argue that the tax on capital is much more "fair". It's definitely MUCH simpler in terms of administration, because you never ever have to prove the cost-basis of your investment. All you need to know is your current P&L. There are a lot of US brokers out there who deliberately "forget" to provide a cost basis when you buy shares (hello and fu DriveWealth).
> In the capital tax system you would have paid between 15.000 and 100.000 EUR of taxes on that over the same 10 years. Which is... much less.
Unless bitcoin crashes to zero. Then you've not only lost the $100K you spent to buy the bitcoin. You've also paid these taxes just because you possessed this now-worthless asset.
This is why capital taxes suck: you haven't actually made any money until you sell the asset. You can easily end up paying taxes on something that has zero value.
Yes, however I'd argue that land, maybe more than other property, is one of the main property rights that government exists to enforce. If the land value tax becomes a land property rights enforcement subscription payment, maybe it makes more sense to have it be an annual payment so that the government (courts, cops, etc) makes sure others respect that you own the land.
Property taxes and property ownership are fundamentally at odds with each other.
Fundamental rights should never be taxed and the government should never be able to take them away from us. If either of those are true then it's a privilege not a right.
As soon as a government can tax me just for owning a piece of land, rather than for the original purchase of the land or the produces I make and sell from the land, I no longer have a right to property ownership. At that point I am effectively renting the land from the government.
That landlord can take the land back if I don't pay my taxes. They can even kick me off the land if they decide they need it, graciously throwing some money at me based on whatever they think my claim to ownership is worth while they send me packing.
You say that the government should never be able to take away land from us that we own. But what if they take away the services that guarantee other people don't take away that land from us?
In that way, they're not taking the land, they're just ceasing to provide police officers, judges, courts, etc., to ensure no one else takes the land.
I think I agree with you in theory, that if we own it, we own it, and yet I think "owning" something is a social construct protected by institutions doing services.
It almost seems like the debate in software where companies have often shifted to subscription SaaS models and customers want to be able to own the software outright. And customers say they don't want updates, but often they still want security updates and for as long as the product exists, which is an ongoing service software companies provide, not so dissimilar to services governments might provide to protect land.
In other words, if I buy a plot of land, does that entitle me to 10 years of someone defending my land borders? 100? 1,000? And if not and i have to defend those borders myself, do we really have government property rights or lots of individuals with guns saying who owns which property?
I dont think it HAS to be paid with property taxes, but i also dont think the concept of infinite ownership makes sense either.
Are governments really protecting our land borders in that situation though, or protecting their monopoly such that they are the only ones who can take it from us? Governments can absolutely protect our borders, my only issue is that it should be universal and governments should also be ensuring that even they can't strip us of land that we own based on the existing laws and social contracts that are fundamental to our society.
I totally agree that land ownership is propped up on by social contracts, and that we have institutions meant to enforce those contract. I'd be okay with getting rid of land ownership entirely if it also meant getting rid of all those centralized powers that are supposed to defend it but sometimes do the opposite.
Because of what you said, I'm starting to think about human rights and how governments also provide services to protect citizens from others and yet, if I don't pay any tax as a citizen, often the government still provides those services to me, because it's not just for my benefit but the benefit of the community.
So I wonder if this is kinda what you meant about still guaranteeing those rights as property as well.
And also, if i understand correct, youre saying that you just want the governments to abide by the social contracts and laws that exist to protect these land rights, not revoke them, correct?
I think i may really enjoy a proper conversation with you about this and I struggle sometimes in these long HN chains to learn and reply.
> Property taxes and property ownership are fundamentally at odds with each other.
This makes absolutely no sense.
> Fundamental rights should never be taxed and the government should never be able to take them away from us.
Property is not a fundamental right and never has been. Firstly, a huge number of people do not own land (which an LTV would apply to) so in declaring it a fundamental right, you'd need to start thinking about how to get land to those people. Good luck doing that without violating the "fundamental right" of the existing property owners.
Secondly, many cultures (past and present) simply don't recognise property rights in the way outlined in the legal codes of western governments. Traveller communities & nomadic tribes, for example, have far fuzzier concepts of property ownership than you or I understand.
To be clear I'm talking about the US here. I actually very much align with the views of some other cultures where land can not be owned at all. I'd much prefer that model, it just isn't what we have today.
> This makes absolutely no sense.
For something to be a right means that we are each entitled to it simply by being human [1]. Free speech, for example, is a right that isn't supposed to be infringed upon regardless of what you say.
Privledges come with strings attached. you have the opportunity to drive a car but not the right to do so. You have to be licensed, you have to pay taxes, you have to register your vehicle, etc. If you don't follow the rules you may lose that privledge.
Many of the US founding fathers wrote extensively about the importance of property rights [2]. They also viewed slaves as property and took land from loyalists after the revolutionary war was over, so by no means am I saying they were perfect. The history of the right to property ownership literally goes back to the creation of our country though.
The right to own property doesn't mean that everyone must own some though, I'm not sure where you're getting that. The government doesn't have to ensure that everyone does own land, only that everyone can own land.
So let's look at the United States. By your definition, this "property right" is still not fundamental, as Property Tax seems to be a thing. [1]
According to the US Constitution, property is outlined as a right but not inalienable. Clearly it's possible for governments to take property with due process (i.e. a process written down) and they don't mention taxing them at all. Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also doesn't mention taxation, so I still don't see how any of this supports your argument that property taxes violate property rights.
> So let's look at the United States. By your definition, this "property right" is still not fundamental, as Property Tax seems to be a thing. [1]
That was actually the core of the original point I was trying to get at, I may have just done a poor job explaining it.
Property ownership should be a fundamental right in my opinion, and at least based on their writing that's an opinion shared by our country's founders.
The existence of property taxes and the state's power to claim eminent domain both show that it isn't treated as a right.
> Clearly it's possible for governments to take property with due process (i.e. a process written down)
Well clearly that is how it is being handled today, but that doesn't mean it should be that way. Though rare, you will occasionally find stories of individuals who's land was taken by the government ad the person is effectively thrown out on their ass. I don't think that should ever be possible, I don't care what the government would like to use the land for.
