Knowing Humans
Study their behaviors. Observe their territorial boundaries. Leave their habitat as you found it. Report any signs of terrestrial intelligence.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Why Tax Land Value?
Taxing land value is not only more efficient than taxing production or exchanges, but it is also less intrusive. All the government needs to know is who owns each plot of land and how much the unimproved land is worth. Appraisers and insurers make such calculations routinely, and one variant would have each land-holder self-assess as long as he's willing to take any offer over his assessed value. There's no need to audit anyone's behavior, as with taxes on income/production/exchanges. You don't even need to visit the site or look over the fence, as you do with taxes on land improvements or square footage. For illiquid landholders, taxes could accumulate as a lien against the property, capped at its market value, so nobody need ever be taxed off the land they hold.
Land value taxes are naturally local, and so encourage Tiebout Sorting. If the the local mix of government services is too high (or too low) for your taste, or if they aren't a good value for the LVT rate financing them, then you can vote with your feet. By contrast, income and sales taxes tend to get centralized at the state or even national level, because (unlike land) income and sales can flee to lower-tax jurisdictions. (New Hampshire is among the most free states, and gets the highest percentage of government revenue from property taxes. California finances its high government spending with high centralized state income taxes that rose after Prop 13 restricted local property taxes in 1978.)
LVT retrieves the extra land value created by public services — streets, pipes, levees, police, parks. This creates pressure to defund public services that do not actually add value in the free market for land.
LVT turns out to closely model how consensual private communities tend to govern themselves. Malls, business parks, hotels, condominiums, homeowners associations — all tend to "tax" their tentants not according to profits or revenues or inventory or improvements, but mostly by site value (for which square footage is often a good proxy).
LVT imposes a built-in ceiling on government revenue. Critics of land value taxation claim it wouldn't raise enough revenue because ground rent is allegedly only a small fraction of GDP. That sounds like a good thing to me. If government revenue is restricted by definition to ground rent and fees for polluting/congesting/depleting the commons, then government cannot be nearly as big as when it is allowed to tax labor, production, exchanges, and all resulting products. Once you have taxation of people's labor and exchanges and produced assets, there is no limit to what the government can take from you.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Free Style
Free Spirit
Free Will
Free Choice
Free Thought
Free Minds
Free Markets
Free Enterprise
Free Society
Free Elections
Free Speech
Free Press
Free Information
Free Software
Free Trade
Free Navigation
Free Oceans
Free Skies
Free Soil
Free Earth
Thursday, December 31, 2009
The Decade Ends Tonight
If the Gregorian Calendar started from the year 2, who would say that the present decade will continue for another two years?
Friday, October 30, 2009
NORAD and 9/11
NORAD was never advertised as being able to prevent hijackings.
Throughout most of my life, there have been thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the U.S. Some of those nuclear weapons were targeted straight at the SAC bases on which I and my family lived during both the 1962 DEFCON 2 and the 1973 DEFCON 3. When I was a kid and the network signal went out on the TV, I quickly switched channels to another network, to test whether New York had been vaporized and I thus had only a couple minutes to live. And yet, none of those nuclear weapons ever hit the U.S., or were ever used to coerce us.
So yeah, I’d say NORAD lived up to its advertising.
As for the gap in our defenses revealed by Mohamed Atta on the morning of 9/11: that problem was fixed within an hour by a small group of heroes in the skies above Pennsylvania. Their number included Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer, and Sandra Bradshaw.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Non-Profits and Land Value Taxation
Example: In the Silicon Valley suburb where I live, land is worth about $2 million per acre. There is a 20-acre monastery here (adjacent to the mansion recently sold by Barry Bonds, and down the street from Cisco's CEO) where 16 cloistered elderly nuns sleep on straw mattresses, have no TV, and wake up in the middle of the night to pray. Their only "work" is "prayer", and they live only on "alms". I kid you not: http://www.poor-clares.org/losaltos/losaltosl.html.
Example: About a mile north of here are hundreds of acres of land owned by Stanford University in the hills above campus, with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. Nearly all of the land is off-limits to everyone but -- wait for it -- cows. The university grazes a handful of cows there, in order to comply with Leland Stanford's requirement that a demonstration farm be maintained on a portion of the vast amount of land he used to create the university.
So we have nuns and cows, both sleeping on straw, keeping hundreds of acres of prime Silicon Valley land off the market, thus propping up property values for me and my zillionaire CEO neighbors, and making sure that their gardeners and maids can't afford to live anywhere near them.
For the market to be able to guide all land to its best use, all land has to be treated equally -- even land owned by churches and governments. If people really value churches, they'll either pay for them to occupy prime sites, or they'll drive a little further when they want to go pray as a group.
