<story><title>Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)</title><url>https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-online-games-and</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roenxi</author><text>You could make the same theoretical argument against most taxes though. If it were possible to unwind corporate taxes through raw political connections it&amp;#x27;d have happened by now for example. Or capital gains tax in its entirety.&lt;p&gt;That is actually a great theoretical argument against taxes generally by the way - there&amp;#x27;d be a lot more money in people&amp;#x27;s pockets if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.</text></item><item><author>at_compile_time</author><text>One limitation I have not seen discussed is LVT&amp;#x27;s self-defeating nature, and it&amp;#x27;s an important one to figure out if land value taxes are to succeed in practice.&lt;p&gt;An upside and downside of LVT, depending on your perspective, is that the imposition of a LVT would seriously lower land values. The inverse is also true: removing an established LVT carries a significant upside for the affected landowners. Property that had been acquired for cheap under a LVT would be freed of its shackles and allowed to appreciate again. Some of this would be immediate, as thousands of dollars in taxes shift away from land and back onto labour, enterprise, and commerce, and some of it would be gradual as people resume buying land because land value always goes up (which causes land values to go up). This creates a powerful incentive to undo any progress that a LVT campaign might accomplish.&lt;p&gt;I doubt that anything short of a revolution would be able to overpower the wealthy landowning class who like their unearned rents and inflated asset values very much thank you, but you don&amp;#x27;t just need to beat them once, you need to be able to hold their political, economic, and intellectual influence at bay permanently or we end up right back where we started in a matter of years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnnyanmac</author><text>&amp;gt;there&amp;#x27;d be a lot more money in people&amp;#x27;s pockets if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.&lt;p&gt;people who say this need to remember what makes the most money vs. what are the actual most necessary goods for basic civilization. Sadly, most people would not fund the electric company to keep their lights on as they throw thousands at sport merchandise, including a new TV that they cannot power on.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s definitely tons of corruption, but we do need someone with a wider scope to budget for the &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; stuff.</text></comment>
<story><title>Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)</title><url>https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-online-games-and</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roenxi</author><text>You could make the same theoretical argument against most taxes though. If it were possible to unwind corporate taxes through raw political connections it&amp;#x27;d have happened by now for example. Or capital gains tax in its entirety.&lt;p&gt;That is actually a great theoretical argument against taxes generally by the way - there&amp;#x27;d be a lot more money in people&amp;#x27;s pockets if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.</text></item><item><author>at_compile_time</author><text>One limitation I have not seen discussed is LVT&amp;#x27;s self-defeating nature, and it&amp;#x27;s an important one to figure out if land value taxes are to succeed in practice.&lt;p&gt;An upside and downside of LVT, depending on your perspective, is that the imposition of a LVT would seriously lower land values. The inverse is also true: removing an established LVT carries a significant upside for the affected landowners. Property that had been acquired for cheap under a LVT would be freed of its shackles and allowed to appreciate again. Some of this would be immediate, as thousands of dollars in taxes shift away from land and back onto labour, enterprise, and commerce, and some of it would be gradual as people resume buying land because land value always goes up (which causes land values to go up). This creates a powerful incentive to undo any progress that a LVT campaign might accomplish.&lt;p&gt;I doubt that anything short of a revolution would be able to overpower the wealthy landowning class who like their unearned rents and inflated asset values very much thank you, but you don&amp;#x27;t just need to beat them once, you need to be able to hold their political, economic, and intellectual influence at bay permanently or we end up right back where we started in a matter of years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnthonyMouse</author><text>&amp;gt; If it were possible to unwind corporate taxes through raw political connections it&amp;#x27;d have happened by now for example. Or capital gains tax in its entirety.&lt;p&gt;But this has more or less been done for the most powerful, e.g. corporate income tax exists but Apple doesn&amp;#x27;t pay it, capital gains tax exists but is deferred until you sell the shares and then rich people don&amp;#x27;t do that. So then Rockefellers don&amp;#x27;t pay the tax, but &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; do as an ordinary peon who has a good run messing around on Robinhood, or when you start making withdrawals from your IRA. Meanwhile we can&amp;#x27;t get rid of the tax which now only applies to the middle class because people claim that you&amp;#x27;re trying to give a tax cut to the billionaires who aren&amp;#x27;t actually paying it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; there&amp;#x27;d be a lot more money in people&amp;#x27;s pockets if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to get bureaucrats to agree on what they should be working to support.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really an argument for tax &lt;i&gt;simplification&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell the way tax policy works is that rich people hire lawyers and PR firms to cast the forms of taxation they would actually have to pay as regressive (e.g. consumption taxes, because you can&amp;#x27;t register the Rolls Royce without paying the tax and you can&amp;#x27;t sell into the jurisdiction without collecting VAT) and the forms they can avoid through shell games and accounting tricks as The One True Way To Tax The Rich (e.g. &amp;quot;profit&amp;quot; taxes, because profit is fuzzy around the edges and has high inter-region liquidity), which the rich then weasel out of and leave only the middle class paying the tax.</text></comment>