"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.

If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it.

If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success.

Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.

I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.

The OP is saying, if you show up with a bill to fix one of these problems, in a scoped way — like, actual working text they can put to a vote, not a general ideal of what to do — and can explain exactly what you're trying to solve, you have a decent chance of them putting it on the floor.

Just in general saying "please fix professional licensing" isn't actionable, you aren't doing the work for them. You're asking them to turn a vague idea into law, when it wasn't their problem to start with.

You can do the work, but what is it worth if the competition is a very generous campaign donation in exchange for keeping the status quo

I think the challenge is that when such things get to the floor, you find out that special interests kick in with ad campaigns or backroom deals.

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I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.

Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.

Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.

It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.

Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of. This is a very different characteristic than scarcity, because many scarce things can be increased, and should be if they are needed.

Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.

Yes, the right generalization of Georgism is the taxation of economic rent in its various forms - something which George himself opposed.

The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.

The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.

How does one even put a direct financial value on clean water, clean air, lack of noise pollution, etc.?

These things have different values to different people. While most everyone wants them in some form, there is a huge spectrum between “it won’t kill me this month” and “living in pristine Mt. Fuji”.

Should private companies be allowed to pollute sparse remote areas with no population?

Does it have a financial value if nobody goes there?

Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.

The generalization I would use is that governments should tax any scarce resource based on the amount of revenue it should produce if used effectively, rather than the revenue a given consumer can actually produces. Whether that is land, radio spectrum, or clean air.

“Undesirable behavior” is overly broad to the point of being actively misleading, and gets you into sin taxes. smut or drugs are not the scarce resources anybody is talking about here.

There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.

Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.

An analogy just occurred to me. Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.

I get why an LVT makes sense from an economic perspective, but in practice it feels nearly as unfair as the above. Residents especially, but small and medium sized businesses would very quickly lobby to eviscerate an LVT. Imagine long-time residents getting kicked out not because a developer wants to make buck, but because the tax system requires that to happen. There's zero chance such a scheme could survive intact politically. In Pittsburg it's an LVT in name only, with a long list of exceptions and curious appraisals. And once it's applied ad hoc, which it must, there's all manner of distortions and incentives for corruption.

There are many ways for land use and tax policy to improve, but you have to come at from the perspective of improving the existing system, not revolutionizing it with an LVT. And you could probably get closer to an LVT by smart incremental reform than you could by trying to nominally pursue an LVT.

You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.

I think land + income is better. It's what I have where I live, and I'd like to see the balance shifted more towards land.

We already have property tax + income tax, and property tax is land value + value of improvements. From TFA, the immediate proposal is just allowing the property tax to assess the land value and value of improvements at two different rates, with the rate on improvements decreasing to remove incentives against improvements.

Does a parking lot in Manhattan pay the same cost per acre than a 50 story apartment block does?

I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh

Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.

I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.

If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.

It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.

Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.

Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.

If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.

The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.

I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.

We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.

The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.

I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.

think bridges being forcibly closed for causes

Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.

Famously sit ins and marches across public streets and bridges did some work for the civil rights movement, but they were certainly not popular with the locals either.

Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.

Those are the same argument. The idea that “I’m the moderate and if you don’t vote for my position, you’ll get the extremist” is a form of blackmail.

Not quite - that’s if you believe the moderates control the extremists. If they don’t, it’s more like “I’m the extremist and I am currently so unhappy I will do this. What will you do to make me less unhappy?”

It’s a terrible idea and I believe a substantial portion of the world’s polarization issues stem from this “overton window” nonsense.

How are you ever going to find common ground if everybody who cares deeply about an issue constantly makes the moet extreme version of their argument?

On principle I usually vote against anyone who harms me, my life, or my family’s life. I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective. We’re all aware of the phenomenon now. You’re just being an asshole and throwing a tantrum because people aren’t voting like you want them to.