I actually saw this happen just a few years ago. The cities of Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, aong with the Alabama stage government, were all fighting over where a new bridge to the barrier island should go and who would get to tax it. A plan was drawn up putting the bridge on part of the canal where homes already existed on both sides.
The owners were forced out and given under market rate for the houses. This was in 2017 or so if I remember right, property value there has gone crazy in recent years meaning they also lost all that potential growth in value. Anyway, the legal fight over the bridge ultimately swung a different way and the homes were taken only to sit vacant and abandoned as the bridge is now going elsewhere.
This should never happen in my opinion, plain and simple. If I lawfully own a piece of land and followed all the rules the government shouldn't be able to kick me out and effectively use my land as a piece on a political game board.
If the founders intended that, they had the opportunity to make that explicit in the constitution. They even reference “due process” so it’s clear they had something in mind. It’s just not what you’re claiming.
This is close to, but not entirely, true. The US federal government also has the power to levy direct capitation taxes (taxes that are effectively constant per-person without regard to any other factors).
In practice, those taxes are impractically regressive, but the federal government does have that power under the Constitution.
In olden days when chopping of heads was more acceptable, smart people understood that "debt relief" was a way to somehow decrease a chance of loosing they'r heads :)
Now, when technology (military) enables to control the masses more strictly this approach has fallen in popularity.
When you have nothing to eat, and the rules that are in play are so complicated that you need team of layers to understand them, "playing by the rules" does not sound really valid argument.
Sure there are ways it could technically be implemented, but that doesn't say whether it should be implemented. Why is an LVT inheritly good for us? And is it so good that we should trick the public into not realizing a new tax was forced on them and the government was stealing more of their money?
There are more than enough words spilled on the first topic by better writers than myself. If you click around the archives of the substack the linked article is from, you will find plenty. As for the second point: usually LVT is proposed as a more efficient alternative to current taxes, not as an entirely new tax on top of all the currently existing taxes.
In fact, there are people in this thread (inaccurately) accusing the author of being a "single taxer", since there are some Georgists who believe that an LVT could potentially be the only tax.
> freed of its shackles and allowed to appreciate again. Some of this would be immediate, as thousands of dollars in taxes shift away from land and back onto labour, enterprise, and commerce
Oh not again with the trickle-down story. It doesn't work, it never worked.
The only way that money trickles is in the pockets of the landowners, from there it will be used to lobby politicians or stored in some fiscal haven.
On the other hand, as long as that money is taxed it can be used by the state for the people. Build infrastructure, improve education, healthcare, etc.
That's how you get money to "trickle down". That is, of course, if the state isn't to o busy making arms manufacturers rich.
> That's how you get money to "trickle down". That is, of course, if the state isn't to o busy making arms manufacturers rich.
If you won't trust in the state parentally taking from some and giving to others, nor trust in people making transactions between each other on what they find valuable, what do you want? Is there a third option?
I don't see any other option. We should remember that we are the state, in theory. It's the whole point of a state. If that isn't the case anymore, we should fix it.
The main problem is that nowadays states operate on the basis of the same false trickle-down fable.
They don't build stuff, they pay corporations to do it for them and expect that money to somehow flow down to the people. We can clearly see that doesn't happen as inequality keeps growing.
We aren't the state, though. The state is the governing body and its surrounding entities, funded through taxes, that controls the justice system and the military.
I don't think it's a good idea to conflate "the state" and "the country" or "society". The state is the most powerful entity in the country, but it's not the only one.
And I've probably said this elsewhere, but inequality is not important. We keep hearing about it every day, so it sounds important, but it's not. Unless it's being done deliberately to keep people down, e.g. in a feudal or 20th century socialism country, but even then the fundamental problem is authoritarianism, not inequality. Inequality is a symptom, and not always of something bad.
I don't care that Tesla owners in the early 2010s had Roadsters and I didn't. Roadsters paved the way for Model Ss, which paved the way for Model 3s, which - if the Cybertruck hadn't got in the way - paved the way for Model 2s.
I don't care that at some point in history only rich people had (terrible) glasses. Basically everyone (outside of impoverished countries whose government officials absorb the cash from overseas to help) now has access to high quality lenses - far better than those the rich people of the past could access.
Temporary inequality leads to - over time - an uplift of the fundamental things for everyone. That's the only thing that matters - the baseline now vs what it used to be. Not the difference between baseline and the rich. The rich will spend on a thousand trivial things that won't matter, but also on things that will eventually be accessible to everyone.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
That's literally in the constitution and not just that of the USA.
> I don't care that
Rich people do care, they want the best healthcare the world can provide, the best education for their children, and want it now, not in 50 years when the "rising tide lifts all boats". Do you consider yourself inferior to them? Then why wouldn't you care?
> Temporary inequality leads to - over time - an uplift of the fundamental things for everyone
"A rising tide lifts all boats", "Trickle down" these are all aphorisms invented by rich people in order to justify their hoarding while there are people who can't afford a roof over their heads. To keep the outcasts calm, waiting for their turn to enjoy a small fraction of what others enjoy entirely now.
> > "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
> That's literally in the constitution and not just that of the USA.
I don't see how this is relevant to whether the state is synonymous with the population of a country.
> Do you consider yourself inferior to them? Then why wouldn't you care?
I don't consider "inferior" to be "I don't have a Porsche and they do". Or even "I can't force taxpayers to pay for a $10m operation and followup treatment and someone else can afford it out of the value they've created", which I think is what you're thinking I should say.
Is that what you're saying? Happy to discuss, but you seem to be talking in emotive language rather than speaking plainly, and I'm just trying to get at the a plain description of what you mean.
> I don't consider "inferior" to be "I don't have a Porsche and they do".
You keep fixating on luxury cars for some reason, I'm talking about fundamental rights recognized in the universal declaration of human rights. I couldn't care less about owning a Porsche or a Tesla.
