This got long and I didn’t want to just drop it into your askbox as an unformatted multipart wall-o-text.
…I also have concerns about relying heavily on land tax, depending on implementation. If it’s based on current value, then:
You’ll have poorer people being priced out of their homes and being forced to move if where they’re living ever becomes more valuable. That’s pretty shitty, even if the land could be put to more “efficient” use. Yeah, it already happens–I think that’s the real issue with gentrification, more than the “character of the neighborhood” changing–but that doesn’t mean we should put more pressure in that direction.
1. Forcing people to move is a pretty heavy cost that’s worth at least trying to avoid imposing. Having to move can mean having to find a new job, losing any location-based community, your kids having to change schools and leave behind their friends, plus the expense and hassle of the move itself. In the worst cases it might mean being homeless. It upends your whole life. Even if a move is voluntary it upends your whole life.
2. It means telling people, “You don’t deserve to live somewhere nice. If where you already are becomes nicer, you’ll be kicked out”. That’s a hell of a message.
3. Knowing that you’ll have to go through all that if wherever you’re living ever becomes more desirable seems liable to create perverse incentives.
I’ve seen you express some disdain for the idea that, and I’m not quoting here, just paraphrasing based on memory, that people have a right to stay in the same place forever with nothing changing. But I don’t think people are unreasonable to want to be able to carve out some degree of security and to not have yet another factor outside their control that can potentially fuck up their entire life.
Additional items:
You’re taxing based on value that’s purely theoretical until someone tries to sell. In a way this is true for any property tax, but I think it’s more true for land; it’s hard to directly compare different parcels of land because the location itself is what you’re selling, more than the actual square footage. And it can change without the current owner necessarily benefiting from the “increased” value.
Also, if revenue from land tax is specifically funding services in the area, you get a situation where anywhere cheap to live has underfunded services. In the US, a large chunk of funding for public schools is from local property tax, and it works very poorly.
Anyway. My thoughts on land tax. I think you could avoid some of this–for example, by the tax being a fixed amount based on the last sale price (i.e. if you buy it for $x, then the annual tax is fixed at $y, a percentage of $x, until you sell it–at which point $y is readjusted to reflect the amount you sold it for). But that wouldn’t necessarily be in line with what it seems like you want land tax to do and represent.
It strikes me that part of what you’re after, dear owl-friend, is the moral basis for this taxation.
Either that, or simplifying the taxes.
I don’t think either is really optimal. People will create “moral” arguments against any kind of taxation that is devised, and most likely the burden of taxation should be somewhat diverse in its sources partly to make evasion harder and partly to cause less distortion. It could be simpler and altered in many ways, but having only one tax is probably a bad plan in some way.
And as for the moral basis, we both know that property and law are just force one step removed. Those claiming a higher moral standing on “taxes are theft” are just fooling themselves. (And in part, this can be chased down to a disconnect on the justification for where to root causality, where consciousness is being used to mark personhood to even attempt such philosophies in the first place, but not as the final causal root, which is incoherent.)
