Although they key thing here is that it's not just that effect, but emergent unintended consequences. In the article, it describes how non profit healthcare institutions have an incentive to buy for profit clinics, because (alongside the other incentives), when they do so, the real estate becomes tax exempt because now it's owned by a non profit, even if the work being performed stays the same.
That's not "unintended" that is the core of what they call the NPIC, the non-profit industrial complex. They do the same activity, with the same financial outcome, but they do it under a different corporate form and pay no taxes. The public does not benefit. Medical care is not the only player in this game. You also get it with "community land trusts" that take a property off the tax roll but don't lower rents.
If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up.
I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?
It's funny that people always bring this up, but I don't see what centrally planned mandatory setbacks, height limits, and parking mandates have to do with preventing industrial accidents.
This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.
Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?
In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:
- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source
- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this
- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)
- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases
I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.
Even in this example, the French are building this in-house, but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.
So the approach would be different depending on which country you approached.
My advice to you would be to follow government events like Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you in the right direction
Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?
Interesting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?
Correct. At the risk of stating the obvious, indoor plumbing (and public sanitation in general) is not something required for you as an individual. It's something required for society as a whole to sustain value added activities that require dense urban areas without debilitating epidemics wiping out productivity (and any other measure of well-being) in those urban areas.
Always how it shows up too: someone says "I've been camping and it was fine".
That's not what a lack of indoor plumbing is like though. In fact going camping when indoor plumbing exists isn't even the same: when it's a few enthusiasts digging holes sparsely is very different to when the entire population is doing it.
The first city to really hit this wall was London in 1858. When the river level dropped, the sewage in the Thames remained, resulting in "the great stink". Construction of a proper sewage system began the following year in 1859. In 1865 it was complete enough to begin operation. It wasn't considered complete until a decade later, in 1875.
The role of sewage in spreading cholera was first hypothesized in 1849 by John Snowe. He'd put together a pretty convincing case by 1854, and the actual bacteria was discovered in the same year. But the proof that finally convinced the medical establishment didn't come about until 1883.
If this makes you suspect that the medical establishment had their collective heads up their collective asses, I'm not about to disagree.
Reasoning is hard, and the medical establishment didn't consist of biologists, any more than the computer-programming establishment consists of computer scientists. It still doesn't today.
The main reasoning challenge here is that doctors are slow to accept evidence that what they've always done is not what they should do.
See the prolonged acceptance of bloodletting, resistance to handwashing, and on and on to the slow adoption in the present day of evidence based medicine.
I guess that's plausible, and I have occasionally observed doctors behaving that way, but I don't have enough evidence to independently confirm that it's especially common among doctors.
Also, I've seen people do amazingly dumb things because of disbelieving their doctors, so maybe a certain amount of overconfidence would be protective?
There is a lot of research in psychology on this. ChatGPT will happily refer you to various books written over the decades on how the strong hierarchical structure of medicine makes it particularly prone to cognitive dissonance, with lots of concrete examples of doctors behaving that way.
I asked GPT-5 Mini and it said, in part, "some studies find clinicians update more when evidence is clear and actionable (better calibration), others show clinicians exhibit the same biases as laypeople (e.g., positivity bias, anchoring). Results depend on task design, sample, and how “evidence” is presented. (...) Experimental psychology and related fields show measurable differences in how some doctors update beliefs—many update appropriately to clear, high‑quality evidence and some update better than average—but there is no simple universal claim that all doctors are more willing than the average person to change their minds. The evidence supports a nuanced conclusion: clinicians can be more evidence‑responsive in domain‑relevant tasks, but updating varies widely and is strongly shaped by task framing, institutional context, performance level, and incentives."
But that's because GPT-5 Mini's responses are strongly shaped by task framing and context. You can get it to say just about anything as long as you stay away from taboo areas.
It did refer me to a lot of books, and the ones I looked up did in fact actually exist, but none of them seemed to be relevant.
No worries. I was sort of poking fun at your bringing up ChatGPT as a source (especially in a discussion about epistemic hygiene), but I probably shouldn't have done that.
Yeah, "would you, personally, forgo this" is a very different value proposition vs. "would you delete this from civilization".
A single person might choose the internet over plumbing because at worst they have to compost and use an outhouse, which is less inconvenient than being locked out of most web services.
