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Laissez-Faire in Tokyo Land Use – Article by Alex Tabarrok

Laissez-Faire in Tokyo Land Use – Article by Alex Tabarrok

The New Renaissance HatAlex Tabarrok
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Tokyo, Japan’s capital city, has a growing population of over 13 million people but house prices have hardly increased in twenty years. Why? Tokyo has a laissez-faire approach to land use that allows lots of building subject to only a few general regulations set nationally. Robin Harding at the FT has a very important piece on the Tokyo system:

Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

Tokyo’s steady construction is linked to a still more startling fact. In contrast to the enormous house price booms that have distorted western cities — setting young against old, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and denying others the chance to move to where the good jobs are — the cost of property in Japan’s capital has hardly budged.

This is not the result of a falling population. Japan has experienced the same “return to the city” wave as other nations.House_Prices_2

How is this possible? First Japan has a history of strong property rights in land:

Subject to the zoning rules, the rights of landowners are strong. In fact, Japan’s constitution declares that “the right to own or to hold property is inviolable”. A private developer cannot make you sell land; a local government cannot stop you using it. If you want to build a mock-Gothic castle faced in pink seashells, that is your business.

But this alone cannot explain everything because there was a huge property price-boom in Japan circa 1986 to 1991. In fact, it was in dealing with the collapse of that boom that Japan cleaned up its system, reducing regulation and speeding the permit approval process.

…in the 1990s, the government relaxed development rules, culminating in the Urban Renaissance Law of 2002, which made it easier to rezone land. Office sites were repurposed for new housing. “To help the economy recover from the bubble, the country eased regulation on urban development,” says Ichikawa. “If it hadn’t been for the bubble, Tokyo would be in the same situation as London or San Francisco.”

Hallways and public areas were excluded from the calculated size of apartment buildings, letting them grow much higher within existing zoning, while a proposal now under debate would allow owners to rebuild bigger if they knock down blocks built to old earthquake standards.

Rising housing prices are not an inevitable consequence of growth and fixed land supply–high and rising housing prices are the result of policy choices to restrict land development.

The policy choices were made–they can be unmade.

tokyo-japanThis post first appeared at Marginal Revolution.

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He blogs at Marginal Revolution with Tyler Cowen.

The Fallacy of “Buy Land — They’re Not Making Any More” – Article by Peter St. Onge

The Fallacy of “Buy Land — They’re Not Making Any More” – Article by Peter St. Onge

The New Renaissance Hat
Peter St. Onge
September 21, 2015
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“Buy land — they’re not making any more!” is an old investing chestnut, and a common sense one to boot. Economically, it’s also completely false.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, we make land all the time. It just doesn’t look like land.

Why? Because land’s value doesn’t come from its ability to cover up the naked earth. Land’s value comes from its economic usefulness. From the value of things that can be done using that land (Rothbard’s “marginal revenue product” of the land). And that value is, indeed, changing all the time. Economically, from a price perspective, then, we make land all the time.

Step back a moment and ask why land has value anyway. Why do people want land? Well, obviously, because you can put stuff there — including yourself — plus buildings, swimming pools, and factories.

Now, anybody who’s visited West Texas knows there is plenty of building space in the world. You could drive for hours and meet nobody. There’s lots of space for that factory of yours. But it’s not really space itself that makes land valuable. It’s location. As in, there’s only so much room in Manhattan. Or Central London.

Once again, though, it’s not the actual space that matters. It’s the access. Put a strip mall on Manhattan surrounded by crocodile-filled moats and snipers and it will have low value. The value is in access. So Manhattan is valuable because it’s easy to get to other parts of Manhattan. And it’s easy for other people to get to you. Customers, partners, and friends can all easily visit you if your apartment or office is in Manhattan, moatless and sniperless.

So if it’s the access that matters, are they making new access? Of course. They’re doing it all the time.

New highways, new exits, new streets, mass transit, pedestrian malls are being regularly constructed. These all effectively “make new land” because they offer access to existing space. They turn relatively “dead zones” into “useful zones,” or new land.

What are some of the meta-trends on land as investment, then?

First: roads. This was a bigger value-driver a generation ago in the US, as new roads made the suburbs more accessible, helping to drain many cities even as US population grew. Outside the US (Mexico, Thailand, Russia), new roads are still a big deal, and even in the US, new highways can reshape values — draining old neighborhoods and building value in new ones. The decline of cities like Baltimore or Detroit are partly thanks to those beautiful roads that redistribute access to the suburbs.

Second: population. In the US “rust belt” of declining manufacturing, many regions have dropped in price simply because people are leaving. Detroit homes for $100 is emblematic, although of course there are also political reasons some cities are so cheap — in particular, taxes and crime.

