And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn’t suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.

I prefer rules-based utilitarianism, which is the idea that we should create a system of rules that achieves the most good when followed. If we created a system whereby we rounded up healthy people and forcibly harvested their organs “for the greater good”, well, society would collapse as everyone flees to the woods to preserve their own life and organs. No farmers, no scientists, no doctors, no infrastructure maintenance, just global famine. And that would be a far worse net outcome than the current system that lets some people die prematurely due to lack of available organs.

No problemo!

To do the link, you want to do the brackets first, then the parentheses. Like this [text](link):

It’s really one of the best instances of the horror genre, imo. It captures the call of the void and sticks with you in a way no other horror piece has done for me. Granted, I don’t consume much horror, but I do really love this one.

Yeah, we ignored the Tea Party as silly folks in 2008 and 2012, but by 2016 they had rebranded as MAGA and now they run the GOP.

Any delusional, hateful ideology – be it tankies, Nazis, or whatever – will fester if you let it.

You can tell a lot about how this person views the world by how they’re utterly convinced that other men will look at their rolex with envy. I kind of pity people stuck in a frame of mind where they think they need flashy, conspicuous consumption to impress people.

For those that don’t know, French Guiana being an overseas department of France makes it analogous to Alaska or Hawaii, rather than a mere territory. It’s considered a fully-fledged part of France, at the same level as all the departments of metropolitan France.

The Phillips curve is an economic model, named after William Phillips, that predicts a correlation between reduction in unemployment and increased rates of wage rises within an economy.[1]

While there is a short-run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, it has not been observed in the long run.[5] In 1967 and 1968, Friedman and Phelps asserted that the Phillips curve was only applicable in the short run and that, in the long run, inflationary policies would not decrease unemployment.[2][3][4][6] Friedman then correctly predicted that in the 1973–75 recession, both inflation and unemployment would increase.[6][failed verification] In the 2010s[7] the slope of the Phillips curve appears to have declined and there has been controversy over the usefulness of the Phillips curve in predicting inflation. A 2022 study found that the slope of the Phillips curve is small and was small even during the early 1980s.[8]

Most economists no longer use the Phillips curve in its original form because it was shown to be too simplistic.[16] This can be seen in a cursory analysis of US inflation and unemployment data from 1953–92.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

It would seem economists would agree that the Phillips curve is simply a model and not some oracle of economic forecasting. If you take take simplified economic models out of context and ignore the whole empirical side of economics, then of course you can portray it as pseudoscience. You can portray anything as pseudoscience if you reduce it to its abstract, outdated models devoid of context.

Well, it’s for that exact same reason the rich will oppose socialism. Personally, I’m more in favor of georgism, which is like socialism with regards to social control of the commons (most notably land and natural resources), but not regular capital. I think this is important because there is a meaningful distinction between land and capital and shouldn’t just be lumped together under “the means of production”. Capital is created, where land (and natural resources) are not, thus taking social control of land via taxes works fundamentally differently economically (and morally, imo) than taking social control of capital which has been created. For example, my uni degrees are a form of capital, and a system in which society takes control of the economic returns on my education is a system which disincentives people from pursuing higher education. But if society imposes a tax on me for the land I occupy or the carbon I emit, that’s completely fair imo. Plus, the key policies georgism is based on (most notably land value taxes and externality taxes) are just really good policies as shown by economics. Even Friedman begrudgingly called land value taxes the least bad tax, as they’re progressive, economically efficient, and incentivize productivity and discourage rent-seeking.

If we taxed land, it would be essentially impossible to evade, even with fancy accounting and shell companies and all that stuff the rich love to employ. All this is exactly why the how of taxing the rich is so important.

Maybe he lives in a jurisdiction that bans abortion, and he’s running the clinic because he knows it’s a critical healthcare service needed by many, despite the personal legal risk he’s taking on by running it.

No impropriety in supporting local sole proprietors

If I had a kid doing stem cell research at 10 years old, I’d probably be the opposite of mad, so long as they’re following proper ethical and safety standards in their labwork.

You’re right; the infrastructure in the US is very car-based, which is unfortunate. In Europe (where I live), we can walk from place to place and the public transport is generally sufficient to move around (at least, for me). However, to make the switch from car-dependent infrastructure to dense, walkable infrastructure does cost a lot of money and how would that be financed? Could everything be financed by the LVT, pigouvian and severance taxes? Also, to add to your idea, I think more comprehensive and free public transport would also be a huge way to convince people to use a train instead of a car. Also add more bicycle lanes as well, for the shorter distances (< 20km).

