JJRousseau

Hold on there! The wealthiest are the wealthiest because they have assets. Yes these facts show that asset ownership is disproportionate but these stats do not correlate assets to income earnings and taxation rates. Most of us, even the higher income earners, have as much or more debt than assets.

But regardless, as much as I think your notion is one of the better arguments I have heard, why should someone with more assets pay a larger amount for the same service? The government provides services to each person equally. They do not give a higher level of service to a person with more assets. Nor do they put a higher value on his or her life. Each citizen benefits from the courts, the armies, the police such that they are free from oppression. Each benefits from the infrastructure such that they can move about earning a high or low income.

It is interesting though, that we use a form of asset taxation to raise municipal taxes. But the guy in the nice house certainly doesn't benefit from the extra he pays...

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Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Yakk

Yes, that is just a measure of distribution. I would argue that basing your taxation of someone based off of their income isn't the best position -- rather, base your taxation of someone based off of how well society serves their financial interests.

An economic term that might be useful is "net present value" -- reflecting both your assets and your expected present and future income, time-discounted. Of course, this gets tricky...

That is an interesting position. The government doesn't give me exclusive right to control property that it considers you own -- instead, the government enforces, up to and including with the use of force, your exclusive right to control the property that it considers you own.

If, according to the government, you own 90% of the land are of Canada, the government will kick me off of the land it considers you own.

To me, that seems as if it is granting you more rights than it is granting me.

Remember, ownership is a legal fiction. It is a powerful, useful legal fiction, but the structure of "I own X" is determined by our societies rules.

This can be demonstrated quite explicitly -- some societies have no ownership, some have communal ownership, have requirements of ownership that let the government revoke your property, etc.

But the infrastructure is making you more money than it is making me.

And the life of a street person is, in practice, not worth as much as the life of a billionare. This effect is not nearly as large as other effects -- we, as a society, do place some innate value on human life. But being rich still, practically, makes your life worth more.

On the contrary. If you make a city a better place to live, what happens?

More people want to move there.

When more people want to move somewhere, what happens?

Land values go up.

In at least one Business school, it was claimed that "the job of the mayor is to raise property values", because anything that makes the city more desireable makes property values go up. The increased standard of living of the city dwellers is, essentialy, captured in the property values.

Now this isn't perfect -- the measurement of a "better place to live" by property value is a wealth-wieghted measurement. The opinions of poor people, as far as property values are concerned, don't matter as much as rich people. But that is a pretty standard market algorithm.

When you think of the price of a piece of land, don't think of it as a static value. The value of a piece of land is what it costs to own.

The cost to own a piece of land is the sum of the price of the money to buy the land, plus the taxes and costs for owning it.

The price of the money to buy the land is the interest you pay on your morgage to buy the land. (interest it the price of money)

So:
Interest% * "Value" of land + Taxes on land = cost of owning the land.

The effective "price" of the land becomes a psycological thing, where you have to take into account the expected future taxes, value, interest, etc.

But your city raises taxes by 1% of the land's value per year, and the money just goes away *poof*, and there is no chance this tax will disappear, the effect should be the value of the land dropping, until the cost of owning the land matches the marginal want for consumers to live in the area.

If those new taxes are instead invested into things that make the city a better place to live in, and the was expendature efficient, then the value of the land should go up dispite the higher cost to own the land at a given purchase price.

Now, the municipal taxes and expendatures aren't the only thing that influence the price of land -- but they are part of the equation.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

JJRousseau

Oh dear, the topic drift... Well let's see what I disagree with.

Infrastructure allowing me to make more money. No, infrastructure creates the jobs. Hard work, or blind luck gave me the job with the higher income.

Ownership as fiction. A society can chose to work around the concept of ownership but to the society that enshrines it in it's principles and laws, it is certainly not fiction.

At the basic level, individuals must trade and barter services and goods to survive. If I build the farmer's fence and he gives me fruit in return, society will fall apart if it doesn't protect my right to keep and use that fruit. Even true communism must recognize a limited form of individualism - including if not ownership at least the right to exercise control over some personal assets.

Property taxes. Your argument falls flat because my house in my town receives the same value from the Municipal govt as my neighbour's more expensive house. Further if the whole town's property values increase, the taxes should stay the same because the mill rate will drop.

Right back at ya!!!

__________________
Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Yakk

If there was no roads, no electricty, no clean water, no heating oil, no gas, no police, no justice, no maps, no money, no laws -- you wouldn't have your job.

Your earning potential would be barely-above-starvation (well, actually, below starvation, given our population density), most likely.

Instead, thanks to the infrastructure that taxes pay for and maintain, you have a job that earns X$ per year. I have a job that earns me Y$ per year. Without social infrastructure, we'd both be earning 0$ per year.