I care about the health and education of my family and I don't want to live in a society where people die because of lack of treatments. You say "a $10m operation", I'm sorry to say that shows again you're out of touch. People die every day because they can't afford insulin, which costs about $3 per vial to produce.
> You keep fixating on luxury cars for some reason, I'm talking about fundamental rights recognized in the universal declaration of human rights. I couldn't care less about owning a Porsche or a Tesla.
I'm not fixating - there's no point introducing pop psychology. They're just an easy way to explain a mechanism. I also mentioned hyper-expensive medical treatments, and corrective lenses. If you only saw luxury cars in that list, I don't think you should be diagnosing anyone else with fixation.
> People die every day because they can't afford insulin, which costs about $3 per vial to produce.
This isn't a human rights issue; nor is it a rich people bad issue. It's an economics/corruption/bad regulations issue. People get rich by making something lots of people want for $3 a go. People want to do that.
In a functional democracy, the state is working in the best interest of the people. And your assertion that GP is arguing that the state is "synonymous with the population" is a straw man, as they didn't say that.
Let's look at the phrase "value they've created" that you used. That's a bit of an idealistic way of thinking. After all those with money and power in society have historically used that money and power to get more money and power. Does a king sitting on a throne produce more "value" than the farmers that feed his cities? Does the hedge fund manager choosing stocks to buy and companies to liquidate produce more value than doctors who save people's lives?
A state that controls its own currency doesn’t need taxes.
They only exist to control inflation. We could achieve the same thing with high interest rate, printing all the money we need and having zero tax on anything.
Taking out loans creates money, including when private banks do it. That’s what national debt does too.
Definitely. There would be more dollars in circulation for a start. Ultimately the government is the final "sink" for dollars in the system. That and loan repayments (but unlike taxes, loan repayments could be made in any currency).
This is the first time I've encountered anybody else who has figured this out and says it openly.
For those who wonder how: If it wasn't for taxes being collected in the currency of the government, people and businesses would conduct their affairs in other currencies that do not decrease in value from inflation. That's also the reason why there will never be any simple taxation system, such as land value tax or whatnot. In order to keep everybody using the government currency, the taxes demanded in that currency has to be applied to every and any economic activity imaginable, otherwise people will flock to other currencies after having paid their dues, and the government currency value collapses.
This is also the reason why the public sector workforce is of an enormous size, even in supposedly capitalist countries. Public sector workers cannot choose another currency for their paycheck.
This is the reason why most third world countries cannot create a stable government currency: Their tax collection is not effective or comprehensive enough. Unless all the population is put under government issued money by rigorous taxation, they will choose other currency.
I'm not saying the same thing as the Wikipedia page. They say that taxes can counter inflation by reducing spending. But this comes from the erroneous belief that inflation is created by spending (or even worse, by labour wages). Inflation is created by an increase in the money supply, which mainly comes from completely different debt than consumer spending.
I'm not saying like them that increased taxes reduce inflation and props up the currency value in this way. The evidence is against this. What I'm saying is that a comprehensive taxation system that gets into every imaginable nook and cranny of economic activity or life in general, is what is required to give the government currency any value at all. Without having complicated taxes on basically everything, the currency would be worthless or worth much less, as we see in the third world. The US of course has the option to bully other countries to use their currency, by military means. But this is not true for the euro or pound, for example.
This is an interesting theory. Basically, as I understand it, you already want to do these things, but since the government can compel you to pay tax on them in its currency, you stick to that currency out of convenience/necessity. If the taxation system is not comprehensive (or you can evade it), you will use the official currency as little as possible, diminishing the amount of useful things transacted in it and thus its value.
Yes! That's exactly how I meant. And it doesn't matter too much if the taxes are high or low, what's important is that they are collected on every activity. I think the prime example is sales taxes in the different states in the US. They are so low (0%-7%) as to be marginal, and collecting them surely costs the consumer economy much more than the gains the state governments have from them.
The rational policy would be to abolish sales taxes and transfer that tax burden by increasing other taxes – but the purpose of the sales tax is primarily to make sure business is always conducted in the government currency, and thereby giving the US Dollar a value. Try to use a foreign currency, bullion, or whatnot to purchase consumer goods in any big box store and you'll be shown the door. The same in most of Europe. Then try to use your foreign dollars or euros to buy consumer goods in the third world, and your money will be more than welcome.
The monetary side is Quantity of Money times Velocity of money. Both affect inflation. It is therefore Possible to have inflation with fixed money supply.
You may argue it is not likely, or it is not relevant, but to argue it is impossible is like arguing about physics but disbelieving in the laws of motion.
I'm a beginner here - how does this make sense? Why would spending money lots affect inflation?
My simple conceptualisation:
If I sell my heap of junk car to my neighbour for $10000 this week, which he buys for sentimental reasons, and he sells it back to me for $10000 next week, for sentimental reasons, and we continue doing this every week, what would drive inflation?
Conversely, if the government doubled the money supply, suddenly people from outside are earning much more money than they used to for the same work, and to them $10000 is worth half what it was, enough to get them to bid $12000 and get the car. They might only do that once, but the price has inflated.
A cryptocurrency where all the voting nodes are run by the state could fulfill the same objective. The problem is that cryptocurrencies as we know them are based upon a publicly verifiable ledger. Inevitably, the state would want an "off the books" way to move money around, which would lead to a shadow currency, and the resulting disequilibrium would destabilize either the state or the "official" currency.
> If you won't trust in the state parentally taking from some and giving to others
That's not how it works. The state is tasked with keeping the public good - such as basic infrastructure. "Parentally (...) giving to others" imply that the government taxes your money to do welfare only (and you implied it in a derogatory manner for that matter, which shows your inclinations).
Welfare is important, but not the only function of a government.
> nor trust in people making transactions between each other on what they find valuable
Those should absolutely be regulated and taxed. "people making transactions between each other on what they find valuable" are looking only for their private benefit, society be damned.