Agree with NIMBY's that a lot of constructions are a blight. Propose to demolish their own house, as you believe its a blight upon the place. They should agree to it after all and be proactive about it given how earnestly they believe in keeping the locality pretty.

People buy a house with an implicit expectation that zoning regulations and building code will be relatively stable. Even if those laws are unnecessarily restrictive or nonsensical, I don’t think the NIMBYs are crazy for being upset about changes to those laws that will lower their property values. They may even want to change them but the fact of the matter is they have a financial incentive to protect the value of their property.

The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.

It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.

Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.

“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.

People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.

I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.

High density is more profitable for developers, they have no interest in supporting SFH zoning.

cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger, so it really depends on the market. i don’t really know any developers who actively oppose upzoning in my region, but the SFH builders I think have an easier and more lucrative job than the ones doing urban infill.

Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive

It’s usually them saying something more like “this will bring jobs”, “growth is inevitable” etc…

And by jobs what they mean is that they will import labor to build housing you can't afford in your neighbourhood.

A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.

Assuming a perfectly efficient market sure. But in reality an expensive house next door raise the price of the cheap house next door because home prices are heavily influenced by the amount banks will loan, and appraisals are heavily influenced by nearby property values.

Plus other reasons like people want to live in good school districts and higher income areas tend to have better schools.

But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.

But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.

But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time.

Especially since these days it is entirely unclear whether a given keyboard warrior is actually a human being at all.

I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?

Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?

Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?

And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?

Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable

I mean, I personally loathe the concept of HOAs so the government abolishing them sounds like a wonderful thing to me.

And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.

Real property is a bundle of rights in land and its fixtures – that's the standard definition in academic legal theory

If there was already a zoning or restrictive covenant, and you knew about that when you bought the land – then the ability to do with the land what that zoning or covenant prohibits is not part of the rights to the land you acquired, and the enforcement of that zoning/covenant isn't denying you any of the rights you paid for.

Besides that, private property is (almost always) a creation of the government. [0] I own a house. If I trace the chain of land titles, it ultimately ends in a government land grant; the government got it by stealing it from the Indigenous people. The government land grant was issued on the condition of obeying the government's laws as in force from time-to-time. You can't sell what you don't own; the original land grant recipient didn't own the land independent of that condition, so none of the subsequent purchasers could either. So the government restricting my ability to use the land I purchased isn't an infringement of any of the rights I actually paid for.

[0] I live in Australia; under Australian law, "native title" is considered to pre-exist Australia's current British-imposed system of governance, but all other land titles derive their legal existence from being created by that system; I don't think the situation in the US is fundamentally different, all non-Indigenous US land titles derive from action of the state or federal governments, or the colonial governments, or the Mexican or Spanish or French or Dutch or Russian or Hawaiian governments

Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?

Uh, no, that's not the case at this point in time. There were racist HOA compacts like that up to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Pretty few people alive today have bought houses where they were given an "explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people" as you said.

I live ten blocks from a neighborhood in Portland called Laurelhurst. Laurelhurst sits on a hill, about 30 blocks east of downtown, and contains the largest 100-year-old mansions east of the river. At each main entrance to Laurelhurst, there are massive stone archways. The arches were built to define the points where Black people were not allowed to enter after sundown.

This is not the case today.

Speaking as someone whose Dad grew up in segregated Baltimore, my grandfather was a bar owner who wasn't even allowed to own or work at a bar in the white neighborhoods. They couldn't rent or buy a house in the white neighborhoods.

The situation today has nothing in common with that. We own homes and businesses wherever we want to. Fold up your manufactured guilt and sympathy and take it elsewhere, we didn't need your help and we still don't.

I think you’re missing the point. It’s not you gaining more freedom with the land that’s the problem. It’s that all your neighbors now have the same freedom.

I bought my house with a close neighbor because I know the neighbor can’t build a steel mill in their backyard. If the government comes in and says we’re all free now to build steel mills, that gain in freedom is a loss in value for me.

It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.

Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.

It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.

the movement against SFH zoning is not about destroying single family zoned neighborhoods, it’s about not forcing every lot to require a SFH. i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read, but SFH zoning itself is more of a taking. people who want to live in a single-family-only neighborhood should find a spot on the edge of town where development pressure is low, not weaponize land use regulations to make it illegal to build what the market wants near jobs and amenities.

and while an LVT doesn’t really care about zoning, depending on how close to a city center your SFH is, a well calibrated LVT might dramatically increase your overall tax burden even if you dropped all other taxes. SFH zoning is manufactured scarcity; LVT prices scarcity correctly, and there’s no upper bound on that value, especially since land taxes become divorced from income.

> i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read

I should have clarified that. I meant it in the context of Georgism. The concept of Georgism was manifestly against the government actually redistributing owned land; instead, landlords would divest themselves of the land if the only utility they got from it was rent. What Georgism says you're paying for when you pay LVT on the land you own is the exclusive right to private use of that land, which comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn't "own" (or essentially, lease) the right to live on it or build on it.

Georgism distinguished between ownership by individuals for productive use and ownership by either (a) individuals for rent-seeking or (b) governments as stewards.

You may be right about LVT pricing scarcity where I live winding up higher than my current tax basis, but even that would make sense since I have to earn a lot and therefore pay inordinate income tax to have the ability to live in a single family home near to a city center already. If where I lived were less important to me, under Georgism, I could simply move to the burbs. But there is a funny corrolary to that which Georgism seems to intuitively grasp and which is orthogonal to the argument between manufactured scarcity and progressive housing policies. (And maybe this is a gap in Georgism's argument):

I live in inner southeast Portland, Oregon. Along all our east-west avenues there are tons of Amazon boxes (what we call studio / one bedroom 4-6 story cheaply constructed wooden apartments with a patina of modern amenity). And tons of local businesses. Between the major arteries it's almost all single family homes. This makes it one of the last cities in America where you can live in a SFH within walking distance of everything, including downtown. Street parking is still free here, and a lot of people don't need a car at all. I live in an SFH within two blocks of apartments where the waiters and bartenders and shopkeepers live who work at the businesses on the avenues. It's truly mixed use. However, they've now rewritten the zoning law to allow tearing down houses as small as mine (1200 sqft) and replacing them with 4-plexes. The problem with the Amazon boxes is that they don't provide room for families. No one is building 3 bedroom apartments with a yard where you can raise your kids in the city. My Dad grew up in a shared row house in Baltimore. No one's building that.

Which gets to the heart of the matter, which is that a major reason that this city and this area are so desirable is precisely because those SFHs exist between all the major streets. The spending value (and social value) of the essentially middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center is widely overlooked by people campaigning to eliminate SFH zoning; but without those people, you end up with neighborhoods where everyone is under 30 and relatively transient, without much money to spend in the local economy or any deep ties to the place. The apartments decay, and most of the work reasons for living there disappear.

Eliminating SFH zoning is an opinionated, political form of slow redistribution that preferences a certain age group and a certain socioenconomic position over others. It reduces actual diversity, and produces monocultural places like Seattle and Santa Monica where only the very rich can raise a family in town, and everyone else is a young renter.

And here's the kicker where Georgism may be right: In the end, eliminating SFH zoning only redistributes property from individuals and families (like me) to corporate landlords.

i appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it’s rooted in a desire to maintain some element of diversity.

i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.

if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.

also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.

I think we largely agree on the fact that SFHs should not be the only option for young families or empty nesters or aging couples. (As an aside, all of the above live in SFHs on my block, as well as young single renters in their 20s who share SFHs as roommates). I brought up Baltimore rowhouses for that reason. My Mom grew up in a duplex in LA with a backyard... my brother is raising his own kids in almost an exact copy of that duplex.

