Everyone deserves free equal land of the same quality based on where they choose to live. The potential benefits include ending homelessness, ending poverty, ending dysfunctional homes, ending spousal abuse, curing many mental health problems, ending inequality, allowing the poor to become rich, providing cheap labor for business, increasing the nations wealth and economy, allowing parks to be fully used and cleaned, and reducing crime.
Land accumulates to the few unconsciously. If a golf course goes up for sale who can afford it? Most likely an existing landowner is the only one able to afford it. When Trump bought a golf course in Palos Verdes, does it not seem strange a person who may never visit it will get to own and profit from it? Yet the homeless people who worked hard in the area their whole life will be forced to live in a park or along railroad tracks. When a farm is sold it usually sold to existing farmers or investment groups. Every year farms get bigger (about 1 acre) and personal real estate empires grow larger. They should be growing smaller as population grows. The poor are denied equal access to priceless land.
The city's rules and taxes make them a co-owner of any property. They decide who controls and owns land, how it is used with permits and laws, and how much tax people must pay. Who gives them this right? The majority can not morally vote in taxes to suit their needs even if 99% agree. The individual has rights. The individual citizen has right to land, to live anywhere in the United States for free with the taxes and building laws she or he chooses! Many people will choose higher taxes to have the best roads, schools, and hospitals, others will choose to have nothing. The people must be free to secede from the city and start a new one with new rules. The city and state should not be allowed to set land laws and taxes for large areas of land.
A portion of land taxes, or land value taxes, should go from those with land to those with little or no land. Government is not the people. Land, not buildings or rent vouchers, should be secured for the poor. Buildings and money involve work and the poor and government officials are not entitled to it.
The 1st policy experiment: Free apartments in an existing city (Los Angeles).
Give anyone a free 500 square foot apartment if they choose not to have a car. The real sentence should be, "Since we stole your land, we beg you to take a 500 square foot apartment in lieu of us going to jail." You could throw 1 million homeowners in jail for 1 year to think about their crime. The idea of not having a car is to control congestion if the program becomes popular. The size is about the legal minimum permitted residence.
Wealth earned by labor and capital will allow you to move up. First you live in cardboard box, tent, or car; then in a trailer; then a in house or apartment; and then in a mansion. . Ideally even housing debt should be eliminated. This starts everyone out in a cardboard box, and puts pressure on landlords to build better more affordable places. The city does not owe you an apartment, they morally owe you equal land. Since they don't give you land they must give you an apartment. Money is wasted on homeless shelters, low income housing, non-profit homeless groups, and rent vouchers. You have right to land, you have a right to build a house. Homeless shelters should be destroyed.
With the small land tax, land will be bought throughout Los Angeles County, California, and the United States. In the city, the building and land will be owned by a trust or government. Every resident might provide 10 to 30 percent of their income for the structure. If you make $10 per hour, you pay about $160 a month in rent. After 100 years, the building will have a mandate to be demolished and replaced with a new building. A forest fire, where no one gets hurt, keeps an area fresh with new construction. A $100,000 unit over 100 years (1200 payments) should cost $80 a month in rent. The trust should overflow with cash. It may grow so fat that after the cost of the new building is secured, it might be rebuilt sooner with higher quality construction. Residents maintain control of the unit until they die, unless they move. The ultimate owner is the trust or government. To start it might be easier to buy an existing hotel.
It might be possible to fund the construction with debt or insurance. Thus seed money might not even be needed. So sad people pay rent, ruining their lives to make someone else rich. As soon as they get older and lose their job, no one will care you will be on the streets.
My ideal design of the building is for the first floor to be for shops, industry, storage, and electronics. Most land area might be grass area. The grass area might be used to sell items in a farmers market type environment. Small 8' by 10' booths of concrete with allow everyone, even kids, to participate in a commercial space of capitalism. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors will consist of the apartments. The roof will be gardens with solar panels. The south, west, and east facing side might have solar panels too. The residents have the choice. Extremely high quality construction, no need to skimp, but targets should be $100,000 a unit.
Los Angeles City with 502 square miles with a population of 4,100,000, leaving half open space, leaves 1,700 square feet of land per person. For the county with 50% open space, leaves 5500 square feet of land per person. These multi-story apartments should only use about 200 square feet of land per unit.