> imply that the government taxes your money to do welfare only
No - this is in the context of the constrasting "trickle down" theory (also derogatory). I took that to mean that instead of trickling down, we should be taking from people who produce the most value and giving it to others. Not we should replace trickle down theory with infrastructure spending - those are not related.
> "people making transactions between each other on what they find valuable" are looking only for their private benefit, society be damned.
Those people are society. Babysitters earning some pocket money; local tradespeople doing jobs; actual community things like churches and running clubs and schools and game cafes; local produce creators. Stuff to spend on locally. That's what makes up society, and those transactions are how it happens.
Society is not a bureaucrat allocating some funds to spend on a committee to decide how round bananas are allowed to be, or whether all children should learn new math or old math, the teacher's opinion be damned. The state is not society.
> Nice hand-wave. This presumes some people produce most value, and they bear the burden of carrying others (who receive value).
I mean, that's actually how it works, only the people who produce most value are the workers, and the people who receive most of it are the capital owners.
> Note that "mutually voluntary" means no other party having their rights violated by that interaction, which would preclude actions like polluting
I don't think this is a rights issue, because it's too difficult to understand. Even simple transactions require contracts, and imagine all the (changing) regulations on what is or isn't deemed acceptable, and how that could be misused. Does noise pollution count? How much CO2 can I breath out before I'm violating your rights? Rights have to be simple; the stuff that will change needs to be laws.
In principle, noise and CO2 emission could be restricted, but of course the justifiability of the specific noise/CO2 emission restriction depends on the details.
In principle, interactions that any reasonable person agrees are mutually voluntary, should absolutely not be restricted. This is a human rights issue.
The devastating COVID lockdowns show what happens when we accept the notion that human rights can be infringed for the "greater good". That justification is what the PRC in China uses for all of its heavy handed intrusions in personal liberties, from limits on free speech to religious and ideological control.
The only morally consistent argument against the authoritarianism, that is more substantive than "what that state does is wrong, because we don't do it", is one based on the principle that mutually voluntary interactions shouldn't be restricted.
It's not about taking versus not taking. The rules of the game that we've put in place favor the haves. The end state of that is a return to fiefs and serfs, if we don't see a revolution first.
We need to create new rules to the game that give the advantage to the small. That lets us keep a "free market" without the homogenization and consolidation. For example, consider progressive taxes based on business size/revenue/etc. If there was a 90% top level corporate tax rate based on company size/revenue, we'd reverse the trend towards mergers and consolidations literally overnight. If most government regulations were relaxed for small businesses (say <= 20 employees) it would provide a massive boost to entrepreneurship. Instead we have rules that favor the big guys.
It would boost entrepreneurship, but would mean any business that requires 1000 people to function at all may never be built. I don't think it's worth only listing the pros of a change.
Can you provide an example of something that couldn't be built by a cooperative formed by a number of smaller companies, each trying to solve a part of the problem in an economically viable way?
I don't think there is anything that can't be built. It's me a matter of the increased expense and inefficiency making things too expensive to be practical.
- Products that significantly benefit from vertical integration like Tesla and iPhone
- Apple throwing around their 800lb gorilla weight to have better user privacy and bankroll TSMC’s latest process node
- Apple being able to afford gigantic SoC dies in iPhone, compared to android where manufacturers nickel and dime on the SoC and users get flaming pieces of shit clocked to high heaven
All those things could be accomplished by a group of businesses entering collective purchasing agreements, without giving one company the power to punish governments.
I think you must have misread the comment. The comment is very clearly anti-landowner and saying if an LVT were repealed, labour and enterprise would be taxed instead, which is bad.
Unearned rents is questionable. People have always understood the value of land and have worked hard to be able to purchase it and vote + participate in local government to help protect the value of that land. Especially in the US, that mostly worked quite well. We still have huge amounts of extremely cheap land that could be made desirable with enough hard work. You can still buy a crazy amount of land in parts of the country for like $50k.
Done right, an LVT can actually increase land value. Suppose you are a developer that owns a plot of land in a desirable area but there are some abandoned building nearby that a stingy owner refuses to sell. With a regular property tax, if you make significant improvements like add park space, nice trees, landscaping, etc. to your building you pay much more property tax while the stingy owner pays nothing but benefits from increased property value. LVT at least partially penalizes the freeloaders. They must pay more LVT if the area around them improves. It prices an unpriced externality which is generally a good thing.
There might be one thing the rich dislike more than taxes: freeloaders
> We still have huge amounts of extremely cheap land that could be made desirable with enough hard work. You can still buy a crazy amount of land in parts of the country for like $50k.
Land is made desirable mostly from what productive use it has. ie: being near jobs. There's not really any hard work any one individual can do to make some random plot of land in Kansas more valuable than its current market price.
> participate in local government to help protect the value of that land.
This is a nice euphemism for blocking new construction and restricting housing supply.
Not only being near jobs but being developable at all. There are lots in the hollywood hills that go for $40k. Why that low for such prime land you might ask? I’d assume you’d find out the reason fast as soon as the current owner unloads their lemon onto you for a mere $40k.
> Done right, an LVT can actually increase land value.
Land value is a measure of supply and demand. But most of the demand isn't for land in particular, it's for indoor space. If you have LVT and don't have density restrictions -- or just don't have density restrictions regardless of LVT -- then people are going to build until the cost of indoor space falls to the construction cost. Then land values will be low because it's being used efficiently, and there is a de facto ceiling on the price -- if you want to add 100 stories of new space and land is dirt cheap then you might build a hundred single-story buildings, but if land gets even slightly more expensive than that you can just build twenty 5-story buildings instead, which is what people would do rather than paying for five times more land unless it's prohibited.
LVT increases this incentive even more, because not only would you have to pay for more land, you would have to pay the LVT on more land, so now it makes sense to build ten or twenty story buildings. Meanwhile if you're not going to build a ten or twenty story building (or in a place like NYC, a hundred story building), holding onto an underutilized lot will cost more than it's worth, so the land values become negligible. This ignoring the overall premise of LVT which is that the tax should be equal to the land value, so even if land values were high, the tax would just offset them and zero them out -- until the high tax incentivized even more construction.
