[ForHackernews]

Automation (or AI) is coming for all of our jobs sooner or later. We need to start talking about how our society can pay for Basic Income for all the unemployable former fry cooks, truck drivers, lawyers, anesthesiologists and software developers.

[joshuapants]

Personally, I'm in favor of a land value tax[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

[ForHackernews]

Interesting case study: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2...

[drzaiusapelord]

Wikipedia:

>A land value tax is said to be a progressive tax, in that the tax burden would fall on landlords and cannot be passed on as higher costs or lower wages to tenants, consumers, or laborers.

The stereotype of rich landlords hoarding money is a falsehood. Every landlord I know here either makes a very modest income or loses money because of shady tenants and the incredible amount of pro-tenant legislature they take advantage of. In Chicago, an eviction takes 6-12 months.

Are you guys going to take these laws off the books then? You can't have it both ways, really. Poor urban areas have enough abandoned buildings as-is without punishing landlords further. If you make rental properties a poor value proposition then squatting takes over. We've seen this a million times. Landlords, are unfortuantely, an easy target for politicians looking to score voting points from the non-land owning rabble.

[ForHackernews]

All the landlords I know are really whiny that they have to actually maintain their properties and provide services to their customers. They seemed to assume they could just get free money for owning a building. I've suggested they sell their multimillion dollar asset and retire or go get a job, but they don't seem to want to do that.

At any rate, the point of the land-value tax is that it would encourage land owners to build larger and better improvements on their property, instead of just holding the land and waiting for its price to increase. Think building a high-rise apartment building instead of leaving it as a parking lot.

[mindslight]

Further making everyone a renter, and eliminating any chance of widespread economic security as there will be even greater dependency on month-to-month cash flow.

What needs to happen is the exact opposite, via eliminating repossession of residences in bankruptcy or otherwise breaking the financial abstractions that create the never ending positive feedback in housing prices. Then we can finally have a housing correction and people will be able to buy homes instead of only renting them from banks. Labor will then have more bargaining power and wages will raise naturally.

[joshuapants]

What makes you think you can own land in the first place? The land belongs to the US, and is the birthright of every US citizen. You should have to pay rent to the actual owners (the US citizens) to use it.

[mindslight]

> What makes you think you can own land in the first place

Well sure, if you want to define it that way. But my argument is coming from pragmatic utility - when people own things, they are freer to choose their own path as they are less encumbered by obligations.

A major assumption of the concept of free markets is that the parties to a transaction are coming from roughly equal bargaining positions with regards to walking away. But a starving man doesn't have much choice of what job he takes or how much it pays when he just needs to eat.

If everybody had their basic needs taken care of and people were working solely for extra gadgets, which job do you think would command more compensation - sitting in front of a computer writing CRUD crapps or arduously picking up garbage while wrecking your body? Is the current gradient of pay rates actually inevitable or simply just convenient?

So what I'm pointing out is that in my opinion, the main problem with our economic conditions is that the concept of ownership has been greatly eroded. People that have to continually pay rent don't have much choice whether to work (whether scraping by minimum wage or hitting it out of the park with an in-demand job), and your proposal makes the problem even worse.

> The land belongs to the US, and is the birthright of every US citizen

Now you're proposing your own narrow framework, which actually contradicts your previous sentence - why wouldn't it be the world population? (USG holds a force monopoly on one chunk, but one can make the same argument about individual self-defense bootstrapped up through game theory and pooling in a sheriff)