If every homeless person has an apartment for free it will be morally justifiable to remove them from the parks and underpasses. The parks can be cleaned up. No one will worry if someone is behind a bush in a tent. Those with mental health problems can be vetted to hospitals.
Parking spaces are a good source of housing in the city for RVs and travelers. The poor should be encouraged to avoid rent and taxes and put that money in the stock market or their land. If you have no tolls for your freeways, you can have no tolls or apartments, parking, and public transportation. It is just funded in a way. Toll booths cost money, rents and landlords cost money and lives.
The high rents are just wealth extractors of creators, artists, capitalists, and workers for the land barons and government masters. If a young man in Germany had a home and place to run his art gallery in the 1920s, World War II probably never would have happened. If Japan did not monopolize their land with 12 generation farmers they may have never had a need for war. If you carefully watch the "I moved to LA" youtube videos the biggest problem is rent, imagine the artists and talent that would come and survive here if the rent was zero or $50 a month. Instead of waiting tables they should be writing scripts and going to auditions. Imagine if a city called "Capitalism" was created with free land and no property taxes.
The homeless are valuable, no one will be able to compete where people are paid on merit, where the workers and capitalists pay no rent.
2nd policy experiment. Free land in rural areas.
Anyone gets a free 2000 square foot plot land in a land commons. Equal land for Los Angeles county is about 5500 square feet, assuming half open space. Here a small land tax will be used to acquire new lands for the commons. Over time the entire United States will become common property based on this tax in the same way duck stamps created so many wildlife refuges. Any farm sold in auction will be bought by the commons. I would like to see 80% wild land to 20% developed land. You can still sell your plot with improvements. The only requirement is that you may own no more than 2 plots. You can build on one sell it an use the money to build another. Flipping but not accumulation. Wild land might be for those that want to live in a van or RV leaving the land in a clean raw natural state. A small fee per resident may be placed for trash and waste disposal and water sites. If people are really poor they can catch rainwater and outhouses where you dig a hole in the ground. When the hole gets full you cover it and move the outhouse or throne. 1000 square feet of solar should generate $300 a month of income at $0.10 a kwh. Thus if you install a $10,000 Amazon prefab home at a cost of $8 per month, you are already $292 a month cash flow positive.
I hope this to be plot of a reality t.v. show. If a contestant breaks the rules, a black van picks them up and they are kicked back on the city streets where they came. In real application a city can remove you but you must have another plot of equal land of quality and quantity nearby that fit your rules. Hopefully you can get professionals to give them tips of masonry, wood, plumbing, electrical, but it will be all their work and as long as you have a roof over your head who is to judge. A new homeless person is added to the community. The community might grow. Thus the show never ends. One contestant might be picked occasionally by the audience and judges to move to the winners to the beautiful "Emerald City".
3rd policy experiment. A new city with free apartments.
Basically a new city is built, "Capitalism" where all the land or apartments are free and owned by the city. All might be designed in school or by contest. Basically you choose to live there and you get a free apartment. The city in return gets 10% of your salary. The capitalists and workers will become rich again. Commercial and industrial land will also be free and equal. Imagine instead of paying $3000 a month in rent to wealth extractors, you get to keep it. This might be done also where a corporation builds residential area for their employees to avoid the abuse of landlords and city workers extracting wealth from evil corporations (workers and shareholders). The cities could have themes, "Textile", "New Hollywood","Corn", "Podcastadelphia", "Open Stock Market Exchange" where people can network in a similar industry.
Henry George and Tiberius Graccus
I dedicate this idea fundamentally to Henry George. Wrote Henry George in 1885, "Poverty is a crime—not an individual crime, but a social crime, a crime for which we all, poor as well as rich, are responsible." Henry George's solution, the land value tax was tested, and led to some positive results but never really caught on. Everything what the land value tax was meant to solve will lead to more confusion, rebirth of collectivism, richer real estate empires, larger bureaucracies, less freedom, and in the end poverty. However, the book itself is an incredible read.
He first came to the conclusion, "All Land Must be Common Property", but later drifted into the land value tax idea and stuck with it. Land value tax is not common property! It is a flawed idea! The value of land in many ways is created by the land owners of the city. The land owner has the right to profit from that. When the development is first built it is often the most valuable, the city ruins value?
Should not people that drive cars, repair the roads with a registration or gas tax? Should not income tax of workers pay for the income of military officers? The property tax just makes the city co-landlord. High city taxes leads to corruption at the city level, early retirements, and pay with no accountability. The land value tax creates a feudalistic society. Instead of one landlord you now have two, the city and the property owner. Land will accumulate to the few.
