Billionaires aren’t the problem. They aren’t good, but even eliminating them would not move the needle.
The only real fix for a significant portion of the current affordability problems is a sizeable Land Value tax. Henry George was mostly right, he wrote that shit out for us more than century ago, and we’re still ignoring him while we fuck everything up because we keep treating land as this giant pyramid scheme of investment.
But why wouldn’t it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?
Go run the math. If you were to tax away say everything people own that’s greater than $50 million dollars, and give it to everyone else, the total amount each person gets is something… but not as much as you would think. On the order of tens of thousands of dollars in the US for example. That would happen one time.
The most significant problem with housing costs isn’t that corporations can invest, it’s that ANYONE can invest. Investments require that an asset appreciate faster than inflation, and if that happens by definition it will always become increasingly more expensive than people can afford. Homes cannot be an investment for anyone, or they will always become too expensive.
In a lot of countries 10 000 dollars is the salary for about 5 000 days. Or in other words, far over 10 years. And you were talking about several tens of thousands, which means several decades of life when distributed among 300 million people, about a decade per person if distributed among a billion people.
Those numbers are for US billionaires divided by US population. If you were to try to divide global wealth from billionaires vs global population it likely wouldn’t even be a thousand dollars.
Not everyone on this planet is poor. I don’t need that money. But maybe roughly 2 billion people do. And “not even a thousand dollars” is two years’ salary. In this case we’re talking about a quarter of the world’s population, so you “not even a thousand dollars” becomes “not even four thousand dollars”.
And that means: “Not even the salary for 8 years. Possibly only 5 years!”
I mean, the money is enough to completely eradicate poverty from this planet. That’s all that really matters.
It’s not even close to enough to eradicate poverty from this planet. You vastly overestimate how much small amounts of money affect things. It may pull some of the ultra-poor out of poverty, but a single $2,000 payment wouldn’t manage to get anyone in the first world out of poverty, and there are plenty of people living in the first world.
Cost of living varies by country, you’re trying to suggest that redistribution would help people, and it would, but A) that’s not how any sort of tax would be redistributed and B) the amount of money relative to each country isn’t enough to solve any of the problems we’re seeing.
You seem to be trapped in the status quo, as if it were a law of nature. There are no self-regulating markets, as economists claim. What you’re presenting here as inevitable isn’t real. It’s simply an expression of an ideology that you mistake for reality.
There are people who live in houses, and there are also people who build them. There is simply no “real estate god” who is anything other than a human being.
You might think that’s naive, but if you think that way, aren’t you also saying that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophe? That puts you no longer in the camp of rationality, but in the realm of theology—namely, the inevitable Last Judgment, the end of the world, and all that nonsense.
What I’m getting at is this: The biggest lie that economics has ever come up with is that it’s science—it isn’t. Based on the theories it pursues, it’s at best a social science that has already been largely disproved.
My proposal is to destroy the market completely with a land value tax. How does that have anything to do with being stuck in the status quo? It’s incredibly radical by the standards of the average person right now.
If something is an investment, by necessity it must increase in price faster than inflation. If you tax the ability for that to happen completely away, it’s no longer an investment vehicle. That’s not economics, it’s not science, it’s basic math.
This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.
Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).
Edit: Please don’t get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don’t think it’s effective to focus solely on the one area where the world’s wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.
It’s because that game (or more specifically The Landlord Game which she made) was meant to teach on Henry George’s work (the guy that came up with the idea of Land Value taxes and explained why they were needed)
Billionaires aren’t the problem. They aren’t good, but even eliminating them would not move the needle.
The only real fix for a significant portion of the current affordability problems is a sizeable Land Value tax. Henry George was mostly right, he wrote that shit out for us more than century ago, and we’re still ignoring him while we fuck everything up because we keep treating land as this giant pyramid scheme of investment.
But why wouldn’t it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?
Go run the math. If you were to tax away say everything people own that’s greater than $50 million dollars, and give it to everyone else, the total amount each person gets is something… but not as much as you would think. On the order of tens of thousands of dollars in the US for example. That would happen one time.
The most significant problem with housing costs isn’t that corporations can invest, it’s that ANYONE can invest. Investments require that an asset appreciate faster than inflation, and if that happens by definition it will always become increasingly more expensive than people can afford. Homes cannot be an investment for anyone, or they will always become too expensive.
In a lot of countries 10 000 dollars is the salary for about 5 000 days. Or in other words, far over 10 years. And you were talking about several tens of thousands, which means several decades of life when distributed among 300 million people, about a decade per person if distributed among a billion people.
Those numbers are for US billionaires divided by US population. If you were to try to divide global wealth from billionaires vs global population it likely wouldn’t even be a thousand dollars.
Not everyone on this planet is poor. I don’t need that money. But maybe roughly 2 billion people do. And “not even a thousand dollars” is two years’ salary. In this case we’re talking about a quarter of the world’s population, so you “not even a thousand dollars” becomes “not even four thousand dollars”.
And that means: “Not even the salary for 8 years. Possibly only 5 years!”
I mean, the money is enough to completely eradicate poverty from this planet. That’s all that really matters.
It’s not even close to enough to eradicate poverty from this planet. You vastly overestimate how much small amounts of money affect things. It may pull some of the ultra-poor out of poverty, but a single $2,000 payment wouldn’t manage to get anyone in the first world out of poverty, and there are plenty of people living in the first world.
Cost of living varies by country, you’re trying to suggest that redistribution would help people, and it would, but A) that’s not how any sort of tax would be redistributed and B) the amount of money relative to each country isn’t enough to solve any of the problems we’re seeing.
You seem to be trapped in the status quo, as if it were a law of nature. There are no self-regulating markets, as economists claim. What you’re presenting here as inevitable isn’t real. It’s simply an expression of an ideology that you mistake for reality.
There are people who live in houses, and there are also people who build them. There is simply no “real estate god” who is anything other than a human being.
You might think that’s naive, but if you think that way, aren’t you also saying that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophe? That puts you no longer in the camp of rationality, but in the realm of theology—namely, the inevitable Last Judgment, the end of the world, and all that nonsense.
What I’m getting at is this: The biggest lie that economics has ever come up with is that it’s science—it isn’t. Based on the theories it pursues, it’s at best a social science that has already been largely disproved.
My proposal is to destroy the market completely with a land value tax. How does that have anything to do with being stuck in the status quo? It’s incredibly radical by the standards of the average person right now.
If something is an investment, by necessity it must increase in price faster than inflation. If you tax the ability for that to happen completely away, it’s no longer an investment vehicle. That’s not economics, it’s not science, it’s basic math.
This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.
Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).
Edit: Please don’t get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don’t think it’s effective to focus solely on the one area where the world’s wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.
It’s because that game (or more specifically The Landlord Game which she made) was meant to teach on Henry George’s work (the guy that came up with the idea of Land Value taxes and explained why they were needed)