And that brings us to politics. Real estate can be cheapened shockingly quickly by taxes and crime, and those traditional drivers have been joined in recent decades by environmental politics.

Environmentalists, by taking land off the market, effectively squeeze the remaining accessible locations, driving up the price. Regions like Seattle or San Francisco are poster children of this environmental squeeze, with modest homes even in remote suburbs costing upward of a million dollars. On the other extreme, cities like Dallas or Houston have kept prices down despite exploding populations by allowing farmland to be converted to residential, commercial, or industrial use.

Beyond the access and political angles, land is also vulnerable to “network effects.” In other words, the neighbors matter. Gentrification or urban decay can be hard to predict. Even in a compact city with rising population like Washington, DC, it can be hard to predict where the middle class or rich want to colonize, and where they want to flee.

There are clues, of course — in large US cities, gays moving into a neighborhood, new coffee shops or art galleries are some leading indicators that property prices might swing up. But gentrification has it’s own mind; even in a booming city it might go into some other neighborhood. New York’s Harlem or Silicon Valley’s East Palo Alto are two very accessible locations with low prices because of perceptions of the neighbors.

So, while they’re not “making” land, they are constantly making things that affect land price: access, regulations, changing neighbors. These are the kinds of factors that make land valuable, not it’s ability to cover the earth.

And so land comes back to earth, joining boring old commodities like wheat or copper. Just as vulnerable to changing supply and demand factors.

And if you are looking for something they’re not “making more of?” Well, gold does come close – hence its appeal. They do mine new gold all the time, but the costs are high enough that gold is a very “inelastic” commodity. It comes close to “they’re not making more.”

Beyond that? Develop your ultimate resource: yourself.

Peter St. Onge is an assistant professor at Taiwan’s Fengjia University College of Business. He blogs at Profits of Chaos.
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This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.
Illiberal Belief #9: It’s a Small World – Article by Bradley Doucet

Illiberal Belief #9: It’s a Small World – Article by Bradley Doucet

The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
January 11, 2013
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We have only one planet, it’s true, and there are ever more of us crowding onto its surface. With six billion humans and counting, surely we must be running out of land—if not on which to live, then on which to grow the enormous amounts of food required to feed us all. As evidence, we are reminded of the large swaths of the planet mired in poverty, a tragedy that is used to justify any number of illiberal policies, from Maoist one-child population control laws to Stalinist food rationing meant to stretch out our meagre and dwindling resources.

Thankfully, these fears are unjustified. The advent and improvement of air travel and modern communications technologies have certainly made the planet seem smaller—we can zip to the Far East in a matter of hours, or send electronic documents anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds—but it’s still the same gigantic ball of rock it has always been. The Earth is really staggeringly large; too large, in fact, to grasp intuitively. Of course, six billion is also too large a number to grasp intuitively. Only mathematics can help us understand if we are truly running out of space.

Our planet has a surface area of approximately 510 million square kilometres, of which just under 30% (149 million sq. km) is land area. How many people can the Earth support? According to Scientific American, “With current farming techniques, a little less than half an acre can grow enough food to feed one person.” One square kilometre contains roughly 247 acres, and so can feed approximately 500 people. If all of the land on Earth were suitable for food production, our planet could therefore support a population of some 73.5 billion people (149 million times 500). Of course, not all land is suitable for agriculture, but thankfully we don’t need it to be. Our current population of six billion could be fed on just 12 million square kilometres of agricultural land, an area slightly larger than the United States. Even at nine billion people (the downwardly-revised population peak we are set to hit by 2050)(1), we would only need 18 million square kilometres, representing just 12% of the land on Earth, or an area about the size of Russia. Furthermore, this figure assumes unrealistically that no further improvements in farming techniques will be invented over the next five decades.

1. Although it is true that there are more of us than ever, the 2004 UN projections show that population growth is slowing and total population is on course to top out at around nine billion by mid-century, far fewer than previously thought.

Bradley Doucet is Le Quebecois Libré‘s English Editor. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.
The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 3 – A Rational System of Land Ownership – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 3 – A Rational System of Land Ownership – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
November 11, 2012
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In this third installment of my short series on land and property rights (see my first and second installments), I aim to outline a rational, libertarian system of land ownership that simultaneously respects each individual’s private property and allows each individual ample opportunities to obtain land of his or her own. This is a system that allows every individual his or her inviolate sphere of action and control, while at the same time ensuring that no individual who strives to obtain land through sufficient exertion will be denied the ability to own landed property.

