You ignore any issues anyone brings up and just make up more junk. No one would anyone buy property if when sold all the proceeds go to the government. The video is stupid as that is now how property taxes are determined. Land with structures on it can be worth more or less than equal raw land depending upon the structures, zoning and various fees. Land with structures on them can be worth MUCH less than raw land or worth much more with structures on it. Property taxes are not set by determining the value of the land and the value of the improvements independently - meaning the person on the video doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Person on the video of your message also totally hates nature and wants all of land based animals and nature totally destroyed because he wants massive tax punishment against anyone who maintains natural land to force them to bulldoze it down nature and develop the property. The guy isn't just anti-environment, he totally HATES nature and the environment. We are on the exact opposite end of this horrific perspective. We have a massive tract of virgin 100% natural land. Woods, swampland, marshes, mud flats, estuaries and small shell islands. Due to this being a semi-tropical zone it is a wildlife haven and breeding ground with this area recognized nationwide for exactly that - land, air and water. In exchange for ZERO property taxes we agreed to lease a 99 year NO development easement on the property for the total rental of $1 a year. Part of this is the tiny portion for our residence is also perpetually tax-free. For $1 a year the government has a huge wildlife preserve - and being tax free us this is viable to us. You and the person on that video want to use massive taxes to destroy it all. To force it to be used to drain the water and marshes, bulldoze it all down, and artificially raise the land to cover it with roads, concrete and buildings in a total genocidal war on nature. Of course, equally you both have a plan to also destroy all farmers and ranchers by punishing them for not developing the land as well. So you plan is to force the total destruction of nature plus everyone starves to death. Swell plan in your idea of how YOU could avoid paying any taxes and how everyone should pay for you.
His and and your core premise is outright false as well as he asserts there is a shortage of developed property with structures on it. To the contrary in much of the USA there is a glut of it. In Florida over 1 million vacant houses. In this area approximately 1/3rd of commercial space and buildings are empty and turning derelict. The last thing we need is more commercial buildings. With real estate prices continuing to crash with far more sellers than buyers, there also is no need for any residential property. As for raw acreage? People who have it can't give it away and the fate of most has been increasing foreclosures and bankruptcy. NO ONE is developing land and wouldn't around here even if the land was free. Abandoned land and abandoned property - which you plan would radically escalate - are not an improvement plus shatter property values overall - and therefore property taxes collected. If raw land has no value, it is irrelevant how massively you raise taxes on it, is it? Nor are taxes paid on abandoned land and structures. So it becomes no-income expenses to the government instead. Urban people who live in apartments or at home live in an unreal bubble in many ways, often developing self-serving theories of how others pay for them that are totally detached from reality. I anticipate you also will ignore this as you have virtually all messages pointing out the lack of reality in your claims, to instead give some other non-real rationalizations why you should pay not taxes and landowners should be required to pay your share of taxes instead - another something-for-nothing-other-people-owe-me socialistic perspective.
Once you recognize the claim the US government has asserted over the 3,796,742 square miles in question as legitimate, you give up any rational standing you may have had to complain about what it does with that land.
You have no idea what you are talking about. None of your accusations about the system I propose are true. The system I am advocating is very simple. All I propose is that instead of the government appraiser telling you what you HAVE to pay in land taxes, I am proposing that the government ask you and everyone else in your community what you and they are willing to pay in taxes. What I am proposing, in essence, is that if we allow each individual citizen of a community the opportunity to make an offer to the taxing authority, an offer that they come up with themselves, that their offers will be sufficiently high that all other taxes on income, savings and trade can be abolished. Land can never be abandoned by the market under this system because the taxes can never be higher than what someone has offered to pay. The most productive individuals will offer the most annual land taxes for land where public infrastructure is dense and of high quality, while the less productive will offer the most where infrastructure is scarce or depreciated. I am not advocating more government control. I am advocating less government control. Under the system I am advocating, the government appraiser doesn't tell you what you must pay. It is up to you to tell the government what you are willing to pay. The government just takes the highest bid and levies the tax at that amount. Finally, under this system the rich cannot “own” all the land, because each individual of the community makes his maximum offer of annual payment to the county government. This means that the rich will have no interest in owning land as an income generating asset, because it cannot generate income. The taxes are equivalent to what the person who wants to occupy the land is willing to pay, and not a dime more nor a dime less. The rich will have no interest in owning land where the person occupying the land is paying his full offer of payment to the local government in taxation. Thus, there is plenty of land left available for poor people. I doubt you can wrap your head around this idea, but at least I can say that I tried.
