Let the peasants rejoice, for the time has come to at last talk about Hong Kong! Yey! Party Time!
Readers will note that you have deleted all context from my references to Hong Kong in order to be able to lie freely about what I plainly said. Up to now, I have proved that all your criticisms of LVT and the arguments for it, and your attempts to rationalize private landowning, have been fallacious, absurd, and dishonest. That will not be changing. In fact, I predict that you will now be lying, absurdly, that Hong Kong has private landowning, which it does not as a matter of objective fact.
For one thing, no large populations are going to submit to having their lives wrecked for decades in order to prove that XYZ does wreck lives.
"History is philosophy teaching by examples." -- Thucydides.
Despite all these caveats and disclaimers, I shall nevertheless dive into addressing Hong Kong as an alleged empirical proof of the benefits of a Land Value Tax. Hong Kong is claimed to be a shining example of the success of the theories of Henry George and his LVT disciples.
No, that's just another stupid lie from you. Hong Kong is a shining example of the success of
no private landowning, not of LVT. HK does not use LVT, because LVT is a remedy specifically designed to redress the injustice of
private landowning. HK uses leasing of public land to recover publicly created land rent, as ancient Rome and Athens did in their periods of greatest efflorescence. It does not have LVT.
The empirical evidence has been suggested roughly as follows:
1) Hong Kong has a high LVT and no land-owning.
No, that is nonsensical. HK has
NO LVT
BECAUSE it has no private landowning. LVT
can only apply to privately owned land. If land is not privately owned, it will be leased, not taxed.
2) Haiti (or Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma...) has no LVT and does have land-owning.
Or at least any land-based taxes they may have are not levied on unimproved land value, and recover only derisory amounts of publicly created land rent.
3) Just look at the results. LVT and lack of land ownership are vindicated as leading to wealthiness.
More accurately, lack of private landowning does not prevent wealthiness, and private landowning does not support it (except for the landowners), contrary to the claims of anti-LVT liars.
Are there any problems with this methodology? Yes. Are there any problems with this data? Yes. Are there any problems with this conclusion? Yes.
Are there any problems with this strawman fallacy? Ooooooh, yes.
Method:Could pairing up Hong Kong vs. Haiti even conceivably give us a slam dunk case as to the efficacy of LVT? Is LVT/lack-of-LVT really going to be named by anyone as the defining difference between these two countries? Is that going to come to anyone's mind other than Mr. L.'s as the answer to "what's the difference between Hong Kong and Haiti"? Will it even be in anyone's top ten of differences? Highly doubtful, outside of those poor souls obsessed with this particular hobbyhorse.
You
always have to lie about what I have plainly written.
ALWAYS. I did not propose any experimental method, data or conclusions such as you describe, as it is self-evidently unscientific. I identified the facts about Hong Kong and the poor countries listed to refute a specific false and idiotic claim: that the economic benefits of private landowning could be established simply by comparing countries that have it with countries that don't. I proved that comparison establishes instead that freedom and prosperity are readily achievable without private landowning, while tyranny, poverty and stagnation are entirely consistent with private landowning.
Data: Furthermore, in what meaningful way can Haiti be said to have more land-ownership than Hong Kong?
In the sense that Haiti has private landowning, and Hong Kong doesn't.
In Hong Kong, if I have a lease with few if any restrictions, as is the case with most leases issued many years ago (the more recent the lease, the more restrictions tend to be written into it), and if it will not expire for another 935 years, is that not pretty close to ownership?
It would be if such leases existed, but they don't. There were nominal 999-year leases until 1898, but under the agreement under which sovereignty reverted to China in 1997, these and most other leases that were extended 50 years (to 2047) will be subject to unilateral revision by the Chinese government in that year.
The Hong Kong government will leave me alone and not seize my land.
No, if you don't pay the lease or ground rent, or if the land is deemed necessary for public use, or if you defy land use regulations, the HK government will seize "your" land.
My effective property rights to the land will be respected.
You only have a tenure right, not a property right.
I can sell it, trade it, rent it, or gift it, and I am the one in charge of deciding what to do with that land -- the government, for the most part, will not interfere. For all practical purposes, I am the owner of the land,
No, because anyone you try to sell it to knows their tenure will be at the Chinese government's pleasure after 2047.
at least as much so as a typical owner in the USA, and more than many owners, say, in
New London, Connecticut.
Leased Hong Kong land is also subject to eminent domain, although the HK government does not invoke it to force sales to private interests.
In Haiti, on the other hand, can we say that land-owners are secure in the knowledge that they will be left unmolested by the state to use the land however they choose? That they have effective property rights to the land which will be respected? I would say no.