The rational criterion for how land may be initially appropriated from the state of nature is the first-occupier rule. The first person to transform a piece of land from the state of nature becomes that land’s rightful owner – but only if the land is substantively transformed and put to a use that can be reasonably expected not to terminate at any fixed time. In other words, a person may only initially appropriate that land which the person actually uses and does not expect to stop using entirely. The use may be sporadic and intermittent, but as long as the land is not abandoned altogether and the reasonable possibility of using it remains, the right to ownership remains with the person who first transformed it. A person can indirectly “use” the land by hiring others to work on it or manage it. As long as there exists an economic connection back to the owner, the use criterion is met. The land’s original owner may sell it to others or give the land as a gift. At that time, the new owner obtains the same prerogatives as the original owner had.

The use criterion prevents arbitrary claims over un-transformed land and also minimizes the possibility of conflict by reference to a criterion that relies on an ongoing state of use of the land. If a piece of land becomes completely abandoned by its owner, in the sense that the owner does not himself, or through the employment of others, perform or intend to realistically perform any physical actions on or pertaining to the land, then this land reverts to the state of nature and legitimately may be claimed by any subsequent first occupant. The use criterion distinguishes the libertarian view of land ownership from certain arbitrary legal precedents in many parts of the world – e.g., the “right” of kings in various Medieval and Early Modern European countries to all of the prime forests of those countries, which denied their subjects the ability to obtain any of the produce of the forests without special permission, or the “right” of certain Latin American potentates to vast tracts of completely undeveloped land, on which thousands of people have lived for generations as “squatters” who possess the land de facto but not de jure. The use criterion suggests that it may be the case that laws treat as private property land which should, in fact, be considered a part of the state of nature and opened to be claimed by future first occupants in substance.  This could, in practice, result in considerable upward economic mobility and improvements in standards of living for many people.

In an ideal libertarian system, owned land is truly owned – i.e., it is free of any encumbrances that the owner has not voluntarily entered into. The owner has the complete right to utilize the property as he sees fit, as long as he does not infringe on others’ rights to life, liberty, and property. There may be some role for the law to restrict the use of certain activities that necessarily infringe on others’ rights, such as spilling sewage into a river that runs adjacent to numerous owned plots of land – or emitting disease-causing chemicals into the air. These activities with negative external effects may be permissible in some cases if the affected other individuals consented to their conduct (with their consent possibly accompanied by compensation from the person engaging in the negative-externality-causing activity). Furthermore, the first occupier of a region has a greater prerogative to engage in such activities if the adversely affected neighbors voluntarily move in after the activity was known to be underway. (In other words, the neighbors could have avoided the adverse effects by going elsewhere, but they knowingly chose to move in anyway.)

An ideal libertarian system would have no property taxes or any other taxes that depend on one’s present wealth in any way. Irrespective of what other taxes may exist (and I have elsewhere argued for a system that can fund the government without relying on compulsory taxation at all), the concept of ownership should not be tied with any ongoing payment, unless the property was purchased by means of assuming a debt obligation. Even with regard to debt obligations, foreclosure on a property should be prohibited until the purchaser’s equity has been reduced to zero by an accumulation of amounts equal to the sum of delinquent payments, plus interest at the agreed-upon loan rates.

An owner of land may agree to an easement on the land in the form – for instance – of allowing a utility to place its infrastructure there, or allowing public traffic through a portion of the land. This easement should be entirely voluntary on the part of the owner, and it is legitimate for the owner to request compensation for granting the easement if he wishes. Likewise, the owner may rent the property to others at a mutually agreed-upon price, or, at his discretion, allow others to use or live on the property at no cost. A contractually conferred easement or tenancy may limit the owner’s subsequent ability to deny certain prerogatives to the tenants or parties using the easement, and a free market would facilitate the evolution of contracts that allow such parties the ability to use the land, subject to certain basic conditions, without fear of unilateral or arbitrary cessation of an arrangement on which they rely.

How would roads be built in such a world? How would utility lines be laid? Perhaps a contractually irrevocable perpetual easement might be the way to facilitate such arrangements while fully respecting private property. Instead of being bullied by eminent-domain legislation to sell the land or grant the easement, the owner may be enticed to collect a perpetual stream of income from the private road company or private utility. The road easement would be priced at prevailing market rates – not through a judicial fiat determining “fair market value,” but rather through negotiations based on millions of data points regarding what owners of similar land used for roads have been willing to accept without any compulsion.

