Some squatter who bought the rights to it for two twigs and a raspberry back when they were first selling off name rights 200,000 years ago

It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

It’s just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

This is so true for the housing crisis. Conservative NIMBYs will be like “deregulation good!” and “free market good!”, but then they religiously show up to any and all city hall meetings to rant and rave about how we need to use heavy-handed regulations to protect “historic” parking lots and the “neighborhood character”.

Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would’ve arrived at the office sweating like a pig.

On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.

With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.

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Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.

Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.

It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.

You speak a lot about “means of production” for someone who has not once uttered a single word of concrete, tangible solutions in this entire thread. I’m out here posting sources, data, policies, and actual solutions that would measurably improve people’s lives, while you’re here larping online, doubling down on your bigotry against sexual minorities, and doing zero praxis.

It’s a libertarian who had his land taken by agribusiness.

Certainly one of the takes of all time.

fursona

I’m no furry, but this is honestly very rude and condescending towards people with that kink. Not sure why you thought that bigoted, conjured-from-thin-air jab was necessary. Maybe don’t be a bigot towards sexual minorities online?

You know those words in that order are talking about slavery right? The ownership of labor in private hands?

Just because you say it confidently doesn’t make it true. Read a little bit about the factors of production. Here, private ownership of labor means the value of your own labor is yours, rather than taxed away (such as via income taxes) or otherwise expropriated by the state.

And yes, of course I’m skipping over a lot of nuance in the difference between communism and socialism, but this is the highest level distinction. Much like there’s a heck of a lot different between humans and E. coli, but the highest level distinction is that one belongs to the domain bacteria and one belongs to the domain eukarya.

You said yourself you support private capital.

And I also said I support social ownership of land and natural resource, either directly with government leases or indirectly via taxes, which is very much not a capitalist/libertarian viewpoint by any stretch of the imagination. Very convenient of you to leave out that half, isn’t it?

And considering Georgism diverges from capitalism at the highest level of categorization, well, let’s just say your pet theory that “georgism = capitalism” falls rather flat. To continue the biological analogy, it’d be like if you said the domain archaea is actually just a subset of bacteria based solely on the fact that you had pre-decided that you think bacteria and eukarya are the only two domains of life. Or if you said all fungi were actually plantae because you pre-decided that you think plantae and animalia are the only two kingdoms of eukarya.

Very bold opinion on the categorization of an entire economic ideology for someone who, far as I can tell, literally never heard of it until today.

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but one of the most basic ways to categorize economic ideologies is based on who owns what factors of production, i.e., who owns land (including natural resources), labor, and capital.

Broadly speaking, communists believe in social ownership of all three, socialists in social ownership of land and capital, and capitalists in private ownership of all three. Within this framework, Georgism falls squarely on the belief that land should be socially owned (either directly by the government and leased out kinda like Singapore does or indirectly via “full” taxes on land, negative externalities, severance, etc.), while labor and capital ought to be privately owned. Thus, it is equally incorrect to describe Georgism as either socialism or capitalism, as it is simply neither.

Unlike libertarians, neoliberals, and capitals, Georgists view monopolies and private ownership of land as basically satan. That’s a pretty dang big difference.

How would you feel if I attempted to reduce down the wild complexity of leftist ideologies – everyone from syndicalists to market socialists to distributists to demsocs to Marxists – into “lmao a bunch of Pol Pot supporters”? Pretty silly and reductive, isn’t it?

Lol what?

You keep on trying to put me into little ideological boxes so you don’t have to engage with a new-to-you economic ideology.

And for the record, libertarians are dumb af and almost uniformly oppose the Georgist vision of land. And carbon taxes. And severance taxes. And unions. Andl YIMBYism. And IP reform. And so many other Georgist ideas that neoliberals and libertarians typically hate.

It’s especially funny because libertarian types love to call us land commies. Clearly we can’t simultaneously be libertarians and land commies…

Your thing, neoliberalism

Except I’m not a neoliberal. Total strawman.

Rather I’m a Georgist:

Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism,[2][3] and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society.[4][5][6] Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.[7][8]

Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value, arguing that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (such as on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen’s dividend.

For reference, several historians credit Henry George’s publication of Progress and Poverty as defining the start of the Progressive Era:

Progress and Poverty, George’s first book, sold several million copies,[1] becoming one of the highest selling books of the late 1800s.[2][3] It helped spark the Progressive Era and a worldwide social reform movement around an ideology now known as ‘Georgism’. Jacob Riis, for example, explicitly marks the beginning of the Progressive Era awakening as 1879 because of the date of this publication.[4]

It’s difficult, yes, but our society has fought and won battles against vested interests before. Good policy can be fought for and achieved, as evidenced by basically every successful country on earth.

I just want to advocate for good policies in this thread so that we can solve some of our problems. In my experience, a lot of people can identify that there is a problem with the landlording class, but many people don’t know a whole lot about the underlying reasons why this dynamic exists or what we can do policy-wise to fix it.

the parasitic relationship between landlord and tenant

This is also part of the goal of land value taxes. If we all can agree that landlords’ hoarding and monopolization of finite land is what allows them to extract unearned profits from the rest of us, the land value tax is the mechanism to reclaim those rents. The idea is to turn landlording – a position of power and privilege with access to economic rents – into mere property management – a regular job where you earn income based on the labor you do in maintaining properties.

In Bibi’s eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.

How so? Land value tax is just supremely good tax policy, and we should be striving to replace our broken property tax system with it.

Any progressive tax system that incentivizes new housing development, disincentivizes speculative land holding, empirically makes housing cheaper, and cannot be passed on to tenants is an absolute win in my book.

drop property taxes on occupied buildings by 17%

As they should. Property taxes are broken and enable land hoarding and speculation.

raise taxes on unoccupied land

Not quite. The point is to raise taxes on the unimproved value of land. For example, two identical lots with the same underlying land value – one vacant and one with an apartment building – would both pay the land tax, but it would be the same amount. They key idea being to heavily incentivize the owner of the vacant lot to do something with it (like build housing) rather than just sit on it as a speculative investment. It should cost speculators money to keep valuable land idle.

Even a quite milquetoast land value tax, such as in the Australian Capital Territory, has been shown to reduce speculation and improve affordability:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

Detroit is trying to, largely at the behest of their mayor, Mike Duggan. Detroit would especially benefit from the proposed tax, as it has a ton of vacant land, much of it owned by the ultra-wealthy Illitch family:

Ilitch Holdings has been criticised for leaving many properties in Detroit untenanted, allowing them to decay, and for demolishing historic buildings and leaving lots empty, or only using the lots as car parking, rather than developing them.^{[11][12][13][14][15]}