And you would be wrong. While Haiti has a small and weak government that doesn't do much of anything but serve the rich, greedy, privileged landowning elite (the kind of government lying anarcho-capitalist ninnies say is best!), that is one thing it
does do:
"In March, Haitian landowners and police authorities began kicking displaced Haitians out of their makeshift cities at the behest of the owners of the land on which the camps sat."
http://www.swp.ie/international/haitis-disaster-capitalists-swoop/3583
"VIDEO: Haiti to Evict “Squatters” – Private Landowners Want Homeless Gone"
http://hcvanalysis.wordpress.com/20...atters-private-landowners-want-homeless-gone/
"Wealthy landowners vow the "new Haiti" will become yet another vast slum unless the government rebuilds on their terms."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/11/world/main6668155.shtml
What was that, Helmuth? "No private landowning in Haiti"? Yet somehow, "wealthy landowners" are telling Haiti's government what to do. Wealthy landowners who somehow got wealthy without owning any land....
Your constant lying to rationalize privilege, injustice and evil is grotesquely sickening.
And the Haitian government isn't the only one subservient to Haiti's private landowning elite:
"The “international community,” which dominates the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission – didn’t want to pressure Haiti’s landowners to accept what would be done in any other country, including the United States: taking available land, with compensation, for the necessary shelter."
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/haiti-the-great-fear
According to a Habitat for Humanity official, only 5 percent of Haiti's land has documentation of proprietorship,
But it's the most useful 5%. Most of Haiti is rocky hillside people can't survive on.
And if having only a low percent of the land area under documented private ownership was the criterion of whether a country has private landowning or not,
Canada would not have private landowning:
"Just 9.7% of the land of Canada is privately held. The majority of the land, 90.3%, is Crown Land, otherwise known as Public Land. Of this, 50% is Crown land administered by the Provincial governments and 40.3% is Crown land administered by the federal government."
http://www.whoownstheworld.com/canada/
But that is a claim that would clearly be about as stupid, absurd and dishonest as your claim that Haiti doesn't have private landowning.
and land is often forcibly redistributed. (
source)
From squatters to landowners.
In reality, despite the current weakness of its government, Haiti has a long history of private landowning and increasing concentration of landownership that has led to its current desperate poverty:
"The [1971 census] also documented that 60 percent of farmers owned their land, although some lacked official title to it. Twenty-eight percent of all farmers rented and sharecropped land. Only a small percentage of farms belonged to cooperatives. The 1950 census, by contrast, had found that 85 percent of farmers owned their land."
http://wn.com/Agriculture_in_Haiti
So, in practical reality, Hong Kong effectively does offer secure land ownership to potential buyers,
No, that's a flat-out lie, as proved above.
whereas Haiti, while it may have land ownership on paper, effectively does not.
No, that's just another flat-out lie, as proved above.
The political situations in the Philippines, Bangladesh, etc. are likewise not exactly paragons of respect for private property rights, not in land nor anything else.
No, that's just another stupid lie from you. Private property in land is much more strongly enforced in those countries than in Haiti (which you cherry-picked only because it has such a weak government and is still in post-earthquake chaos), and is indisputably the basis of their highly unequal social and economic structures and consequent poverty and stagnation.
I would say that on a continuum between no land ownership and absolutely secure land ownership, Hong Kong one of the closest in the world to the latter,
No, that is just an absurd lie. There is no private landowning whatever in Hong Kong. What people have in HK is not ownership of land but leases with a limited transferable tenure right.
whereas Haiti is within spitting distance of the former.
Refuted above.
If I "owned" land in Haiti, I would have no comfort whatsoever that my land might not be seized at any moment by any number of statist groups claiming to be in charge there.
But such discomfort is in no way justified by the facts. Land titles in Haiti are not threatened by "statist groups" claiming to be in charge. That is just another silly fabrication on your part. They are threatened by
OTHER PRIVATE LANDOWNERS who may have
documented claims to ownership at least as good as yours.
If I owned land in Hong Kong, I could sleep peacefully knowing that chances were good that no one is going to seize my land for at least 935 years (or however long my lease)
False. The continuations of lease terms granted in 1997 are all up for unilateral review by China in 2047. Your "935 year lease" is a fairy tale, and one that never applied to more than a microscopic fraction of the land in any case.
and that even at the end of that time, 99.9% odds I can simply renew the lease with no hassle.
False. Lease renewal terms will be up to the Chinese government.
Which ownership is the more ownery? Hong Kong's situation offers a lot more of those qualities of owneryness which vile land parasites look for in a jurisdiction, even if it's not officially called "owning".
It's true that HK's bigger and stronger government, and the positive economic climate created by land rent recovery through leasing, makes it far more attractive for real estate investors even though they do not own the land, and have to pay far more tax on it than Haitian landowners do.
Point of information: Hong Kong has no LVT.
