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epistasisyesterday at 10:12 PM1 replyview on HN

> There is some opposite momentum toward the land value tax, which is a good thing, but these are less visible and likely weaker than a tax revolt by landowners.

You're breaking my heart here. A land value tax is embraced by anti-tax advocates like Milton Friedman as the "least bad tax" as well as by actual Marxists. However, it does seem like in the current moment a land-owner tax revolt is the likeliest end game.

And if there is a big push towards eliminating property tax, those states will rush towards California-like real estate disasters.

I just wish that all the people who had a hard time purchasing a home or paying rent would act on their own self-interest in reducing the share of our economy that flows to the rentierism of the land owner. Rentierism is bad in all economies, yet we have enabled an overclass to exploit young people and the poor. We live in an asset economy, where there's a big class divide between those who must work to survive, and those who own real estate (especially if it's their own home) and those who own financial assets like stocks. Making capitalism work better requires more class mobility and less inequality than we currently have.


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mothballedyesterday at 11:06 PM

I'm more convinced that the LVT is the least invasive than it being the least bad in economic action, although I can somewhat understand the argument for it. If you eliminated all the other taxes and only used LVT then a large part of the financial surveillance apparatus wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The part about bean counting every bit of income, profit, and gain and then being made to report it to the government under the auspices of just paying your tax is absolutely dystopic compared to LVT.

The biggest challenges of Georgism are that it is basically communism for land (George straight up admits this in one of his books) and creates some issues with efficiently allocating land resources, especially bad with the fact that it can wipe out land speculators which perform an important role in doing time-allocation of land. But it's probably worth the tradeoff if you can eliminate the other taxes.

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