It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. Many people who have owned a house for the last 20 years got in at a lower price compared to their salaries. The only way younger people can get a house now is to inherit their parents wealth.
Even if I work my ass off, I won't be able to afford a house the same as my parents did. My only hope is that I inherit their house when they pass.
What most people have yet to realise is that home ownership is a quite negative phenomenon. The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing. People who are particularly attached to the capitalist system will suggest crazy solutions like a limit on the number of houses per person, but the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. There is no advantage to privately owned land except the ability to horde it and create waste, or rent it out and create inefficiency.
What is owning a home? It is having the power to legally demand other people leave it. Hence owning a home requires the ability to rent out a home, and to to rent out many homes and drive up the price. Likewise we have much land, but it has not been developed because people own it. In a system of government ownership, they would eventually be outbid on the lease for their land and it would be developed into a larger amount of affordable and higher density housing. Instead people own that land and are able to keep it underdeveloped at the cost to everyone else, then use this leverage to enrich themselves through the increase in house prices. There is no positive argument for the private ownership of land over public ownership.
Just say “ownership is theft” if thats what your argument reduces to.
That said, I think the concepts around georgism and dynamic value based taxes are a bit more interesting and address the “land banking” concerns you inserted.
I hate having to explain this to people, but a tax based on the value of something is called rent. Georgism is a system where the government owns all land and leases it out, but then the call the rent a "tax" to make it more palatable to people who are afraid of public ownership.
Thats a pretty reductive world view. I suppose “the monopoly of force and law implies control, and quote-unquote ownership, by the state.”?
So, mission accomplished? The state already compels me to pay annual taxes based on the value of my titled real estate, my car, my income, my foreign assets, etc… I guess Im just renting it all from the state?
Mind you Im no John Birch-man here. I actually pay 42% of my income in taxes, and think real property _should_ be taxed more effectively here in AU. But jumping all the way to “ownership is theft, and taxes are double secret ownership” doesnt seem particularly useful.
You are trying so desperately to put those words in my mouth, but I will not say them as I don't know what they mean.
> taxes are double secret ownership
I'm not making an ideological point here, simply pointing out that the proposed systems are isomorphic in their objectives and execution. They both aim to increase the productive use of land by charging a periodic fee to the occupants of said land based on the market value of the land. There are two differences: the first is one of language (rent vs. tax), and the second on how the rate of this fee is determined. Under socialised land, the market price of land is the same as the fee charged. Under Georgism, the fee is charged by a bunch of politicians looking at the market price of land and trying to figure it out based on that.
Given that the two systems are essentially identical, but the second brings in undue political meddling, I see no reason to prefer it to the first solution outside of the practical situation that many people are afraid of public ownership and therefore would be more likely to vote for the worse option. Do you have any real argument for Georgism over public ownership?
Honestly, he argument you make is quite confusing as it seems to conflate ideas/terms[1], redefine language[2], and draw distinctions[3] at will. It's a bit hard to reason about something when it mixes interpretations of 'what is' with 'what could be'.
You're conveniently glossing over issues like price discovery (auctions?), periodicity (annual?), and what I suspect are some pretty large inefficiencies implied by requiring continual re-bid/repurchase of existing real property vs a small proportional tax. Im an amateur, no graduate degree in economics here, but I would wager there's a reasonable amount of literature around the benefits of surety of title and depth of markets for efficient discovery to support a distributed, private, ownership & transaction model.
WRT "scary" ownership, as I said I live in Australia. I understand what crown land is, title, registry, and how we've transitioned through those ~3 times in 200 years. That's actually another example where some proclamations[4] don't quite hold up; Land ownership in Australia _is_ owned by the crown already. I merely hold (indefinite) title, so maybe 'government ownership' isn't quite the panacea? I do find our current real property and capital rate mechanisms deficient, and would appreciate something a lot closer to an annual LVT.
When you say "... the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. There is no advantage to privately owned land ..." don't act surprised if you get lumped in with those who argue against private ownership of real property.
[1] "The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing"
[2] "a tax based on the value of something is called rent"
[3] "Given that the two systems are essentially identical, but the second brings in undue political meddling"
[4] "...the real solution has always been government ownership of all land."
> I suspect are some pretty large inefficiencies implied by requiring continual re-bid/repurchase of existing real property
You are incorrect to suspect that. The price must still be discovered in the Geogist system through market means, and the additional burden of rediscovering it to issue the tax means doing that work twice. You are on a software forum so I assume you understand computers well enough to appreciate that the effort required for this in practice is essentially zero. A system sufficient to serve an entire nation of people could be programmed by perhaps ten engineers.
> I would wager there's a reasonable amount of literature around the benefits of surety
You can't just assume someone else has made your point for you and expect me to buy that. The system of government ownership can provide any degree of surety depending on how its implemented, but in general the objective of both systems is to force people to sell land instead of hording it, i.e. to reduce the surety people have over their ability to occupy land indefinitely.
> a tax based on the value of something is called rent
This is not a redefinition of language, but a simple observation that the two things are identical in practice.
> don't act surprised if you get lumped in with those who argue against private ownership of real property.
I don't care how justified you feel in mischaracterising my views.
> so maybe 'government ownership' isn't quite the panacea?