Because it has no private landowning. Duh. If your goal was something other than deceit, this would not even be worth mentioning.
This would seem to be an important fact for those claiming that Hong Kong proves and vindicates all they've ever said about LVT,
Nobody claimed that, so you are just lying again. What it does prove is that claims of the necessity of private landowning to prosperity made by apologists for landowner privilege are also just stupid lies.
but it is nevertheless one which seems to have escaped their attention or in any case which they pass over.
Hong Kong only proves that private landowning is not needed for growth, freedom or prosperity. Secure lease tenure on public land is quite sufficient.
Hong Kong has no LVT; it does have a property tax. Hong Kong's property tax is 16%, or 17% profit tax for land-owning corporations (yes, I'm simplifying). What portion of that tax is on the value of the pure land? Not much -- Hong Kong is highly urban and the value of improvements and buildings far outweighs the value of the land.
No, that's false. Land is worth more than improvements because the mathematics of exponential land appreciation and building depreciation guarantee that for most of the lifetime of improvements, the land is worth far more.
So I don't know what the haul of Hong Kong's "virtual LVT" would be if we were to separate it out, but it is not all that much, relatively. So does Hong Kong even have a high virtual LVT? Higher than average? That remains to be proven.
<yawn>
"Between 1970 and 1996, land revenue (land premiums, annual rent, rates and property tax) accounted for, on average, 33% of annual government budgets. If profits tax from development companies and taxes on mortgage portfolio profits are included, up to 45% of the government’s annual revenue was based on land."
http://www.hkjournal.org/archive/2011_spring/3.htm
I myself have skepticism, as the pro-LVT side has shown to be warranted.
That is an outrageous lie. I have consistently told the truth. The anti-LVT side, by contrast, has CONSTANTLY LIED.
Does Haiti have a low or non-existent LVT? Haiti's property tax rate is 15%.
Of what? Some decades-old amount of pre-inflation money?
Now I'm sure there's a tax code a mile long in both places complicating the situation, but on the face of it, 15% is not dramatically lower than 16-17%. In fact, another site, doingbusiness.org, says that Haiti's property tax rate is 15%, while Hong Kong's is 5%. So maybe, in fact, Hong Kong's virtual LVT is much lower than Haiti's, for a typical businessman vile land parasite.
As proved above, HK gets a third of its revenue from land, far higher than any sovereign country. Haiti's property tax, by contrast, raises so little revenue it is more accurately considered a cartoon of a property tax. All the yak about rates and assessments doesn't mean a thing. Where the rubber meets the road is fraction of total revenue obtained, and fraction of total land rent thereby recovered.
HONG KONG'S "PROPERTY TAX" DOESN'T INCLUDE LAND LEASE OR GROUND RENT PAYMENTS, DUH.
And in Haiti, as YOUR OWN SOURCE proves, the "property tax" accounts for just
1/80 of a typical firm's total tax burden!
So as far as the data goes, reality is almost backwards from the claims we've heard:
No, that's a flat-out lie, as proved above.
Hong Kong has a stronger land ownership regime than Haiti in every meaningful sense,
Lie. There is no private landowning whatever in HK. It is LEASEHOLD TENURE that is more secure in HK, because its larger and stronger government is more able to secure people's rights than Haiti's near-anarcho-capitalist regime that simply works for the highest bidder.
and the tax rates on land in both are either similar, or Hong Kong's is much lower.
No, that's just pure deceitfulness, as proved above. HK gets a large fraction of its total government revenue from land, and recovers a large fraction of total land rent. Haiti does neither.
Conclusion: Because comparing Hong Kong to Haiti is not an acceptable method for proving LVT's benefits,
Agreed, because neither of them use LVT. Which proves how absurd and dishonest your garbage is, as usual.
and because the data presented is very, very wrong,
No, the data are correct; you just edited, cherry-picked and lied about them.
the conclusion that was based on this method and this data cannot be supported by this experiment
Because all three were fabrications by you.
Knowing the, umm, level of academic rigor to which the researchers have held themselves thus far in their careers,
Referring to yourself, there...
I have taken it upon myself to ponder such an experiment. My hypothesis is that Hong Kong has some of the lowest tax rates
Because it recovers a lot of publicly created land rent through leasing and ground rents.
To test this hypothesis, let's look at two nations with very high degrees of economic freedom, respect for property rights, low taxes, etc., but one which taxes land and one which does not. This way, we come closer to somewhat sort of isolating that single variable -- land value taxation -- that we want to look at. Even though the quality of isolation is inevitably still low, it at least is better than when we compare Hong Kong and Haiti, a comparison where obviously the one minor factor of Hong Kong having similar or lower property tax rates than Haiti
Disproved above.
is making a much smaller difference than the cumulative effect of the million other ways in which Haiti's economy is horribly unfree and Hong Kong's outstandingly free.
