[anamax]

Oh goody. Another group with an equation that they confuse with a complete picture of reality. (When you point out that reality comes up with different answers, they try to change or camouflage reality.)

Note that Georgists don't tell us HOW the value of this "land value tax" is determined. It certainly isn't uniform across the US, but where does it change and why?

In addition, Georgists insist that "public infrastructure" drives value. Ask the folks who own motels near Disneyland whether they'd have a business if Disney left.

Note also their assumption that "maximizing value" (as they define it) is the only important goal. It isn't.

That's why they go for insults for anyone who doesn't behave as they'd like.

For example, a "speculator", who Georgists hate and want to punish, is someone who says "hmm. There's more value in the future if I preserve things now." In other words, it's more reasonable to point out that Georgists are (at best) short-term maximizers.

Then there's the small detail that Georgists fundamentally believe that everything should be at the average/the same. If one apartment house is the highest value near a given location, they want to punish anyone who doesn't have apartment houses near that location.

You'd think that they'd get called on that by the "everything should be walkable/bikeable" folks, but I suppose there's some sort of tribal loyalty at play here.

[ethanbond]

Georgists absolutely do not believe that public infrastructure exclusively drives value. Rather that the value of the land is set ~exclusively by the things that happen not on that land, both public and private. So your example of Disney is a very good pro-Georgist example. Why should someone who happened to own a random piece of land and did nothing with it for 4 generations get a multi-million dollar windfall because Disney accomplished something nearby?

Re the valuation of land separately from the improvements, these are already separated on the vast majority of appraisals. Granted the need to get this right goes up if all taxation was derivative of this, but let’s not act like this is some impossible problem that no municipality would take a stab at. The vast majority already do.

[anamax]

> Rather that the value of the land is set ~exclusively by the things that happen not on that land

You do know that that is not true, that the value of land often depends ON things that happen on that land, right? (It's not hard to come up with examples.)

But, I do appreciate an example of something that I didn't mention, namely the propensity of Georgists to make claims that they find self-evident and profound but are actually are false.

> Why should someone who happened to own a random piece of land and did nothing with it for 4 generations get a multi-million dollar windfall because Disney accomplished something nearby?

The taxes aren't going to Disney....

> Re the valuation of land separately from the improvements, these are already separated on the vast majority of appraisals.

And that separation is mostly a fiction, as anyone who owns real estate knows.

[ethanbond]

The unimproved value of the land (I.e. the basis of taxation in a Georgist scheme) is definitionally exclusive of things that happen on the land. There are improvements that, especially over time, become inseparable from the land (e.g. irrigation, grading, etc.), at which point of full integration are just considered an intrinsic part of the land. This too sounds a little weird until you realize that again, this already happens today! Improvements to land that are not identifiable, e.g. the grading that the owner 200 years ago did, is already baked into what we perceive, today, to be the unimproved land (again, as already designated on your appraisal).

I am very curious to hear your examples of improvements/activities on land that become part of the unimproved value of land at a fast enough rate to matter?

Of course some portion of the taxes go to Disney. Who do you think pays for the air travel system that brings people to Orlando or LA? Who pays for the freeway system that brings in the food?

Re your last argument, the word “mostly” is doing an obscene amount of legwork. Obviously the unimproved land has a market price $X and then the land + structures on it have a different price $Y. So no, obviously the separation is not a fiction, but any particular dollar value is certainly a bit subjective and fuzzy, just like all appraisals are. For what it’s worth, appraising unimproved land is much less subjective than appraising the land + improvements, which we use as a tax basis today.

[anamax]

> The unimproved value of the land (I.e. the basis of taxation in a Georgist scheme) is definitionally exclusive of things that happen on the land.

Ah yes, "let's define away the problem."

> Of course some portion of the taxes go to Disney. Who do you think pays for the air travel system that brings people to Orlando or LA? Who pays for the freeway system that brings in the food?

The typical argument is that Disney doesn't pay enough for those things. No one thinks that such things are "money going to Disney", which just goes to show the absurdities that you have to accept when trying to paper-over the problems with Georgism.

> I am very curious to hear your examples of improvements/activities on land that become part of the unimproved value of land at a fast enough rate to matter?

Who said that "improvements/activities" are the only way for the unimproved value to change rapidly? The land around Disneyland is a counter-example.

As to your suggestion that there aren't examples that fit your absurd restriction, I'll point you to the super-fund sites where SV fabs used to be.

As I hinted earlier, having a cute equation is no substitute for critical thinking.

> Obviously the unimproved land has a market price $X and then the land + structures on it have a different price $Y.