Yes, according to the Henry George Theorem, public goods can be funded entirely by their resulting increase in LVT revenues. This paper extended the results of the HGT to congestible local public goods as well, e.g., roads, transit, education, healthcare, eldercare, childcare, museums, etc.

What if someone, who owns a house and lives in it, becomes unemployed? I mean, every landowner will have to pay land value taxes, and I assume these taxes won’t be temporarily cancelled. If someone suddenly becomes unemployed (maybe a recession or an accident which resulted in a lost limb?), they won’t have a stable income anymore and if they don’t have any saved money, they will be unable to pay LVT. What’s going to happen in this situation? While the LVT certainly does have advantages to distribute wealth more equally across society, this does seem like a problem for the poor, right? I mean, a rich person has plenty of saved money and will be able to pay LVT, but a poor person doesn’t.

I think there are two main scenarios to consider here: 1) the short-term transition period, and 2) the long-term equilibrium. In the short term, yes, there are definitely some owners of single-family detached homes who would need to move, but I think that’s an unavoidable part of solving the housing crisis anyways. I don’t know the situation in the Netherland, but in the US and Canada we have the issue of almost all our urban land being zoned for SFHs, and simply there is no fixing the housing crisis here without many of those being redeveloped into missing middle housing or denser. However, the beauty of LVT is it’s meant to target the full rental value of the land, i.e., how much you could rent the land for on the open market. So if you find yourself unable to pay the LVT due to unfortunate circumstances, because you still possess the land, you have the option of renting out the land to pay it, and yourself renting someplace cheaper that you can afford off of UBI/citizen’s dividend. After all, the LVT due is supposed to be the rental value of the land, i.e., if you can rent it for $100 a month, you pay $100 a month in taxes. Realistically, though, due to difficulty in appraising with such high degree of accuracy, I’ve generally seen it recommended you shoot for 85% to 100% of the rental value of land. 'Tis better to slightly under-appraise than to over-appraise.

In the long-term, I think the housing market would be vastly more affordable and people economically better off, with very few SFHs on high-value land (basically only mansions owned by the rich who can afford to bleed money on LVT payments). The reduction in evictions due to failure to pay rent would be vastly greater than the increase in evictions because of LVT, I would imagine. After all, our current system evicts you if you are no longer capable of paying, but we don’t even have a UBI/citizen’s dividend to help you meet those payments under extenuating circumstances such as sudden disability.

Something else that came to mind was when will the LVT be paid? Is it paid annually, monthly, or is it paid when the landowner dies? If it’s paid annually or monthly, then it could be very hard for poor people with small plots of land to pay the LVT. Also, what kind of percentage of the land value would the tax be? 10%? 20%?

This is actually an open question. I’d personally be fine with annually or monthly. I’ve seen proposals for paying it when the landowner dies as an option to protect pensioners. Perhaps a land value transfer tax that is applicable for certain people who qualify? Downside is any conditions like that 1) introduce significant bureaucracy, and 2) introduce an avenue by which to potentially evade the LVT. As for percentage, the idea would be to target the full rental value of the land, but even smaller land value taxes can still have benefits, just not as many. If we did a revenue-neutral shift from property to land value taxes, for instance, we’d still need income taxes, but we could still cool upward speculative pressure on land prices such as seen in the Australian Capital Territory (which has a pretty milquetoast LVT, nowhere near the full-LVT system I’m arguing for).

Thanks for all the responses again! I agree that this is a fun interaction, and this is what I love most about platforms like lemmy – you can have random in-depth conversations about tax policy with someone on the other side of the planet.

Don’t say that to the Netherlands lol (they’ve created an entire province from the sea)

This is where it becomes semantic in that the “land” in “land value taxes” is more akin to “location”. When talking about land reclamation from the sea, the reclamation would be an improvement (and thus untaxed), and it would only be the value of the location (derived primarily by proximity to businesses, services, infrastructure, jobs, etc.). Using this concept of economic land also suggest other potential types of “land” value taxes, e.g., the electromagnetic spectrum, domain names on the internet (to avoid cybersquatting), low earth orbits (because orbits can get cluttered if there are too many satellites or debris), etc.

