Re: What the LVT is, and what its advantages are - must read

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:25:50 -0500, S. Doo <none@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 07:16:28 -0500, Bob Kolker <nowhere@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Michael Price wrote:

Well why is concentrating the ownership of land in the hands of the
government less obnoxious than having many landlords? Monopolists
are generally more obnoxious than other traders.

It is very amusing, that.

Single Taxers regularly damn politicians for peddling "land" -- all
natural resources, to them -- at below cost to their cronies,

Below _market_value_: their _cost_ is zero. I've already corrected
you on that error.

and also
for slapping exploitative regulations and development-killing zoning
rules on it for their cronies, etc., all for their own greedy kickback
and political gain.

And indeed politicians do just that all the time!

Yep. Because their owners are the same people who own the land.

Yet then these same Single Taxers pose as their remedy dropping *all*
land into the hands of the same politicians,

Lie.

and making taxation of
its lease value these politicians' *only* source of revenue -- thus
*vastly increasing* the incentives they have to further rig the land
market by taking land out of the market and grossly restricting other
land's use to artificially reduce supply, thus increasing lease rates
and their own direct income,

Nope. Wrong, as usual. All such restrictions reduce total land rent,
which is maximized when all sites are placed in their most productive
use. You have become confused, and are mistaking an increase in the
rent of _some_ land parcels for an increase in _aggregate_ land rent,
two quite different things.

while giving them *monopoly power* to
make crony deals with developers, constituents and interest groups.

Lie. You are simply claiming that LVT will not be implemented, and
that a more corrupt version of the current system will be implemented
instead, and called LVT. But as Lincoln observed, calling a tail a
leg doesn't make it one.

This is Monopoly Behavior 101. Yet it never enters the single taxer's
mind that politicians -- as selfish as they are today at abusing the
land they hold in public trust -- would ever, ever, do such a thing
when granted vastly more power and greater incentives to so in their
imagined world.

They would have _less_ power, as the land would be allocated to those
willing to pay the most to use it.

And they certainly never bother to look to see if such things happen
*right now* in jurisdictions that actually have land taxes today even
at modest rates. No point in bothering with that!

Liar.

I have already informed you that levels of corruption are if anything
inversely related to property tax rates. Nationmaster informs us that
of the 25 LEAST CORRUPT countries in the world, the only one that does
not speak a Germanic language (i.e., has no Protestant ethic) is
Singapore -- which happens to lease out public land for much of its
revenue.

You are destroyed.

All the incentives that politicians have today suddenly disappear in
Single Tax Utopia. ;-)

The ones that center on private capture and retention of publicly
created land rents certainly do.

I've never seen a Single Taxer say a word about them.

What's to say? The inherently public nature of land and the open bids
and records make corruption more difficult to get away with under LVT.

It is conceivable, but not likely that government stewardship of the
land can be moderated by a democratic process. Maybe. If. Possibly. As
it stands tax is truly a demonic thing. The government taxes us, not to
meet the consts of community defense and order, but to redistribute and
to regulate. I thought (and I am mostly likely mistaken) that
restricting government taxing scope to the raw land ( a form of rent)
would limit the scope and therefore the evil of government.

Really?

Consider land tax, incentives, and the Single Tax.

Start by asking what *possible* incentive does a land tax create to
stop politicians and governments from taxing everything else in the
world they can tax, just as they've always done?
None at all, obviously, nothing, nada.

Wrong. The land tax would demonstrate that it is possible to pay for
government _WITHOUT_ all the unfair and destructive taxes. If people
have been living on boiled turnips all their lives, and then they get
to try deep-dish pizza, are they going to put up with many more
turnips? I don't think so.

So how is a Single Tax supposed to maintain itself as Single?
Where is the explanation for that? What is the mechanism?

?? It is not up to LVT to create wise and informed voters, but
exactly vice versa.

Unfortunately tax systems must exist and maintain themselves in the
real world, like, say, airplanes.

?? No tax system maintains itself, stupid, any more than airplanes
do.

Assume an airplane that can fly without wings or engines. There
would be a whole list of great advantages to this I could *prove*: big
fuel savings, no CO2 emissions, more compact parking at airports... I
could even list them on a Wiki page!
Now you might ask: How does the damn thing stay in the air?
But that's no refutation of it's advantages! You simply cannot deny
the advantages of an airplane that flies without engines or wings!
Next come the advantages of pigs with wings that fly themselves
direct into the butcher's dept.

?? It would difficult to overstate the stupidity and dishonesty of
that argument. How is land taxation, which has been used successfully
many times, analogous to an airplane without wings or engines? You
are just being stupid and dishonest, as usual.

So the Single Taxer must answer: how in the *real world* do you get a
land tax to become and then remain a Single Tax, in light of all the
incentives on all the players?

Same way it must be enacted in the first place: education.
Unfortunately, some people -- including some conspicuous contributors
to this thread -- are remarkably resistant to such measures.

The only possible answer is: the advantages of a land tax over other
taxes are *so great* that when a land tax is enacted the community
will note a marked benefit for itself, which will lead it to increase
the land tax incrementally further while reducing other damaging
taxes, which will provide even greater benefits, which give incentives
to the community to further the process, and so on, until it arrives
at a Single Tax on land or something close to it, and then other
communities will imitate to compete.

Wrong again. History shows that when a society gets the enormous
benefits of land taxation -- prosperity, justice, efficient
allocation, etc. -- landowners will do anything to prevent that
positive feedback from proceeding very far, even if it means putting
their own necks under the blade.