I am confident most people would say "sorry, I can only afford a dollar and I'll have to owe that to you" if they set their own property taxes. Maybe I confused you with another member? If so, sorry.
Sorry, I didn't explain that quite the way I wanted. What I meant to say is that you get to have input to what your taxes will be, but so does everyone else in the community. In other words, you get to tell the government what you are willing to pay in taxes, but if others offer more, then you must vacate the land parcel. All the land will have a private owner, except for land which the government needs for specific public purposes. Who those private owners are will be determined by who makes the greatest offer of annual tax payment to the taxing authority. The government agencies who use or hold land would also be subject to this land tax, with a portion of what the government pays in taxes, along with a portion of the taxes collected from private land holders, being returned to the citizens of the community in the form of a citizens dividend. Every parcel of land within the community (including land held by the government) would be held by whoever offered the most tax payment in return for the exclusive use of the land. Every citizen of the community would receive an equal annual payment from the government, as the government would be required to return any unearned land rent back to the citizens in the form of a citizens dividend. The citizens dividend would effectively cancel out the land taxes for small parcels of land held by an individual, because the individual can use his dividend to pay the land taxes. Under this system everyone would get to use some land for free, nobody would be landless.
All claims to own land are based on nothing but force, and are therefore just as "legitimately" overturned by force. Huh? He somehow gives up his "rational standing" to advocate better government policies to secure liberty and justice in land tenure administration? Run that one by me again.
No, he is objectively correct, and your claims are objectively false. There is a shortage of structures people can use. Why aren't the homeless in them? Blank out. Evidence? Clearly false. Prices are rising. there also is no need for any residential property. Clearly false. Because of mortgage debt. Nonsense.
What you responded to was a single sentence. You cut it in half, and tried to give separate responses to two incomplete thoughts. No wonder you had trouble understanding. Anyway, this is false. Many ownership claims are based on homesteading. Homesteading is not force.
Before the land can be homesteaded it must be stolen – by force – from those who were otherwise at liberty to use it. “AFTER conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with the land.... In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms”.--Albert J. Nock,(*)Our Enemy the State "A right of property in movable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands not till after that establishment.... He who plants a field keeps possession of it till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated and their owner protected in his possession. Till then the property is in the body of the nation".-- Thomas Jefferson
When I say "homesteading", I mean the act of putting an unowned resource to use. Appropriating, by putting to use, something that no one else is using or has a legitimate claim to is homesteading. Appropriating by force, threats of force, or trickery is stealing. Homesteading is a legitimate way to establish ownership. Stealing is not a legitimate way to establish ownership.
First of all, there is not a single title to land, the whole world over, which can be traced through consensual trade to the first user of the land. Homesteading is a myth. As I said before, the land must be stolen before it can be homesteaded. Secondly, unowned land represents an opportunity available to workers; an opportunity which allows workers to demand higher wages from employers. Every appropriation of land reduces the alternative opportunities available to workers. Once all the good land has been appropriated, the workers lose all of their leverage they had over their employer, and can be forced to work as virtual slaves. So while it may have appeared to you that the land was not being used before the appropriation, it was actually being used as leverage by the workers to demand fair wages. Because the appropriation of land causes real losses to workers wages, a system must be created whereby those who receive the appropriation make a compensatory payment to those who are harmed by that appropriation. The Georgist land value tax system provides the mechanism whereby those who receive the advantages of appropriation can make just compensation to those whose opportunities are diminished by that appropriation.