The idea does not require taking a single square foot away from private property. Mother time will slowly destroy the private land holdings, inefficient use will go to efficient use. George argued private land is a poor used of land (http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp31.htm). Since it is poor use, it will go to efficient use or merit based use. All that is required is a small parcel tax is used to help people with no land gain some with their rules.
Rome seem to flourish when an emperor was selected by merit. Where was the Roman army to stop the Visigoth invaders? Over the centuries the senators and emperor's took more control of the land. Small farming towns went vacant as families moved to the cities as the male soldier died in war. The family farm grew into Latifundium (large land holdings) run by immigrants and slaves. The citizens became disjointed from the land. Rome was sacked. In Weimar Germany and Rome currency devaluation occurred before empire collapse. This was not cause of the empire collapse but a symptom of being landless. Landless disgruntled citizens demand more than what the few tax payers and corporations can provide, deficits soar. Dedicated to Tiberius Graccus who sought to transfer land to poorer citizens as result of seeing land being accumulated by the senators.
Problem with the Solution
There may be a problem, if a person has more kids, they will have more land. Thus, equal land might be a problem, however owning just a small piece of land anywhere will allow people to rise with merit. If you are homeless you might get a little bit of land with no building permits if you can't afford them.
Farmland and Iowa Example
Large farms might be limited to the size one person can farm, thus they will not grow too large such that the farmer just hires labor or becomes an absentee farmer. Maybe 40 acres or 160 acres should be the limit.
Imagine Iowa when the glaciers came it deposited some of the best farmland in the midwest. The farmland is good everywhere, east, north, south, and west. On the west is the wide Missouri and on the east is the mighty Mississippi. Virtually the entire state farmland rents for over $200 per acre (Cash Rental Rates for Iowa 2019 Survey, Iowa State University). If the government put a tax of $200 per acre, with 30,623,000 acres farmed would generate $6.125 billion in tax revenues. The current State budget is $8.5 Billion (wikipedia, State Budgets, 2018). Farmland should be more productive with leased land, more corn and soybeans would be grown per acre on leased land. As the LVT is implemented farms still accumulate to the few.
But that productivity comes at a cost. Furthermore as people are removed from their farms to work in the city, the landowner seeks to hire the most productive worker. If that worker complains they are disgarded, the farm will choose the slave and immigrant to farm the land at the lowest cost. Society becomes disjointed from the land, many honest farmers commit suicide (probably at lower rates than society averages). The worker works twice, three times harder than the owner. But they need the job to survive.
Now in the mean time large farms will be more productive. The larger farm can install the $500,000 combines. The farmer will not do the hard work and will be looking for the cheapest labor they can find. Most likely immigrants that you can pay below minimum wage and risk of lawsuit is low since they are not residents. If a resident Iowan complains, he is fired, as there are plenty of hungry bodies worldwide to fill the vacant spot. Work 40 hours with 2 weeks vacation, complain, fired, that is what land ownership promises. Where is the owner? Skiing in Vail at $500,000 a year. As Thomas Paine said, The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe (Agrarian Justice).
For Iowa, 55% of the farmland is leased (farmprogress). 60% is owned by people older than 65. 82% of farmland is free of debt. 49% owned by women. 35% owned by someone older than 75. In 1982, 1% was in trusts, now it is 22%. 10% is now owned by corporations and growing. Iowa had 17,700 farms, making up just 20 percent of the state’s farms, but with an average size of 1,034 acres, their combined 18.3 million acres encompassed 59.8 percent of the state’s farmland (The changing face of Iowa's family farms, TheGazette). A stat I would like to know is, what percentage of the land do the largest 1000 and 10000 farms own?
Average Farm Size
1900 151 acres
1920 157 acres
1940 160 acres
1960 199 acres
1980 281 acres
2000 347 acres
2020 345 acres (more hobby farms and larger big farms).
I am not a fan of taxing the land at $200 per acre and giving it away as a basic income. Suppose this tax is for state residents only. It works out to about $2000 per person, for doing nothing. What will happen is people will move to Iowa to get this check. Immigrants from other countries and States will move there to get the free money, So Iowa's population will double, and the check will now be $1000. But the reality is the money has to be earned. Someone had to slaughter a pig or cut a field for $1 to be earned. The labor and capital that created it, deserve it. If all land is free and open to everyone equally, there is no need for UBI.