As Roderick Long points out, it is also possible for a libertarian view to accommodate a type of “common” land which is neither private nor governmentally owned. This category of commons could be created by means of a private owner opening his land to common use in perpetuity – as in a landowner designating his property a public park or thoroughfare. Such common land does not revert to the state of nature, because it continues to be used regularly – e.g., by means of moving through it. The latest private owner retains a certain degree of rights to the land, in the sense that his designation for how the land may be used must be respected. However, as long as this designation’s terms are obeyed, the latest owner has surrendered his discretion over any particular instance of the common land’s use. The ability of common land to arise could be facilitated by the formation of voluntary cooperatives that purchase private land and declare it to be common. These cooperatives could then also supply services to keep the land in proper order for the purpose to which it is intended to be put. An example of this might be a group of shop owners in a busy urban area deciding to render the street adjacent to the shops to be common, so that any person could approach the shops without paying fees to any party, or being otherwise restricted. The shop owners could form a cooperative to purchase the land constituting the street. The cooperative would then declare such land to be common and would provide maintenance and security services to ensure that the street remains clean and accessible, and that no one significantly obstructs passage.

A true libertarian system would likely lead to the creation of numerous common spaces that would give people without substantial wealth the ability to use land for certain purposes which may bring them economic benefit and enrichment. For instance, it is conceivable that a common working area could be established, where individuals may bring their tools and utilize certain space for the period of their presence – on a first-come, first-served basis.

A legitimate question may arise as to how far up and down a right to legitimately acquired land extends. Again, the boundaries of such ownership should be circumscribed by considerations of use, as well as considerations of personal safety. It is reasonable to conclude that one’s owned airspace does not extend 10,000 meters into the air – which would have restricted the ability of airplanes to pass overhead. However, it is also reasonable to conclude that airplanes should be prohibited from flying at 50 meters above a residential area – even if they do not directly damage any property during a particular flight – because the risk of such damage is too great. The precise amount of owned airspace cannot be given a priori through philosophical argument – but use and safety do set some minimum bounds for the owner to rely on, and a rational legal system would work out the implications of these principles for various types of situations and technological possibilities.

Similarly, to what extent could a land owner lay claim to resources underneath the land? Clearly, one owns the land on which one’s house stands, to a depth that is sufficient to ensure that the house would not subside into the earth. However, does a land owner have the right to a mineral deposit 5 kilometers underneath the land? Perhaps so, if extracting the mineral would require transformation at the surface of the land. However, if a vast underground cave network leads to the mineral deposit from an entrance external to the land’s surface – or if such an access route can be created without any risk to the land on the surface (or the health, safety, or comfort of the owner), then does the owner still have a property right to the mineral – particularly if the owner does not intend to do anything with it and lacks the technical skills in any event? This is again a question that can only be addressed fully by considering the technological possibilities at hand, as well as the circumstances of a particular case. The general principles of use and safety would, however, result in the land owner receiving some claim to most underground resources in most real-world situations.

A libertarian system would penalize violations of others’ private property using Murray Rothbard’s “two teeth for a tooth” rule. In other words, a person who has infringed on another’s rights to property owes the victim twice the amount of the economic harm inflicted. A person who steals a television owes the victim two televisions (or the market value thereof). A person who breaks a window owes the cost of replacing two windows. This treatment both fully compensates the victim and punishes the violator by having the violator forfeit an equivalent item to the item of which the rightful owner was unjustly deprived. Monetary compensation may often be an appropriate way to address this when the property damaged could not easily be conceived of as a discrete unit.  It is important for the punishments for violations of property rights to be proportionate and only directed toward true violators. In other words, there are limits to the kind and degree of force that a property owner may wield to protect his property – depending on the circumstances and the nature of the threat. However, deadly force may be used if the property owner has justifiable reason to believe that his life or the lives of others on his property are threatened. When only inanimate property is threatened, incapacitation of the violator should be pursued instead of deadly force.

The great opportunity-promoting effects of a true libertarian system of land ownership would arise from the absence of any zoning laws and building restrictions – or restrictions of any sort on land use that does not pose negative externalities. Even private associations that attempt to foist such restrictions would be limited by law from prohibiting non-coercive, non-damaging uses of unencumbered property, over which the owner would remain sovereign. Thus, the tyranny of zoning and the tyranny of homeowners’ associations would both be absent in a libertarian system. Rapid economic growth and a flowering of individual expression on private property would result. Furthermore, more convenient economic arrangements  would arise – such as the pre-zoning-era practice of a store owner living with his family on the second floor above the store he owns on the first.  A libertarian system of true private land ownership would result in many more “mixed-use” areas arising, where functions of life and business are not artificially segmented from one another, but rather occur together in such a manner as is most convenient to the residents. Travel times to one’s place of employment would be greatly reduced, resulting in immense savings on transportation costs and improvements in personal safety. More rapid construction would occur, as building permits would not be required.