That is about the most ridiculous proposal ever. If you build a house or business on some land, and one day someone else shows up and offers to pay more taxes for the land than you, then you lose your land and house and business. All your years of hard work gone in one instant because someone let you build the house/business/farm, let you take the risk and spend the money and make the sacrifice, and then outbid you. And you get nothing for your efforts. The result? Nobody except the wealthiest - and the govt - will invest or build because it can all be taken away from them by the highest bidder. And who is the wealthiest entity ever? The government. After a while, the government will own all the critical land. Most poorly thought out concept ever.
Basically what he is saying that I can take anyone else's property by offering more tax money. Since a majority of Americans do not have a spare $1000, I could steal most homes for $1000. For a penny on the dollar I could take 90% of the homes of the elderly and then over half the farmers and ranchers in the USA. Then to avoid homelessness and starvation, I could make them pay rent at such a level that they pay me the money to pay the taxes plus a profit. What he posts is so naive and bizarre, totally detached from reality, that certainly he could at least come up with a better theory of why he should what others have without earning it, working for it or paying for it.
His plan also would be a good tactic to wipe out enemies. Anyone who understands auctions understands only the high bidder wins. We go to many. We "win" maybe 1% of what we bid on - but drive up what everyone else bids without it costing a cent. So if I didn't like someone living in a $150,000 that is paid off, I could bid against person for his own home, with no intentions of getting it, though would if cheap enough. So I can bid him up to $100,000 - since I have $100,000 - and take his house for a profit - or take it for less if he doesn't have $100,000 - or he has to pay $100,000 because I bid his up from $10,000 - thus costing him $90,000 because I don't like him. I wonder if he would agree to this for his personal property - since many states have personal property taxes. Anyone can bid on the taxes on his car, bicycle and computer. So I could bid $100 taxes on his computer and take it - or he pays $100 in taxes to keep it - costing me nothing. You are correct, it is the most absurd plan ever proposed on the forum - and one that allows the rich to literally take everyone else's homes, property and every business location, plus every acre of farm and ranch land. Big corporations would quickly wipe out all small competitors and the super rich literally could wipe out entire towns. I don't like Democrats? I find you voted in the Democratic primary around here - and then run up everyone of their annual property tax to 50% it's total value - and it wouldn't cost me $1 to do it. But if some didn't have 50% cash the value of their home? Then I buy it for 50 cents on the dollar and cash in the equity they accumulated to put into my own pocket. In fact, I would likely be agreeable to selling their own house back to them at a great interest rate and owner-financing - so they have to pay me to live in their house. Certainly a way to get black, gay, Latino and poor people out of your neighborhood. Just run up their property taxes beyond what they can pay - which for most people isn't very much. Of course, there would no longer be possible for anyone to get a mortgage loan.
Factually, land must be "occupied" prima facie. Moreover, the original land was occupied by Indians whose ancestors were from Asia and had come across the Bering Straits (when there were no "straights") via a land-bridge. They were not considered individuals or even human-beings (but "savages") by the colonists, and had no title to the land because they roamed it to hunt. It was the sedentary European colonists who arrived in the New World to apply their own sense of "ownership" to the land, and all that was both on the land and under its surface. In an international court of law, the Indians would have a good case against "Uncle Sam" for land-theft; which is why perhaps Uncle Sam does not recognize many of them. The notion of "Aboriginal or Indigenous Rights" exist, however, in Canada. From here,
just like people used to be able to live on one income, but then when women started to work it took two, soon without taxes we would have the same spending power as with taxes
Ownership is the exclusive right to control a given resource. Homesteading is a conceptual standard by which ownership can be established peacefully. The Georgist land value tax is a system on which a government is the owner of all land(Georgists will disagree with this and say that it is really owned by "the people" or "the workers", but everyone knows that neither "the people" nor "the workers" run the government), and the government will rent out the land(which the government attained its exclusive power to control, not by consensual trade or peaceful means of any kind, but by threatening violence against anyone who would defy its claim) to whomever is willing to pay the higher rent. On Georgism; not using something is equal to using it, theft is necessary in order to use something for the first time, late comers have a better claim to a resource than its first user, threats of violence are a legitimate way to establish ownership, land is the only capital good, there is no such thing as time preference, and failure to prove that something was not stolen is proof that it was stolen. There are many other fantastical delusions in the world of Georgism, but that shouldn't surprise us.
