[amunicio]

He doesn't have to move far and away, he can go live to the other side of the San Mateo bridge and pocket at least a million dollars on the house price difference.

And as others have mentioned, there are other mechanisms to defer the tax payment based on the house equity.

The real cruel thing is to lower the bar for the "have" (as in have a house in SV) and higher it for the "have not".

[jelliclesfarm]

I guess at the end of the day those who own property will do what feels good for them.

It’s funny to see non owners seem up of ways property owners could do with their ‘wealth’.

Guess what, they own property in the hot Bay Area market by virtue of..wait for it..being here and working before most of us were born!

So we can sit here on hacker news and think of all that they need to do to make us feel better, but it means nothing, you know. It’s like the French peasants wondering how Louis XIV should redistribute his kingdom to them. There are no victims. They aren’t the villains...they are just old folks who want to continue to live and die in the towns they funded and built and not be bothered by kids who were likely educated in free public schools they helped build.

[dodobirdlord]

> There are no victims.

What a ridiculous take. Besides, the problem of people wanting to remain in their existing homes is trivially solvable by deferring property taxes as liens against the property to be paid on the death of the owner. Average property tax in California is ~1%, so a person could live an entire lifetime without having to pay anything. But of course that was never the real reason anyone supported these absurd initiatives. It was always about rent-seeking.

[jelliclesfarm]

Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t tax people for living in the properties they own. Property taxes are just another way to ensure that one never owns their homes 100%. Leins? Who in their right minds would agree to this?

When you want someone to part with their money or wealth, you have to give them a reason to do so. ‘We want what you have’ is not a good reason. It becomes a punitive tax and is based on coercion.

I see no valid arguments or offers that would make people agree to higher taxation.

The have-nots want to take more from the haves. This has happened many many times in the past. It comes from lack. Not logic.

[neilparikh]

> You can’t tax people for living in the properties they own.

We have to do this if we want to allocate land properly. Land is an exclusionary good, so one person owning a piece of land means that someone else can't own it.

Imagine a society with no property tax. What prevents one (or a few people) from buying up all the land, holding it indefinitely, and then charging arbitrarily high rent to everyone else? Property tax forces people to sell if they using it inefficiently, and makes sure that few aren't able to take land and exclude everyone else.

[jelliclesfarm]

When you want to take what’s someone’s property and make sure you want to ‘allocate’ it to someone else who wants it..it’s called redistribution.

They used to send people to re-education camps to ensure it happened smoothly. We may not have re education camps here in CA but asking senior citizens to accept punitive taxes so they would feel incentivized to move to the country so land can be reallocated is the same thing.

And yes, ‘one or few’ people will buy up everything and hold it. It is the nature of property rights. To have rights over ones own property. If you want to rewrite that, we have to change what America is about..

Being able to live in your property is not ‘using it inefficiently’. Wanting someone’s property ..otoh..is theft.

[neilparikh]

> When you want to take what’s someone’s property and make sure you want to ‘allocate’ it to someone else who wants it..it’s called redistribution.

No one's property is taken, they'll just sell it on the market to whoever can pay the most. That's not redistribution, it's called markets (what America is build on).

I think we fundamentally disagree on economics, so I doubt we'll come any useful agreement here unfortunately.

However, one thing I wanted to note is that Milton Friedman, one of the most libertarian modern economists thinks property tax is the best tax [1][2]. If a libertarian economist thinks a policy is good, yet you're comparing the policy to authoritarian socialist countries and re-education camps, you may want to consider that your mental model of economics/definitions of common words is extremely off base from how everyone else uses it. The Conservative Party in UK did the same thing, where they called land value tax (essentially what I'm arguing for here) a "Marxist tax grab", even when Marx opposed it!

In general, using words to mean the exact opposite of what everyone else considers them is not a great strategy.

Even ignoring that, I think claiming that property taxes are the "same thing" as re-education camps is a fairly tone-deaf statement to make (and one most readers would consider wrong), and it only serves to weaken the rest of your argument.

[1]: in his words, the "least bad tax", but that's equivalent, since he considers taxes to be required

[2]: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7Jb58hcsc