Under a libertarian system along the lines described above, much land currently in the state of nature would be converted to useful purposes, including the construction of residences for people who find the currently available stock of housing to be too expensive. The massive increase in the supply of housing would cause prices to fall to truly affordable levels for most. Furthermore, the freedom to build would result in an increased and accelerating rate of technological and design innovation – since no third party would be permitted to prohibit a structure for employing unusual esthetic elements or a method of construction that differs from what prevails in the area. More generally, esthetic criteria would never justify coercive prohibition of property use in a libertarian system; only physical harm to other persons would. Ultimately, the result of recognizing a genuine, rational regime of property rights would vastly enhance individuals’ standards of living not just through increased material prosperity, but through the improved satisfaction of living as a true master of one’s own sphere of life and activity.

The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 2 – An Analysis of the Georgist Land-Value Tax – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 2 – An Analysis of the Georgist Land-Value Tax – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
October 16, 2012
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In this second installment of my short series on land and property rights (see my first installment here), I begin to respond to “We Can Have It All: The Beauty of Value Capture” by Edward Miller. In particular, I focus on the idea of the single tax on the value of land, as originated by Henry George. Mr. Miller, a contemporary representative of the Georgist position, states that “We can eliminate taxes and debt, poverty and special privilege. Contrary to the dour pronouncements from the curators of the dismal science, we can have it all.” Mr. Miller advocates doing this by advocating the elimination of “no-strings-attached sovereignty” over land and replacing it with what he calls “Value Capture” and which many others would call a land-value tax. Mr. Miller states that this “is a tax only in the sense that Pigovian ‘Taxes’ are. It is not a tax on production, and thus there is nothing objectionable about it from the perspective of classical liberalism. Indeed, I’d argue that without it, classical liberalism is a cruel joke. Value capture is simply a reconceptualization of who owns the value of the access rights over the Earth.” In this installment, I will focus on the Pigovian/Georgist land-value tax idea in particular. In subsequent installments, I will address what I consider to be a more desirable approach to land in a free-market, classically liberal manner that seeks to facilitate economic growth and the continual improvement of living standards.

I am not a supporter of a land-value tax (however it may be termed) or of Pigovian taxation in general. The idea of a Pigovian tax (however called) seems to me rather contrived, in that it assumes a perfect knowledge on the part of the taxing authority of not just which activities create negative externalities, but also the precise extent to which a particular instance of such activities creates those externalities – and, correspondingly, the precise extent of taxation needed to take the “social cost” of these activities into account. The economic distortions of taxation, relative to a tax-free free-market situation, cannot be avoided in practice, no matter what form the tax takes – though, admittedly, it can be said that some types of taxes produce greater distortions or different kinds of distortions than others. Furthermore, the idea of a Pigovian tax is unworkable in practice, because political incentives and the influence of special-interest pressure groups would surely distort the incidence of the tax to benefit those with lobbying clout. In other words, even if the exact “social cost” of every activity could be calculated, the influence of lobbyists on elected officials would result in the incidence of the tax departing from a proper reflection of that “social cost.”

The elimination of all other possible taxes would be a definite advantage of the Georgist system, though – in practice – attempts to introduce a new type of tax have seldom supplanted existing taxes but have merely resulted in yet another kind of tax alongside all others. In fact, in the United States today, we might consider the current system of property taxation to be a partially Georgist system – but the property taxes are paid alongside income, sales, excise, gift, estate, fuel, and numerous other taxes – not to mention a myriad of fees to fund specific government services.

However, let us assume that it is politically feasible to enact a single land-value tax that supplants all other taxes. Perhaps an added advantage of this simplified approach would be the reduction in the overall cost of administering tax determination and collection – which the most benevolent conceivable government would entirely pass on to the people in the form of a lower tax rate. Even in this ideal situation, why might a land-value tax still be less favorable than other possible taxes?

Consider that certain kinds of taxes can be avoided by a property-owning individual entirely. He only needs to pay an income tax if he earns taxable income. He only needs to pay a sales tax if he purchases taxable goods. He can avoid gift taxes by not giving gifts (beyond the tax-exempt amounts). If he has enough money saved up to live on, grows/produces all of his own goods, and keeps his property largely to himself, he can avoid all such taxes in theory (even though, in practice, he would admittedly be part of a small minority of the population). The similarity among these taxes (no matter their other flaws, of which there are many) is that they do not reduce current wealth kept for personal use. Property taxes are different in that they are able to actually diminish a person’s stock of wealth without that person undertaking any positive action. As long as a person owns a house, or a commercial building, or even a stretch of land for recreational use, he cannot avoid the diminution of his wealth through taxation solely due to the passage of time. An income tax only reduces one’s potential earning opportunities. A sales tax only reduces one’s potential purchasing power if one chooses to make purchases. A property tax, however, reduces one’s existing stock of wealth, no matter what one chooses to do. Thus, with all other things (including the total tax collected) being equal, a property tax is more adverse to an individual because it compels him to engage in positive actions in order to maintain his present wealth, rather than merely discouraging the individual from undertaking certain additional activities that might be taxed to a greater extent than he might prefer.

