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Tolstoy was a Georgist, and this is basically a little Georgist short story. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487337 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487337 The bas

• baxtr 7y ago
  Interesting! I wonder though what is specific to land which is different from any other asset or capital in general according to Georgists?
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  • curuinor 7y ago
    Basically, the social value of land is 100% socially constructed, but under a system of landownership, it's 100% privately held and all the profit goes to private hands. There are multiple empty lots very close to downtown SF which are worth millions, tens of millions that the landlord didn't do jack shit to improve, that everyone else improved the value of, that the entire value of is the location. But when the landlord sells, only they get the value. But it's easy as hell to tax land and impossible to avoid the tax (just show up with cops, what the hell are they going to do, move the land? - and if they don't pay, just sell the land to someone else, although usually the aim is to collect the tax when transactions happen) So tax it. 100%. Georgism's tax suggestions go: have that 100% land tax (not property tax), have no other taxes, that's it. Also tax networks which have an inherent monopoly effect, it was also suggested by Henry George. Nothing to do with agrarian points of view, really. Georgism was created in SF, it was most popular in NYC, and it was talking about the problems of the first properly modern cities in America and Britain.
    • throwno 7y ago
      Do you suppose the owner of the land wants to build on it, but is being blocked by socialists in the government? Do you think this developer bought some lots in SF and left them empty just to make tech bros upset?
      • curuinor 7y ago
        In a Georgist system, they would throw up their hands and immediately sell. But the developer isn't selling it because the land is appreciating...
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    • mc32 7y ago
      When you don't or can’t own land you end up with favela-like developments. It’s okay as a sort of transition from homelessness to home ownership but you don’t want that to be the end stage for a city.
      • curuinor 7y ago
        Land value tax isn't property tax. Despite my use of the word "expropriation", what George specifically suggested was that people would be able to own land, they just wouldn't benefit any from improvements in land value because of the land value tax. So you would have to improve property and do something with it to benefit from it.
      • asdff 7y ago
        You get that in absence of building codes. Right now in many major cities people don't or can't own land, can't build rigid favelas due to building codes, and instead end up living in tent favelas on the sidewalk or sleep in their car. That's not a great end stage for a city, either, but that's the status quo in our investment driven real estate market.
    • rcurry 7y ago
  • jandrese 7y ago
    Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need.
    • lsc 7y ago
      >Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need. Producing enough in the growing season to sustain yourself through the off season is... no small amount of work. You need a reasonably large amount of capital in the form of tools and knowledge to have a reasonable shot at doing so with only your labor. And unless you have a lot of capital in the form of advanced machines, it would be a huge amount of labor. But that's not the real problem; the real problem is how chancy farming is. Too much rain? no food this year. Not enough rain? no food this year. I mean, there are a lot of things technology can do (like, say, tile drainage and irrigation) that make the growing conditions wider, those things can require significant capital and/or labor, and even then, you can have too much or too little rain. Even if you do everything right, if you are depending on growing your own food, there's a reasonable chance of not getting significant calories for a year or two just 'cause the weather was bad. Most of our farm subsidies go to crop insurance; the government essentially sees to it that our farmers are made whole if it rains too much or too little, which makes farming a lot more certain, and helps ensure our overproduction of food. (note, I totally support my tax dollars being used for this; If there's anything the world should overproduce, it's food.)
    • throwno 7y ago
      Except ironically, the most satisfied and dominant group in the story are nomads who subsist solely on animal byproducts not agriculture.
      • harimau777 7y ago
        It seems to me that is a variation of the same idea. The only difference is that nomadic groups need access to much more land in order to generate the same number of calories that agriculture does.
  • wallace_f 7y ago
    Good question, and why not just look at the Wikipedia entry, which addresses this in the second paragraph: >paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.[6][7] >Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by natural monopolies, pollution, and the control of commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of 'land monopoly' involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value
  • larnmar 7y ago
    Cynically, the difference is that they don’t own much and other people do. If you’re a 19th century new-money factory owner [] looking enviously at all those old-money landed aristocrats it’s easy to see why you’d be able to persuade yourself that actually it’s assets you don’t* own rather than assets you do that should be taxed. (Or a ruined old-money aristocrat turned novelist. Or a 21st century San Francisco tech bro who has just realised that he’ll never be able to afford a house.)
