Lahaina Fire Victims Being Pressured to Sell Land
Tangential to the discussion, but:<p>Economist Henry George (1839-1897) proposed that taxing land, but not the property constructed on that land, better reflected the fact that land is a limited shared community resource. [0]<p>This arrangement has both moral and economic efficiency benefits.<p>Among them, is the rich 1% are less incentivized to use limited land as an investment vehicle (like gold, or today, Bitcoin), a practice that has runaway price increasing effects, resulting in more affordable land for 99%.<p>So real estate investment bubbles are less likely, or likely to be less severe.<p>Since constructing on land does not directly raise its taxes, there is a strong incentive to use it most productively (greater multi-housing development, etc.)<p>Suppressing availability and productive use of land, by holding unused land as a financial hedge, or unused dwellings as a common step in money laundering, both become much less economically viable.<p>And there are other benefits of aligning tax (a shared rent) against land (a shared resource), instead of taxing property (the result of individual effort &amp; resources).<p>—-<p>How that would apply here:<p>In Lahaina’s case, investors would be less incentivized to scoop up land since a land tax would not have dropped due to the disaster. No land was destroyed.<p>Whereas currently, property taxes, where property was destroyed, will have fallen significantly, incentivizing investors to use the disaster to acquire as much of the limited land as they can.<p>The more land investors take off the market, the higher the land prices will go, creating a self-reinforcing situation where regular people will be much less likely to ever be able to acquire land in the future.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Henry_George" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Henry_George</a>