A Georgist land-value tax is different from the current American property tax in that it taxes the land only and not the manmade improvements on that land. In this respect, the land-value tax is superior. It would probably encourage significant vertical building by landowners/occupants in order to increase the amount of improvements per unit of land. However, it would also probably result in large stretches of land being unoccupied and unused, because there would be a sub-optimal level of interest in developing that land, as the owners/occupants would be responsible for paying tax. This may make the unfortunate phenomenon of urban congestion common even in less populated areas.

Furthermore, one can conceive of a supremely sub-optimal outcome of the single land-value tax, which would be the result of a perverse incentive indeed. This is the scenario where most individuals decide that it is not worth the trouble to own land (or partially own it or “rent” it from the community – however this might be described legally). Instead, large landholding corporations would emerge and purchase most or all of the land. Their owners (probably a lot of dispersed shareholders beholden to an entrenched management and thereby subject to numerous principal-agent problems) would be willing to absorb the costs of the land-value tax in exchange for collecting rents from everyone else who lives and works on that land. Many ordinary people might think that they are getting a good deal by avoiding all legal incidence of taxation – but in reality, the amount of rent they would pay to the landholding corporations would be higher to reflect the taxes those corporations have to pay. In other words, the cost of the land-value tax would be at least partially passed on to the renters/majority of people in the community by the landholding corporations. Economically, this is identical to the scenario that the Georgist proposal seeks to avoid – the situation where (whether or not this is indeed the case) it is alleged that most of people are beholden to a minority of landowners or lienholders by means of payment of rent or repayment of expensive mortgages.

One significant downside of this scenario, relative to the status quo, is that the possibility of “free and clear” ownership of property would be more definitively off-limits to everybody – even in theory. Another even greater concern is that the landholding corporations would essentially behave like supercharged homeowners’ associations – with even more power to micromanage people’s lives and impose arbitrary restraints on the use of personal property and the improvement of land. They would be able to conduct this abuse with impunity, because there would be fewer of them in any given geographical area, compared to today’s homeowners’ associations. This would give the landholding corporations the oligopoly (and sometimes monopoly) power that enables many similar entities to disregard consumer preferences and extract large amounts of unearned money.

The reality is that the market always seeks to correct for economic distortions that are the result of confiscatory or redistributive policies. The correction is always imperfect, because real wealth is in fact appropriated through taxation. However, changing the tax structure cannot, by itself, solve the whole distortion – without addressing how much wealth is kept by private citizens and what they are legally able to do with that wealth. There may, however, be a valid argument for changing a tax structure if this inherently results in a lower total proportion of tax collected, relative to the wealth that exists among the general population. This, of course, depends on the real rates of tax selected for each alternative under consideration. For instance, I would wholeheartedly support (as an unambiguous directional improvement relative to the status quo) a single land-value tax whose entire collections would be a mere 0.5% of the Gross Domestic Product. Irrespective of any concerns about the incentive effects of the tax, those would be dwarfed by the sheer amount of wealth that individuals would be able to keep compared to today’s tax regime. In this situation, though, I would still strongly prefer that the legal concept of full ownership of land be retained and that the land-value tax be administered similarly to today’s property taxes – as opposed to treating the occupant of the land as a “tenant” who owes a “rent” to “the community.”

There may also be a valid argument for changing a tax structure if doing so results in more wealth-generating behavior and increased productivity. However, I cannot find a system that allows for the diminution of current wealth through taxation to be more encouraging of productivity than a system that merely takes a share of future active production or consumption. If one cannot be guaranteed the peaceful and total enjoyment of the wealth one has already earned, then earning more seems less attractive from a psychological (in addition to a purely economic) perspective. Productivity is simply not as enjoyable if one views it as a chore to be done in order to remain in one’s present situation and prevent a decline – rather than an ambitious endeavor of self-improvement and possible enrichment.

Next, I will address how land might properly be approached from a libertarian/classical liberal standpoint, with beneficial practical consequences to most and the avoidance of effects that might stifle economic growth or decrease individual opportunities.