Although it looks great to the teeth of a school teacher, I am not in favor of taxing the land for government use. We are learning the lesson, government is not the people. They overpay themselves. They are inefficient. They waste money and accomplish little. People that get fired from the private sector work their way into government where they can be paid with no accountability. Thus you have a feudalistic state, where the the workers work the land or die and the government sector profits. As the government becomes large and the population grows the sector becomes more wasteful, people get less with more. Consider California government compared to Iowa government. It is not a product of California crazy liberals, it is the result we have higher population density. Red (individual rights) states are where land is cheap and blue (socialist) states are where land is monopolized. Cities in red states are blue and rural areas in blue states are red. Life for the poor is better in red states.
Equal land for equal people idea becomes apparent. It rewards work and merit. People pay taxes to government as a choice if it adds benefit to them. I propose limiting ownership to 120 acres, about the average size in 1900. A small land tax may be added to force owners to do something productive. As before given to those with no land, land and wildlife conservation, and the hungry. Many farmers that own the land think very long term. They might have farm ponds and allow the land to lay fallow for wildlife and rejuvenation. The fallow land in the city of country may prevent the black swan event. Some small farmer may develop a new crop that saves the world. The economist experts with their government buying programs and fallow payouts may have prevented the famines that have occurred in virtually every other country of the world. However, it may just be we never got near the carrying capacity.
Housing Acts
The housing acts in my opinion seem to be the the cure to the great depression. It allowed people to get land at low monthly payments. However, these acts might be the leading cause of inequality now. Real estate investors use every means to get the cheapest debt to accumulate the most rentals. Home owners, IRAs, Sep-IRAs, and just bank accounts are passed on to the new generation. Thus, if you ever get to the point where you can survive on your home and investments, your kids will be able to survive on your home and investments and retire when they are born. Cheap debt allows those with assets to accumulate more often below the true cost and the inflation rate. Seems the people that became rich on cheap debt, want more cheap debt and more exclusions. They move up. Ever see how Trump, Romney, Stiglitz, et. al. are all in favor of cheap debt. It may be bitcoin that saves the United States and Europe of the U.S. Dollar and Euro. These mediums of exchange are in constant abuse as new deductions are added like Prop 13, homeowners interest deduction, depreciation, debt forgiveness, bank bailouts to help those with power to become more powerful. All interest deductions from student loan to corporation debt should be eliminated!
Section 8 housing and rent subsidies are bad use of public funds. These seem to only enrich landlords and local governments. FHA loans are wasteful and almost always below market and if the loans fail the banks get blamed. The real estate industry fees are expensive to the worker and capitalist.
Land is not labor or capital. Capital such as factories and business require labor to build. Who built the Tesla gigafactory? Individual shareholders put the money up. Houses are built with capital and labor, the government has no right taking money from someone and giving it to another for homes. Land is free, always will be free, and that is what people deserve for free, not the structures. It is only in areas where the city denies land, where you have the homeless. A $50,000 unit is $40 a month over 100 years if indexed to inflation. So what is the discrepancy in $40 a month and the $2000 a month landlords charge? Monopoly!
The parcel tax to fund apartments for the homeless is a great idea, but don't let the mayor touch the funds as history is showing. To fix sidewalks in front of your house should based on the linear feet of road is in front of your house. Police should be paid for with income or sales taxes. Schools should be paid by resident, not land. Land is, land is free, thus there are no taxes counties or cities can justify for land. Be careful with this! Land barons will use the idea of no property taxes to own the country and make you a slave. No property taxes will only work where land is equal or commons. Residences could be taxed on value, for things the home needs like fire protection. One man may want to use his land for a butterfly park and live in a tent, it is his choice in a free society. That is what will make people happy.
Universal Basic Income: A Bad Idea.
There are the new universal basic income ideas, where people get $500 a month for doing nothing. This is a bad idea. Suppose you make $10 an hour at McDonalds. That is 50 hours of labor you get for free? A girl builds a lemonade stand, what right do you have to take money from her? UBI has some merit in the current system of private property. The city could offer you a minimum wage if you can't find work. Some city jobs might be cutting brush, helping the elderly, and repairing sidewalks. But history has shown city unions will demand more and more as time goes on. UBI with land tax could work in that it could destroy land monopoly.