I'm not sure what you mean about the lack of new construction of that type coming from broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum. Maybe uou could elaborate. The upper end of the spectrum in Portland is... almost everyone with money moves to either the oldest exclusive homes in one of two very non-diverse neighborhoods (Laurelhurst or the West Hills), or else they move to the exurbs and build McMansions out in the farmland. Neither is really actively engaged in a community beyond a homeowner's association, and neither is walkable or a place where people of different economic and cultural backgrounds get to interact for everyone's benefit.

So maybe what I'm trying to say is that the high upper end (homes over $1M, let's say), is going to remove itself anyway, and that yes there should be more construction of 2-4-plexes which are not Amazon boxes... but there seems to be no incentive to build those things, and I don't even know how you could do so on a 1200 sqft lot.

In the interim, Portland has eased lots of rules on the use of ADUs and trailers in backyards and even yurts. I bought my home for $450k and the range in the area goes up to $800. This tells you that what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard.

But I do feel like the crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class, anti-family quality to it... and what I mean to say is that it is the working middle class families in the upper end of housing on those avenues who anchor those blocks and keep the neighborhoods livable and loved and who keep the businesses in business. I've seen what's happened to such inner city SFH neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and it turns into somewhere that no one would want to live if they didn't have to, with no community or neighborhood to speak of. Row houses and shared brownstones in East Coast cities have fared slightly better as an attractive living pattern.

Ultimately too, your argument is that not everyone should live where they live, because more people want to live in that spot, so if they want space they should move to the suburbs. My argument is that not everyone can afford to live exactly where they want, either way, but that doesn't logically imply that you should increase density as much as possible in a mixed and vibrant neighborhood just because people want to live there. At a certain point it will lose the very thing that makes people want to live there in the first place. Not even to get into the fact that no one actually works downtown anymore or commutes away from the neighborhood, so this is purely a choice for most people.

You still didn't address my point that every SFH torn down for a 4-plex just redistributes individual middle class ownership to financial corporations.

Many places have all of the single-family homes also owned by corporations. I think the problems you are concerned with here are predominantly increasing financialization of the economy and increasing wealth inequality rather than anything to do with zoning changes.

what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard

If housing has gotten so expensive that the "working middle class" has to live somewhere else and commute in, the way to attack that is to increase the stock of available housing, not continue to sharply restrict it.

crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class

To the contrary, relaxing zoning requirements most strongly benefits people who are less wealthy and currently end up overspending on housing or getting priced out.

you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles

after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.

there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.

watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously

"Yes you worked your whole life for that house that you carefully chose and maintained, but we want to send its value through the floor because we're more powerful".

What do you care about the value of the house you're living in?

What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?

Do you think any of the folks who benefitted the way you’re talking are going to give a damn about the attempted guilting you’re doing? Lol

They're responding to attempted guilting. "Retirees will lose all their value they worked their whole life for" is the guilting, "actually they didn't earn shit by buying land and sitting on it" is the "not giving a damn". Your reply is literally the exact inverse of reading comprehension.

Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell. But you should not expect to profit 2, 3, 500% by waiting 20 or 30 years. Speaking from my personal experience, housing in Japan is extremely affordable and Japan is much, much better off for it compared to the hellscape that is US housing prices. And for what purpose? To reward people for already having wealth by passively giving them more of it?

(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.

You never know until you try.

How dare these wretched poors fight to protect the single most important financial asset in their life: their home. Those NIMBY backwards cretins! Those swine! How dare they not embrace the sweet delights of the 5 over 1 luxury condo with an HVAC that sounds like a tornado and walls so then you learn every single neighbor's dog on your entire floor by bark. Of course I, the noble YIMBY patrician who knows what's best, will continue to live in the $1.2M home my parents purchased for me and my wife in the walkable part of town near the hustle and bustle of the city's best breweries and axe throwing salons!

Are you sure this isn't just 'turnout inertia' working in your favor? People who are relatively content with the zoning rules are probably not actively engaged on the issue. But swap them in a way that they become unhappy with (as you presumably were) and you see sharply increased turnout in the opposite direction.

