Anyone who says "X is what we need to do" over and over again will be part of a weird cult eventually and that's not a bad thing regardless of whether X is desirable.
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Yes. Using land reform to disrupt the grip of the landed gentry was likely a valuable move helping the development process writ large in East Asia. Much more than just talking about how taxing land.
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Do you think redistributing houses would have a similar effect today? I feel like it might. Taking care of a house is similar in some ways to taking care of a small farm.
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I don't. It doesn't seem to involve the same types of distributional inefficiencies as the political economic grip of the landed gentry entailed historically. But I could be wrong.
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I'd be interested to hear more of the case against doing this, because it sure does seem like our rent crisis is acute and is inflaming class tensions.
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Well, I support (1) vastly increased public expenditures towards housing and (2) smart use of regs to incentivize construction of affordable housing in urban core. I think we need to tilt effective property rights over land towards working class folk.
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The historical failure of collective farming, and the wild success of small-plot independent farming after land reform, along with America's own experience with social housing, make me think (by analogy) that housing redistribution would be better than social housing.
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Collective farming was a disaster. Public housing is alive and well in many countries (Sweden). However, I didn't necessarily mean publicly owned housing. I said public expenditures toward housing (i.e, construction of affordable units, subsidies, etc.)
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Oh. In that case, yes. Though I think we also need to address our excess cost problem...
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Also what Guatemala wanted to do before Ike got red scared
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Yep. We were idiots and assholes for not making land reform our standard Latin America policy.
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Or just letting them do it
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History seems to suggest that few countries do this on their own, but sure, of course!
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It was a major policy goal of the Arbenz government before we overthrew it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_900
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An analogue in the U.S. would be the Homestead Act, which took expropriated land and handed it out in 40 acre chunks. Diff type of exprop obviously, but arguably similar results.
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Yes, it's politically easier when you have noncitizen populations to take all the land from!
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