But there is a different reason the argument doesn't apply to this -- or to any other tax. Governments have budgets. If they currently get money from a tax, and you propose to get rid of the tax, and your proposal is to cut spending, the people currently receiving the money (often politically connected corrupt industries or government unions) will fight you. If you propose to get rid of the tax without cutting spending by instituting or raising some other tax, the people you propose to tax instead will fight you. The status quo is sticky.
Done right land is worthless under land value tax. Ideally the vast majority of then unimproved lands rents will flow to the government through the tax. An asset with no profits is worthless.
Is there some rationale for setting the LVT rate so that the land is worthless?
That seems unnecessary and counter-productive. If I were designing the system, I would want both the government and the landowner to share in the appreciation of the land. If a nice park is to be built next to some land in a city, interests are more aligned if both the city and the landowner share in the benefit.
Because land belongs to society at large. The entire idea that someone can own land is nonsensical. Private ownership exists to encourage people to create stuff but land can not be created. When land value increases it is not because of anything the landowner did, but because of what society did. The gains should go to society.
Its also more effective at removing speculation the higher it is. LVT is one of the few taxes with no deadweight loss, so even if it wasnt the most morally acceptable tax it still is the most economically beneficial one so we should try to collect as much as possible through it.
>When land value increases it is not because of anything the landowner did, but because of what society did. The gains should go to society.
Nicely landscaping your home can increase the surrounding home values, especially when other neighbors do it also. Conversely if neighbors have junker cars and trash on their property or if you're in a city surrounded by abandoned buildings, land value decreases.
You solve this by implementing the LVT as a small tax rebate on top of traditional property taxes. Something along the lines of an "Improvements Rebate" or whatever polls best. This is much more politically palatable, you can pair it with a small increase in tax to some currently unpopular sector. Very slowly over time you can increase the property tax, while increasing the LVT rebate. Now those who might want to kill LVT now have a more complicated job of negotiating simultaneously to remove a popular benefit while adjusting overall tax rates, a much more complicated proposal.
LVT also has the drawback of being more complicated to calculate than property taxes, and therefore makes convincing constituents that it is being implemented fairly harder. When it is a negative (cost), this complexity makes it easy to attack, while a positive is more defendable (sure it's a tricky calculation, but it gives me money back in my pocket).
Continuing to be an equal society, or not seeing that reverse, requires strong institutions (as in culture).
You are right. And right now we see so much institutional deconstruction due to lobbying, fear of being anti dogmatic, and straight up propaganda that this should concern everybody.
This is also why regulation and transparency is needed for massive social networks.
I think you're right that it would require a revolution, but we've had those before and come out OK, so it's not so far-fetched or scary as it sounds. It's definitely not going to be voted into law by any local or state legislature without great civil unrest to motivate it.
However, as the landowning class concentrates and we run out of valuable "frontier", it becomes an inevitability.
As a history lesson, we used to have feudalism in New York from before the revolutionary war up into the 1800s. It was a grandfathered-in political-economic system initiated by the Dutch to encourage high-class immigration and patronize friends of the governor, which the English expanded and the nascent U.S. extended to curry favor with the wealthy families who'd supported the revolution.
That system, too, was really valuable for the people who had that privilege. But eventually they were outnumbered and overthrown, in a movement that was pretty revolutionary [1]. By the time it happened, we had innovated new ways to develop wealth that didn't require rent-seeking landlordship and monopolies (this was the era of the industrial revolution), so it'd become significantly less politically-tasteful, even in comparatively bourgeois and aristocratic circles, to depend on these ancient monopolies for access to wealth. But, ultimately, it was a popular (and, at times, violent) revolution that tipped the scales towards reform.
I think it'll probably happen at the municipal or state level before it happens at the federal level. Most likely in NY (again!) or CA, if I were a betting person.
Some states of Germany are currently introducing it. I don’t see any land owners revolting about long term implications. Many bitch about the transition because reevaluating land is some paper work.
Everybody seems to believe that it will not make much of a difference. I assume it depends on the municipalities to raise it in the future.
What new tax is that? Or do you mean the changes to the Grundsteuer (which is more like an update to the value that is being taxed, I think, and it was a forced change).
Rents are "unearned" in the same way all appreciation is unearned. You spend your money on something, anybody else could also have spent that money on it, but the person who does spend the money on it enjoys the appreciation, if any, because they pay the opportunity cost.
> because land value always goes up
Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years. Their land didn't just go down in value; it went to less than zero. You'd literally have to pay somebody to take it and it's a huge burden on those municipalities.
The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.
So someone who buys and empty piece of land, and holds it while everyone else around them invests money in the neighbourhood, deserves the gain they realize. That's an interesting worldview.
>Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years.
Tell them that I was speaking in general? If the value of your home can explode or crater for reasons outside your control, perhaps it would be wiser for housing to not be so expensive so that families need to have everything invested in their home.
>The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.
That isn't really an argument that the fixed supply of land doesn't matter, you're just asserting that it doesn't. It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead, so what are you contributing here?
> It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead
We should just simply allow a free market in housing and housing construction. That's the obvious solution on the table and the one we should try before we bother revisiting eccentric tax schemes from the 19th Century.
Also it is not just the "landed gentry" who will feel like they lost their investments but also the 64% or so of Americans who own their own homes. [1]
Ithaca NY has the unusual situation that much of the land is owned by universities, colleges and other non-profits that don't pay property taxes so residential property taxes are high. In recent years tenant organizations have come to perceive that any increase in property taxes is going to be added to their rent so in addition to trying to get more money out of Cornell they are becoming increasingly spending skeptic.
Yes, it would need to be implemented gradually. It would be enough to start by slowly shifting taxes from buildings and improvements and onto land values. This would only negatively affect those with a greater than average amount of their home value in the land rather than the house, and maybe those people should have a fire lit under them during an housing crisis. Everyone recognizes that housing should be cheaper, just so long as it's not their house that's cheaper, and they're too busy wondering why their children haven't started families yet to notice the contradiction.