But while giving up the internet globally sends you to the 1980s, giving up plumbing globally sends you to the 1780s. YouTube and Amazon ain't worth chamberpots, dessicated skyscrapers, and regular cholera outbreaks that would reduce most cities into dysfunctional public health disasters.
As in "lacks running water," meaning you have to dispose of a building's worth of piss and shit at street level multiple times per day. And if it's a residential building, that means no water for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc. (You could ship in thousands of gallon jugs per day, but that's a logistical nightmare.)
Like a world without elevators, urban life without plumbing very quickly becomes unsustainable in buildings above a certain size.
The piss and shit problem is real, but not nearly as bad as you're imagining; I've written a bit based on my extensive shit-related experience and shit-related human history in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908441.
Burning Man recommends 6 liters of water per day per person for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc.: https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/ But that can generally be cut in half when you're anywhere other than one of the world's driest deserts in the middle of summer. This means you need to bring in your own weight in water roughly once a month; if there's no elevator, and you can safely lift 25% of your own weight, you can lug it up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator, you can probably bring the water up the elevator every month or two.
About a third of that water has to eventually go back down in the form of piss, which is not a major problem if you have sealable plastic bottles to store it in. There's always the risk of an unpleasant accident with that approach, of course, but that's rare.
So I don't think there's ever a building size where a lack of indoor plumbing makes urban life unsustainable. If you're strong enough to walk up and down the stairs every day, you're strong enough to carry water up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator that you can ride carrying two children, you can also ride it carrying water, once a month. Throughout history, and today in poor rural areas, most people have always had to carry their water much farther than that.
If all labor is automated and nobody can earn anything selling their own anymore, all that’s left are the other two factors of production: capital and land.
Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.
Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.
In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.
Which is already happening. This is why stock buy-backs, IPO-less/private companies and private equity rule the future.
This "wealth" will NOT come from government subsidies or UBI. It will stay where it is, with enough income doled out to the masses to keep the supply/demand economy chugging along.
The article asserts that as wealth has increased, so has spending on social programs.
I think what isn’t said here is that there was a lot of blood involved in getting weekends and 8 hour workdays. Labor strikes used to be violent, and social programs are pitchfork insurance for the global elite.
If the owners of capital control all means of production, all automated, they will control literal robot armies - we already see this developing with drones and the like.
It’s entirely possible that the global elite succeeds in fighting off the underclass and their reality looks a lot more like Elysium where the owners of capital do not have to worry about the angry masses reaching them.
Every time I say we are headed towards an Elysium-like world, it gets downvoted pretty quickly. Yet all signs are pointed to that trajectory! The rich are getting richer, they live in essentially their own world already--they're buying islands and building fortresses. They are more and more just selling to each other because the rest of us are essentially irrelevant to commerce. It's reasonable to assume we are moving towards a society where a mere 1-10M or so people live walled-off somewhere in luxury (not necessarily a space station) while the remaining 8B people are economically irrelevant, scraping by in the periphery.
Well , if that’s the case , it would be much easier to tax the land owners. Can have exponentially bigger tax so the more land they own, the more tax they have to pay until they can’t afford to own the land. They can’t run as they can’t bring the land with them . Socialism might work in that world
You don't even have to tax the monetary value of the land. You can require a percentage of the land, itself, over time. If we're really moving to a post labor world -- which I sincerely doubt -- I think the concept of private property is going to have to be narrowed only to things that have a limited lifespan.
In the times of the French Revolution that was enough, but I think technology is obsoleting us there too. If evil oligarch can make a bunker and ten million $100 kill bots, I don’t think the people are rising up unless existence is worse than death, and even then they might not win.
colonial revolutions tended to be fought by those for whom death was preferable to existence. i don't disagree that, in this age, the chance of success is slimmer, and will continue to shrink as such --- there's probably some critical mass of capital fortification which is unpenetrable without worker leverage
Socialism "might" always work in an immaginary world that does not take into account the reality of the human condition.
One of the many flaws of such immaginary worlds is thinking that people will be content to live in a system where they have no creative outlet left and nothing they do will have any ultimate meaning.
People in those conditions might burn down the system for the mere excitement of novelty. Even experimental rat utopias quickly degenerate.
There are a lot of functioning socialist states. You don't have to imagine them. They are happier, healthier and have better infrastructure than the United States.
All economies are mixed, save for North Korea, which is command economy communism.