So, I take Hong Kong vs. Dubai.
Oh. My. God.
Are you serious? This is just too funny.
Both very free, economically speaking, according to the libertarian standard, UAE being ≈ the 14th freest country, and Hong Kong being the 1st. (
source) Hong Kong has a property tax; Dubai does not. If my hypothesis is correct, Dubai is that much better off by having no property tax, though that benefit can be offset by additional other taxes or state interventions. If the pro-LVTers are correct, Dubai is dramatically worse off by not having a property tax and their economy should be doing much more poorly than that of Hong Kong which at least has some property tax.
Ah, no, actually, because it is not "having a property tax" that matters. It is recovery of the land rent that government spending creates to fund that spending. Property taxation is just one (not very good) way of doing that.
But as you seem intent on sleep-walking off the rhetorical cliff where you have chosen to make your last stand, I think I will just let you:
In examining the facts and figures, I find that Dubai has a much higher rate of GDP growth than Hong Kong -- a much, much higher rate. From 2000-2010, GDP of Hong Kong increased 133%, while GDP of Dubai increased 503-542% (I found varying figures for 2010 Dubai GDP). It's not even close. No mitigating factors can begin to mitigate this difference.
Well, there are a few, actually. Like the fact that just 55 years ago, Dubai got its
first concrete building, quite a change from the palm-frond huts the few hundred pirates, brigands and ruffians that inhabited the place had lived in up to then.
Pro-LVTers may claim that Dubai's prosperity is still due to LVT principles, for though there is no tax on land, the government does control oil reserves, another form of economic "land". However, the share of Dubai's economy coming from oil and natural gas extraction has plunged to vitually zip at the same time that the rest of its economy has soared. So that argument will fall as flat as Dubai's oil revenues.
Yes, well, it would... except for the inconvenient (for you) fact that the government -- i.e., Sheik Mohammed al-Maktoum and his family -- also happens to own ALMOST ALL THE LAND IN DUBAI. Most is owned either directly by him and his family or by their development companies. Except for a microscopic fraction, all the land other development firms are using for all the fantastic real estate projects is all LEASED from the al-Maktoum family on terms generally ranging from 50 to 99 years. LVT is the method of recovering publicly created land rent to fund government expenditures when the land is mostly privately owned. When it is government owned, as in Hong Kong and Dubai, the rent can be recovered either by leasing or by government ownership of real estate developments like public housing. Both HK and Dubai use both methods. Dubai's explosive growth has been built on massive infrastructure and education investments
PAID FOR OUT OF LAND RENTS.
So do you see how completely you have destroyed and humiliated yourself? DUBAI'S GOVERNMENT RUNS ON RECOVERED LAND RENTS EVEN MORE THAN HONG KONG'S!!
It's over, Helmuth. Nothing you can possibly say matters any more. You have proven yourself a complete ignoramus and have made yourself a laughing stock. The (let's be charitable) "argument" that you triumphantly offered to show how LVT was inferior to private landowning in fact proved me absolutely and irrefutably right, and you absolutely and irrefutably wrong. You have refuted and demolished yourself, comprehensively and conclusively.
Again, looking purely at empirical data, would it be too extreme to claim that humanity is better off today than at that time thousands of years ago when, you claim (based on no data) that humanity had not yet started homesteading nature?
Lie. All anthropological data show consistently that pre-agricultural societies don't recognize private landowning unless they have imported the concept from more technologically advanced societies.
I venture that it would not be. Thus, the period of human history with land ownership clearly has a better economic track record than the period which you claim (based on no data)
Lie.
was without. It's not even close.
It's also a blatant post hoc fallacy. Landowning arises with agriculture and fixed settlements, which is obviously more economically productive than hunter-gatherer ar nomadic herding economies. But it was the more productive economic regime that produced landowning, not the other way around.
I mean, Dubai being quintuple as good at Hong Kong at generating wealth was not even close.
LOL! You need a refresher in arithmetic as well as basic logic and facts about Dubai.
This, where land-owning humanity has generated millions upon millions of times the wealth as (supposedly) non-land-owning humanity,
Idiocy. You could with equal "logic" claim that as children's brains grow far faster before they are weaned than after, they should never graduate to solid food.
Landowning, like slavery, was a quick and dirty solution to a real problem that arose with the advance to settled agriculture; it did not
cause the advance to settled agriculture, let alone any later technological advance. And as with slavery, we now have better solutions.
this is at a level where all blowing-out-of-water wiping-the-floor-with idioms fail.
ROTFL!! Those idioms already failed when you blew
yourself out of the water, above, sunshine.
In conclusion, empirical data supports land-owning as an economically successful practice.
Of course it has been economically successful. So was slavery. Very. But we now know there are better solutions.
