| > First of all, it's come from no one's pockets until you sell. Until then it's just a hypothetical, theoretical gain on paper. It comes from their pockets when they pay rent. Meanwhile you, as a property owner, receive thousands of dollars a month in imputed rent by owning a place to live. You also have the ability to spend the money without selling the property by borrowing against the equity, as many people do. > Second of all, when you do sell it, the money will come from the pockets of your willing buyer People "willingly" subscribe to Comcast. Not because they prefer doing business with Comcast or believe themselves to be getting a fair deal. > if you still want to feel bad about something, let it be this: The people celebrating the increase in housing costs because they own housing should feel bad about it. Especially the ones who caused it by lobbying for zoning restrictions. > But that's why we created the universal land value tax and used it to replace all other taxes! (Hello from the year 2078!) This doesn't actually fix housing shortages created by restrictive zoning -- which you could conceivably still have with a land value tax and a government that keeps the restrictive zoning to maximize land values and therefore tax revenue. (Land is worth a lot more if you need it proportionally to build housing instead of just buying one piece of land to build an arbitrarily large amount of housing by building an arbitrarily tall building.) |