Food Stamps: A Good Idea
There are food stamps, which I say is a good idea. People are denied farmland and the farmers must pay for the land they hoard. Food stamps is a good idea, a better idea is limiting size of farms and allowing everyone to farm somewhere. If the poor were hungry they would just grow their own food. In the city it is easy to spend $30 a day on food, and to give someone a $10 a day voucher for food is plausible. It should be sourced from a tax on excessive farm acreage. A farmer can avoid this tax by giving 2 acres to the hungry.
2% Elizabeth Warren Asset Tax: A Good Idea
Then there is the 2% asset tax after $50 million as Elizabeth Warren proposes. Generally all her ideas are poor, but this is a good idea. Would Warren Buffett ever vote to sell BNSF railroad shares below intrinsic value if he was a minority shareholder of BNSF? No they were below intrinsic value! He used his shares and his loyal kool-aid followers to take the company. Now they can even used loaned shares, shares from etfs, hedge funds, and mutual funds to influence votes. Many of these multimillionaires are not really rich from ingenuity, they just own a lot of land. If you include Buffett's railroad, solar panels, wind farms, See's Candy buildings, Haagen Dazs, and all the other businesses he is more of a land baron than an investor. Land creates a moat. If you own $50 million in stock or real estate, you own tons of land. It should even go lower to $5 million. Private equity LBO should be illegal as it is nothing more than rape and theft of shareholders. I you don't like your shares, sell them on the open markets. The landless rich should pay no tax. Every listed stock and business can list the acres they own. Acres the business owns divided by the number of shares you own is the amount of land you own.
Green New Deal (GND): A Poor Idea.
Why increase taxes on something that is one of the cheapest sources of electric power? A solar panel at $.50 a watt, 5 sun hours a day, over normal degradation rates results in less than a penny a kilowatt hour power ($.50/(5*365*50/1000)). GND should be paid for with a tax cut and a electrical rate cut. The government can demand all new roofs have solar installed. The government should own the land and hire the low-bid contractor to build the solar plant with a 20 year lease. The government owns the plant and low-bid contracts should maintained and improve the plants after the lease is up. Idaho recently had a 2.175c/kwh fixed with 20-year power purchase agreement. Battery storage could be by another contract. Lithium Titanate with 20000 cycles at $200 kwh, stores electricity for 1c/kwh. Los Angeles may have recently gone to 1.997c a kwh solar.
Taxes
You have one hospital that is non-profit and one for-profit. Both have $100 million in revenues and charge the same, yet the for-profit hospital pays $5 million in tax and the non-profit pays nothing. You buy a house, the value goes up, but over time the city deteriorates around you and you home rots starts to fall apart? Do you have a capital gain? The company increases the price of a car due to inflation, as result profits rise proportionally do you really have any gain at all? The reality all capital gains taxes should be eliminated, all corporate taxes should be eliminated, dividends taxes should be eliminated, depreciation expense eliminated, interest deductions eliminated. The only tax should be a tax on gross income (without depreciation) and it should be about 5%. Surprisingly it should generate more revenues. If foreign dictators don't have to pay dividend or capital gains taxes on U.S. stocks, why should you?
Employee stock options should be banned or counted as income when they are issued as per quantity, thus is the ceo is issued 100,000 shares of ABC company and the price is currently $10. In 10 years, they get the difference of the current price and future price. The option should be taxed at $1 million at top bracket when it was issued. A CEO should not get options, pay, or retirement packages.
You buy a house for $550,000. You are allowed to depreciate that home over 27.5 years or $20,000 per year. You lease the home to your brother for 27.5 years at the mortgage price and he pays for all the repairs. Depreciation expense needs to be eliminated.
Conclusion
"You have the Right to Life, liberty, and Property." Everyone deserves free equal land anywhere with no mandatory property tax, building permits, fees, or codes. You pay the taxes and land rules you want. It should be easy to leave, create a new city or state with rules you value. The city owes you a free apartment for stealing land and monopoly. The LVT is a poor idea, the current system of unlimited ownership is a poor idea.
Marxism, socialism, and other ideas demand the entire country be destroyed for it to work. They never will work. They will be tried again and again claiming it was never tried or that if we only had a different leader it would work. These ideas are so powerful only a small trial is needed to potentially take over all the land of the United States and World.