After a few generations, people forget what it was like before the
land tax, and the landowners constantly lie about how onerous and
unfair it is, how it would be better to tax wages, capital,
production, trade, anything but land. And people also tend to get
cocky with success, and sabotage the very factors that made that
success possible. Like the mental patients who feel so good they stop
taking their medication, the people whose lives have been enormously
enhanced by land taxation start to think, "We don' nee' no steenkin'
lan' tax"...

When push comes to shove, landowners do not hesitate to arrange the
assassinations of land reform and land tax advocates, as they have
been doing with great success in the Philippines for years now. Of
course LVT can be defeated by just killing those who advocate it, and
in extremis, landowners have done and will do exactly that. That is a
given. But it is odd to see the ability and desire of landowners to
pay for the assassination of LVT advocates adduced as evidence for the
wrongfulnes of the latter's cause and the rightfulness of the
former's...

OK, fine. So in light of all the many land taxes that exist today and
have existed throughout history, just where is the one that has
evolved into a Single Tax? Or even one that has evolved into anything
like a 100% tax on land value, plus other taxes too???

Answer: Uh...

In many cases, the inheritors of successful land taxes did not
understand how they worked, and fouled them up. Excellent land tax
systems implemented by the public policy geniuses of one generation --
Augustus, Akbar the Great, Emperor Kang Xi, and on and on -- have
often been sabotaged by the fools, crooks and megalomaniacs of
subsequent generations.

And why "Uh?". (If you say "world-wide conspiracy for a couple
hundred years", you just might be a crank!)

Certainly conspiracies have played a role; that is a documented fact.

The real answer is that land taxes *exactly like all other taxes* have
costs that rise with the tax rate only more rapidly than the rate:

Flat false, as economists since before Smith have been pointing out.

by increasingly hampering open markets and creating black markets, by
increasing administrative and litigation costs (with appraisal-based
tax systems being by far *the worst* at this, for reasons obvious to
anyone with a functioning frontal lobe)

IOW, you have no evidence for that claim, and in fact it is known to
be false: appraisal-based property taxes have among the _lowest_
administration, compliance and litigation costs per dollar of net
revenue raised.

by increasing the ability of
and incentives for politicians to profit by using their power to
manipulate the system for self-gain, etc. etc.

LVT eliminates politicians' power to manipulate the system by taking
the decisions out of their hands.

With the result being that the maximum payoff for real-world land
taxes maxes out at a modest rate time-after-time-after-time -- in
fact, 100% of the time.

Nope. The relevant fact is that the real-world resistance by
politically powerful landowners maxes out at a modest land tax rate
time after time after time.

I thought it
might be preferable to the system we have now where government meddles
in every aspect of our lives. Perhaps, perhaps it is worth a try.
It sort of worked in Hong Kong for a long period of time.

Hong Kong??? Of all places. How do the Single Taxers succeed in
selling this nonsense?

Because you are deeply ignorant as well as stupid and dishoest, you
are apparently unaware that all land in HK is public, and leased to
users.

How do they even manage to fool themselves?

Whom do you think _you_ are fooling, hmmmm?

Look, there's nothing wrong with a land tax per se, as long as it is
imposed at a *moderate rate* and is considered as one option on a menu
of taxes that keeps the maximum rate for all of them down.

IOW, a land tax is all right as long as you, as a landowner, continue
to get lots of money for doing nothing.

(Since the
harm done by taxes rises *faster* than the tax rate,

It is known that a land tax does no harm whatever as long as the tax
amount does not exceed the land rent -- which is impossible with LVT.

it is a 101
policy objective for all real-world tax professionals to keep top tax
rates down by using a range of lower-rate taxes instead of a few
higher-rate taxes to collect the same revenue -- which is of course
the exact opposite of the Single Taxer's simple-minded fantasy world
policy.)

That policy objective only applies to taxes that distort the economy,
of which LVT is not one.

That kind of reasonable-rate land tax has, like all kinds of taxes,
its own benefits and costs.

LVT is _not_ like "all kinds of taxes," a fact known for well over 200
years. That is just another lie that anti-LVT propagandists are eager
to disseminate.

The benefit is that it reduces the supply of the item being taxed less
than most other kinds of taxes would be expected to.

It does not reduce the supply of land at all, as the supply of land is
fixed.

The costs are that appraisal-based assessment systems are a costly
bitch -- so the assessment system always resorts to some kind of
shortcut that compromises the fundamental claimed benefits for land
tax

Because wealthy and politically powerful landowners order their
politicians to make such shortcuts in order to sabotage the system.

-- *and* the politicians obtain powerful incentives to rig the
market and restrict land usage, both to artificially increase the
lease rates they tax and to give themselves greater leverage in
forging crony relationships with developers at the citizenry's
expense.

Already refuted above. All you're saying is that LVT will not
actually be implemented, but rather some other, corrupt system.

As to these downside costs, Hong Kong happens to be the world's famous
#1 textbook example among real tax professionals working down here on
Earth. Those costs nearly did in Hong Kong's economy about ten years
back.

??? ROTFL!! Lie. HK and Taiwan, because they recover so much land
rent for public purposes, were barely affected by the Asian financial
crisis of 1997. And if anything threatened HK's economy about ten
years back, it was the imminent handover to China, not some fabricated
"downside costs" of its land leasing system.

You are just makin' $#!+ up again.

-- Roy L
.