    • curuinor 7y ago
      Georgism had far too much popularity in its day to be a specialty economic point of view, although it is nowadays. Two years after its publication, _Progress and Poverty_ was the second most bought book in the US, after the Bible.
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  • papito 7y ago
    Land is not an unlimited resource and therefore a public good. This is the same principle the FCC applies to the airwaves (obligated to say here - fuck Ajit Pai). One obviously should be able to LEASE the land from the people if they intend to do something useful with it, but otherwise, you are just going to have the land accumulate in the hands of ultra-wealthy who just sit on it. It will appreciate in value since there will be fewer and fewer patches to buy, and then you have a bunch of kids from Succession acting like they own the world, since they happened to inherit it by purely winning the birth lottery.
    • Erik816 7y ago
      Almost every resource is limited. That doesn't mean they are public goods.
      • harimau777 7y ago
        Alternately: Since natural resources are not created by people, there's no reason why a given person should have the right to profit from it to the exclusion of others. They didn't do anything to create the resource, it was there already.
        • wahern 7y ago
          > there's no reason why a given person should have the right to profit from it to the exclusion of others. The social value of private ownership isn't in permitting owners to profit, it's in aligning incentives so that a resource is put to the most productive use. Very often those willing to pay the most money are the ones with the most productive use, and so long as there's a private owner his interests are usually to sell to the highest bidder. More importantly, a private owner can't be corrupted into selling to lower bidders, whereas bureaucratic owners (public or private) can be.[1] I [very briefly] researched Georgist taxation systems in the U.S. when taking a seminar on land use regulation. My tentative conclusion was that they weren't very effective because the bureaucratic systems for appraisal were very quickly corrupted--not to benefit individual politicians, but to satisfy the electorate, who often find such taxation schemes unfair. [1] A private owner with multiple interests might be willing to sell one interest to a lower bidder in exchange for a higher bid for some other interest, though.
  • harimau777 7y ago
    One argument would be that if someone doesn't have the opportunity to provide for themselves through farming then they have no choice but to work for someone else. That then means that their labor is no longer freely exchanged which is supposed to be the core of Capitalism. However, my understanding is that Georgism generally applies its arguments to natural resources in general; it's just that land has traditionally been the most important natural resource. You could also probably extend its arguments to other forms of economic rent.
  • ajuc 7y ago
    Well in 19th century Russia 99% of economy was farming :)
  • snidane 7y ago
    In Georgist terms 'land' means any non-renewable natural opportunity such as thr actual land, magnetic spectrum (wifi, 5g)… deposit of oil or iron ore or even ancient sites built by previous civilizations that nobody can claim inheritance to nowadays. Labor is in theory infinitely expandable. Capital is infinitely expandable. Land (and natural opportunities) is fixed in supply, so according to Georgists there is no moral argument for favoring somebody for its monopolization. It should be community owned and rights of use to it should be given out to people, priced by a market mechanism. Labor and capital don't suffer from fixed supply or renewability so according to Georgists there is no need to prevent it from expanding, eg. by slapping taxes on it. Georgist movement is also known as single-tax or zero-tax movement, because they advocate that there should be no taxes on labor, consumption or capital. The only tax implemented should be the natural monopoly tax (land value tax). They say it would be enough to finace government from it because there are crazy trillions of dollars parked in real estate. Real estate price is actually land value price (location, location, lovation), so only land tax would suffice and there is no need for property taxation, which is actually product of someone's labor. Some Georgists say that Land Value Tax is not even a tax but a payment for exclusive rights of use. You pay for the service the government gives you directly, therefore it's not a tax. In this way they argue you can run a society with exactly ZERO taxes and paradoxically raise even more money than current tax system.