On the sliding scale of welfare state socialism, Finland and Norway have the greatest degree of public investment. Angola would be on the other side of that spectrum, with almost no public services or redistributive programs offered.
When people want to introduce Scandinavian-like social programs to the US, it's "socialism doesn't work". When people point out that they work in the Scandinavian countries it's "Those aren't actually socialism".
When people want to claim that socialism works, they point at countries that aren't socialist.
Socialism is very well defined and it's made nebulous only to claim virtues it doesn't have.
Scandinavian countries aren't socialist. They themselves say they are not socialist and a simple google search for "are scandinavian countries socialist?" will show you that the consensus is that they are not.
Ah, that's the billion-dollar question.
In most of the revolutions, the army, not the citizenry, was the one who went against the ruler. For example that's why Putin kept his army weakened and ineffective and had Wagner force(which still tried to revolt).
Feudal lords, at least, had the wisdom to build their castles in the middle of their protected fiefdoms. In times of social upheaval, a doomsday bunker just becomes a particularly juicy oyster to shuck.
Because a revenue neutral implementation lowers taxes on net on improved active sites that do something with land, and raises it on net for vacant abandoned sites that do nothing, shifting the incentive to do something with the land or sell it to someone who will.
Texas already has exorbitantly high property taxes, more than most, that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning (which never stops increasing) will do.
Remember the purpose of property tax to begin with is for the owner to lose the property in case they are not as wealthy as someone else who might be interested someday. Or in case the property itself can not provide more than enough income to pay the tax in a timely way.
Another problem is that taxes were always high but they didn't actually start skyrocketing until a few decades ago, after one of the key stabilizing anti-Carpetbagger laws which prevented home equity loans, was repealed.
And the sky's the limit whenever untapped wealth is unleashed, to be audited and appraised.
So it's been kind of a race between property appreciation, available equity to borrow against as values increase, versus tax rates and appraisals trying to capture more of that in ways that can only result in owners becoming less whole that it ever has been.
Revenue-neutral or not, anything that makes it worse makes it worse.
A land value tax is based on the value of the land only, with no input from whatever improvements are or are not built on it. So, with a proper LTV implementation (i.e., one where LTV is the only tax incurred on real state), there would be literally no tax incentive to tear down a usable (but unused) building. You would be paying the exact same amount of taxes on an empty lot as on a high end modern building on that same lot.
What you say does make sense because it's got to be better than what things have evolved into in so many misguided places.
But I forgot to add that the amount of revenue from property tax is only intended to act like collateral damage :)
When you do the math it turns out anytime you start taxing anything but commerce, it is unsustainable because it accrues and accumulates disadvantage to the taxpayer until it is overwhelming. Plus the higher that taxes rise above absolute insignificance, the more likely a major upset occurs from just a slight lapse in overall prosperity, re-balancing to the further disadvantage against those who can afford it least. And that doesn't include the pulling of political strings by those who benefit most from that type activity.
You don't sensibly tax people just for existing, even at 3/5 the amount per head. Likewise their property unless it is involved in commercial activity, nor wage income since the employer is the commercial enterprise they should have that all covered like it used to be when things were not so predatory.
But they tax "rooftops" like a lot of other places based on square footage and now in Houston there has been some recent influence to demolish unoccupied buildings more so for appearance sake to the world for the upcoming World Cup as an excuse more than anything else.
It appears the actual demolition of truly abandoned buildings can not be accelerated without blurring the lines between actual abandonment and merely unoccupied to some degree or another.
But appearances can be deceiving.
The big thing is there's enough people much wealthier than those who have the properties now, who want them either way, demolished or not.
Under threat of forced demolition those having buildings suitable for rehab would need to sell for less than they would have otherwise. Who cares about the poor sellers who have been paying taxes on the buildings the whole time, working toward a financial turnaround? The idea seems to be to incentivize new buyers to have better opportunities by preying on previous owners' misfortune.
OTOH, as soon as any property has had any nonproductive structures removed, its appraised value and tax levy drops like a rock, making it way more attractive for the same type buyers who could have already obtained all the lots having buildings they are willing to rehab.
The new buyers can then afford many more vacant lots for potential future construction, which had always been a non-bonanza prospect otherwise, and with the newly lowered taxes afford to wait and see which might be a bonanza to build on someday. A lot more so than the previous owners.
