[epistasis]

A tax on the market value of a house should go up when the market value increases.

This is double true when the value went up without any change to the structure. Structures depreciate, and become less valuable over time. When property values go up in California, it's almost entire land value that goes up. The value increase isn't from the labor of the land owner, it's just simple rentierism.

Land gets more valuable because of what one can access close to it: jobs, relationships, people, universities. All this value is socially created. This sort of wealth hoarding is hugely damaging to the economy, and all sorts of thinkers revered by people in the US have nothing but the worst possible words for it, from Adam Smith to Thomas Paine.

It is quite strange for the wealthiest members of a community to depend upon the less wealthy to fund a community, but that's what Prop 13 is all about. This situation, where the wealthy could buy their way out of taxation, is a lot of what led to the French Revolution.

[jjav]

> where the wealthy could buy their way out of taxation

This is literally the opposite. If you buy (a property), you'll have the taxes based on what you bought. You can't buy your way to a lower tax rate.

[imtringued]

You're right. Early adopters bought their way out of taxation, house appreciation made them wealthy. It's not that you start out wealthy, you get wealthy in the process and once you are wealthy you don't get taxed more. That's the effect he was describing.

[jjav]

> Early adopters bought their way out of taxation

I wouldn't phrase it that way because it's not what they did, even if decades down the road it turned out that way (it could well have gone the other way like it did for homeowners in Detroit years ago).

What they did was buy a home they could afford, based on monthly mortgage + taxes payments, which is the entirely reasonable and responsible thing to do.

Having the property tax balloon out of control and out of any conceivable affordable range due to actions of other people in the area, is hardly fair.

[epistasis]

Every year their taxes get smaller and smaller, as the tax is, by law, sub inflationary.

The older the wealth, the lower the taxes.