Comment on Reification
HardNut@lemmy.world 7 months agoLand value tax is simply unjustifiable, because land is the most important thing to leave in private hands. To allow for land tax is to concede that the state has a right to the land you own. The problems that has directly lead to in history are innumerable. From Rome to Russia, state control of land was at the forefront of their issues.
Why do you think reducing their wealth is a moral good? If you want to improve life for some people, your focus should not be on reducing wealth for others. The latter does not necessarily lead to the former, and it’s an inherently destructive mindset. Destroying one person’s wealth merely destroys their wealth, it does not make others lives better by default
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m sorry but I completely disagree, the state of current affairs is a direct result of the private ownership of land with inefficient tax systems intended to staunch the flow of blood like a bandaid over a gushing artery.
Land and natural resources were not created by anyone and cannot be justified as being owned by anyone. The way we would represent public ownership of natural resources via capitalism would be a tax on the use of said resources, a rent paid to society for being allowed exclusive use of it.
I’m not advocating for socialism or communism which is where your issues regarding public ownership of land stem from, capitalism works just fine as long as the correct institutions are being taxed in an efficient manner. The LVT would work well because it doesn’t allow land to just sit around unused. You either fulfill a direct supply need for a market or you sell it to someone who will do so. Not only does that put market direction and supply back into the domain of the consumer who’s needs in terms of say… Housing are being left unfulfilled, but would incentivize the efficient use of land and help create something other than single family homes that most of society doesn’t need and can’t afford.
It also keeps the wealthy from dodging taxes, because it wouldn’t be possible to hide the amount of land your businesses use the same way you can take stock options instead of an income or use tax haven bank accounts and deflect most of your tax burden. It also frees up the worker and their employer from taxes while putting the tax directly onto the people who provide the least value in the chain and derive the most wealth from that parasitic action, landholders. Individuals who own a couple houses aren’t the target, we are talking primarily about businesses that take up hundreds of thousands of acres for manufacturing and who’s owners are more wealth than the rest of the nation combined.
As for your insinuation that reducing wealth doesn’t equal more wealth for others, that’s correct. However, the entire idea of wages deriving from capital and the malthusian doctrine are both fundamentally flawed and have lead to the idea that there has to be poverty, there has to be this significant of a class divide. It’s just the laws of the universe, can’t do anything about it! We have never seen the outcome of a society that taxes in this manner and provides services like an automated capitalist economy which uses land tax to facilitate a UBI, which is the inevitable endgame of modern LLM and robotics technology. If we don’t plan for that by deciding now that land is publically owned and “rented” from society via tax then we are going to see continual wealth disparity and our Western cities are going to start looking a lot more like India with obscene wealth next to miles of homeless camps. Those that own the land and the capital will reduce our workforce while sucking up the increased profit margins and the eventual reality will be a few trillionaires alongside millions of destitute and starving people who don’t have jobs to justify their existence. Only we won’t have the ability to drag them into the street and cut off their heads like the French revolution, because they’ll be living in underground bunkers on unmarked islands or in space stations at the top of the gravity well. Untouchable.
The human race is fucked, these issues were called out over a century ago and we might have gotten through to people, but because an entire generation of Westerners thinks public ownership of anything is LITERALLY COMMUNISM even when it’s in a capitalist economy, we will just see the issue get worse as the middle class gets nuked into oblivion.