If you have an alternative solution that would drive investment and lower housing prices, I'd love to hear it. Most of the solutions I've seen proposed are some form of dumping money on the fire in the hopes of cooling things off. Housing too expensive? Here's a first-time home-buyer's tax credit.
The tax exempt hedge funds that also provide post-secondary education are another matter entirely.
> An upside and downside of LVT, depending on your perspective, is that the imposition of a LVT would seriously lower land values.
I would really like you to elaborate on this point. Sure, I guess if land comes with an extra $X of tax attached to it, the net value of land is lower. But it encourages things like building taller buildings, because a 2 story apartment building can't break even with the land tax but a 20 story building can. Land in the middle of SF's financial district or Manhattan isn't cheap: a strong argument can be made that building taller denser buildings increases land value.
Just summarize Progress and Poverty, okay. One important note is the "land value" always refers to the undeveloped value of the land. The tax pretends that it's an empty lot with no improvements, taken in the context of its district or neighbourhood. We want the land developed to it's best use, so we make sure not to tax those improvements.
Do land values encourage density, or does density increase land values? It's the productivity of the surrounding society that drives both. Land is valuable because people want to live and work there, and because the land is valuable it makes sense to build up, and as more people live there more culture and services become available, attracting more people. It's a virtuous cycle.
If the rental value of the land is taxed away, the only income a property can generate is based on the rental of the buildings on it. The first order effect is that the stream of rental income is diminished, lowering its value as an asset. Landowners would try to pass the taxes along to their tenants, but the taxes are not evenly distributed on all landowners, so doing so would only drive people renting houses into more land-efficient options and would skew the rental vs ownership decision wildly in favour of ownership.
Because development becomes the only means of generating income from a property, undeveloped property becomes a tax liability instead of being a speculative asset that appreciates over time. Land that had been held out of use enters the market, lowering prices further. This surface-level parking lot in SF's financial district [1] and the thousands like it across North America become something more useful. Because the speculative value of land is being taxed away, land appreciates as its potential for productive use increases, not merely because everyone is buying land because land goes up in value because everyone is buying land.
The more developed a piece of land is, the lower its effective tax rate becomes because the taxable value of the land does not include improvements. This incentivizes development, and disincentivizes sprawl.
gets on soapbox
If you want a small house and a big yard, nobody is telling you that you can't do that, but that's land that other people can't use, and I think that society has more right to tax you for holding a fixed and finite resource for your own use (land value taxes) than it does to tax the the products of your hard work and enterprise (taxes on income, commerce, and property). We want people to use the land wisely so that is some of it for everyone, and we want people to work hard and invest their resources, so why do we tax things exactly the other way around?
It's a multivariate differential field equation. I've summarized it as briefly as I can.
Not quite. There is information that's not part of the price system.
National defense isn't going to be priced in by markets. And food security is national security, even if it's "more efficient" to ship food in from your geopolitical rivals.
Things having a price isn't same as profit maximizing on everything. People don't purely profit maximize.
Are you maximizing profit in your primary residence? You might derive pleasure from having a large garden instead of building an industrial plant of same sort there, for example, or not rent out rooms, or have more shirts than you need instead of investing those monies into a business.
When you said generally desirable, I assumed you meant to the general public and society at large. Absent some other very convincing information, the price of a plot of land is going to be the best analogue for how much society values that land.
Obviously the private land owner (in general) would prefer that the cost of owning land was as near zero as possible so that they could use it how they saw fit, regardless of the opportunity cost to society. And that's how it spirals into the mess we have today.
Why would it be most desirable for society if the only thing done with land was to maximize profit? Society also values museums, parks, etc. - but those are not a profit maximization things.
You keep bringing up price, but price and use of the land are not the same. A price (if transacted on) also only really speaks towards the parties involved, not society as a whole.
The mess we have today is not because we don't maximize profits from landownership enough.
The mess we have is because landowners can squeeze the users of the land for all of their profit. Really what should be maximized is the productivity (in a broad sense) of the land.
Profit is a pretty good stand in for productivity, especially if you can't trivially extract rent.
If landowners already maximize profit, why would you expect any change if you tax landowners in a way that encourages profit maximization from land?
Or do you mean things like more industry and less housing? Smaller, high density and expensive housing instead of larger housing?
Landowners can now maximize profits by renting it out and speculating on land value increase. They are getting value for free, at the expense of the renters and people who can't find land. They are nothing but a drag on society if they take this approach.
Note that a landlord who builds and maintains a nice house isn't freeloading and not part of the problem.
The problem to solve here is vacant lots, land speculation, and, slumlords. Anyone who makes their money off their land from it just being there, rather than by working on improving or using the land. Put differently, anyone who makes their money purely by virtue of people who have no other way to access land.
Being a slumlord could be the most profitable in the current world, but stop being profitable when an LVT were in force.
In the current world, slumlords make profit because their costs are negligible, and it's mostly profit. They could build nicer houses, but they don't deem it worth the effort. They make money either way.
Once an LVT is introduced, if they don't invest, they lose money. All of a sudden, investing in the place becomes worth it.
Sorry, but I don't understand how that follows from an LTV. If the payout from being a slumlord is positive, making no investments might lead to higher IRR than investing, for example. Even if investments where the way to go for higher profit, it might not mean that investments go towards nicer houses.
I think the idea that an LTV can so finely steer investment seems unlikely to me (also, would need to take varying interest rates into account). Trying to steer investments by increasing certain costs has in the past led to a lot of unexpected behavior - I'd assume the same would happen here.
In a world without LVT the slum option is quite attractive, especially if you don't have much capital, don't want to do effort, or expect to sell soon.
If you introduce an LVT, that might turn out at about 90$.
All of a sudden, investment becomes much more profitable.
And it isn't inconceivable the LVT comes out at 105$ . At that point the slumlord is forced ti either improve, or divest.
