(1) Property tax considers both land and land improvements, e.g. a house or factory. Taxing the house disincentivizes construction and investment on land, which is exactly the opposite of what we want. The land value tax only attempts to capture rent, which is an intrinsic value associated with the productivity of the location compared to alternatives. Actual studies of this policy have been done and LVT encourages construction when used to displace property taxes.

(2) A tax on the market value of the land (or property) can never capture the full ground rent. This is because the market value of land derives from the rent you could collect from it (or the work you could do on it yourself). The market value of the land will decrease, adjusting for the lost tax revenue, and that in turn changes the amount of tax that will be collected...

Let's call "Rev" the annual tax revenue, "Rate" the annual tax rate on land value, "Rent" the true ground rent, and "t" the number of years someone considers in their assessment of market value of real estate.

Rev = (market_value)*Rate
Rev = (Rent*t - Rev*t)*Rate
Rev = Rent * t*Rate/(1 + t*Rate)

No matter what combination of t and Rate you choose, the tax revenue will always be smaller than ground rent. Moreover, the higher you try to set the tax rate, the more unstable the assessment will get, because you're trying to charge large multiples of tiny appraisal values. Instead you have to assess the ground rent directly.

Or maybe the one in loch modan

For corporations, at least, I think a stock-based solution might be a good approach to the transition of capital to land.

The work you do for a company can be divided into two broad categories: (1) directly trading time for product, and (2) creating stuff that increases productivity of future labor. Manually stamping every part on a factory line or waiting tables would be type 1, and writing code or building robots would be type 2.

So, it seems logical that you could define two classes of stock: "labor stock" and "productivity stock." Labor stock is issued when you join and dissolved when you leave, which basically pays wages for type 1 work (companies must now issue regular dividends as their wage process).

Productivity stock is issued as you work and stays with you when you leave, until it expires (end of life or some fixed time). When productivity stock expires, it is transferred to the public.

Depending on the scope of work, a worker may be paid in some mixture of the two classes.

As time moves forward, ownership of a company (and its assets) will gradually move from the original workers to the public, while still incentivizing the production of new capital at the company. In this system you could no longer issue stock to raise money; instead, money would have to be raised through "loans" with fixed payback terms, rather than indefinite future ownership of the company.

> Instead of land, as important as it is, my thoughts consider water.

Henry George, the pioneer of this field of thought and the land value tax policy, had a fairly broad definition of "land" which would include not only water but "all natural forces and opportunities." This would include things like sunlight, radio bands, low earth orbits, mineral deposits, and so on.

Personally, I might go even further and include "sufficiently old capital" under land. In this context "capital" means "wealth employed for the increased productivity of future labor." Someone who saves their money to build a tractor instead of buying ice-cream should enjoy return to their capital, aka interest or dividends. On the other hand, if someone built a tractor thousands of years ago (that somehow still works) we might consider it "land" since no one alive today made it. Use of that tractor excludes everyone else from using it and the user should have to pay the "rent" for it if they want to use it. In a world of increasing automation, taxing ownership of robots/software that you didn't personally build would be a critical step in approaching the UBI paradise that we all hope for.

> All that said, i don't want to hand over everyone's possessions to the federal government

The land value tax doesn't take away land, it just charges people the "ground rent" to keep private ownership of it. You can own a square mile of Manhattan and do whatever you want with it, you just have to pay others for your exclusive use of that valuable land. And if you don't want to use it, let someone else use it (either renting it out or "selling" it). Ideally under a properly assessed LVT, the price of land should tend towards zero, because there is no economic advantage in just having it.

> The general narrative pushed is "work hard and you can do anything" rather than "get extremely lucky and you might have a successful buisness after a few failed attempts "

Indeed rent will soak up any increased productivity and hand it to land owners, whether it's residential land or the industrial land. To "get ahead" and perhaps own some land, you basically have to exceed the average productivity expected from a location. (Assuming they haven't over-estimated rent, which is what leads to economic depressions btw). You can do this either by working way harder than the average person, inventing a way to increase your productivity beyond expectations. Either way, this is not accessible for the average person almost by definition.