The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 1 – Arguments for Land as Property – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Vital Importance of Property in Land: Part 1 – Arguments for Land as Property – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
October 14, 2012
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In this small series on land and private property, I hope to counter the claims of Henry George and his contemporary followers, who generally support a libertarian view with respect to all property except land – which they do not consider to be legitimate property. I, on the contrary, see the ability to own property in land (based on a true Lockean understanding of “mixing one’s labor” with rightfully owned land, or legitimately acquiring it from those who did) as indispensable to the existence of other property rights – as well as, more generally, to the expression of human individuality and the improvement of the human condition.

Why is property in land essential for the exercise of all other property rights? In this first installment, I provide six arguments.

Argument 1: Use of Personal Property: If there is no property in land, one cannot be guaranteed the ability to set one’s personal property in any location for its use and enjoyment. This means, ultimately, the use and enjoyment of one’s personal property is always at the discretion – and with the permission – of whichever governing authority or collective decision-making would supplant the right of private property in land. This is not liberty; the best that it can be is a kind of benign neglect from the persons or committees who have the power to dispose of the land and what is on it.

Argument 2: Complete Ownership: If there is no property in land, then there is never an ability – even in theory – to enjoy the use of land “free and clear” – without paying some sort of rent or “usage fee” to someone. Ignoring property taxes (whose absence is wholly conceivable and would be tremendously beneficial – even if other types of taxes are kept in place), it is possible today for people to pay off any mortgages and liens on their property and to enjoy it outright, without fear of losing the property if they do not pay a continuous stream of money to a third party.  The greatest value of private property comes about precisely when the ownership of that property is absolute – not contingent upon future services or payments rendered to other people.

Argument 3: Opportunity to Choose Leisure or Work: If there is no property in land, and one must continuously and inescapably pay a stream of money to a third party in order to avoid losing the property, then this means that one must continuously earn a sizable income to support that stream of payments. The ability to lead a life of leisure (after having made adequate provision for one’s other needs) is forever closed off to most people (unless they are beneficiaries of trust funds or a fortuitous investment strategy). Whatever the relative merits of work versus leisure might be in any particular situation, a libertarian would hold that the choice to pursue either (or any combination of each) should be up to the individual. Restrictive institutions should not permanently foreclose individuals (in multiple senses of that word) from pursuing one of these alternatives or the other. My own ambition, for instance, is to pay off the mortgage on my house while I am still relatively young. I would continue to engage in paid employment (and hopefully earn decent money) for many decades thereafter, but a lot of the economic pressure would be removed by getting rid of the largest recurring expense, and the same amount of earnings could achieve a much higher standard of living in other respects.

 Argument 4: Incentives for Improvement: If there is no property in land, then there is little incentive (other than sheer benevolence) for the occupant to improve the land by the addition of permanent fixtures, for someone else (or “the community at large”) would capture the values of the improvements, while the occupant would spend his personal resources on the improvements. This is the classic case of a “positive externality” not being realized – or, alternatively, a “tragedy of the commons” situation arising from the community laying claim to a resource that becomes over-exploited and insufficiently maintained. If one wishes for private residential lots to begin to resemble the public roads of a large city in appearance, then doing away with land ownership is an excellent means to that dubious goal.

Argument 5: Individuality: Only through the exercise of the right of private property can a person truly actualize his individual aspirations and distinctive esthetic. True private property enables an individual to act within his own realm as he pleases, as long as he does not infringe on the identical prerogatives of all others with their property. Only private property in land can give an individual the unfettered ability to paint a house with the colors and patterns of one’s choice, to determine the surrounding landscaping, to select the appliances and amenities therein, and to decorate it (which is a right that should not be undervalued, lest we lose it in the age of draconian busybody “homeowners’ associations”). An individual who owns land can truly turn the land and the improvements on it into reflections of himself, rather than just another barren, drab, or cookie-cutter plot (though any of those are within his prerogative as well, if he wishes to be unimaginative). True innovators are always in the minority and always unconventional. If they do not have a sphere where they can act unfettered, then many of their creations may never come to be.

Argument 6: Owned Land versus Land in the State of Nature: While I do not support arbitrary claims of ownership to undeveloped land, I do hold to the Lockean view that a person comes to own land by mixing his labor with it as the first occupant – and only to the extent that he does so. Locke himself argued that a person’s legitimate claim to land extends only to whatever land this person (or others acting on his behalf, through the voluntary exchange or offering of their services) was able to transform with his labor and put to use. Any other (undeveloped) land remains in the state of nature, free for others to claim. This is why Locke opposed arbitrary claims of the King of England to all of the prime forests of that country as the King’s “hunting grounds”. Likewise, one might question whether a Lockean view of property rights would allow national governments today to lay claim to vast undeveloped territories and to preclude development thereon (or sell “development rights” or “resource rights” to those territories). A fully libertarian system of property law would recognize the right of the first occupant and user of a property to be its owner, but only with respect to the land which is truly inextricably involved with such occupancy or use – i.e., land that has been improved and transformed. This is a consistent and universalizable standard for legitimate ownership, and it is a standard that follows directly from the desire to use and transform objects in nature for the improvement of human well-being. Such improvement and transformation are precisely what differentiates owned land from land in the state of nature. Owned land is much more usable and often dedicated to specific purposes, whereas land in the state of nature remains to be adapted to human needs. In practice, the two would look quite different and would enable natural demarcations of private land holdings.