Agree 100%. Consumption taxes are the civilised approach. But I would limit it to luxuries- ie, anything newly manufactured which cannot otherwise be sourced used, and of course alcohol, tobacco, cars, tvs, air conditioners, etc etc. The rich might choose to pay to consume those things, but there's nothing about being rich which indicates a special need to do so. Ergo any suggestion that it's a rich tax would be emotional, not logical.
How about only tax NEW items. Rich folks tend to buy NEW cars and pay the tax. Poor folks buy USED cars (like they tend to do anyway) and pay NO tax.
Wrong. Property would trade in the open market just as it does now, only at lower prices because the land value would be stripped out of real estate prices. Buying and selling a house or business would happen exactly as it does now. While the market would be responsible for determining what taxes are due, that doesn't mean that owners of property can be displace without fair compensation. If you cannot afford the taxes which the market dictates are fair, then you put the improvements up for sale and sell it just as you would now. You don't get nothing for your efforts but rather you get everything your efforts produced, free of taxation. Under land value taxation you get MORE for your efforts than you do under the current system. That is why I advocate for land value taxes, I want producers to keep MORE of what they earn. Under the system I advocate the government would want to own as little land as possible. Under the land value tax system the government receives its revenue from private landowners, and the less land that is in the hands of private owners, the less revenue the government can collect. If government owned all the critical land the amount of revenue it could collect would be severely reduced.
If you tax new cars that just creates more demand for used cars and the prices of used cars skyrockets. In other words, the tax on new cars is passed to the buyers of used cars, but I have a feeling you already knew that. I know that you like taxes that can be passed to the poor, so that you can get something for nothing.
No, land has been stripped of having any value whatsoever and only a true idiot would spend a dollar improving it or building anything on it. Your plan has nothing whatsoever to do with market values. It has to do with who has the money to steal everything from people who don't. All land would end up in the hands of a few super rich people, no one else.
I understood it as well as it could be understood, given its ungrammatical nature. No, it is true. "Homesteading" is definitely force, because it forcibly removes others' liberty to use the land, liberty they would have enjoyed had the homesteader not purposed to deprive them of it by force. In any case ACTUAL historical homesteading only happened after -- or while -- the original inhabitants and users of the land were forcibly dispossessed. There is not a single square inch of privately owned land, anywhere in the world, whose legal title can be traced in an unbroken chain of consensual transactions to the land's original user. Not one square inch. ALL land titles are based on force.
No, it would only be stripped of almost all its EXCHANGE value, because that is just the market's estimate of how much more the owner will be able to take from the community than he repays in taxes. The land's USE value would remain intact, and in fact, would be measured by the market rent. So you are unaware that all of Hong Kong is built on publicly owned land? You are unaware that the fashionable -- and very expensive -- London districts of Mayfair and Belgravia were built on leased land? You are unaware that the EMPIRE FRICKIN' STATE BUILDING was built on leased land? Your claims are false and absurd. It is based entirely on market rental values. It simply requires the repayment of the market rental value to the government and community that create it, rather than to a parasitic private landowner who does not. That describes the current system of landowner privilege, whereby the earned income of the productive is stolen by taxation and given to landowners in return for nothing. No, your claims are false and absurd. Rich people who tried to exclude others from more land than they could efficiently use would simply lose money. It would be a very quick way to bankrupt themselves. You appear to possess no comprehension whatever of basic economic relationships.