All capital investments? If I buy Apple stock from you, I wait for the market price to increase and then sell it again. What have I contributed by doing this? I have not invested directly into a company (I bought the share from you, not from Apple itself) nor have I solved world hunger. I simply spent money, waited a bit and then earned more money. I feel like these kind of useless profits should be taxed; additionally, any dividend should be taxed as well, because in an ideal world, the profits would be invested back into the company, which leads to more innovation and an increase in wages.

Yeah, I agree this is where things get messier. There are clearly many capital investments that are productive, but many like speculative day-trading of stocks that are not. For example, it’s very common in tech to pump up your profitability right before your IPO (by doing unsustainable business practices to boost revenues and cut expenses) so you and your early investors can cash out. The majority of tech startups’ stocks drop after the price at IPO. It essentially leaves those who buy in at IPO holding the bag for the early investors’ partially unearned profits. Where it gets sticky in this example is those profits are only partially unearned, i.e., some is legitimate returns on their investment in a productive new startup, but some is from overselling to eager and naive public investors at IPO thanks to asymmetry of information. (Asymmetrical information is a classic cause of market failure; if people don’t know the true value of what you’re selling them, they won’t buy the optimal amount at the optimal price.)

As for solutions, I actually don’t know. Is it easy or even possible for a tax to discern between the earned vs unearned profits of something like that? If we do try to solve this market failure via taxes, is it easy to evade with fancy accounting, or does it cause unintended side effects? I don’t really know enough about finance to propose many solutions here. At least in theory, the purpose of a stock market is to allow anyone to invest in a company, allowing that company to raise funds for growth and reinvestment, and we certainly don’t want to discourage that, but of course speculative day-trading is not good either.

I think you’re talking about (human capital)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital], and I agree with this. This is also the reason why public education is free (despite being quite expensive). Additionally, I feel like all student loans should be with 0% interest, for this specific reason.

I agree 100%. Even beyond the investment in productivity factor, education has positive externalities such as lower crime rates, better public health, fewer teenage pregnancies, and better-informed voters, hence why we should publicly subsidize it. Tax the negative externalities, subsidize the positive externalities. On the part of the student themselves, however, it still does incur an unavoidable opportunity cost, as time spent studying is time not spent working and earning money.

Do people always have to generate more wealth? Can’t they just be content with having some wealth and live happily ever after with their wealth, without the perpetuating need to create more? I feel like this is the kind of mindset billionaires have; when they have 100 billion dollars, they aren’t satisfied, because they could have 101 billion dollars. And when they got 101 billion, they’ll go for the 102 billion, etc.

I agree, and I think this is actually one thing a more Georgist system would enable. Instead of spending our “productive time” like crabs in a bucket, rent-seeking and cheating each other, if we spent our “productive time” doing productive labor and making productive investments, we wouldn’t need to do nearly so much of it to achieve the same quality of life. If we had citizen’s dividend/UBI, Pigouvian subsidies for things like tree-planting and other public works (with positive externalities), free education, much cheaper land + housing, and much lower barriers to business creation, I think the negotiating power between employees and employers would be leveled tremendously.

Currently, I’m working as an engineer in a niche field, which means I get good pay, good treatment, and good work-life balance. This is because it’s hard to replace me, because plenty of people want to hire my skillset but not so many people have it to offer. If the average laborer had more fallback options – like UBI, pursuing higher education, planting trees for money, etc. – and less economic stress – like cheaper land and housing thanks to solving the housing crisis – I think they could naturally demand more pay, better conditions, and better work-life balance. I don’t know if you saw it in the Netherland, but I know the US and Canada saw something like this with the worker shortage during and post-COVID with the “great resignation” as they called it; suddenly there were lots of people needing labor, but not as many people providing it, meaning employers had to offer better deals to the workers.

What other things wuold you tax besides land, negative external effects and severances?

Main thing is I would primarily try more forms of those basic three categories of taxes. For example, a vehicle weight tax to account for the negative externalities associated with vehicle weight (e.g., the Fourth Power Law). A hefty pedestrian/cyclist fatality tax applied to automakers every time a pedestrian/cyclist is killed by one of their cars so as to encourage designs that protect the people outside of cars, not just inside of them.

I would also be in favor of congestion pricing to tackle the issues of congestible public goods, e.g., traffic on roads. Arguably this is a form of land value tax or Pigouvian tax. (That’s the beautiful thing about a lot of these taxes is they’re kind of isomorphic to one another.)