If a lot of this happens at the same time, then the market for reclaimed lots like this will have downward price pressure too until the effect runs its course.
"Property taxes currently generate 70 percent of all local tax revenue, some or all of which would have to be replaced with other taxes under property tax
repeal."
And if you DO choose to tax commerce, the effects are lousy.
Even Milton Friedman repeatedly called LVT the "least bad" tax. Too bad he didn't life a finger to support it. Not sure who he was working for, or what pressures he must have been under.
I think it's helpful to stay up-to-date myself. But also not forget how we got here and what it was like before.
>Property taxes currently generate 70 percent of all local tax revenue,
That's what I'm pointing out.
How badly it can get out of hand. Not because it's unchecked, just because it exists at all and can't be kept down to insignificance through ordinary ups & downs. Especially not over the very long term.
That's what makes it unsustainable.
At least to where they tear down more perfectly strong buildings than ever.
And 70% is not nearly enough in case nobody noticed.
It's too late now. You could calculate when 100% won't be enough, or even 110%.
That's not as drastic as it sounds though. It only means your own taxes are bound to rise 30 to 40% above what they are now by the same time. But to the taxing authorities, it will be just a drop in the bucket.
Most people who can afford what they are paying now will be able to handle that much of an increase though. So maybe only a few thousand more will lose their homes and no way it should be any vast percentage wiped out completely.
But could continue to add to the homeless population, and maybe 30 to 40% more than there is now would be a good estimate.
Still only a few thousand families, which I guess some will figure is the least bad in a city this size.
Originaly, the Lords crafting the levy scheme didn't need the money at all. They just wanted a way to get the land.
And it only affected the very most unfortunate who sadly couldn't even afford to pay such an insignificant pittance.
Other than commerce, so far nobody has proposed any other way for any tax to more accurately track prosperity, and therefore the ability for all to pay as long as there is any prosperity left at all under the worst of conditions.
Without compromising or threatening any previous earnings or property which have always been completely unfair to tax more than once.
Probably a good time to mention that I always pay more than my fair share because I like to be more than fair. It's only a few percent so I just work a few percent more and then some so I'm fine. But not everybody can do that.
Perhaps the high-and-always-increasing-tax enthusiasts don't want anybody to have any permanent assets, ever.
One thing's for sure, when prosperity booms, the revenue from commerce alone booms in exact tandem with it.
Come up with anything else like that and I'm all ears :)
Certainly property taxes can even overshoot commerce in the case of a real estate bubble, but if that's the least bad it sure doesn't work out like the taxation tracks when actual money is made very much at all. Rather like taxing anything of value just because it exists. Who ever thought of that? If you whittle away at things over and over again eventually they cease to exist.
Not that I would want to repeal property tax overnight, I like stability for the prosperity that has already been earned more so than the (remote) possibility of future prosperity as a result of hare-brained schemes from dream salesmen.
Things like this which are too big to fail need to be carefully rolled back before they fail catastrophically from their own weight.
>all of which would have to be replaced with other taxes
Which would be ideal as long as earned assets could only be taxed once, when the commerce occurred. Repeat commerce would be paying all the bills as it repeats in an ongoing way as long as any wealth is being created. With no chipping away of anything else already built by long hard work.
With a revenue-neutral bottom line local operations would be no different, so the dramatically reduced risk to the working or retired homeowner would be without financial cost.
You can't get much cheaper than that :)
When people can't even see any way that a complete rollback could ever be set into motion, or any rollback, I take that as an indication they lack the responsible nature to steward prosperity to any net taxpayer benefit whatsoever. As has consistently been seen among politicians with no exceptions in Texas for decades.
>> that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning
This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.
The owners don't want to destroy the structures at all.
They've been holding onto the properties because appreciation was outpacing taxation, allowing a predictable path to remodeling and re-habitation.
Until that changed. Primarily from greedier investors not having enough low-hanging fruit to pick from so they're shaking the trees for all they have until they can give no more.
It's new buyers instead that want to swoop in if the landscape can be further tilted in their favor. Just a little bit is all it takes to yield a big return for a privileged few.
Other costs have risen too but the taxes are so high that's what triggers the final destruction.
Property tax has that extra-financial "property" that keeps your home positioned like dominos ready to fall. Like other skyrocketing costs don't do, even though the pressure from them is huge too.
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