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Natural Monopolies

Ted Gwartney:  Estimating Land Values

EFFICIENCY OF PUBLIC REVENUE
Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, suggested that any "tax" should be a charge for services which benefit all people and are more efficiently performed by a single cooperative effort. He postulated four principles of taxation which any source of revenue should meet:
1. Light on the production of wealth, and does not impede or reduce production;

2. Cheap to collect, requiring few collectors, and easy to understand;

3. Certain; can't be avoided, little opportunity for corruption, and provides adequate revenue;

4. Equitable and fair, payment for benefits received, impartial, and just.

Collecting public revenue from land rent is the only revenue source, or "tax", that meets these criteria.

While the major argument for raising public revenue from land rent and natural resources is because it is equitable and fair, it is also the most efficient method of raising the revenue which is needed for public facilities and services. Land is visible, can't be hidden and its valuation is less intrusive than valuations of income and sales. Taxes on labor and capital cause people to consider alternative options, including working with less effort, which produces less real goods. For example, a tax on wages will reduce after-tax net wages and weaken the incentive to work. A person might be willing to work hard for a wage of $20 per hour, but decide to drop out if the taxes take $8 and the net wage is only $12 per hour. Economists claim that present taxes account for a 25% loss in production in the United States. Production and consumption would be greatly improved if public revenue came primarily from land rather than a wage tax. The same would occur when buildings and machinery are taxed. The tax on building reduces the quantity and quality of buildings produced. A tax on sales, commerce or value added reduces consumption, production and net wealth. Sales tax evasion in the United States has exceeded 30% in recent years.  ... Read the whole article


Mason Gaffney:  Full Employment, Growth And Progress On A Small Planet: Relieving Poverty While Healing The Earth
3. Detailed causes of artificial scarcity of land. Major forces holding labor off better lands are the following (George, 1879):
a. “Land Speculation,” conceived as holding land primarily for its anticipated rise in value. Hasty readers and simplifiers of George see only this point, overlooking items b-f, following.

b. High demands of the rich for land as a totem, for pleasure and prestige. This demand rises with income, in greater proportion than income.

c. Advance of labor-stinting, land-lavishing technology, roughly associated with economies of scale.

d. Tax bias. Taxes based on work, production, exchange, coupled with preferential tax treatment of landholding, land income, land gains, etc., create a powerful bias in favor of wasting land and downsizing labor forces (Gaffney, 1999).

e. Lack of basic infrastructure and public services, due to constraints on the tax base

f. Overpricing and poor service from natural monopolies. ...

Natural monopolies (a term going back to George’s harbinger, J.S. Mill) should be publicly owned, or regulated. Georgism as a political movement was closely allied with movements to lower urban mass transit fares and improve service, using if necessary the property tax base to cover deficits. Read the whole article


Michael Hudson: The Lies of the Land: How and why land gets undervalued
Turning land-value gains into capital gains
Hiding the free lunch
Two appraisal methods
How land gets a negative value!
Where did all the land value go?
A curious asymmetry
Site values as the economy's "credit sink"
Immortally aging buildings
Real estate industry's priorities
THE FREE LUNCH     Its cost to citizens     Its cost to the economy

Turning land-value gains into capital gains
YOU MAY THINK the largest category of assets in this countrly is industrial plant and machinery. In fact the US Federal Reserve Board's annual balance sheet shows real estate to be the economy's largest asset, two-thirds of America's wealth and more than 60 percent of that in land, depending on the assessment method.
Most capital gains are land-value gains. The big players do not want their profits in rent, which is taxed as ordinary income, but in capital gains, taxed at a lower rate. To benefit as much as possible from today's real estate bubble of fast rising land values they pledge a property's rent income to pay interest on the debt for as much property as they can buy with as little of their own money as possible. After paying off the mortgage lender they sell the property and get to keep the "capital gain".

This price appreciation is actually a "land gain", that is, it's not from providing start-up capital for new enterprises, but from sitting on a rising asset already in place, the land. Its value rises because neighbourhoods are upgraded, mortgage money is ample, and rezoning is favorable from farmland on the outskirts of cities to gentrification of the core to create high-income residential developments. The potential capital gain can be huge. That's why developers are willing to pay their mortgage lenders so much of their rent income, often all of it.

Of course, investing most surplus income and wealth in land has been going on ever since antiquity, and also pledging one's land for debt ("mortgaging the homestead") that often led to its forfeiture to creditors or to forced sale under distress conditions. Today borrowing against land is a path to getting rich -- before the land bubble bursts. As economies have grown richer, most of their surplus is still being spent acquiring real property, both for prestige and because its flow of rental income grows as society's prosperity grows. That's why lenders find real estate to be the collateral of choice.

Most new entries into the Forbes or Fortune lists of the richest men consist of real estate billionaires, or individuals coming from the fuels and minerals industries or natural monopolies. Those who have not inherited family fortunes have gained their wealth by borrowing money to buy assets that have soared in value. Land may not be a factor of production, but it enables its owners to assert claims of ownership and obligation, i.e., rentier income in the forms of rent and interest. ...

IF THE APPRAISAL controversy is framed in terms of business cycle analysis, then the statistician finds no reasonable alternative to seeing that when the cycle rises and falls, the difference must be in the land, not buildings. What people are buying are not reproduction costs, whose fluctuations over the course of the credit cycle are relatively minor. They are buying site value, which is in limited supply, akin to a natural monopoly. Most of all, real estate investors and homeowners are buying the right to resell their property as prices are bid up by what they expect to become an increasingly affluent economy fuelled by an abundant supply of mortgage credit. ...  Read the whole article

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