>Yeah. Humans are crafty though. I don't think it would take conspiratorial coordination in order for this to turn into somewhat of an arms race. I'm imagining homeowners associations shifting prices from land value to HOA dues or some such. People putting tires and broken toilets on their lawn in front of a privacy fence. Sometimes HOA's requiring this kind of thing. People getting pissed at the nice lady who keeps trying to plant flowers everywhere. Nonsensical home renovations like putting a toilet on the ceiling or installing doors that go nowhere. Just goofy humans responding to incentives.
Yeah probably you'd see things like this happen in some cases. It doesn't seem obviously worse to me than all the games people play to keep their incomes or profits or employee counts under various thresholds to avoid tax. Or the hundreds of other tax tricks involving charities or art or minority ownership. We're used to those things so we forget how weird and silly it all is.
The thing about land is that it's public -- you can't keep it a secret. So that makes it naturally more difficult to hide wrongdoing than when things are abstracted by accounting tricks and shell corporations. Someone can come by and just look at it.
All good points. I haven't encountered an implicit deal breaker/an issue impossible to mitigate yet while thinking about it. The devil would be in the details.
I would need to do some deeper analysis to fully convince myself that this could be applied in such a way that it doesn't screw over retirees nor drop an economic atom bomb on every major urban area. Seems more reasonable than a lot of wild overhauls I've read about though. I like it more than the "get rid of all taxes except for sales tax" idea.
Yeah probably you'd see things like this happen in some cases. It doesn't seem obviously worse to me than all the games people play to keep their incomes or profits or employee counts under various thresholds to avoid tax. Or the hundreds of other tax tricks involving charities or art or minority ownership. We're used to those things so we forget how weird and silly it all is.
The thing about land is that it's public -- you can't keep it a secret. So that makes it naturally more difficult to hide wrongdoing than when things are abstracted by accounting tricks and shell corporations. Someone can come by and just look at it.