What do you think of Land Value Tax (LVT)

[Roy L]

The tax penalizes and discourages home beautification and estate growth.

That's just objectively false.

A young couple that suddenly needs to make room for children tend to decide not to add improvements to the home as it will increase their taxes.

That is objectively false. A land value tax is unaffected by improvements.

Further, well maintained homes and neighborhoods are the ones that deal with higher tax values.

Well maintained neighborhoods do tend to have higher land values, but that is a result of what the whole neighborhood does, not just one homeowner.

While those who allow their homes to be run down and go without maintenance are rewarded with less taxes due to their homes of "lower value".

Again, that is objectively false. You are talking about the current property tax, not a land value tax.

I used to be a real estate appraiser.

Then you know that land is much easier to value than improvements, and improvements do not affect land value. If the house burns down, the land value stays the same.

I have seen the system personally from the inside and on the ground.

No, of course you haven't. You are just makin' $#!+ up.

Anyone who is against such a system should be aware that Debra Medina has created the website "We Texans" to combat this form of tax.

Look what Proposition 13 has done to California. Are Texans going to be as stupid as Californians?

 

[Roy L]

Ding, Ding, Ding! Looter exposed.

Yep. The land grabber is the quintessential looter and greedy parasite.

 

[Roy L]

It is private appropriation of mineral resources that is theft and therefore criminal in nature, as it forcibly deprives others of their liberty to use what nature provided for all. Mineral resource taxation redresses that theft.

Correct.

It is private appropriation of food stuff that is theft and therefore criminal in nature, as it forcibly deprives others of their liberty to use what nature provided for all. Food stuff resource taxation redresses that theft.

Assuming you mean food resources like wild fish, game, fruit and nuts, etc., then yes, that is correct.

It is private appropriation of well water resources that is theft and therefore criminal in nature, as it forcibly deprives others of their liberty to use what nature provided for all. Well water resource taxation redresses that theft.

Correct. In many cases well water extraction depletes aquifers that others also want to use.

It is private appropriation of solar energy resources that is theft and therefore criminal in nature, as it forcibly deprives others of their liberty to use what nature provided for all. Solar energy resource taxation redresses that theft.

If someone is depriving you of sunlight, then of course that deprivation should be compensated. But in most cases sunlight is not scarce, and would thus have no taxable value.

 

[Roy L]

The nice thing about freedom is that it will allow those who do think that hedonism, nature-worship, homosexuality, etc. are feasible elements to base a successful society on will be free to buy up land and have their way of life as well.

"The nice thing about being owned, Uncle Tom, is that you are free to buy your liberty from me and live as you please!"

 

[Roy L]

Of course you do know there are other jobs besides farming right?

Please name a job people can do without using any land.

Thought not.

When I first started out, I didn't own any land, I rented. I went to work in a factory and earned money. I save the money and finally had enough to make a down payment on a mortgage to buy a piece of land with a house on it. I then worked another 30 years to pay off the mortgage.

So, you figure because you were victimized by an unjust system, everyone else should be, too?

Good luck at going back to the way it was here before white man came to this continent.

No one is suggesting that.

Of course back then, there were tribal wars in years when game became scarce. There was also a lot fewer people on this continent at the time too. If everyone who is on this continent were to try to live like the native Americans did, there would be mass starvation and fighting like you never saw before.

I realize that like slavery, landowning was a quick and dirty solution to a real problem of allocation in settled societies, a problem that did not exist in hunter-gatherer societies. But just as we now know better ways than slavery to solve the problem of labor allocation, we also know better ways than landowning to solve the problem of land allocation.

You have to pull your own load through life. Nobody is going to give you a free ride.

Unless you are a landowner, of course. Then you need not lift a productive finger:

"The widow is gathering nettles for her children's dinner; a perfumed seigneur, delicately lounging in the Oeil de Boeuf, hath an alchemy whereby he will extract the third nettle and call it rent."

-- Thomas Carlyle

 

[Roy L]

Because you say so? You will have to do a whole lot better than that.

One cannot do better than identifying self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality. It is self-evident and indisputable that were it not for the landowner, others would be at liberty to use the land. The landowner therefore deprives them of their liberty. It is not possible to dispute such facts. It is only possible to lie about them.

What planet are you on? Bizarro? Do a search for tax lien sales - thousands of property tax sales every year.

Please provide evidence that ANY of those sales are of owner-occupied residences, AND result primarily from high property taxes rather than other forms of financial stress. In almost all cases there is also a delinquent mortgage, an absentee owner who cannot be located and may have died, an alcoholic or drug addict drowning in credit card debt, etc. Property taxes are just something that people let slide because they know the city or county will not do anything about them for quite a long time, often several years. In most cases the tax lien sale is merely the final phase of a prolonged financial downfall due to medical bills, divorce, unemployment, gambling or drug addiction, etc., NOT property taxes. If it was merely that they could not afford the property taxes, they would just sell and move.