Put another way, one of the historical critiques of democracy was that it ends up catering to interest groups whose interest may not align with the rest of society. At first that seems paradoxical, because a more knee-jerk critique would expect democracy to just turn into a tyranny of the majority. But the reality is that people generally don't act on things until they are sufficiently incentivized to do so. And that incentivization is often reactive in nature.

I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".

So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.

Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.

Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.

What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).

LVT is assessed on land value. Your 13 rural acres aren't insanely valuable and would not be assessed a million dollars a year under a Georgian model.

Ok, that makes sense to me then. I thought I was going to be taxed for unused land.

The idea here is that unused land in a city should be highly taxed, but unused land in rural areas should not.

The point of Georgism is to get rid of the 'unused' part. You're just taxed on land, full stop, based on the most valuable things that could probably be done with it right now.

Land in a city center? Hefty taxes, identical for a parking lot and a skyscraper, because the parking lot could be a skyscraper instead.

Land in a low population rural area? Low taxes, because the likely uses are homes or businesses that could be built in any other rural area.

So the idea is to make cities denser? Is maximum density use what we really want? What about industry, data centers, etc., that could be built in rural areas - wouldn't that push land value up there a lot?

The idea is to encourage more efficient use of land. In urban areas of the US that usually means more density since they aren't actually all that dense(the oft cited example being surface parking lots in downtown areas, this isn't a very efficient use). There's a lot of other baggage to make that work well, imk - better infrastructure and transit come to mind.

My concern is that the endpoint of most efficient land use might not be a great one.

Why?

The effect on taxes depends on the specific rules. But, with the easiest answer of basing it on market rate of land sales, industry in rural areas only increases taxes if that industry's paying significantly above existing market rate for some reason.

And if they are doing that, the taxes should go up, since there's some previously unrecognized value to the land that's driving industry to need to build there specifically and not somewhere else they can buy at preexisting market rate.

Of course, the same also applies in the other direction: if an active mine shuts down and sells for pennies, taxes for the surrounding land should go down based on that.

If it isn't considering hypothetical land uses than it isn't necessarily always pushing for more efficient use, no?

The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.

In most cases LVT would be the same or lower than current property taxes. Only empty lots would pay more.

TFA literally shows how it is better for homeowners

Eh... After finishing the article, did I miss the section where the author discuss if Georgism actually works?

Did it actually increase the amount of housing? Reduce wealth disparity? Got enough taxes so cities can make commutes better?

Yes, you did. Re-read the end of section III, around the part with the final two color coded images.

There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:

Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.

But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.

Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.

Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?

All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.

You are confusing "location" and "dirt"

When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.

Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.

Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.

Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.

Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!

https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/georgism-through-land-leasi...

Georgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.

Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.

Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.

What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?

This is the argument again Georgism I have the hardest time countering.

Landlords tend to raise rent to the maximum value they can.

If they could raise rents, why haven't they already?

And if their costs go up and they can't make ends meet, they will sell the property, possibly at a loss, and the lower value will lower taxes.

But this won't happen, because the landlord's taxes won't rise. They'll almost certainly fall, as shown in the abundant data. And if for some reason the landlord's property tax does rise, it's because it's a ridiculously underused parcel in an area of really really high value, like a duplex next to 10+ story buildings. Which means it may be best to let 100-300 people use that parcel rather than ~10.

The LVT shifts tax burden away from homes and businesses and towards empty lots and parking lots.

rent seeking

I would worry that you just substitute a rent seeking landlord with a rent seeking government (local?).

The headlines would be more along the lines of ”Grandma Jones is losing her family farm, because she refuses to turn it into condos and now the land is taxed as if there was development on it”

Georgism ignores how many voters are vehemently anti-development. Just visit any hearing where housing is discussed, people really hate the idea of getting more homes built.

[flagged]

Austin does not have a land value tax.