The issue with LVT here, is that it will wreck the financials of anyone with significant landownership. It will be a massive transfer of wealth and incine. It will be a totally fair transfer of income. No one is working to earn the money LVT taxes. The transfer of wealth is more hairy, people have worked hard to buy their land. It was at worst a slightly immoral decision if they invested most of their wealth in land, but it is harsh to destroy that wealth.
Regardless of fairness tho, it will face a loooooot of opposition from self interested parties, with a lot of power and influence.
The slumlord could just increase rent a bit, for example (where would other options for housing come from for the current renters?).
At a 90, the slumlord option is still much better than the decent option (100% return on investment in the former, less than 20% in the latter). An LVT would just further highly extractive land use - that might not be by existing landowners but not sure why that would matter much.
It will be bad for the landowners who don't actually use the land. Landowners who make their money either renting out the land to others who actually use it well, or who just leave it vacant for 10 years until the value spiked.
Those landowners are nothing but a drag. All the other landowners will have some more tax, but the more they invested in improving the land, the lower the taxes will proportionately be.
I wonder if this could be solved with a local maxima. Let the established landowners keep a (much smaller) benefit to align incentives.
Spitballing...
I wonder if it could be balanced to give an LVT discount for holding on to land for 5+ years or some such thing. In this system, we still have reduced land prices because of LVT but there's still a benefit that old money has over the default and can clutch tightly to. Suddenly, long term owners have an incentive to keep such a system else they be set at the same level as new owners.
That would be a disincentive to land ever being sold and I don't think we want that. It's gameable too: you just have one entity own the land, and then rather than buying and selling the land, you just buy and sell the entity.
Tying ownership to a market determined LVT has been my goto. That is, when “buying” land you don’t bid on the one time transaction, instead you directly bid on the rent.
In practice it could perhaps be implemented such that it would still look like the current market where a private bank loan determines the rent, only you shift the loan to a central bank like institution for collecting on it as rent.
there's a middle ground: LVT could be progressive, like income taxes. In that way owning a small/not valuable piece of land would generate little or no taxes, while wealthy landowners, with large very valuable assets, would be required to contribute back much more.
I inherited three properties. I pay a property management company to do everything on them, all I get is a regular check in the mail. Please explain how I have earned this?
"Earning" something is not a useless question. As someone who's had things stolen from me before, a large part of the anger comes from feeling like someone took something that you earned through hard work. It's a big reason we criminalise and punish things the way we do as a society.
Sure, but when people propose a land value tax it's because morally, they've come to the conclusion that the current system is unjust. Systemic changes need to originate somewhere, right?
> Systemic changes need to originate somewhere, right?
Yes, but that does not need to be morals, values, ethics or ideology.
Instead I prefer Kant´s idea of the categorical imperative whereby the question only is if a society following specific rules would satisfy its members long term. It is more pragmatic as it shifts the question from should/shouldn't to does it work out.
LVT satisfies the categorical imperative. If I didn't know whether I'd be born as a landless serf (very high chance) or born to inherit wealth (low chance), then I should prefer to be born into a society with an LVT, since the LVT distributes the land rent to everyone.
then live to your own standards and give it away. This all just virtue signaling until you actually so something with your (not very strongly held) values.
Luck is part of part -- in economics we call it risk. And without risk there is no economic development.
Somebody in your past took a risk and passed profits from that risk down to you. Trying to take the ability to pass that down is both immoral and bad economics.
Didn't the previous owners want you to to inherit their properties? As long as they did, you must have done something to have earned this inheritance, with or without you being aware (e.g. being born to or adopted by them).
If they didn't want you to inherit them, presumably they would have done something about that.
Doing genealogy, one of the most interesting ancestors I have actually got mentioned in a discussion in parliament for his real estate shenanigans. His wife had inherited some small but vaguely defined land from her first husband. He then became mayor and land assessor, and drew up ridiculously generous borders (and low tax assessments) for that land. No one thought to stop him. At one point during a sale, some officials had commented that they couldn't find that he had title to this land, but they didn't follow up. By the time they complained about it in parliament, it was two generations and many land transfers ago so they didn't think it was worth it to try to unwind it.
The trouble with this is it's a playbook for huge inequality. If there is very little cost to holding onto land, then as soon as someone accrues some, it never leaves their family tree. For example, do you believe that the Duke of Westminster should be the beneficiary of his aristocratic ancestors? He is literally living off of land accrued hundreds of years ago.
You haven't earned it, your ancestors did. But your inheritance of this property is only a small fraction of your unearned benefits. Ask a dung beetle how fair life is.
Someone earns a salary by working. By when land appreciates in value, it's not usually because of the work _you_ put in, but the work others did.
Like, if I found a tech startup that grows big in a small town, homes in that town will increase in value because people want to work at my company. The landowners did nothing for that value.
The value of land is the result of the productivity of society and the bounty of nature. Would you consider the massive growth in property values over the last 30 years an earned benefit? What have landowners done to deserve this bounty besides owning an irreproducible asset? An empty lot held out of productive use will appreciate just as much as the same land put to productive use as the city around it grows and technology advances.
>Do you consider the salary you work for an unearned social benefit?
On the contrary, I consider the wages of labour and the return on capital to be the actual earned benefits. Yet these are the things we tax. So the wealthy claim no income, hold their assets, and never realize capital gains, and multinationals play accounting games and pretend that all of their profits happen in the lowest international tax jurisdiction. Sales taxes and personal income taxes end up being the majority of government revenue.
Land value taxes are much harder to avoid, they reward investment by not taxing it, and they promote efficient use of the land, which is the one thing that you need to do anything and the only thing that we can't get any more of.
"David Ricardo [1772-1823] introduced the term 'rent' in economics. It means the payment to a factor of production in excess of what is required to keep that factor in its present use."
After additional economic theory development, "People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena."
"But why do economists use the term “rent” [for a market benefit that is being sought outside the market mechanism]? Unfortunately, there is no good reason."
Once those two terms are understandably conflated, and a commenter showed you their example of inheriting the right to some rental real estate, the terminological clarity in the discussion is more or less gone.
The way I see land value tax and taxes in general is different.