In agriculture/environment, I would also be in favor of a nitrogen + phosphorus tax applied to fertilizer manufacturers to account for the externalities of fertilizer runoff. If it’s practically feasible, also a severance tax on soil depletion by unsustainable agricultural practices and a carbon tax on soil carbon emissions from loss of soil carbon (also due to those same unsustainable agricultural practices).

I don’t know enough about finance to personally propose taxes for it, but I’m sure one could argue for some specific taxes to address some of the previously-mentioned issues in stock speculation and IPOs.

I’ve seen arguments for Harberger taxes on intellectual property as part of IP reform. My personal thoughts is to just abolish patents and publicly subsidize open R&D instead, through prizes, grants, and large public projects like the Apollo Program. After all, not all R&D is suited to private development anyways, e.g., nuclear fusion, which is far too expensive and far too uncertain to be an attractive private investment. I could, however, see the argument for some form of Harberger taxes in conjunction with more IP reforms.

(continued in reply due to length limits)

Thanks for the in-depth reply!

According to one of your comments, the LVT won’t be passed on to the renters, because the supply of land doesn’t change and the land owner is already charging the maximum price the market can bear. This would be true in theory, but we’re talking about an essential good here. Land is something people will eventually need, otherwise they’ll be homeless. This is also called an ‘inelastic’ product, because the demand for the product won’t change a lot if the prices change. The same applies for food; if a piece of bread costs $1, maybe there is a demand of 10 million in a country, and if the same piece of bread is suddenly $10,000, the demand stays the same, because people will starve without it.

This is actually what makes land special compared to almost every other good. The supply of land is perfectly inelastic, i.e., you cannot create nor destroy land, while the demand for land is merely regularly inelastic. If land prices are high, people can do things like move back in with their parents, move in with roommates, sell their car to not need to pay for parking (parking takes up land), etc. Because the supply is perfectly inelastic and the demand not perfectly inelastic is why, in theory, land value taxes cannot be passed on to tenants. This is borne out in practice, as well. This site describes far better than I can about the empirical evidence for this: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants.

In the original post, you say that you want to tax unproductive ways of earning money (such as owning land). What about financial securities? Things such as shares (as long as they’re not bought from the company directly), bonds, stock dividends, etc. Maybe also tax stock buybacks, as they’re often (ab)used to create artificial scarcity and increase the stock value (aka increasing profits for shareholders).

I’d be hesitant towards some of these because capital investments are still productive. One example of a capital investment is my education. My degrees cost quite a bit of time and money and opportunity cost, and the higher wages I now earn because of my higher labor productivity are the reward for spending time and money and forgoing income investing in my own education. As a general principle, I think people ought to either be doing productive labor themselves, or at least investing their money into generating new wealth. I’d rather see investments in factories and education than in land speculation. My inclination would generally be to tax land, externalities, and severance first, and then see if more is necessary beyond that. Part of why is, as Stiglitz showed, LVT is the only tax necessary to fund all government expenditures, and LVT is a uniquely elegant tax: it’s basically impossible to evade, remarkably easy to calculate and administer, and requires only tracking who owns what land (something we already do) as opposed to tracking every single individual’s private financials (much more complex and invasive, imo). However, I’d be open to any individual tax that one could show would target speculation/rent-seeking and would have more benefits to society than costs to implement.

with ‘negative externalities’ do you mean everything that has a negative external impact? Obviously carbon emission is an example, but what about something like smoking? When people smoke, they have a higher chance of getting lung cancer, therefore putting a higher burden on our healthcare system and additionally potentially negatively influencing others who have accidentally inhaled the smoke caused by the smoker. Would you tax this?

In a perfect world, yes, all externalities would be taxed, but practically it would be incredibly hard to tax all. Like I’m sure the engagement-driven algorithms of most mainstream social media have some bad externalities, but those are extremely hard to quantify and tax without having unintended side effect. Carbon is easier to quantify and tax, however, Same with nitrogen fertilizers (nitrogen pollution), PFAS pollutants, plastic pollution, etc. Regarding addictive behaviors/substances like tobacco and sugar, I probably would want a Pigouvian tax on them. However, the addictive nature of them means that more complex policy would likely be necessary to actually dissuade smoking. An added sugars tax might be a good way to combat the epidemic of adding sugars (in all their forms) to anything and everything. Part of the reason manufacturers add them is because they’re a dirt cheap way to easily make junk food taste better to the average person.

