In This World, Everything Costs Money: The Inescapable Question of Who Pays

There are a lot of naive people who still don’t get it today: operating a city—covering food safety oversight, education subsidies, healthcare subsidies, water, electricity, gas, and public facilities—all ultimately come from land sales revenue. In other words, it’s land money that’s subsidizing everything. The wealthy are effectively subsidizing the majority by spending their money on buying homes.

When the wealthy stop buying homes and local land sales dry up, how do we continue providing good services to the majority—like improving food safety? We need to open new revenue streams, and that means making money off the rich. Since land sales can’t cover the shortfall anymore, a huge gap has opened in the funds we collect from wealthy individuals. If you don’t come up with other ways to make money, where’s the revenue going to come from? Without money, how can you improve services? With love? Can you motivate people to work for free out of passion alone?