I got to thinking about property taxes today and I thought I’d share some thoughts. Using property taxes to fund public education is both immoral and counter-productive. The pros from such a policy are far outweighed by the cons. Firstly, a property tax is essentially a rent on land. By imposing a property tax, the government or state makes it impossible for people to actually own land and thus it makes it impossible for people to be free from the government. Not only that, but by making it very difficult for those with less means to afford property you decrease production exponentially or even more. That is, over time as innovation and competitiveness decrease you get less and less production in various areas. It is also counterproductive because while the young become educated, you can argue to what extent, there become fewer and fewer outlets for that education. In other words, diminishing returns set in quickly.
The immorality, which was implied above, is that people have an inherent right to life. This right’s origins, etc. can be argued about philosophically, but it’s safe to assume that almost everyone agrees that people have the basic right to live. This does not mean that they have the right to food, etc. it just means that they have the right to acquire food. By imposing a property tax you are essentially saying that in order to live here you must pay something to some outside force.
Yes, taxation is immoral, but to just say that isn’t going to be very convincing. I was hoping to lay down some good arguments and points to show why it is both immoral and counterproductive, or inefficient.
Lol, ok sure. I came to other conclusions as well. For example, talking about positive and negative externalities in economics is practically useless because there are many different types of positive and negative externalities, both quantitavely and qualitatively.
I was simply making a humorous observation about the sheer number of times you mentioned “thinking” in that single sentence. “I got to thinking today and I thought I’d share some thoughts.”
It was kind of funny. So I said how “that’s a lot of thinking.” It’s a simple Yogi Berra/Marx Bros. kind of punchline. I thought someone might get a chuckle out of it. Jeezus christ I’m sorry I tried to brighting people’s day.
talking about positive and negative externalities in economics is practically useless because there are many different types of positive and negative externalities, both quantitavely and qualitatively.
That’s not really good logic… There are a lot of goods produced by the market too. Is it pointles to talk about them?
Not only that, but an externality can be positive in one person’s opinion and negative in another’s.
That still doesn’t prevent us from talking about it.
I’m interested in critiques of externalities, but I’m not sure that these meet the qualification for such arguments
It’s perfectly fine logic lol. This is what the Austrian argument essentially is. It also includes the idea that actually calculating positive externalities and negative externalities is impossible. What I should have said was, using the current models of externalities for policy prescriptions is useless. Of course, we can talk about externalities in general terms.