It is a nearly essential fiction, but it is a fiction. The society determines what the principles and laws and rules of ownership are.

The most direct benefit one recieves from such principles and laws is purportional to how much stuff those laws grant you.

The cost to maintain those laws and principles should, thus, be levied in purportion to the benefit granted by those laws and principles.

That is one model of good allocation that has proven effective. However, in many smaller societies, the boss-chief has ownership rights over everything in the domain. In other societies, you "own" exactly what you can defend, and if you cannot defend it someone else "own"s it.

I'm not saying that ownership isn't damn useful. I'm saying that ownership is defined and enforced by society -- having more assets allocated to you by society is a huge and massive benefit to society that the "rich" recieve that the "poor" do not.

I'm not saying that this is a bad idea to allocate resources like this -- I'm just saying that the cost of enforcing property rights and maintaining a society which respects property rights should fall on those with property, not uniformly on the population.

It does not! When the city makes itself a better place to work, both you and your neighbours house tend to go up in value at about the same rate, percentage wise.

The more valueable house gains more value from the improved state of the city than the less valueable house.

Now, the city doesn't have to get uniformly better -- sometimes lower value housing gains in value at a faster rate than higher value housing, or vice versa.

Also note that many municipalites have multiple tax rates -- a fee for water/sewer service, a fee for garbage, a fee for mail, a fee for street clearing, a tax rate for education (and in many cases, this goes to the local school), and tax rates for things like city infrastructure.

*nod*, that is how it works in some places.

Right back at ya!!! [/QUOTE]

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

JJRousseau

1) But Yakk, I accept taxes! Just not that fact that I should pay more to drive on the same road use the same water, electricity as you.

2) OK, I'll even accept higher taxes based on my assets but as assets are only a small part of the life we are afforded here I will only pay a tiny bit more. We both benefit from freedom, liberty, clean air, clean water, roads, etc, etc so we can both pay equally for that. The services that the govt transfers to me specifically because of my enormous asset base (smirk), I am prepared to pay proportionally more for. How about $20?

3) Well since I don't think either of us wants to live in a dictatorship or an anarchy, there is no point considering those social structures.

4) How do you figure my neighbour's house gains more? Same street light, fire dept, bus stops, water, sewer, garbage. BUT BUT he can afford to send his kids to private school so in fact the rich guy is getting less for his municipal tax dollars than me.

Funny thing is, Yakk, the biggest problem I have with some Libertarians is that they don't accept the notion of ownership. That seems to be the only place you do agree with them.

Seems we have bored everyone else off this topic.

Oh Dear

__________________
Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Yakk

The road/electricty are extremely valueable resources, but thier benefit is not from being able to drive on them and turn on a light. Their main benefit is that they enable the engine of the economy to burn brighter.

You pay for the roads using collective (government) methods not because you want to drive on them, but because the existance of well maintained roads make the entire society richer beyond their costs.

You should pay for your liberty with a tax on your liberty.

As an aside, there are numerous studies that demonstrate that the wealthy care more about clean air than the poor.

As a thought experiment: Bob earns 10,000$ per year, Charlie earns 1 million dollars per year.

Which of these two is more likely to accept "you will earn 1000$ more per year, and in exchange smog levels will double".

If the assets and income that society provides to you mean so little, why are you complaining about losing less than half of it in exchange for liberty, clean air, clean water, etc? If they mean a huge amount to you, then taxing that massive benefit provided to you by a functioning society seems fair.

If you don't want to fund a functioning state, then you will be living in a dictatorship or anarchy pretty damn quick. Practically, making a state that is powerful enough to resist being turned into an anarchy or dictatorship is expensive. The people that can afford to prevent it are those which the current state setup allocates control of resources to -- hence, the "tax the people with the money to keep the current state of affairs stable" tactic.

If the government shrunk to less than 1% of the nation's economic output, how long would the nature of the government matter? The government might not be a dictatorship, but it would lack the power to prevent one from forming, or prevent organizations with enough power from just ignoring it.

The property value of his home. When a city becomes a better place to live, home values don't go up by a fixed amount -- they tend to go up by a percentage of the home's value. Or at least I think...

... ya, that will happen. If that wasn't the case, investors/speculators would buy up the undervalued land (because if low-value land has a higher expected value increase, it is undervalued) and correct the market imbalance.

So to the limits of the market's knowledge, when a city becomes a better place, the land serviced by it should increase in value in approximate purportion to it's current price.

Now, given that the job of the city is to make the city a better place to live in, and that the quality of the cities life determines the market value of homes, allocating the cost to pay to make the city a better place to live based off home market price seems reasonable.

I accept ownership. I think it is a very useful legal fiction. For related reasons, I think free markets are a good idea -- they solve a problem.

It doesn't mean that I am about to build a moral philosophy built around ownership. Private ownership is a means to an end.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.