> Land is in fixed supply and everyone needs land to work, sleep, and exist upon.
For those who are convinced supply&demand doesn't work for dwellings, buy a rental and charge 10x the market rate. See how that goes. This applies to any business. For example, try selling something on Amazon/Ebay/Etsy/Craigslist. You can charge whatever you like for it. Whether someone will buy it is another thing entirely.
Everyone needs food, too, but ironically it's the unneeded food (like Starbucks) that's expensive.
Today how that goes is you get huge tax cuts for not making money and keeping valuable resources off the market.
How that should go is you get taxed at the same rate as if you had set it at a price it could be rented at, therefore encouraging you to set your price correctly.
That’s the LVT, that’s basically the entire thing.
You have to think of it in a deeper context than it being binary. It has very similar properties to oil. It's also fixed, but technology has done some phenomenal things to extract more of it with greater efficiency. The same is true for land and housing. UBI, self driving cars, and a greater shift away from working in offices are all going to change how we live and the type of land we will want to live on.
I don't think land is fixed in supply. We can build up and down and in the far future, into space. Either way, we are seemingly far from land being the bottleneck at the moment.
So you're saying that it's hypothetically everyone then? I say hypothetically because the U.S. is only partially a free market (i.e., not a free market), and so that makes any appeal to the "free market" hold little water.
In what way is the increasing ratio of rent to income working for renters?
The government is a monopolist land owner that hands out new land at prices designed to please existing private land owners and lobbyists. This is as far removed from a free market as an absolutist monarchy.
Of course it is a fact, it is one of the most basic laws of nature. It can be observed in interactions of other biological species not only ours. It would still hold if there were no humans. Claiming otherwise is like denying gravity.
A model working and producing a personally.desired outcome are two separate things.
The assumption of a labor shortage because of low nominal unemployment is incorrect - the gig economy is thin margin as it is even with poor pay. It utilizes the previously "idle" labor in a marginal business model but without sufficient demand in other sectors it only provides a low floor.
You are citing a political opinion from a newspaper to prove somehow supply and demand is not a natural law. What is next, an article in Astrology Today arguing 1 + 1 != 2.
