[AnthonyMouse]

The purpose of taxing tobacco is to discourage consumption. The tax is directly the mechanism for achieving the desired purpose rather than a hardship imposed on some otherwise innocent people only incidentally. It's not a taking, it's a penalty.

When your neighbor builds a house next to yours, that's not a taking because it's not the government doing it. If you wanted to control what got built on a piece of property that isn't yours, you should have bought it yourself, or entered into a contract with the property owner where they agree not to do that for a particular period of years and you compensate them for the restriction.

Governments should have to compensate property owners for zoning restrictions and the like. That makes perfect sense, for the same reason they have to compensate for any other takings -- because you're imposing a hardship on a specific innocent third party for a collective benefit, which is unreasonable. If there is to be a collective benefit then it should be paid for out of the collective fund and not disproportionately imposed on unconsenting innocent people at random. And if it turns out that the cost of compensating the property owners for the restriction you want to impose exceeds the value you hope to achieve by imposing it, that's some pretty good evidence that you shouldn't be doing it -- which is exactly why it should have to be paid out.

The fact that courts decided not to do that with zoning is the whole reason we have a housing shortage -- because now we've over-produced zoning restrictions since they can be imposed without accounting for their cost.

[jen20]

> because you're imposing a hardship on a specific innocent third party for a collective benefit, which is unreasonable.

This sums up the American attitude to life better than anyone has ever done for me before.

[wiz21c]

I don't know if it is for Americans only but reading that makes me, once again, very nervous for the next century climate...

[twelvechairs]

> The purpose of taxing tobacco is to discourage consumption. The tax is directly the mechanism for achieving the desired purpose rather than a hardship imposed on some otherwise innocent people only incidentally. It's not a taking, it's a penalty.

And the purpose for environmental regulation is to discourage extinction in the same way. You are arguing black with one and white with the other...

> When your neighbor builds a house next to yours, that's not a taking because it's not the government doing it.

So when I'm overshadowed, my view is blocked, added noise etc. thats not 'taking'? Only governments can take not private citizens? I don't understand this view at all.

I agree zoning has been completely overdone but its definitely necessary unless you want your neighbour to be a 24-hour chemical plant.

> If there is to be a collective benefit then it should be paid for out of the collective fund and not disproportionately imposed on unconsenting innocent people at random.

Its going to have to be a huge fund to pay for all of this. Where's all this taxation going to come from to compensate me for not being able to build my chemical plant? or skyscraper?

> The fact that courts decided not to do that with zoning

I think you need to look deeper into the history of zoning. For me the new york zoning of 1916 is a good start in the United States - it was obviously needed and lobbied for by all the boroughs, as well as huge numbers of residents and landowners. Nobody could have had the money to pay for the compensation you ask for. The Euclid case I would tend to agree wasn't a proven good and has started a downhill trend.

You should also understand that land has historically always had a communal quality and this is growing more important in the 21st century as a scarce resort. Land use regulation of some kind has always co-existed with land ownership through history.

[AnthonyMouse]

> And the purpose for environmental regulation is to discourage extinction in the same way. You are arguing black with one and white with the other...

The difference is the proportionality of the hardship.

If you smoke cigarettes and there is a cigarette tax, you might pay an extra $5/pack, but so does everybody else. It's uniform. That amount might convince you to quit or smoke less, which is the whole idea.

With zoning or environmental rules, they're not uniform. It's not the case that anybody who cuts down a tree has to pay a tree tax. It's that one unlucky soul can't cut down any trees on his property, and the trees there are worth a million dollars, but somebody else is free to log their trees without constraint.

Notice that in the first case, compensating the target for the tax would make it totally ineffective. If you paid $5 in cigarette tax but then that was a taking and you got your $5 back, that wouldn't cause anybody to quit smoking.

Whereas if government had to pay the one guy with the land where the woodpecker lives a million dollars to not cut down his trees, that works fine. All it does is spread the million dollar cost of saving the woodpecker onto the whole tax base instead of unjustly imposing it on only that one guy.

And it forces you to do the accounting. So that if it turns out to cost a trillion dollars to save that one woodpecker, maybe it's not worth that much.

> So when I'm overshadowed, my view is blocked, added noise etc. thats not 'taking'? Only governments can take not private citizens? I don't understand this view at all.

Your view goes through the neighbor's property. So there are two ways to handle this.

One is, you have a right to the view. Then the person who wants to build a skyscraper first has to pay you for the right. But this works very poorly because you can see a skyscraper for miles and if any one person can stop it then everybody has the incentive to demand a million dollars. It becomes impossible to build anything anywhere.

The other is that it's the property owner's view and they just hadn't been charging you for it. If the neighbors don't want a skyscraper there then they can get together and buy the property and not build a skyscraper on it.

Mostly that still causes the skyscraper to be built, because in general the value of a skyscraper is greater than the value of the view, so people aren't willing to pay that much to preserve the view. But that's things working as intended. You want the thing that produces the most value. If people really want to preserve the view that bad, they have to pay the money.

> Its going to have to be a huge fund to pay for all of this. Where's all this taxation going to come from to compensate me for not being able to build my chemical plant? or skyscraper?

It only has to be a huge fund if you're over-using zoning restrictions so that it costs a lot to build certain things.

Suppose you say that 20% of the town is restricted to single family housing. Well, that's fine, if you want a single family house which isn't next to a chemical plant then you buy one there, and if you want to build a chemical plant then you can do it in the other 80% of the town. Since there are still plenty of places to build a chemical plant, the value of the properties where it's allowed is only negligibly higher than the value of the properties where it isn't, and that's the amount you have to compensate for the restriction.

But if you want to zone 90% of the town for single family housing and there is almost nowhere to build chemical plants and skyscrapers then the value of the land where you are allowed to build those things will be really high and so will the amount you have to compensate everyone else for the restrictions.

That would be completely unaffordable, but the solution isn't to pay out the money, it's to increase the number of locations where it's permissible to build chemical plants and skyscrapers so that you don't have to.

> it was obviously needed and lobbied for by all the boroughs, as well as huge numbers of residents and landowners.

Existing landowners like for zoning restrictions to exist on everybody else's property, because it increases scarcity. If you have a single family home and it's illegal to build high density condos anywhere in the city, the value of your home goes up, because you don't have to compete for home buyers with the condos.

Zoning restrictions on your land reduce the relative value of your land and increase the relative value of everyone else's land. So the profit maximizing strategy for a land owner is to have none on your own land and heavy restrictions on everyone else's. The next best, especially if you weren't planning to further develop your land anyway, is to have heavy restrictions on yours and everyone else's, because the increase in artificial scarcity is more than the value lost to the restrictions on your own property.

The cost of this is paid by anyone who wasn't already a property owner when the zoning restrictions were put into place, e.g. people who don't yet live in the city. This is one of the reasons they spread so rapidly -- the victims don't have a vote at the time when they pass, and to get a vote in order to remove them, you have to buy property at the artificially raised price, at which point you have the incentive to retain the restrictions and not lose the money you paid.

> You should also understand that land has historically always had a communal quality and this is growing more important in the 21st century as a scarce resort.

It's growing more scarce because of zoning restrictions. If it was easier to build skyscrapers then the supply of real estate in terms of available square footage would increase and ease the scarcity.