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Interesting! I wonder though what is specific to land which is different from any other asset or capital in general according to Georgists?

• deleted 7y ago
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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
    “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?“ The revenue man wanted granddaddy bad, headed up the holler with everything he had, ‘fore my time but I’ve been told, he never came back from Copperhead Road...
    • curuinor 7y ago
      If you shoot all the cops (and probably the army), then you have conquered the land, congratulations. You are now the state. Probably have to go and make your own cops now.
  • Barrin92 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. But this can be said for anything, no? After all the value of every asset is socially constructed, whether that's shares in a company or land seems irrelevant, so if you buy that logic I feel like the Marxist case makes more sense instead of just arbitrarily stopping at land. It also seems counterintuitive because it would essentially mean that someone who holds billions in shares or digital assets has no tax burden under the Georgist logic but a small independent farmer does.
    • lmm 7y ago
      You own the value of the goods you've made with your own hands (minus the value of their raw materials if you want to be strict about it), and by extension you can freely trade those. Land is the exception because people don't make it themselves, they lay claim to what's already there (even in the case of "artificial" land, most of the value is in the seabed that was there before rather than what you did). > It also seems counterintuitive because it would essentially mean that someone who holds billions in shares or digital assets has no tax burden under the Georgist logic but a small independent farmer does. Someone living like a billionaire probably owns a much higher value of land (if only what's under their mansion) than a small independent farmer. The land value tax would end up being built into food prices, so farmers wouldn't lose out on the whole unless they're currently growing wastefully; maybe farming would be pushed onto less valuable land, that's sort of the point (but in practice that mostly happens already; farmers near towns wanting to expand would get gradually pushed out via higher taxes rather than getting a windfall for selling up, which is bad for those individual farmers but better for society as a whole).
      • nybble41 7y ago
        > Land is the exception because people don't make it themselves ... People don't make the land but they do make the value of the land. Even if that just consists of recognizing the potential in what is already there. LVT does nothing to distinguish between value resulting from the actions of the owner—apart from a very limited set of formally recognized "improvements", mainly permanent structures—and value resulting from the actions of others. And even if part of the "unimproved" value does result from others' actions, these others are not, in general, the ones receiving the tax.
• 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.