Austin is the main example of consequences of densification.

You are attacking a strawman of your own invention, since LVTs have nothing whatsoever to do with Austin.

You are confusing property taxes with land value taxes

No, I'm not. LVT is a vehicle designed to force density in housing.

A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.

When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.

It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.

It's actually a really key part of the functioning of the LVT. It is fuel to grow the economy, just like the LVT is the stick that punishes those who hold back the economy by hoarding land.

At least, that's my opinion. Carrot based economic policies have a tendency of working in multiples of the money involved, and penalties a bit less than that.

It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.

Serendipity, I guess.

This place has always had a soft spot for Scott Alexander, and in turn he loves to talk about Big Systemic Fixes.

It never ends.

This piece was not written by Scott Alexander.

I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.

So… a big systemic fix in other words.

Allow to me cite another beloved HN blog by way of explanation for why this mostly appeals to people without a strong understanding of the systems they want to “fix”.

https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising...

Georgism has been mentioned many, many times in the 15 years you've been on HN. How could you not know about it?

One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase masquerading as innovative tax policy. It would be great if cities were to reduce the spend by a 30% while they are at it.

At the very least, it would be great if politicians implemented it as tax neutral and as originally designed: the ONLY tax, and including renters. Some jurisdictions are doing it that way.

It’s unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve. Market value changes for every asset, not just land, and unearned wealth creation is common. Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?

I will probably believe it more when the proponents act on their recommendations, say, if Lars sells his house and sends the 50% appreciation he says in his blog he didn’t earn, as a gift to the Federal Government so that Trump can hire a few more ICE agents.

My concern is also aligned with Orwell in Notes on Nationalism: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

It's deeply weird how little interest there seems to be the inquiry of why Georgism failed in the past despite being an enormously popular political movement. It was tried. And abandoned. Investigating that history would yield a lot more compelling information than musing about the hypotheticals of what would happen if it was implemented now.

its unclear to me how you could pay for the massive tax burden of a modern state with a single tax. while i agree in theory that taxation of land is the most "fair" type of tax, it does not seem possible that eg. the federal US government could obtain $7,000,000,000,000 from a %5 tax rate on land, without making it completely unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home.

if you were to couple Georgism with a massive reduction in state spending i would be more on board i think.

It's already unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home in much of the country. Only if you worked and then moved to a cheaper place.

Also, I don't think it precludes a sales tax or tariffs, etc.

i think it generally does preclude other taxes, although i'm sure there are people who consider themselves georgists who would also want to see other forms of taxation.

but yes, home ownership is becoming increasingly unaffordable for a number of reasons, including increasing government spending...

The US ideological push for homeownership is what eventually led to the housing shortage that we’re in now. If we tie up a big chunk of the majority’s net worth in their house, of course they’re going to vote for their own net worth going up. Of course they’re going to vote for renters to become their serfs. Of course they’re going to vote for subsidizing housing demand instead of subsidizing housing supply.

We needed a government to crush the majority’s house values yesterday. As a consolation prize, we got ‘08. It sucked investment out of housing, and we got a booming economy.

The average citizen should not own a home and be allowed to vote at the same time. Canada experienced the consequences of a psychotic ideological homeownership push, China dodged it by intentionally deflating property values, the US will pay the price if people keep voting for property values to go up.

Buried in the middle, a whole section on "won't landlords just pass costs into tenants" passed over with the weakest deflections. This is willful naivety.

we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.

This was made dramatically obvious in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the 2011 earthquake.

Land that previously housed people or businesses in the central city became unsealed carparks run by an overseas company that dominates parking businesses here, for years, and many still are, 15 years on.

Likewise, the owners of buildings rendered unusable by earthquake damage had no compelling reason to demolish and rebuild, as their local taxes dropped significantly, as they're based on land value and improvement (i.e., building) value, and the building was now worth nothing.