    • vanniv 7y ago
      The universe is sufficiently close to infinite that I think we can probably say that land is infinitely expandable too
      • snidane 7y ago
        There are grades of land. Land in the city is more scarce and more valuable. Rural land is less scarce and less valuble. Land on Mars is even less scarce and less accessible and less valuablee. Same with domain names. People are interested in using shorter domains like abc.com, not long ones such as xyajfbeusnfdbdjak.craptld The scarcity applies to a grade of land or string, not to all land in the Universe or string space in total. It is difficult to compare the 'grades' of land, because the grading is not discrete but somewhat continuous.
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• lend000 7y ago
  I have tried understanding Georgism a few different times, but I struggle to understand pricing: assuming we could fairly solve the transition from a society in which people currently own land, how would land be valued? Who determines what land is worth? In a society with property rights, the market bids up land that is undervalued according to society's current needs and expectations and bids down land that is overvalued. When not significantly hindered by government zoning policy, it is pretty good at generating more buildings where there is high demand (see Dallas, TX). If the answer is a bureaucracy, it seems like a system of price controls where prices will inevitably be wrong and misallocate assets. I'm not aware of any country that has yet demonstrated the ability to successfully set direct prices of important economic assets for more than a decade without causing huge surpluses or (more commonly) shortages. A direct price control removes all input information from the market, whereas existing price floors (minimum wages), price ceilings, and subsidies tend to create smaller scale problems.
  • curuinor 7y ago
    Georgism is also compatible with a system where land is auctioned, it's just that the proceeds of the auction go to the state instead of the owner of the land. So you could do auctions and market stuff. Without the possibility of profit from appreciation, of course, the land value would be much lower. But land has value even without appreciation.
    • lend000 7y ago
      Interesting -- the market aspect is crucial. My only other qualm, which may or may not be better than necessary side effects of capitalism: if someone has "owned" a house for a long time, especially in a growing area, what is their Land Value Tax? Have they not profited through intelligent or lucky speculation by not having an auction since decades back when the price was much lower, and are they not incentivized to hold onto it even if it should be redeveloped? On the other side, will the feds kick people out with eminent domain for the above reasoning? I came up with a scenario about why I thought this would hinder property improvement, but I think I solved it within the Georgian system: Let's say Alice buys a piece of property zoned for 10 story buildings at 2mm/year LVT. She invests 30M and 3 years of construction into building a 10 story building that can generate 4mm/year in rent. It will pay itself off in 21 years plus start generating profit. Alice has specialized in being a great property develop but not a property manager. However, she is now TIED to this property -- if she lets it go up for auction, she loses the profits from her improvements. Sure, she can contract out property managers and eat into the profit, but this just increases the time until she can afford to build the next building. In a capitalist system, Alice can sell the building upon successful completion and immediately profit to the exact degree the market thinks she improved the land's value. That capital can immediately go into the next project and allow better specialization of human resources. However, I now suppose that the party who "bought" the land from the feds doesn't have to be the specialist who gets contracted to develop it. She can still be paid 30M upon completion and go straight into the next project with a different owner, without ever dealing with an auction. I potentially like this system a lot, as long as it allows wealth and non-land property rights, and market pricing, but I do need to think about it more. Thanks for helping to explain.
• dennis_jeeves 7y ago
  Thanks for the summary. Thought experiment for readers, supposed humans magically appear on planet earth when no humans existed before, how would they go about utilizing the land in a manner that is peaceful, sustainable and fair? A simpler version of this thought experiment would be: Given some land (say 100 acres) how would 2 people go about utilizing the land in a manner that is peaceful, sustainable, least impactful to the environment, fair, protects individual ownership, simple etc. Assume that no government or laws exists. If one can chip away at this problem, I think one will have the solution to most problems created by (but not limited to): 1)Absurdities of law. 2)Property taxes 3)Property ownership 4)Inheritance ( let say later these 2 people have 3 kids) 5)Socialism/capitalism ( these definitions vary depending on who you ask) 6)Zoning issues. 7)Common property.( roads, rivers) 8)Food production and distribution. 9) Etc...( covers innumerable other things, so Tolstoy was right in my opinion - land ownership is the root of most of the economic evil )