VDH
4 Likes
Has Victor Davis Hanson ever so much as mentioned the important historical American figure of Henry George even if only to dismiss, with an imperious wave of the hand as a “non-starter”, land value tax?
Such historians don’t know how to cultivate Elon Musk’s.
I do.
2 Likes
Since Hanson is the only guy at the Hoover Institute with direct connections to the land primarily as a productive asset with substantial underlying liquidation value arising from civilization’s positive network externalities, I decided to see if the Hoover Institute had bothered to do more than cite the standard Milton Friedman dismissal of land value tax as “the least bad” tax.
They didn’t as evidenced by “Taxation, Individual Actions, and Economic Prosperity: A Review” where they merely mentioned Friedman’s quote and moved on.
So it is not surprising that they said this about “wealth tax”:
As regards the approach of directly taxing wealth, history increasingly suggests that wealth taxation is an inefficient means through which to raise tax revenue. For one, any taxpayer potentially subject to the wealth tax is strongly incentivized to alter his behavior from economically productive behaviors such as capital investment to inefficient behaviors such as paying lawyers and accountants to avoid the tax altogether, thus lowering tax revenues and effectively compounding the cost of the tax. A number of European countries that once had such tax policies eventually faced this reality and abandoned the measures altogether.
This is exactly the kind of imperious wave of the hand that one would expect of the “conservative thinktanks” occupying positions wishing to harvest the fruit of civilization in the form of Elon Musk’s, but don’t want to cultivate the fruit-bearing tree.
It shouldn’t be left up to some pariah like me to point out market-based assessment of liquidation value as the foundation for civilization as a service providing property rights.
This is particularly ironic given that Hanson is a tree farmer. I suppose he thinks the Little Red Hen also created the land on which she planted the seeds.
3 Likes