3 ms·

Land is capital.

• jampekka 3y ago
  This does depend on definitions. In classical economics the factors of production were labor, land and capital stock. Notably "land" means any non-man-made resource, probably including legal monopolies like intellectual property, which contemporary neo-Georgists seem to totally ignore. Capital stock means man-made stuff that is used to produce something, e.g. buildings and machines. Marx generalized capital to roughly mean anything that makes money for the owner without them doing work. Neoclassical (the current mainstream) definition is quite close to Marx's. Land is capital.
  • eru 3y ago
    For purposes of taxation, what's important is how 'elastic' a taxed good is. If you tax beer a lot, people drink wine instead. If you tax labour or capital, you get less of them. Especially in a globalised economy. But the supply of land is fixed, it's perfectly inelastic. So you can tax land without any deadweight losses to the economy.
• eru 3y ago
  We can make more capital. We can't make more land. [0] The supply of land is perfectly inelastic, it's fixed. So taxing it doesn't burden the economy, there are no deadweight losses. [0] Yes, I know that land reclamation is a thing, but that's mixing up definitions of 'land'. In the generalised economic sense, sea floor is also 'land'.