The question is not whether they have prices, it's whether they can be determined.

It's reasonably easy to determine the market price for their sum. How, exactly, do you separate them?

BTW, you're probably assuming that improvements necessarily have non-negative value. That's actually wrong.

[ethanbond]

It’s getting hard to label all these straw men!

1) I don’t know what “typical argument” that Disney pays too little you’re referring to. I find it completely believable that Disney pays too much, but haven’t run the numbers to figure that out. More important than how much they pay is why they pay it, as the latter controls the nature of their incentives.

2) Of course it’s not true that “no one” thinks public services that benefit private entities should be considered tax dollars doled back out to those entities. You’re talking to at least one such person right now, and I strongly suspect there are others.

3) No, I do not believe that all improvements have positive value, which is why I said no such thing and is also why your superfund example is not that tricky. If an improvement incurs negative value and cannot be easily separated from the land (such as pollution), then it becomes, effectively for all purposes (not just taxation) a feature of the land itself. In this case that would, as is reasonable, yield a reduced land value and thus a reduced tax basis. In cases where the negative improvement is easy to remove, the reduction would be less or nonexistent — as would be reflected automatically in the market price for that plot.

4) Yes we agree that determining the exact $ value separation between land and improvements is nontrivial.

[Schroedingersat]

A buy or sell offer system works pretty well for determining value.

Claim whatever value you please for tax purposes.

Anyone can put your land into the commons by giving you your claimed value multiplied by a small safety factor. The current owner then gets priority on public housing or continued stewardship of the asset.

Anyone can purchase your land in a forced sale by offering your claimed value x a larger safety factor (+ max(the median home value within a half hour walk/train/etc, median home value country-wide) if it's your only residence).

The goal is to counteract the agglomerative nature of wealth. Profitability (no matter whether your abstraction for ownership is property or political favour) as a fundamental concept is a tax on the poor to the benefit of the wealthy. You must fix this for your system to be stable and not excessively punishing to the poor.

[anamax]

> A buy or sell offer system works pretty well for determining value.

Georgists, which are the subject of this thread, explicitly say that taxes should not be NOT based on improvements, just the "land value". So if the improvements have significant value, buy sell doesn't work.

I'll let you fight that with them.

> Profitability (no matter whether your abstraction for ownership is property or political favour) as a fundamental concept is a tax on the poor to the benefit of the wealthy.

Twaddle. The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid.

To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free.

[Schroedingersat]

>The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid.

>To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free.

That's pay.

Profit is proportional to capital, not effort (even if it requires effort to materialise). Wage or earnings don't prodce the same pathological effects as profit, even if one person earns $500/hr and another earns $5/hr, the inequity and power imbalance is a constant and relatively quite small compared to exponential inequity entailed by making earnings proportional to wealth.

The assertion that a factory, or a 1000 hectare farm, or a house that you don't live in can be owned is a positive statement, not a brute fact of the world, or a necessary consequency of commerce and trade. As soon as you maoe that statement you are saying that owning these things entitles the owner or shareholder to an exponentially increasing share of control over the world and other people while your farmer and garbage man slowly go bankrupt.

[anamax]

"exponentially increasing share of control"? "Exponential" has a meaning and the situation you're describing isn't consistent with it.

If there's an exponential at work here, it has a vanishingly small exponent.

People who don't get paid for access to their capital don't make said capital available to others.

Note that all capital starts as "I made x but I'm going to spend less."

[Schroedingersat]

d/dt(wealth) = a * wealth - constant

This is the definition of an exponential and the definition of profit. If under your system you can profit in terms of proportion of a real, finite commodity which is essential for life (ie. control more land in proportion to how much land you control on average with a known strategy available to anyone) then your system definitionally has runaway wealth inequality and will necessarily end in violent collapse or totalitarianism.

The inclusion of the constant prevents entry to the system by people with less than a threshold level of wealth and skews the benefits towards wealth levels where the constant is small. The result also holds as long as the term on the right is polynomial or larger.

[salawat]

Except Georgists determine your unimproved land value by looking at the improved land value of everyone around you. Otherwise, the proximity to Disney wouldn't mean squat in the post-upthread.

[anamax]

> Except Georgists determine your unimproved land value by looking at the improved land value of everyone around you.

How, exactly, do you get from improved land value to unimproved land value?

It's arguably possible to approximate the value of a hotel+land across the street from Disneyland. How, exactly, do you determine what fraction is hotel (improvements) and what fraction is land?

Looking at other hotels in the area just tells you (an approximation of) the difference between the hotel values. That's not enough to determine the absolute value of any hotel.