• SwingingTheLamp@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    There’s a movement called Georgism that advocates for abolishment of all taxes, except for a land-value tax. (“Land” being any extractive natural resource use.) It’s really the only fair tax system. At the risk of oversimplifying it: All wealth comes from a combination of natural resources and labor. Natural resources belong to all of humanity, so it’s not fair to give ownership of them to well-connected individuals or firms to profit from extracting and selling them. On the other side, an individual’s labor is the only thing that people have that’s entirely their own. It’s not fair to tax individual labor, like an income tax, as nobody else should have any claim on its value. Thus, the taxes to run a society should come from the use of humanity’s limited store of natural resources/land, rather than have value which belongs to us all disappear info the pockets of a few individuals, while most people must work to justify their existence while the value of that labor is siphoned away.

    • TAG@lemmy.world
      0·
      8 months ago

      It is a beautiful philosophy, but the issue with a land tax is that it is regressive, meaning the poor pay a larger portion of their income than the rich. If you look at detached suburban homes, from 100m² single floor starter homes to 1000m² mansions, the size of the lot is about the same. If you look at high density urban housing, a skyscraper full of luxury condos uses less land per occupant than cheap multi-family homes.

      It seems to make the most sense in Soviet style ultra high density housing where the poor live 4 to a shoe box while the rich have luxury country estates.