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I would support tax paid free education for a persons entire life until the day they die, over tax paid universal healthcare anyday.
The world is overcrowded anyway, last thing we need is healthcare making it more crowded. Smart people on the other hand, those are a rare commodity, we need as many of them as we can get.
@cee I am strongly against taxing held assets. income tax is ok, but i dont think its the best approach to tax either. If it were up to me all tax would be in the form of sales tax with various tax grades for how much a luxury something is (with bare essentials not being taxed).
i mean, i can understand the logic, (although one could argue that income taxes and tariffs could trigger inflation).
The Georgist argument would be that, the LVT is a temporary measure used to break up land monopolies (prevents landlords from artificially jacking up the rent) and underutilised land could be put to good use. So instead of having to fork out a fortune from interest by the central banks through real estate, you'll end paying less on tax and land gets to be legally held under ur name.
@cee I generally would address monopolies through antitrust laws. If one person owns 95% of the land across the whole country (or even in just a really large region) then yea, probably a need to break it up. But this is rarely the case. It is usually land owned by many people rich and poor all competing with each other. This isnt a monopoly.
What seems like poor reasoning here is that they wind up taxing **everyone** in the hopes of breaking up monopolies that probably either dont exist in the first place, or if they do exist should be targeted without harming ordinary land owners.
@cee its also going to empower monpolies more than it hurts honestly.
A monopoly means you own a large enough portion of land to price-fix your rents. This means you exlude competition by lowering rent in any region where someone competes with you and raising it everywhere you dont have competition. Your competition goes out of business because they cant rent out land, and the monopoly owner ultimately buys their land at a discount and then restores prices in the region to high prices.
If you tax the land then the person struggling to compete with the monopoly will just fail all the sooner due to the extra burden of being a land owner. Meanwhile the pricefixing of the monopoly owner gives him a financial advantage and is capable of paying the taxes due to the price fixing and the extra income it brings in.
Overall that means land taxes will bolster monopolies and drive out small owners. The exact opposite of the intended effect.
I have no problem with a "union of elites" so long as they dont collaborate with eachother to engage in price fixing (which is against anti-trust laws). Obviously the word union here you are imply the act collectively for the benefit of all elites. I wont say that doesnt happen but i will say if it does then that is and should be illegal. The problem with antitrust laws isnt that they dont work, its mostly that they just arent enforced when they apply.
verizon and at&t sometimes throw "memorandums of understanding" at one another to synchronize rules at the top, in a much less formal manner.
its come out in congressional testimony that big tech does similar. they have secret slack chats where operators collude moderation policy decisions with plausible deniability shields to upper management
Yea this is what i mean, the issue isnt that antitrust laws dont work, its that antitrust laws just arent well enforced.
