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I understand what a land value tax is. I just think that for it to be progressive requires the rich to behave like turn-of-the-century aristocrats with large es

I understand what a land value tax is. I just think that for it to be progressive requires the rich to behave like turn-of-the-century aristocrats with large estates, whereas I think today rich people are more likely to not use a proportionally large amount of land, and to own shares in companies (which themselves don’t need much land) instead. Thank you for the link to the study around Fort Worth (my first guess was that this was some rural country which wouldn’t be very representative but that’s wrong. Most people in that county live in Fort Worth)

epistasis 6y ago
It's hard to visualize just how much more valuable land is in high-value areas. It far far outweighs the amount of land. And remember that it's a tax on the value of the land, not the amount of land. $1M of land in the Bay Area is not often enough to place even a house, but $1M of farm land far from economic opportunity will buy hundreds of acres. What this does is make the Ricardo/Georgist of land more relevant in the current times than it was for agricultural land hundreds of years ago. The difference between good and bad land is amplified, not reduced. Check out this map of the US, that switches from pixels proportional to acres to pixels proportional to real estate value. Georgism applies most extremely to these areas that metastasize: https://twitter.com/bufordsharkley/status/1387997395078684673?s=21 https://twitter.com/bufordsharkley/status/138799739507868467... It's also worth pointing out that the primary "critique" of Piketty's analysis of wealth inequality, with wealth increasing towards capital owners, by Matthew Ronglie, was two fold 1) depreciation wasn't properly analyzed, and 2) most of the wealth transfer went to capital in the form of real estate rather than other forms of capital. And the part of real estate that doesn't depreciate is the land, not the structure. So I view Ronglie not as a refutation of Piketty, but an addition that points the way to the real problem with capital: land. For George, land was not capital, it had to be separated out because it behave differently than a set of tools. And for George, land doesn't refer just to the dirt on which we build structures, it also applies to things like patents and other monopolies that the HN crowd understands to sap wealth from society. Georgism is a very unintuitive understanding of political economy, but I think that the HN crowd is far more likely to find it a natue thing to understand, since our "capital" in the form of computers are cheap and plentiful, most of us live in places where real estate demonstrates George's insights dramatically (the Bay Area), and we also encounter other forms of economics land like patents/IPv4 addresses/domain names.

epistasis 6y ago

It's hard to visualize just how much more valuable land is in high-value areas. It far far outweighs the amount of land. And remember that it's a tax on the value of the land, not the amount of land. $1M of land in the Bay Area is not often enough to place even a house, but $1M of farm land far from economic opportunity will buy hundreds of acres. What this does is make the Ricardo/Georgist of land more relevant in the current times than it was for agricultural land hundreds of years ago. The difference between good and bad land is amplified, not reduced. Check out this map of the US, that switches from pixels proportional to acres to pixels proportional to real estate value. Georgism applies most extremely to these areas that metastasize: https://twitter.com/bufordsharkley/status/1387997395078684673?s=21 https://twitter.com/bufordsharkley/status/138799739507868467... It's also worth pointing out that the primary "critique" of Piketty's analysis of wealth inequality, with wealth increasing towards capital owners, by Matthew Ronglie, was two fold 1) depreciation wasn't properly analyzed, and 2) most of the wealth transfer went to capital in the form of real estate rather than other forms of capital. And the part of real estate that doesn't depreciate is the land, not the structure. So I view Ronglie not as a refutation of Piketty, but an addition that points the way to the real problem with capital: land. For George, land was not capital, it had to be separated out because it behave differently than a set of tools. And for George, land doesn't refer just to the dirt on which we build structures, it also applies to things like patents and other monopolies that the HN crowd understands to sap wealth from society. Georgism is a very unintuitive understanding of political economy, but I think that the HN crowd is far more likely to find it a natue thing to understand, since our "capital" in the form of computers are cheap and plentiful, most of us live in places where real estate demonstrates George's insights dramatically (the Bay Area), and we also encounter other forms of economics land like patents/IPv4 addresses/domain names.