February 22nd, 2023
- call w Daniel Thorson
- Natural Intelligence
- happier to give half my sandwich
- Steve March
- Diamond Approach-based coaching program in San Leandro
- had a convo about it
- how to be evocative
- unpacking this tweet
- (tweet which feels connected with a sense that LVT aligns with Hayek's notion of natural law)
- the absence of land value tax is ABSURDLY UNFAIR
- and I'm not the sort of person to normally orient in terms of fairness
- but like, all apes have some sense of fairness
- here's another way to evoke what I'm aiming to evoke in my tweet
- so like, wolf packs have territory that they defend from other wolf packs
- and to some extent, they respect each others' boundaries, which are marked with urine or whatever, because it's costly to actually get in a fight
- but if it comes to it, a stronger pack might encroach on a weaker pack
- but suppose that one particular wolfpack was granted the power to have humans defend their territory from other wolves, using guns, helicopters, etc
- any territory they captured, would now be theirs FOREVER
- and that wolfpack would eventually take over the entire continent
- because they'd be getting free protection of their territory
- this is clearly absurd and against the natural order of things
- now, having seen that, allow me to highlight the parallels with human society
- people own land. they got it by buying it from whoever had the land before. that part is arguably maybe roughly basically fair (debatable but eh)
- the more valuable the land is, the more you have to pay for it because other people might want it more
- so you need a certain amount of power (money) to acquire the land, just like a wolf pack needs to scare off another wolf pack
- (sorta; this analogy isn't perfect; I'll work on it)
- but then ONCE you've acquired the land... what does that mean?
- well, it means the govt/police will defend it for you (keep other people off it, like wolves)
- it means that more than it means you can do whatever you want with it, TBQH
- given zoning laws etc
- and the question becomes: what's the appropriate price to have them defend the land for you?
- tweeted about this here, as a sort of guerrilla case for LVT:
- and once you are asking that question, the answer becomes obvious that the current price is WAY TOO LOW
- this is sort of a frame control move, but I don't think that acknowledging that makes the point weaker, which it does with most frame control 😅
- this is sort of an example of metaphor design
- I sometimes like letting go of what I think something is and asking myself how it functions
- including like, features in the app I've designed
- it's like "okay, it's called this, but what is it REALLY?"'
- and it's like, if we forget our associations with ownership and just ask "what does it mean that Bob owns 123 Main St?"
- then we find this connection with animal territory, beautifully evoked in this passage from Eric S Raymond
- "Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property."
- it's not just that the government will defend it on behalf of the owner, tbh, it's that there's common knowledge of that fact
- and yeah, "what does it mean that Bob owns 123 Main St?" currently means that the government defends Bob's ownership of the land, and the price Bob pays for that service is way below its natural value...
- not that we want markets on land defense—that's gang territory stuff, or close to it
- but we do want the price to be apt, because otherwise weird shit happens
- what about current property tax being greater than LVT would be?
- friend >
- > I’m trying to square if that natural price is necessarily the same thing as land value. For many high-intensity development owners, a revenue-neutral shift to LVT would likely lower their property taxes.
- > It’s the vacant lot, parking lot, big box retail owners specifically that end up paying more. Maybe some single family homes but unless the land is zoned for multi-family the assessed value of the land won’t be very high.
- "revenue-neutral" might be key here—don't a lot of LVT proposals suggest not just replacing property tax but also income tax and sales tax (not excise taxes on smokes etc)
- in which case the total land+property tax goes substantially up
- friend >
- > That’s getting into old school Henry George ‘single tax’ territory, but yes
- me > ahh, right
- anyway, hm, let's hash out the defense thing in relation to property tax
- so if ownership (and whatever you pay for the right to continue owning) is about your right to not allow anybody else to do anything with the land
- then if the land is already more valuable than anyone else could easily make it (eg a nice high-rise) it makes sense that the price of defending it shouldn't be that high, since nobody else wants to take it over and do something better with it
- boom!
- "right to not allow anybody else to do anything with the land"
- "right to not allow anybody else to change what the land is being used for"
- I haven't found exactly the keyphrase here but it's close
- like we don't pay a tax on other objects we own at all, and a building is kind of like an object