Those people lose the properties.

No, they receive the sale price less the taxes owing and associated costs.

Read the law.

Good advice. Please take it.

Your powers of reason are truly staggering.

Economics is subtle and often counter-intuitive. Sorry.

I was living in CA when 13 passed. Properties were already well on the way up for years before it passed.

It passed in a period of high inflation, so of course properties were going up; but since then they have gone up much faster relative to inflation.

Is that the best you have? Really? Nothing more?

Sad.

It's good enough to demolish you, anyway.

 

[Roy L]

This post takes the cake for most retarted statement to ever hit these forums.

You just refuse to know facts that prove your beliefs are false. Simple.

 

[reardenstone]

I don't like a tax where if unpaid, they can take your land. It's my land, and they should have no power over any of it. All property taxes should be abandoned.

Who owned the land originally? Was there an original deed?

I happen to like the land use Georgism approach. We can't make more land nor can humans create it (yet).

 

[heavenlyboy34]

'Tax' is really a misnomer imo. Ground rent is a more appropriate term. We would be reimbursing the community for the privilege of keeping a piece of land for ourselves.

The fundamental presuppositions of this "rent" idea is flawed. It assumes that the government 'owns' the land, and that regular folks are just tenant serfs. If you want a logical, fair way to fund the government, make it all voluntary. Donate whatever % of income to the IRS you want, and call it a "patriotic donation".

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Who owned the land originally? Was there an original deed?

I happen to like the land use Georgism approach. We can't make more land nor can humans create it (yet).

The land was originally given to man in common (as Locke correctly noted). As man became civilized, the need for private land became apparent. The recognition of the concept of property is one of the things that raises us above animals.

 

[Roy L]

Ding, Ding, Ding! Looter exposed.

Right: the landowner is exposed as the quintessential looter.

Now let's see if BillG will come back and also advocate theft.

The apologists for landowner privilege are the advocates of theft, and I don't know who BillG is.

Oh yeah, obviously. That's why all our wages have been inexorably pushed down to subsistence levels,

Without welfare, minimum wage laws, union enabling laws, publicly funded pensions, health care and education, etc., typical wages would be at subsistence or lower, as they are in countries that have private landowning but lack such social safety nets, like Pakistan, Haiti, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Myanmar, Colombia, etc.

the richest men in the world are all landlords,

While it's true that Smith did not foresee the emergence of vast intellectual property monopolies, broadcast spectrum allocations, etc. that have made a few people very, very rich, the fact remains that most of the richest people in the world have obtained their wealth primarily by owning land and other natural resources: Carlos Slim Helu, for example, made most of his money on broadcast spectrum. Many of Warren Buffet's investments have had large real estate and natural resource components. Sam Walton's fortune was predominantly in land value. Etc.

and we're all dying in the streets from their rampant exploitation.

Smith also did not foresee the social safety net that is all that stands between the landless and destitution.

Private property in land happens in the absence of the state. Historically, repeatedly.

No, it has not, and can't. There is a difference between property and forcible animal possession.

So.... yeah. Kind of baffling, that, eh?

It's baffling how you manage to concoct such bizarre beliefs.

Those poor paupers the Rockefellers. If only John would've been smart and gone into land speculation!

He did, Captain Ignorance. In addition to his immense oil resource holdings, he bought into land speculation deals in the Pacific Northwest, in Wisconsin, and of course in NYC ("Rockefeller Center," hello?), mining and railroad land deals, and on and on.

Allocating scarce land,

The landowner does not allocate land. He simply accepts the high bid. The market does the allocating for him.

making sure land is arranged and divvied up

The landowner has no such function.

according to it's highest productive use?

Ah, that would presumably explain all the vacant privately owned land, abandoned buildings, etc. in every major US city...

Coming and fixing the plumbing when it breaks?

That is looking after improvements, not owning land. Stop trying to change the subject.

These guys are completely worthless!

The landowner qua landowner is a pure parasite. This is proved by your inability to answer The Question:

"How, exactly, is production aided by the landowner's demand that the producer pay HIM for what government, the community and nature provide?"

Sure there is.

No, there is not . You are just makin' $#!+ up.

You just advocate smashing both landlords and capitalists. Pretty simple.

And pretty simply a fabrication on your part.

There's plenty of people who are all for this program of smashing.