So long as the increase in the value of the land outweighed the now minimal local taxes they paid, they'd still come out ahead when they finally sold.

Hence the local government resorted to naming and shaming the so-called "Dirty Thirty", because they had no other levers to pull.

https://ccc.govt.nz/the-council/future-projects/barrier-site...

But this still doesn't address the previously utilized land that is now just a muddy carpark operating for the benefit of a company in Singapore - they have no economic incentive to invest in a parking building when they can just run their business on several hectares of unsealed and frequently muddy and pot-holed sections in the central city while paying minimal local tax.

And in and around Auckland, New Zealand's most populous city and the most expensive to buy or rent a home in, they struggle with the land bankers, and ghost houses - properties owned solely for (largely untaxed) capital gains.

And then we struggle with a housing crisis.

Here's a dumb question. If there was just one tax, the lvt, what would stop businesses sort of rediscovering income tax.

I mean putting a line on your pay slip called "lvt contribution" and then state the pre-lvtc salary in job descriptions and stuff like that.

Similarly with vat and related taxes. The incentive in both cases being to signal: here's what we would pay/charge if it weren't for the government. Which is presumably the current incentive to state before tax salary/cost (this assumption could well be totally wrong).

I’ve always been Georgism curious, but didn’t know how to handle some of the more obvious challenges so I really want to thank the author for the work here!

I’m curious about how to think about the dynamics of a LVT:

- I can imagine urbanism creating a flocking behavior that ruins neighborhoods in 5-10 year cycles. Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”, only to collapse when a nearby area is cheaper for a cool coffee shop to start. (The problem specifically is that you’ve both driven out people and caused an inefficient overbuild in each area)

- Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?

- Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.

I’m a fan of the idea - these are just some of the tricky challenges I don’t have a good answer to yet.

I would think that lag, combined with the general public legibility of LVT, combined with the inertia of property transactions, would damp oscillations.

Gentrification and decay are already cycles, and maybe those cycles would accelerate somewhat; but a prediction that they would drop to below decade level would be a bold assertion.

LVT and things like market value based taxes are all far more complicated than is what already works, and what Singapore does (and a couple other countries like China): all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.

So the revenue comes through in resales once leases end.

Super simple: no valuation (only market sales); no annual expenses to consider (all upfront); development issues are simply a matter for leases to expire; speculation is capped given the capped lease length (although it can still get to stupid valuations).

Implementation is also extremely simple if you’re already onboard with taxation as expropriation: the state just legislates that all property is now a 99 year lease and they own it at that point (alternatively they compensate you 2-5% of market value, and retain existing annual taxes, or cut existing annual taxes to compensate, or they just do it without compensation!)

Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...

Singapore has freeholds.

Nit:

The UK just elected a new prime minister, Andy Burnham

He wasn't elected by anybody. The country didn't get a say and he was unopposed in his party.

I learned a little bit about georgism as the idea started crossing my feed.. 5-ish years ago.

What I've noticed, especially in online spaces is that advocates have quite disperate notions of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work.

Relatively contentious and complex arguments about 2nd and 3rd order effects seem to dominate. EG rent will decrease because of incentives and political economies.

I think this comes from defensive arguments.

Here, he defends against the argument thelat taxes will be passed on to tenents. I agree that the answer is no, but how that is established is important. It's core to understanding the whole framework.

The premise of georgism is that land is scarce. Hi demand, and low supply yields a price. That price does not change because the landlord owes taxes. Supply and demand remain the same, and yields the same price/rent.

LVT is the maximum, non distorting tax rate. The rate at which land itself is worth zero. If tax exceeds LVT building becomes unprofitable and land has negative value.

When tax equals lvt... Tax revenue is maximized and land value is zero.... in the theoretical chalkboard economy.

This is the whole core reasoning underlying Georgism. It is about capturing the value of land, in taxes. All of it, ideally.

Price, scarcity, abundance, affordability... These are peripheral. Also the same rules, more or less apply.