Tax is someone taking money by force. Supposedly this tax is then used to protect the land / assets from being seized. Over time every country seemingly has increased taxes as stability increased (not the other way around), so in reality — it’s extortion. Give us money or we take your stuff, your “protector” takes more because you don’t have other options.
Back to the land value tax, why bother? It’s the same fundamental issue; why are we paying these taxes?
And before we get into “but the services”. I moved somewhere that has approximately zero taxes and zero services. It’s great - safer, cheaper, better run. A lot of community stuff is ran by parents or churches, people tend to just “figure it out”.
The idea of a land value tax is insane because it robs you of assets faster the more valuable it is. We had this in the past, feudal Europe, it sucked. What it will end up being is just like Europe some random person will dictate what you owe and if you don’t pay it, then someone else is granted it at a discount. Probably the bureaucrats cousin.
"Tax is someone taking money by force" <--False, the entire ownership regime of land is an exercise in force. Land rent is either publicly collected or privately captured. When one has the (correct) philosophical position that everyone has an equal right to use land, it simply becomes a matter of 'who' receives the rent. As a matter of justice, the value of a free gift of nature should be shared. To believe otherwise is to believe that some people have less of a right to live, as land is required for all life and economic activity.
"Robs you of assets faster the more valuable it is" <--False, it collects the advantages that accrue to land (a free gift of nature) in exact proportion to the benefit that the land provides. Land value is a social surplus, not a charge.
"random person will dictate what you owe" <--False, assessments are made by observing the market according to well-established principles. See: https://www.iaao.org/ and just like today, you can establish multiple levels of oversight and include the option to appeal.
It is inherently immoral to own land. Land belongs to the people of the society that controls it. No one in that society ever had the right to give it away. I agree that land owners should be reimbursed if we enter an LVT, but the idea that private ownership of land, an asset that can not be created and is inherently limited, should be allowed is frankly nonsensical. Land belongs to society, and thats why LVT is the best tax. Funding the government with the profit of the land makes the most sense.
On the Indian reservations in the US, the land isn't wholly owned by the individuals. It is kept in a tribal trust where a lot of people own slivers of the land (called land shares), and it cannot be used for things like securing loans and economic development if often redistributed through various means. There has been a lot of write ups on this over the years.
It is also the poorest and most corrupt parts of the country. Shit happens on the reservations that would even make Congress blush. If you want to see what happens when land is devalued and not ownable, look at the reservations.
The libertarian notion that taxes are extortion is frankly childish in how overly simplistic it is.
You get all sorts of benefits in return for your taxes. You can't realistically opt out of them. You can't live without using roads or being defended by the military. You can't tell society at large that when you get hit by lightning that you want they to leave you to die and not call an ambulance
Since you can't opt out, a nontaxpayer ends up being a freeloader and social parasite. The only just option is to have to contribute to the imperfect system
The whole idea of extortion is premises that people can exist somehow outside of society which is disconnected from reality.. No man is an island
The alternative to the current model is not to have no services at all, as that makes no sense, agreed.
> The libertarian notion that taxes are extortion is frankly childish in how overly simplistic it is.
The argument is weak because you constructed a straw man. The libertarian notion is not to live without any of the services provided by a state, but to have different providers which are in competition. The issue is that the state / gov has a monopoly but is exempt from antitrust laws.
The implementation is tricky though because in reality, when functions of the state are privatized there is often a huge amount of lobbying and corruption involved and these functions are given to a small group of big companies which effectively form a cartel once again. Then they extract all the economic value left in the infrastructure, the privatization is declared failed and undone, effectively another channel of syphoning tax money into the hands of big companies.
> but to have different providers which are in competition
it never worked in practice though.
> has a monopoly but is exempt from antitrust laws
because it does a mediocre job at many things, making it quite easy to compete against it when and if it's worth it, but provides those things no private entity would, because it's anti-economical.
like, for example, the proverbial roads to nowhere.
> The whole idea of extortion is premises that people can exist somehow outside of society which is disconnected from reality.
Or people can agree to collaborate (like a church or workers union) without extortion of citizens. There’s plenty of examples where extortion isn’t necessary.
I’m also not suggesting taxes shouldn’t be levied at all, I’m saying land and income taxes are particularly gross, as they misalign incentives. Like I said, the more civilized a civilization is, presumably the less protection people need, so we should pay less taxes. Similarly, the more civilized a civilization the more services can be provided by the private sector. The reverse trend is true for taxes, they charge more for less.
It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't need to literally bring a whole factory and the input materials up on a rocket but instead use resources available in space.
Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.
Assuming you're hitting on carbon stuff. There are simple solutions even with rockets. For instance liquid H2 / liquid O2 rocket engines are a thing - this is what the Space Shuttle Main Engine used. [1] Reacting hydrogen with oxygen is, counter-intuitively, an extremely effective propellant! And the exhaust is literally water vapor.
Some reason SpaceX decided on methane based propulsion are because it's more safe/stable than liquid hydrogen, because Mars is the goal, and the Sabatier reaction! [2] You can create methane + water from reacting CO2 + hydrogen. And Mars has practically infinite CO2 + hydrogen, which translates to practically infinite fuel + water. Add in fully reusable rockets and you have one heck of a nice starting framework for colonization, that in some ways almost feels too convenient.
It's even worse than that. A space elevator, the only thing that could conceivably replace rockets, requires materials so strong that they don't exist in our universe.
Space is like the internet. You can communicate through it, but sending matter is nigh impossible.
Not true - an orbital ring doesn't require any scifi materials, though the engineering is not yet there. And you can build magnetic accelerators, that's fully possible with current knowledge of science and engineering.
As to which is more fundamental, I don't think it matters. You could argue that the dot and exterior products are more fundamental because the geometric product is their sum (for vectors). You could also argue that the geometric product is more fundamental because it is simply the Cartesian product of two multivectors, and you derive the dot, exterior and commutator products by filtering that product by grade. Both definitions are true, and "fundamental" is both a matter of perspective and irrelevant to any practical concern.