Name one.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

One cannot do better than identifying self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality. It is self-evident and indisputable that were it not for the landowner, others would be at liberty to use the land. The landowner therefore deprives them of their liberty. It is not possible to dispute such facts. It is only possible to lie about them.

So what? One man's ownership of land does not prohibit other men from owning land. If there were no recognition of property boundaries, society would crumble quickly-as the American pilgrims discovered after the severe mass starvation that resulted from all land being collectivized. More recently, the collectivization period in the USSR is illustrative of the horrors that result from it.

 

[Roy L]

The fundamental presuppositions of this "rent" idea is flawed. It assumes that the government 'owns' the land, and that regular folks are just tenant serfs.

Oh, garbage. Government administers possession and use of land in any case. That's what government IS: the sovereign authority over a certain area of land. The only question is, will it discharge that function in the interest and to secure the equal rights of all the people, or only in the narrow financial interests of a small, wealthy, idle, privileged, greedy, parasitic landowning elite?

If you want a logical, fair way to fund the government, make it all voluntary. Donate whatever % of income to the IRS you want, and call it a "patriotic donation".

LVT IS voluntary. You pay for exactly what you take from society.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Oh, garbage. Government administers possession and use of land in any case. That's what government IS: the sovereign authority over a certain area of land. The only question is, will it discharge that function in the interest and to secure the equal rights of all the people, or only in the narrow financial interests of a small, wealthy, idle, privileged, greedy, parasitic landowning elite?

That's what the government has become, but it has not always been that way-and you have not shown that it is ideal. I have given you examples to demonstrate that such an arrangement is destructive, but you failed to address it.

LVT IS voluntary. You pay for exactly what you take from society.

No, it is not voluntary. Noone "owes" society anything. To come to such conclusions, you had to use false presuppositions, as I showed previously.

 

[Roy L]

So what? One man's ownership of land does not prohibit other men from owning land.

How is that relevant to the fact that it violates their rights? One man's ownership of a slave does not prohibit other men from owning slaves, either. If government were issuing literal licenses to steal (a land title is only effectively a license to steal), one man's ownership of a license to steal would not prohibit others from buying licenses to steal. Do you really imagine that somehow alters the fact that what they are doing is stealing?

If there were no recognition of property boundaries, society would crumble quickly

Secure tenure and boundaries do not require private landownership, as Hong Kong proves.

-as the American pilgrims discovered after the severe mass starvation that resulted from all land being collectivized.

You are misstating the historical facts. It was not that the land was collectivized, but that PRODUCTS OF LABOR were collectivized. Try to find a willingness to know the difference.

More recently, the collectivization period in the USSR is illustrative of the horrors that result from it.

Same error: the USSR collectivized the PRODUCTS, not just the land. All land in Hong Kong has been publicly owned for over 160 years, and it has been a model of freedom and prosperity. By being willing to know the fact that land is not produced by labor, I am able to understand why the USSR and the pilgrims failed, but HK succeeded. Because you refuse to know the fact that land is not a product of labor, that difference in result is inexplicable to you.

 

[Roy L]

That's what the government has become, but it has not always been that way-and you have not shown that it is ideal.

No, all governments administer possession and use of land, and always have. That is what government IS, by definition.

I have given you examples to demonstrate that such an arrangement is destructive,

No, of course you haven't.

but you failed to address it.

Don't be silly. I have demolished everything you have said, in all ways.

No, it is not voluntary.

It is as voluntary as paying for the groceries you take home from the store.

Noone "owes" society anything.

No, everyone owes society what they take from society. The value of land is precisely equal to the minimum value of what the landowner expects to take from society and not repay in taxes.

To come to such conclusions, you had to use false presuppositions, as I showed previously.

You showed no such thing, and you won't.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Everybody trying to re-invent the wheel here.

Tariffs and duties.

 

[Xenophage]

Taxes are bad, mmkay?

How about we establish a completely voluntary society of no institutionalized coercion? I like that idea better.

 

[Roy L]

As man became civilized, the need for private land became apparent.

With the advent of agriculture and large-scale fixed improvements, there was a need for secure exclusive tenure. Private ownership was merely a quick and dirty solution to that problem, just as slavery was a quick and dirty solution to the problem of surplus captives and scarce labor. But we have better solutions now, for both problems. In fact, the "solution" to the land tenure problem has BECOME the land problem.

The recognition of the concept of property is one of the things that raises us above animals.

That doesn't mean all property is valid, as slavery proved.

 

[Roy L]

Taxes are bad, mmkay?

Try having a civilization without them.

How about we establish a completely voluntary society of no institutionalized coercion? I like that idea better.

Then you oppose private property in land, as it is inherently institutionalized coercion.