If it was illegal for someone to own enough Amazon stock that they had a net worth of larger than some limit you think is reasonable, then either the government would own and run every major corporation, or those corporations (like Amazon) simply wouldn't exist. I don't think I or ordinary non-rich people in general are better off in that world.
Who's talking about the government? The most obvious natural owners of a company to me are the employees, who are actually the ones responsible for its success.
yes i would agree. nothing wrong with either one of those things, but if we are talking about open source you can't be mad the coder sucks at designing.
What parts of the pre-14th-century american southwest corresponding to modern Arizona were more densely populated than they are today? I'm a bit skeptical of that claim, given how much more human density is possible under conditions of technological modernity compared to anytime prior to the 14th century.
Bits of Mesa that are now extremely low density suburban development were at one point large Hohokam pueblos. It's not an entirely fair comparison because it's essentially comparing high density midrise apartments to some of the least dense suburban sprawl in the US, but it's not wrong.
At a more regional level, the area around Cortez, CO is less densely populated than it was simply because virtually no one lives there now. Kayenta, much of the Navajo nation, the upper Gila region, etc are similar.
If you're a professional landowner and investor, and the taxes on one parcel of land in your portfolio went up because someone built Disneyland near it, this is fine. You might want to sell that parcel out of your portfolio now; or you might want to do something like build a hotel on it catering to Disneyland-visitors, which will earn you enough in profits to more than make up for the higher land tax.
If you're an ordinary person who owns the home you live in, and they build Disneyland next to it, most of the ways that the value of the land your home is on increases are useless or actively harmful to you. It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it. You're probably not a professional real estate developer who knows how to effectively use the land as an investment, after all, you just wanted to live somewhere stable.
In fact, the increase of value of your land and the consequent tax increase under Georgist land value schemes, would be so bad for you, that you might decide to protestthe construction of that Disneyland to begin with. This is typically called "NIMBYism", and it happens all the time even under current property-tax schemes because the negative externalities of many different types of construction are bad for the quality of life of existing homeowners.
> It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it.
But it's no problem of course that several generations of people currently can never afford to own a home of their own even though they contribute enormously to the economy and to society through their highly productive labour?
Ten times more people have already been forced to move away from where they grew up because of real estate prices than would ever have to be forced to move away because of land value taxes.
A hundred times more people can never afford a home because of real estate prices than would ever have to be forced to sell their homes because of land value taxes.
How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains? (Obviously higher capital gains taxes would also impact other assets, but I mean in the context of land. Seems like both result in the same effect if you're able to defer LVT until sale.)
> How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains?
The goal of the deferment is to stop a negative outcome (the resident being forced to sell their property because of higher LVT taxes) from occurring until the resident actually wants to do so.
Seems like a huge risk, what if the land then deprecate after appreciating for a while? You'd owe a lot of money from the appreciation years, but the sale of the house doesn't cover it because it's now depreciated
Or you can.. you know, sell the now expensive property, buy one cheaper which doesn't have such appreciation, and enjoy those sweet money gained by doing nothing (well almost). If you invested in stock and gained significantly, you should also not be taxed more on those gains (and even more in tax progressive regimes in most jurisdictions)? Wealth is wealth at the end, you gain more, you pay taxes.
I get it, people are inherently selfish, most don't want to give back to society more than absolutely minimum to keep them from prison, and this mentality is way more common in US or most of 3rd world than say Europe. But then don't complain when state institutions like public schools and healthcare are utter crap, something about cake and stuff.
This has basically nothing to do with with market cap of Google or Larry Page's percentage ownership of it; and the state government taxing it more will not make this situation any better.
The situations aren't comparable. Oakland is a major city that is absolutely big enough to have its own police department. One of the biggest problems with it is that it is understaffed - it would be good for the city of Oakland to hire hundreds more officers. If the city was barred from running a police department and policing responsibilities were transferred to the county, that would itself be a huge political issue - it's already the case that the Oakland electorate is at odds with the electorate of Alameda county at large about crime and policing - and realistically the county sheriff would have to hire a huge number of the same people currently doing policing in Oakland.
I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech. If anything, I think that technological development created to serve Earth-based demand also has benefits for making space exploration cheaper and easier - computers have gotten way cheaper and way more powerful since the Apollo Guidance Computer, which has obviously affected the entire world in countless ways but also means that we can computerize every aspect of space launches, generally for good.
> I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech.
It clearly was, at least in several examples. It looks like he's getting it right from NASA:
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