Are We Destroying the Earth? – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Are We Destroying the Earth? – Article by Sanford Ikeda

The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
October 3, 2012
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People often complain that mankind is destroying the earth: that insatiable consumption and relentless production have laid waste to irreplaceable swaths of our planet, and that these activities have to stop or someday it will all be gone.

Which raises the question: What does it means to “destroy” something?

When you burn a log, the log is destroyed but heat, light, smoke, and ashes remain.  It’s in that sense that physics tells us that matter is neither created nor destroyed.  Similarly, cutting down a forest destroys the forest but in its place are houses and furniture and suburbs.

The real question is: Is it worth it?

Value Can Be Both Created and Destroyed

What people usually mean when they say mankind is destroying the earth is that human action causes a change they don’t like.  It sounds odd to say that my wife, by eating a piece of toast for breakfast, is “destroying” the toast.  But if I wanted that toast for myself, I might well regard her action as destructive.  Same action, but the interpretation depends on purpose and context.

When a missile obliterates a building and kills the people in it, it may serve a political purpose even though the friends and family of those killed and the owners of the building are harmed.  The perpetrator’s gain is the victim’s loss.  In the political realm, one person’s gain is necessarily another person’s loss.  You rob Peter to pay Paul; you kill Jack to appease Jill.  It’s a “zero-sum game.”

In the economic realm, however, a thing is destroyed to the extent that it loses its usefulness to somebody for doing something.  Someone may want to bulldoze my lovely home just for fun.  If she pays me enough I may let her do it and be glad she did.  When not physically coerced, a trade won’t happen unless each side expects to gain.  If it does happen, and if the people who traded are right, then all do in fact gain.  Each is better off than before. The trade has created something–value.  If they are wrong they destroy value and suffer a loss, which gives them an incentive to avoid making mistakes.

Profits and Losses Help to Minimize the Destruction of Value

In free markets gains manifest themselves in profit, either monetary or psychic.  (In the short run, of course, you can sustain a monetary loss if you think there’s a worthwhile nonmonetary aspect to the trade that will preserve the profit.)  Now, the free market is not perfect, despite what some economics professors say about the benefits of so-called “perfect competition.”  People don’t have complete or perfect knowledge and so they make mistakes.  They trade when they shouldn’t, or they don’t trade when they should.  Fortunately, profits and losses serve as feedback to guide their decisions.

There’s another source of market imperfection.  People may be capable of making good decisions but they don’t trade, or trade too much, because the property rights to the things they would like to trade aren’t well-defined or aren’t effectively enforced.  In such cases their actions or inactions create costs they don’t bear or benefits they don’t receive.  The result is that their decisions end up destroying value.

If I free-ride off the oceans, if for example I don’t pay for dumping garbage into it, then the oceans will become more polluted than they should be.  If there is a cleaner, more efficient source of energy than fossil fuels, but no one can profitably use it because the national government prevents anyone from doing so (for example by prohibitions or excessive taxation), then again the value that would have been created will never appear.

Aesthetics or Economics?

Our esthetic sense of beauty is part of what makes us human.  If we wish to protect a lake or a valley from development because we think it beautiful, how do we do that?

To some extent it’s possible to do what the Nature Conservancy does, and purchase the land that we want to protect.  But that’s not always possible, especially when the land is controlled not by private persons but by the national government, which makes special deals with crony capitalists in so-called public-private developments.  In any case, even the free market is not perfect.  Economic development and material well-being mean that some beautiful landscapes and irreplaceable resources will be changed in ways not everyone will approve.

Remember, though, that economics teaches us that an action is always taken by someone for something.  There are no disembodied costs, benefits, and values.  In a world of scarcity, John believes saving rain forests is more important than saving the whales.  Mary believes the opposite.  If we are to get past disagreements on esthetics–essentially differences of opinion–that can turn into violent conflict, we need to find some way to settle our differences peacefully, some way to transform them into value-creating interactions.

Imperfect though it may be, the free market has so far been the most effective method we know of for doing that.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.