DaSaw

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.

The occupant should own the land. Absentee landlordism shouldn't be a thing.

Empty housing is empty land. It just has a house on it. And there are times and places where landowners will spend decades sitting on infill waiting for land values to go up. Additionally, land that could be developed into high density housing but is being held at low density at the behest of the area's politically connected residents, is kind of like "empty" land. It isn't a binary.

Land value taxation is inherently progressive. That's probably why it's never been implemented.

"Income tax on their properties whether they're rented or not" is just a long way of saying "land value taxation".

Also, the "divine monarchist" point is a weird one. When asked about it, Jesus asserted that his kingdom is "not of this world". And when the Israelite demanded of them relief from the anarchy of the period of the Judges in the form of "a king like the nations have", the response was "don't you already have an even better one?" Which is what John Locke cited when writing against monarchy as practiced at the time.

When James spoke of helping the poor, he said, "is is not enough to say 'be warm and well fed', you must actually give him food and clothing". He might also have said, "it is not enough to say, 'be healed!', you must also pay his medical bill".

Maye that's a round number in their non-decimal numbering system?

I don't think it's any more reasonable to expect honey bees to be restricted to their "native lands" any more than cows, or wheat. But flowers will feed whatever happens along, and wildflowers will feed what tends to live in that area.

If people really want to save the bees, they need to replace lawns with fields of wildflowers.

Re: Username: I'm not sure I want to see your planet's fjords.

I think properly funded schools with properly paid special needs instructors would leave far fewer students behind than allowing homeschooling.

True, but what if that's not the choice being prevented? What if the choice is between not between individually sought resources and state provided resources, but between individually sought resources and none at all? Should we really deny people without access to decent school systems the right to pursue other options?

I believe good public schooling is better than home schooling. But the solution isn't to ban homeschooling. It's to make the public schooling better. In many places, public schooling is very very bad, and it isn't going to get any better any time soon.

And I don't think we should be so quick to deny people their rights just because they believe things that are different from what we believe.