• 1 Post
  • 118 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle



  • All they have to do is, instead of calling it a “law”, call it “militia regulation” instead. “Militia” is the entire arms bearing populace; if you own a gun, you are, by definition, part of the Militia. And the 2nd amendment doesn’t merely say “everyone has a gun”; it does so in context of maintaining a “well regulated militia”. All the right to “keep and bear arms” does is prevent them from requiring we store our arms in a central armory (which was one of the controversies over the matter in England when the right was in development).

    I would say we also have a right to own a car. That doesn’t prevent them from requiring we maintain the capacity to bear responsibility if we should accidentally exercise that right improperly.













  • You don’t need to adjust for income. How do you get high value land with a low income? How do you own high value land and not derive an income from it? You’re imagining an extreme edge case of some family that’s been passing high value land down, generation after generation, without ever leveraging this advantage into financial success.

    The more valuable the property, the larger a component of that value that tends to be in the value of the location itself, as opposed to the capital improvements to that location. Low income housing, as cheaply built as it is, is built in an even cheaper location. Conversely, a house but for higher income people is built more expensively, but even greater is the access to good schools, jobs, shopping, low (blue collar) crime rates, and so on that a high value location provides.

    And that’s just residential real estate, which is almost people even think about. With commercial and industrial sites, location becomes even more important.

    People who talk this way don’t know what land value is. They imagine there is a relationship to quantity, when location is almost the entire driver. Maybe a thousand square feet of space in upper Manhattan or San Jose or something is comparable to a hundred acres in rural Wyoming, or wherever.

    And what about the poor in cities? They already pay a land value tax… to the owners of the land. You will say that if the owners are taxed, they will raise rents… but if they can just raise rents like that, why haven’t they already? Normally, a tax can be “passed on” because a tax on a thing affects the supply of that thing: the tax raises costs, which lowers profits, which drives capital out of that industry and into another, which reduces the amount being produced, which allows the higher price.

    But land is fixed in supply. If you’re imagining a way of increasing or reducing the supply, you’re not thinking about land, but capital improvement to it. The supply can be neither increased nor decreased. Its existence is not dependent on any industry or thrift or other service on the part of the landowner and, as such, any income derived simply from owning a location and leasing it out to others is unearned. It’s essentially extortion, one person renting to another the “privilege” of existing, and if there are any landowners not collecting the full value that can be collected, it is either because they haven’t found the highest price yet, or out of the kindness of their hearts.