Would you also tax owners of cars that use petrol / diesel instead of electricity? They also produce carbon emissions. A negative thing is that logistics can become very expensive with such a tax and additionally lots of people use the car to do something productive (such as going to work or school), in which case their productivity is kind of taxed, because their productivity is producing co2 emissions.

Yes, this would be borne out in significantly higher prices paid at the pump for their fuel. It would, however, incentivize people to find more carbon-efficient ways to live their lives. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is both environmentally and fiscally unsustainable as it is, and our economy would be improved by using more micromobility, walking, and transit. Of course, a big part of enabling this would be by abolishing restrictive zoning and parking minimums. At least in North America, it’s literally illegal to build dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods on the vast majority of urban land, and nearly every single city has outdated, pseudoscientific parking minimum laws that dictate arbitrary minimum amounts of parking for businesses and housing. If we simply made it actually legal to make denser communities, people simply wouldn’t need an expensive, polluting car and tons of city real estate wasted on car storage just to do things like get groceries or go to school/work. Also considering the average annual cost of car ownership (including depreciation) is something like $10k, car-dependency creates a huge barrier to entry for people trying to access good jobs and schools to escape poverty.

Getting rid of income taxes obviously increases the amount of money people can spend, which will probably increase the demand for goods. When demand increases, but the supply doesn’t, there will be a higher inflation, which will negatively impact people who have less money (or are dependent on government welfare and are unemployed).

Yes, but it depends on the goods. Land value taxes (and lifting onerous land use regulations like parking minimums and exclusionary zoning) have been shown to reduce stabilize and reduce housing costs. LVT by incentivizing more development and cooling speculative pressure on land prices and the others by allowing more supply to be, well, supplied. Reducing land prices can vastly reduce the barriers to entry for many businesses, who could help increase overall supply in other sectors of the economy. Plus, if overall purchasing power goes up, who’s to say supply for ordinary goods won’t go up as well? In the short term there may be an adjustment period, but it’s not like I’d recommend switching to all LVT, no income taxes overnight; I’d want a phase-in period to give society time to adjust and plan around the coming changes.

Now that I have typed all of this, I feel like a lot of these points can be solved by government spending (for example, provide people with free public transport, so they no longer have to use the car to get to work, increase the unemployment benefits based on the inflation index), but I’m still commenting this lol

I agree completely. I (and many people of the same ideology re: LVT as me, aka Georgists) also support a citizen’s dividend/UBI. Basically the money the government collects from LVT, externality taxes, and severance taxes should go back into society in the form of just straight cash, infrastructure and public goods, and subsidizing positive externalities such as education and public research and rewilding/conservation and so forth.

But yeah, overall my view is a combination of pragmatism and idealism. Sure it’s nice to strive for the ideal, but we want to at least get as close as possible via pragmatic, economically grounded policies. And I just think it’s neat that a lot of these policies (such as LVT) can simultaneously reduce inequality and increase prosperity and reduce wastage.

Edit: spelling

My brain always reads “ACAB” as “assigned cop at birth”

Thankfully, that’s not quite how tax incidence works.

For land value taxes, both in theory and in practice, LVT cannot be passed on to tenants.

For Pigouvian taxes (e.g., carbon tax), yeah, that’s actually part of the point. It shouldn’t be so dang cheap to pollute the planet. If it’s artificially cheap to pollute and waste and destroy, neither you nor businesses have incentive to clean up your act except out of pure good will. And unfortunately good will alone cannot be counted on to protect the planet and the victims of negative externalities from a perverse profit incentive.

For severance taxes, well, the Norwegian model shows that subsidizing exploration and taxing exploitation increases competition, increases supply, and increases overall prosperity in society. The high (and risky!) costs of exploration act as a huge barrier to entry for smaller competitors, ultimately resulting in monopolistic competition, high rent-seeking, and half-assed exploitation. Why bother developing efficient exploitation techniques if you can coast on unearned monopolistic profits?

Exactly! You do produce the value of your own wages, but you don’t produce the value of the land or natural resources in your possession. All of humanity ought to be the ones to benefit from the value of the land and earth’s natural splendor, not just a select few who staked their claims early.