Rodarmor's Shortform
Nov 12, 20211
rodarmor
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Assessing the "unimproved value" of land is likely non-trivial and politically fraught.
I think that's fair. It seems like existing forms of taxation are worse in that respect though.
And the rate of taxation will be under pressure to rise (especially since most recipients are not landowners).
That's also true of existing mechanisms of taxation and wealth redistribution.
More importantly, the amount of money that governments want to collect pretty much requires a diverse set of mechanisms and payers - there's no way to collect enough taxes from any one source.
Agreed.
It turns out that raising land value taxes to 100% would only double the amount of land taxes already being collected.
I don't see why this follows. Why does it double the amount of taxes collected?
This was originally a blog post. It is a proposed economic policy. It is hand-wavy and non-rigorous. I thought it might be of interest here.
*Tax the land, pay the people.*
The Terrestrial Dividend consists of a tax and a dividend. Revenue is generated with a tax on the unimproved value of land and distributed as a cash dividend to all citizens.
## Why?
### If You're in Favor of Wealth Redistribution
If you are in favor of wealth redistribution, you should want to raise as much money as possible, as fairly as possible, and get as much as possible into the hands of those who need it.
The Terrestrial Dividend accomplishes all of these goals.
### If You... (read 557 more words →)
What do you think about my counter-argument here, which I think is close, but not exactly of the form you describe: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RrG8F9SsfpEk9P8yi/robin-hanson-s-grabby-aliens-model-explained-part-1?commentId=zTn8t2kWFHoXqA3Zc
To sum up "You say humans look weird according to this calculation and come up with a model which explains that, however that model makes humans look even more weird, so if the argument for the model being correct is that it reduces weirdness, that argument isn't very strong."
Thanks for making this post and video. It helped me understand the grabby aliens concept much better.
One nagging question.
I find myself as an individual in a non-grabby civilization. But, according to the grabby aliens model, the vast, vast preponderance of individuals will exist in huge, universe-spanning, grabby alien civilizations. And, using the style of argument used in the grabby aliens model, summed up by Steven Byrnes in his sibling comment:
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this model seems to take for granted the idea that we can line up all the intelligent civilizations in the past and future history of the universe, and treat "humans on earth" as if it's randomly drawn from that distribution. That seems to be a core piece of the model, if I'm understanding it right.
This is incredibly unlikely, and must be explained, which seems like a weakness of the model.
The math is simple enough, but I don't understand what the terms and formula of the model are, and what assumptions are going into them. Can you explain it?