Skipping onto YIMBY, supply constraints and whatnot tends to obfuscate the key parts.

Georgism wants to crash the property market. Zero out the location component of real estate value.

If I actually instituted, an enormous class of wealth goes poof.

That's the key fact to consider.

Georgism does not assume that land is scarce, Georgism only assumes that land is in constant supply. E.g. that taxing land does not cause the land to disappear, unlike produced goods, where if you tax a shirt, for example, you get less shirts produced. That's the whole point. Because fewer shirts are produced, the price of each shirt goes up, and this is the mechanism by which taxes can be "passed on" to the buyers of shirts.

On the other hand, structures on the land are produced, they are not in fixed supply. Therefore Georgism does not advocate taxing the structure -- only the land itself.

Because land is in fixed supply, it is impossible to pass on costs to renters of land. In a market economy where prices are set by supply and demand, the only mechanism for sellers to pass on costs is a reduction in supply (since they cannot influence demand), because for all goods (not just land), the sellers always charge the maximum the market can bear. Once this price is established, they cannot "choose" to raise prices, because this suggests they were charging less than the market would bear before. Therefore threats to raise prices even more are always hollow. Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.

In that environment, the only way for land rent prices to go up higher is a reduction in supply, as demand curves bend downward. But with land, supply is fixed so reductions in supply are impossible. This is the insight of Ricardo.

Now the argument is that land, encumbered with a tax, is worth less to the land buyer than unencumbered land, so that what happens as property taxes rise is that the land falls in value due to the tax burden. It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value, if even just a few pennies -- at which it will be sold, and so the result is the capture of the value of the land by the state, while people get to keep the value of what they produce (the structure on the land), which is not taxed. It's important to recognize that not taxing produced goods is an important part of Georgism also. This incentivizes people to invest in produced goods rather than non-produced goods, and to save by acquiring capital rather than land, as there is no social benefit for people to bid against each other for ownership of something in fixed supply like land, because no matter how many bidders there are, the same amount of land will be supplied every year, regardless of what price it is.

Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.

This is simply not true in the same way that consumers are not always rational and always pay the exact correct price.

Landlords regularly charge less than full market rate, for example when they have a good tenant, as the costs of a new tenancy and the risk of a void are higher than the incremental marginal rent (once taxed at the landlord's marginal rate) is worth to that landlord. Unlike what most people seem to assume, being a landlord is not a zero-labour job. Things that require additional labour on the part of the landlord have to be worth it.

The thing that changes this calculation is an increase in costs. You are right that landlords are not charities, so they will generally avoid a loss. The primary costs for most landlords are mortgage interest and taxes. Increase the taxes and some of these landlords will now be underwater and will increase prices towards highest market rate as a result.

I think it's perverse that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a global competition with every other human to survive

It's hard enough to survive but in our world you have to do survive while everyone else is incentivised to take money from you

Life shouldn't just be about efficiencies it should be about things that make us human, sharing and community used to be a big part of that

Like we're geared up for taking but not giving - like petting my dog in the global competition I'm incentivised to give him up he costs me time and money I could be grinding the next facebook

There should be a point of abundance where we reflect on what the point of all this competition is

Because I predict in the end it will be one guy with all money and everyone else in desperation

It's funny/sad that some people have so much capital they could live in absolute abundance, they could light up the lives of an entire country but they're the most robotic and desperate of all of us

As things are at the moment they're our future until we can imagine a world where everyday is not a slow decline into the end stages of a monopoly game

Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history. *Billions* of people can afford food and shelter and clothing now, who would otherwise have died. We have eradicated diseases which have plagued humanity and caused incalculable harm. People are surviving all manner of afflictions like cancer and heart disease. We have harnessed flight, and billions of people can now afford to travel to the other side of the world to begin a new life, or just experience another culture. The internet has enabled the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world to learn advanced knowledge, start businesses, and improve their lives and the lives of their communities.

Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.