Yes, clearly if you read my argument made thusfar it dictates that government ownership is only effective when it is leased back to people in a market fashion. "The government owns it but you have an indefinite lease with no charge" is another example of changing the language of something without changing the practice of it. In practice, you own that land.
Finally, I am going to ask that you no longer attempt to find differences between Gerogism and social ownership. When you look at the actual implementation of both systems, they are the same. Any policy in Georgism has a one-to-one equivalent policy under government ownership. In fact Georgism is equivalent to a government ownership system with the following setup:
1) Leases are indefinite.
2) A substantial upfront cost is levied against people who wish to acquire a lease, determined by the highest bidder.
3) The charge on a lease is determined by some fraction of the upfront cost on surrounding leases of buildings.
Having observed this, we can see that it could be improved by removing the upfront cost, and instead have the lease determined by the leases on surrounding buildings when those buildings are vacated and the lease is put back up for auction. Forced renewal of leases is not necessary under a government ownership system as the increase in lease prices should be enough to naturally remove under-performing businesses. However the opportunity to renew a lease gives you a positive advantage over a Georgist one: if you feel your rent is too high, you can subject it to market scrutiny by voluntarily ending the lease on the property and offering the highest bid in the resultant auction.
Nope. The government could own all land and have the same system for withdrawing leases as is currently employed for eminent ___domain. You might say the government could change that system, but it can also change eminent ___domain. This is not an inherent difference of the two systems. One could even envision a system where the government has no ability at all to withdraw a lease and thus occupants are more safe than they would be under eminent ___domain. On a practical level, the Georgist system might even be more likely to turf people out than a social land system, because presumably the land tax would increase to price people out at the market rate, where a lease agreement is more likely to have controlled increases.
Well as nice as the sentimental definition you gave is, the legal definition of home ownership revolves around a set of rights granted to you by the government over a plot of land. I could feel safe and secure with my family a t Pizza Hut, but I don't own Pizza Hut.
Problem is, homes have two functions: a place to live and a wealth preservation vehicle. As a result, many homes are owned by those who have no need to live in that particular place. Bitcoin can substitute some wealth preservation functionality, because it has the same scarcity property as the land, thus improving the housing situation.
Assets which purport to preserve wealth (outside of a bank account) usually end up as some kind of pyramid scheme. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of housing as the victims have no choice but to buy in, and take out increasingly large loans to pay off the previous generation's buy in. Bit coins are quite similar in structure, though they lack the forced buy in, which is why many of them are now attempting to target pensions funds and even lobbying to create official government reserves. (About half of all corporate spending in the last US election was crypto.)
I'll bite, why do you think a limit on how many homes a person can own is a bad thing? Let's clearly separate homes and other real estate here, so shop floors, factories, warehouses, etc are out of the equation. Since you mention inefficiency, how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use?
I think it is better than the current situation but worse than the optimal situation, that is government ownership. What's more, ignoring commercial land ignores that many commercial enterprises would benefit from the proposed solution in the same way people living in houses would, yet there is no mechanism by which you could limit one company to a single building of operation.
> how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use?
This question is why I consider the solution of a limit on ownership stupid. A person can reasonably use however many houses which they can afford to rent. It isn't up to me to decide what counts as reasonable use. It is simply a question of whether other people would be willing to pay more for some other purpose. Suppose someone wishes to purchase an entire abandoned town and can do so at a relatively low rate due to it being abandoned, I see no reason to deny them them this, yet a limit on home ownership would do precisely that.
One should also note that a land tax is another inferior solution to the problem. It is effectively a government lease on land which doesn't allow the rent charged to be determined by market forces. What makes total government ownership of land the most practical solution is that it most closely follows market principals. Usage of land is contingent on productive revenue from that land in excess of the revenue generated from alternative usages. Any other solution will fall short of the optimal allocation of resources which the market provides.
This is pretty basic knowledge, there is only State and Collective owned land in the PRC. Individuals can only obtain _leases_ of State owned land. Property rights of _buildings_ are distinct, but will generally follow land title/lease.
Collective ownership isn't State or Government Ownershaip (negating the "all land" part) and in China "State Ownership" is an underlying ownership that doesn't carry the weight of immediate direct ownership, hence nail houses where individual lease holding rights that are automatically renewed trump the underlying state ownership.
Point being, it's not as simple as it's made out to be and it's not dissimilar to many other countries that have a notion of underlying ownership, seperation of surface and mineral rights, cave outs for eminant ___domain, etc.
In this specific context it's not especially clear what the GP's "how's that working out for them" is meant to convey.
Please do some research before accusing people of "BS".
>In general, rural collectives own agricultural land and the state owns urban land. However, Article 70 of The Property Law allows for ownership of exclusive parts within an apartment building, which endorses the individual ownership of apartments.
Rural collectives own agricultural land is not "government ownership of all land" which you asserted to be true.
Moreover, the devil's in the details:
( In China, your maint.loc.gov ) According to the 2007 Property Rights Law, when the term for the right to use land for residential purposes expires, the term will be automatically renewed
Which means that residential land use rights persist, as they do in the US, and while mineral rights remain with the state it's not the case that all land ownership in the US comes with mineral rights, these may have been signed awy by prior owners or retained by the State or Federal Government whe first transferred.
Both countries are more complicated than you sweepingly make things out to be.
Even if I work my ass off, I won't be able to afford a house the same as my parents did. My only hope is that I inherit their house when they pass.