Who are "original owners"? Ultimately someone just found some land and put a flag on it. Even natives who have been living in a place for thousands of years are still just using land they didn't make. We either have to agree that all humans have equal claim to the earth by virtue of existing, or accept the arbitrary acquisition of land by whomever can hold it for a sufficient period.

The "equal sharing" solution is known as the land value tax.

Land rent is fraudulent, in the sense that land is not something that can be created yet we let people own it and sell it to us.

What do you know, this shut down coincides with an uncharacteristic cessation of spam phone calls from my area code.

It's an increase in productivity of otherwise unproductive locations due to remote work. Rent is set based on the difference between productivity of a location and productivity of the available free alternative (e.g. wilderness). Since home prices necessarily include land speculation, i.e. the rent that could be collected by owning the property, home prices rise too.

Housing (land ownership) is an entirely different, but more fundamental, issue. See Henry George.

I'd think plumbing is way more complicated than a package system. Plumbing deals with a variety of pipe sizes, terminal devices, hydrodynamics, chemistry, etc. all meticulously integrated into your building. A package system just has to get a single type of object to the general vicinity of your building, and that object won't deposit limescale or grease over time. I think a better analogy is internet infrastructure.

Lol I've semi-seriously thought about a system of (pneumatic? electromagnetic?) tubes to take on the increasingly large role of home delivery services. Instead of trucks and cars with humans manually delivering small packages, food, etc., we could just create a standardized tube system. Anything below a certain size can be shipped via tube, and only the big stuff requires an over-the-road solution. Then the only questions are how big should the envelope be and how much would it cost to install?

I think the problem most capitalist countries are struggling with is the failure to distinguish capital from land. Capital - that is, wealth reinvested to improve the productivity of future work- deserves returns. Instead of enjoying your wealth, you gave it up for a time to be more productive.

Rent seeking - that is, the withholding of land from those who need it to live and work - is pure parasitism. No one created land, they just found it and claimed it. (Similarly, old capital that was made by someone who is no longer alive is indistinguishable from land.)

Henry George proposed a solution known as the land value tax. It effectively rents all land out, and distributes that rent uniformly among citizens. While the owner can still choose how to use their land, the economic value of that land is owned by everyone.

Capitalism in its pure form, i.e. privatized rewards for private investment, is probably fine. But land is not capital and we can't continue to treat it like it is.

I mean they had ubiquitous landlines and phone booths in the movie so I'd say that's getting pretty anachronistic.

The spin cycle really helps reduce mineral buildup on drying. Make sure your bowls are facing concave out when you load them.

If you make it go around the world you can significantly reduce the need for grid storage too.

Hopefully the original dosage wasn't smaller than one.

Land/housing ownership is also the single greatest barrier to building generational wealth. Owning land is what enables you to keep the output of labor, whether it's yours or someone else's.

Sharing land equally is neither good nor bad for the middle class, only fair. It's good for working class people who don't own land, and it's bad for wealthy people who rent land to others. People who own their own homes and workplaces? Largely unaffected. (Though it depends on the location.)

To be clear, an LVT only eliminates the financial portion of private ownership. The holder of the deed still gets exclusive decision-making authority over how the land gets used as long as they are paying the tax. If you want to conserve natural resources you'd have to add additional market corrections, e.g. a payment to NOT cut down a tree.

Have you read the link? Land rent is based on the availability of marginally productive alternatives. Think of an island with one fertile patch and a bunch of desert. The rent you can charge a worker by owning the fertile patch is the difference between output of the fertile patch vs the desert.

On the other hand, the desert is still more productive than the ocean. If we find ways to make the desert more productive... rent on the desert will also go up.

Land speculation applies to all land and the rent you could expect to collect, regardless of how urban or rural it is. The solution is to effectively eliminate private ownership of land through a Land Value Tax.

Eh. The houses aren't really important, it's the land they're built on. There's already enough housing, It's just that people don't own them (or the land they are built on).

Yes, you could build more houses and leave some empty, but they will be in slightly less productive locations. There's a reason people pay so much to live in NYC or San Francisco.

Not that I'm aware of. If you're using massive simulation to explore design space the limiting factor is usually computation, not transfer. And you don't have to transfer that data often, even so. We transmit way more data in media.

I mean that's mostly a limitation of the display, not the internet. You can already play videos with a higher bitrate than your internet if you download them beforehand.