[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

[NoRagrets]

Right. I don’t think we will agree on economics because I have a degree in economics and my thesis paper was on Milton Friedman.

Secondly it is not market forces when the govt has to interfere and impose more taxes to make sure homes become affordable to the working class by snatching away the economic net of the non working retired class. In fact, it is the exact opposite of ‘Markets’. It’s a freebie by the govt to the govt educated public school kids who became adults. The kids who grew up in public schools are doing what they were taught to do. Redistribution of common resources and wealth. Socialism sits uneasily with free market forces. An imposition of an INCREASE in taxes is not the same as imposing a tax.

Friedman speaks about land value tax on unimproved land. And that the property tax thus collected should be used for public services like law and order, infrastructure and essential services.

Almost 85% of the property taxes collected is used for public system. 45% of California state budget goes to provide free public school education for everyone regardless of whether they pay taxes or not to the tune of 10-12k/child per annum. It is also used to cover unfunded pension liabilities of these public school system teachers.

I am pretty sure you haven’t understood what Friedman suggested and this was read from some Bay Area real estate sponsored article from a click bait’y rag that has nothing to do with economics or Friedman or libertarian economics.

There is zero economic logic is in trying to alleviate housing shortage by taxing retired property owners on fixed incomes except to displace them..aka drive them away to make space for public school educated young people who despite having earning power are not mobile enough to educate their kids in quality schools because California’s educational system is a Ponzi scheme. And no one is paying attention to it because the schools did not do the job of actually educating these kids in..I don’t know..subjects like economics.

Current workinh populace can not afford to buy properties from older folks. Because they lack the purchasing power. So the mob wants to increase taxes so old people who don’t gain anything from public school funding will leave.

This is exactly what is known as ‘cutting the nose to spite the face’ because what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The only winner is the govt that gains more taxes from property, income(because only the wealthy can now afford to buy and most of their income is going to income taxes, property taxes, sales tax, gas tax, road tax on top all the other special taxes, parcel taxes, business tax etc). It’s like in the casino..the house always wins. Why anyone with a modicum of understanding of economics cannot see this beggars belief.

The problem is relating property taxes to public education budgets. The problem is the speculative nature of real estate and allowing foreign investors to speculate on California real estate. The problem is the lack of TRUE purchasing power of the Silicon Valley grunt workers allegedly making hundreds of thousands of dollars in income but have little to show for it. The govt is taking them for a ride and they can’t see it because the critical knowledge of evaluating a bloated govt’s economics is conveniently left out in the public school system. And I suspect..by design.

Density benefits taxes. Taxes are ‘good’. The purpose of a tax increase is to make it unaffordable for retirees to continue living in their homes and to displace them. It doesn’t pay for any services. The govt acts like a henchmen so housing stock is cleared and made available for the highest tax paying demographic. So they can collect more taxes. Let this sink in. I repeat. Let.This.Sink.In. Milton Friedman ..trust me on this...wouldn’t approve.