site banner
PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   28341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Georgism doesn't pass the laugh test either. It's impossible to fund a modern government with land taxes alone. We'd have to revert to 1776 levels of taxation. Maybe not a bad thing overall, but kiss social security and aircraft carriers goodbye.

Nevertheless, more Georgist-esque taxes are a good thing. In major urban areas, we should tax land more and buildings less.

Will this "one weird trick" fix the fertility and housing crisis? No. But it might help, slightly.

It's impossible to fund a modern government with land taxes alone.

Source

America's annual land rents are sufficient to cover 18–40 % (Fed) or 34–78 % (Smith) of annual federal spending. The low-end figures come from 2020, which was a major outlier in federal spending thanks to COVID.

But wait, what about state budgets? Many states are funded by property taxes, so if we're going to shift to land value taxes, we need to take states into account, too. So let's add state budgets into the mix (minus federal funding to states so we're not double counting). If we do that, we drop to 18–30 % (Fed) or 36–58 % (Smith) of annual spending.

Georgism is equivalent to the elimination of private real property. I don't think that's going to fix the fertility crisis. If it "fixed" the housing crisis, it will be by accelerating the process of putting us in pods. This is why urbanists like Georgism, it forces property "owners" to develop "their" property to the utmost or pay taxes the property's income cannot support.

Surely there's a middle ground.

Imagine some lord who owned land in central London in 900 AD, used it as a sheep pasture, and then passed it down to his sons for 30 generations, each using it as a sheep pasture onto the present day. There's no property taxes because taxes = theft. The lords never sell or convert their land to non-pasture since the value goes up every year.

Why not just kill the lord, build a park everyone can use, and then piss on his rent-seeking grave?

Surely there is a place for reasonable accommodations to common sense in any system, even if we should err on the side of ancient liberties. For example, I think that on balance the electoral college is a good thing, but the pre-1832 rotten boroughs of England take things too far.

This comment undercuts the moral argument for Georgist taxes pretty severely. (I've long been suspicious of the practical argument in general, although the practical argument of "we ought to incentivize the medieval sheep farmer to get the hell out of the middle of London" still makes a huge amount of sense in your hypothetical.)

A tax that can be framed as "We're just taxing the value that the rest of society has provided to you" feels like a huge moral advance over the typical lesser-of-two-evils "We can't make civilization work without lots of money so we're raising the amount of yours we'll take; pray we don't raise it further". And this moral justification for land-value tax makes some sense, for land uses where most of your revenues (and/or at least your use-value for a homestead residence) really come from the value of proximity to your neighbors. But what if you just wanted to farm sheep, and the main thing your neighbors have done to aid that is dump a bunch of air pollution into their lungs and their wool? Asking you to pay ever-increasing taxes for that service seems almost cruel.

But what if you just wanted to farm sheep

Then you sell your central London sheep farm for a gazillion pounds and buy a sheep farm somewhere else.

If we make a rule that people and their descendants get to keep their property tax free forever we end up with a stagnant, feudal economy. That puts us in the bottom left corner of the "growth / equality" grid, the worst of all words economically speaking.

Honestly, I'm probably 90th percentile in the anti-tax camp, but we need to be practical. Abolishing property tax goes too far.

What rent is he seeking? He's passing up taking advantage the value of the land by pasturing sheep on it (surely, in the modern world, an activity with very low economic value). For what reason should his land be expropriated? If Richard Branson wants to build an apartment building there instead, let him make an offer.

I explained this in a different comment.

Maybe it's not the most perfect example of rent-seeking. But it's close enough. Every year your wealth increases due to the urbanization of London, but you personally have created none of that wealth. You are just the heir of a lucky land speculator.

Let me be the one to ask a question. Are you are against property taxes?

I'm against taxes in general, but if a government must be funded, property taxes CAN be a reasonable way to do it. Georgist taxes are not, for various reasons, one being that the government cost attributable to the land is typically more related to improvements than the land itself, at least in urban areas.

As for rent, what you're talking about is just capital gains, which isn't the same thing as rent or rent-seeking. The owner is actually forgoing the land rents.

We have some of these: Lord Cadogan and (the Duke of?) Westminster. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that such people are far, FAR more responsible and long-termist landlords than the politicians and private equity companies that would like to replace them.

Why not just kill the lord, build a park everyone can use, and then piss on his rent-seeking grave?

Because the lord, who is aware of the limitations of aristocratic power and is also a normal human being who quite likes parks and doesn’t need more money, will build parks of his own accord. The politicians will build ugly vanity projects and the equity people will build unobtainable buy-to-lets for the Chinese.

I can see the case for lost economic productivity, but how could using your own property as a sheep pasture despite opportunity to develop it be in any sense rent-seeking?

Maybe it's not the most perfect example of rent-seeking.

But it's close enough.

Every year your wealth increases due to the urbanization of London, but you personally have created none of that wealth. You are just the heir of a lucky land speculator.

Your wealth on paper increases, but if you continue to use it from for sheep pasturing then you are not benefitting from it because you are precisely not seeking any rent that matches the value of the land!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats