Georgism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

by timurlenk • 6 years ago

210 332 6 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

axlee• 6 years ago

Is it what Norway is doing with their Sovereign wealth fund financed by nationalizing oil surplus?

EGreg5• 6 years ago

There was a time - for over half a century - when Progress and Poverty was the best known economics book in the world. If you buy one, it has a who’s who of people endorsing it, from famous economists to writers to presidents.

And somehow, in the last 50 years, we have all forgotten it, and some people only remember the land tax. Not only that, but the same debates rage today, about why there is still so much poverty even while there has been so much progress. Libertarian people know Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard before they know Henri George, about whom Milton Friedman had a lot of good things to say.

chii2• 6 years ago

why there is still so much poverty even while there has been so much progress

there's been an objective improvement to the % of people in poverty over the past few centuries.

It's just that there's an even larger improvement to those who were rich, relative to the improvements to the poor.

If you had a choice, you would choose to be poor today, than to be poor a century or two ago.

bsanr22• 6 years ago

Why does this matter?

MiroF15• 6 years ago

Yes, and peasants under feudalism were much better off than they were as cavemen - none of that justifies economic/social stagnation

JSavageOne4• 6 years ago

If you had a choice, you would choose to be poor today, than to be poor a century or two ago.

The classic false dichotomy that somebody always feels the need to point out in justifying the status quo.

EGreg5• 6 years ago

I upvoted you, to counteract the downvotes.

You are correct... obviously science and technology have improved the lot of the ordinary person, and made us all much, much richer.

The main issue is that automation tends to hurt workers while it helps consumers. And since most people are both — they have to work harder and harder just to stay in place. Until we put in place a UBI and universal health insurance, pass overtime laws to shorten the workweek etc. we will have technology creating demand shocks for human labor, as happened before the Great Depression on farms, and has gradually happened in manufacturing, and is about to happen to white collar jobs and menial jobs.

In the 50s, a single man could support an entire household on one paycheck. Women didn’t compete with men for those jobs, but rather did jobs that now are not valued by the market. Automation didn’t make employers not need their employees, so they would retain them for decades as they built experience.

Today, we have two year stint— wait that was 20 years ago, today we have temp jo— ait no, that was last decade, now it’s the gig economy with no protections. You see where I’m going with this? Automation and outsourcing is once again putting people in a race to the bottom.

Yes, electronics are cheaper than ever. But some things like rent / land just go up in price, they need a UBI. Paid for by land taxes maybe.

Edit: funny, I am getting downvoted also, for agreeing with you

jhpriestley• 6 years ago

would you really choose "the wire" over "little house on the prairie"? How can such a comparison possibly be "objective" anyway?

nabla94• 6 years ago

"The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give."

— Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI "Of the Rent of Land"

toohotatopic5• 6 years ago

This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. This can be true for one generation, but the next generation can choose another profession. People don't become farmers if they have to pay too much.

aww_dang2• 6 years ago

"Rather than nationalize land outright, the single taxers would levy a 100 percent tax on the annual land rent — the annual income from the site — which amounts to the same thing as outright nationalization." --Murray Rothbard

Georgism is reasonably well known among free-market enthusiasts and libertarians.

tlholaday5• 6 years ago

Rothbard's error: under land nationalization, state actors decide who uses the land; under single tax, who uses the land is determined by auction.

rikroots8• 6 years ago

Back in a different life, I worked on the Lyons Inquiry which looked at English Local Government finances. Final report was issued in 2007[1]. As part of the work we had to look into Land Value Taxes as a supplement/alternative to Council Tax and Business Rates.

There's nothing wrong with the idea. The big issues were mainly around introducing a new tax system and the massive upheavals and uncertainties businesses and people would face as part of the change. Winners and losers, etc. Given the uproar surrounding the later introduction of Universal Credit I'm glad Sir Michael chose not to recommend LVT in his report.

Anyway - anecdote time. One of the big questions we asked at the start of the Inquiry was: "Why tax property?" After long consultations with the most senior Experts and Gurus across Government and Academia the answer came back: "Because it's there."

[1] https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20070411120...

(I'm mainly commenting because it's an opportunity to show off the Inquiry's website. I built that! I had to do it in my "spare time" because we didn't have a budget for the work. This version is from 2007, but the original code was written in 2004 in PHP and after that most of the work was adapting the site to add events, display responses received, etc. Simpler times!)

MiroF15• 6 years ago

The big issues were mainly around introducing a new tax system and the massive upheavals and uncertainties businesses and people would face as part of the change. Winners and losers, etc.

It's funny how we introduce massive upheavals all the time - ending this social program here, injecting trillions of dollars there, but this one addition is considered infeasible.

I suspect that the primary problem with George's theory is that he underestimated the political power of rent-seekers.

rikroots8• 6 years ago

The Inquiry didn't happen in "splendid isolation", and the recent history of property taxes across the UK was not a happy one. Property rates were replaced in 1990 by the Poll Tax (Community Charge) which led to protests and riots across the country. Council Tax was introduced in a rush in 1993 ... and the poor design of the system is not easy to hide.

The Inquiry was set up in 2004 because there was a legal requirement to undertake a property revaluation before 2005 which, as things stood, would have led to massive changes in people's tax burdens (winners and losers). The Government wanted a way out of the problem - but the Inquiry didn't give them one: Lyons decided that revaluation was essential and should go ahead.

The Government sorted the issue in time-honoured fashion by changing the legislation to remove the need for a revaluation, and changing the Inquiry's terms of reference. And so it goes ...

It's funny how we introduce massive upheavals all the time - ending this social program here, injecting trillions of dollars there, but this one addition is considered infeasible.

My understanding is that things are done in at least 51 different ways in the US. Maybe one of the smaller, more progressive States in the Union will be willing to try out some form of LVT in the near future?

pydry14• 6 years ago

If I were representing the wishes of extremely wealthy landlords I'd try and make sure the rationale for killing LVT were something like "it would introduce upheavals and uncertainties" too.

I'm certainly not going to say something like "because me and my mates and people like me would lose a stream of unearned income".

rikroots8• 6 years ago

The Inquiry didn't kill LVT, and efforts to promote it haven't stopped just because Lyons didn't recommend it as a solution going forward.

... extremely wealthy landlords ... killing LVT

LVT would not be an appropriate method for targeting tax extraction from extremely wealthy landlords. They would (probably) make up their losses through rent increases and additional service charges - effectively passing on the tax to renters and leaseholders. If you want to target the rich you need to use tools that target their personal and/or business income streams - in the UK, for example: Income, Capital Gains, and Corporation taxes.

grey-area3• 6 years ago

Why tax capital instead if income?

The reason to do so is because it reduces inequality and leads to a fairer society.

andi9992• 6 years ago

Well, if you tax potential capital (like house prices), then gentrification is the consequence. Think somebody living in a modest house mixed neighbourhood. Rich ppl buying houses there, property tax shoot so high (because the small house is now worth millions) that the person has to sell. As far as I understand that happened in Vancouver.

Not sure if it leads to a fairer society. (of course one could argue it is fair for a not so rich person not to live in a rich area :-) )

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

Were we to treat Land -- sites, and natural resources, including clean air, clean water, and things like geosynchronous orbits, fisheries, electromagnetic spectrum -- as our COMMON treasure, our source of natural public revenue, instead of something to be privatized, our wealth concentration problem would be much much smaller.

Instead, we permit individuals and corporations and trusts to privatize the value and we tax it only very lightly --- they get to keep the lion's share, just as if they made it themselves.

somewhereoutth• 6 years ago

I'm from the UK - Council Tax was always a real pain, its based on property price but paid by the occupiers (i.e. renters) NOT the owners. When you are house-sharing this becomes very problematic as its the largest and not insignificant shared bill - especially when housemates are moving in/out frequently. Collection is also a nightmare for the councils - sure they know the address and the amount owed - but who was living there in the period in question?

Its a shame the inquiry didn't recommend formula funding from central government receipts (couple of pennies on income tax?) - so much grief could have been saved.

rikroots8• 6 years ago

Its a shame the inquiry didn't recommend formula funding from central government receipts

The Inquiry's main objective was to investigate possible revenue streams that could be raised locally, to help local councils free themselves from the tyranny of central government funding. At the time local government revenue came from Council Tax, Business Rates (though the level was set by central government, not local authorities themselves), licence and other fees (eg to open a tattoo parlour, or register a death), small fines (dog mess and other litter) and car parking charges. Altogether the revenue raised covered less than 10% (I think) of all local government spending. The rest of the money was supplied by central Government - making the UK one of the most centralised states in the world.

A "couple of pennies on income tax" would've made the situation worse - though one of the things the Inquiry looked at was the possibility of localising (some) income tax.

perilunar3• 6 years ago

"Why tax property?"

Because its appreciation in value is largely unearned wealth, especially in a country like England with a long history of aristocracy and landed gentry.

rikroots8• 6 years ago

No seriously. The answer was: "Because it's there."

The whole thing about tax is to extract the maximum number of feathers from the goose with the minimum amount of hissing. Taxing property is easy "because it's there" - you can't hide a house, or a barn, or a factory.

Though deciding _how_ to tax property is a bit more difficult. At one time they tried taxing by the number of chimneys a house had[1]. Another was the Window Tax[2].

Have you ever heard of the phrase "They got away with it scot free"? I was born in the village which (by legend) introduced the Scot Tax - not a per-head levy in our Friends born north of Hadrian's Wall but rather a tax on properties across the Romney Marshes, specifically raised to pay for maintenance of the sea wall. Houses below sea level had to pay the tax, houses above sea level were 'scot free'.[3]

... And people think tax policy is boring!

[1] Technically they taxed hearths, but it's a lot easier to count chimneys from the outside of a house than it is to gain entry to the house to count the number of fireplaces - https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/...

[2] You can still see many houses in the UK with bricked up windows. It wasn't done for aesthetic purposes; it was done to limit the level of tax that could be levied on the property - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

[3] https://theromneymarsh.net/newhall

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

And as Adam Smith pointed out, it is there, and visible. It can't be hidden, can't be spirited out of town or offshore during the dark of night. You don't even need to know who it is that owns it; as long as they pay their land value tax, they can remain anonymous.

You might search for the term "unearned increment." It was a common expression to point out what people who reaped but did not sow receive due to our failure to collect the economic rent.

One person's unearned increment is another's — and likely many others' — lost birthright. Who is entitled to it? All of us! How do we implement this? Land value taxation.

yufeng66• 6 years ago

The founding father of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was heavily influenced by Georgism. He believed all income derived from land, including appreciation of the land, should be heavily taxed. He incorporated it into three principle of the people, which is the cornerstone Kuomintang ideology.

But nobody would argue Taiwan is a Georgism heaven right now. Why? Rich and political powerful people own the land. Georgism as a practical matter is very difficult to push through.

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

Doesn't Taiwan (in common with other Asian countries) mostly allocate land to the private sector via long-term leases, as opposed to ownership of indeterminate duration? That would be enough to regard it as quite Georgist.

em5002• 6 years ago

No, most of Taiwanese property is freehold. You might be thinking of Hong Kong and mainland China, where almost all private property is leasehold.

sudosysgen9• 6 years ago

Leasehold land is mostly a thing in communist countries that claim to temporarily implement capitalism.

_4ziu• 6 years ago

It is because the rich and powerful own the land that georgism is hard to push through. You could implement georgist laws simply, but the rich and powerful have connections that you don't and politics will always favour them, so you won't get any of that policy to hold. This isn't georgism's fault in particular, but the fault of just about any tax scheme.

snidane16• 6 years ago

This part about Georgist economics is quite startling.

You have an economical theory following in the footsteps of classical economists at the beginning of industrial revolution like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It becomes incredibly popular with massive amount of followers. You were not an intellectual back then unless you knew about this school.

Somehow it offered a way out of the societal mess, but costing great fortunes to the economical parazites - monopolies (neo-aristocracy).

Some people in the school argue it was strategically removed from the society by funding a competing economical theory which removed land from the 3 factors of production and kept only 2 - labor and capital. Thus divert the attention from the real parazite (monopolist, rentier and landlord - someone who monopolizes land) to the conflict between employer and employee as depicted in the Marxist view on societal problems - which actually never existed.

So the new aristocracy (Rockefellers, Carneggies and others) decided to fund and found universities with the main purpose of destroying Georgism and promoting red herring economical theories instead - such as Marxism and neoclassical economics, both of which remove the parasitic monopolist and landlord out of the picture.

By not fighting with their enemy directly and thus making the georgist theory indirectly more popular it was a smart move for them to silence it down by promoting other theories instead, which is exactly what happened - from the most popular theory of economics to nonexistent to this day. No mention of it in economics curricula around the world - which suggests economics as taught in universities today is a fraudulent wannabe science or form of propaganda or both.

http://dollarsandsense.org/blog/2017/04/the-dissing-of-henry...

Mason Gaffney (famous Georgist) wrote a lengthy piece on this topic - Neoclassical Economics As a Stratagem against Henry George

http://masongaffney.org/publications/K1Neo-classical_Stratag...

alexmingoia5• 6 years ago

The problem with georgism is that “unimproved value” is a non-market price. It’s just made up by whoever is appointed assessor.

Georgism conflates made up “value” with market “value”. Ultimately some person has to assess the value of the unimproved land, meaning someone anointed to write down whatever number they want.

Value is subjective. There is no such thing as “unimproved land value”, unless you’re talking about the last sale price of a particular unimproved lot. Property taxes in general have this problem, but it’s very acute with unimproved land. Unimproved land is one of the most non-fungible goods there is.

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

Isn't that true of any assessment? With the ordinary property tax, you have to assess both the land value and the improvements. (There are of course ways of taxing property that don't involve that kind of outside assessment, but they're not commonly used.)

epistasis8• 6 years ago

Yes, this, most definitely. And the land versus structure value is already calculated for most properties for insurance purposes.

Even places (like California) that do not assess tax based on value still have massive fleets of property value assessors that are used during the course of normal market transactions, since those who lend mortgages use them to prevent fraud.

alexmingoia5• 6 years ago

None of that changes the fact that there is no inherent value to land (improved or unimproved). Different people value the same piece of land (or any good) differently. This is just reality, regardless of whether someone is appointed to imagine a price for the purposes of taxation.

nabla94• 6 years ago

There is brilliant way to solve it so that value and market-value meet. Keep the land always in market.

It's called Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST).

Land owner would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a tax on that value. The owner would be required to sell the asset to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price.

If you value the land high for any reason and want to keep it, you must self-assess the value higher than anyone is willing to pay for it and pay tax for it. If value it too low, someone might buy it.

andruby• 6 years ago

That would mean anyone who has enough money can buy the land that people live on just to harass them.

It’s an interesting idea, and I like it in principal, but I also like living in my house on my land knowing that I need to give permission before someone can buy it.

np_tedious• 6 years ago

The land most people live on does have market precedent so this would be unnecessary.

This idea could still be workable for unimproved land

CydeWeys11• 6 years ago

This seems to be directly in conflict with the idea that once you own land, it's yours. I don't see this flying at all, at least not with the current expectations of most people.

Any sizable company could easily bully any number of people out of their homes to acquire the land. It's hard to overstate how much people would hate this.

alexmingoia5• 6 years ago

Someone being able to take my house or business away at any time because they have more money doesn’t sound brilliant or practical. It’s also not market based at all. Trades are willing.

thechao2• 6 years ago

This is exactly how non-private copyright & patents should work. That is copyright/patent "for hire" would be COST, with the rate of taxation increasing by a small amount each year until tax rate was 100%. This would given Disney the ability to keep the mouse for 120 years, but also free up less lucrative works for public enjoyment.

sudosysgen9• 6 years ago

The issue with that is that you then have the exact same issue with assessing the value of the improvements made in order to determine non-improved value from improved value. No issue is fixed, it's just moved around.

corpMaverick• 6 years ago

What happens if I build a house in the land ? Is the house is still mine ? It seems like it would keep me from improving the land.

wnavarre5• 6 years ago

The problem with this is that the improvements wind up bidding up the land underneath because people know if they get the land the old owner forfeits the improvements.

JSavageOne4• 6 years ago

I've yet to see a single valid objection as to why LVT (Land Value Tax) should not be the primary tax, yet it's nowhere to be found in the political dialogue. Such a shame that the majority of the tax burden instead falls on the working class while the landowners get a free ride.

oDot7• 6 years ago

It actually makes much more sense to use a uniform sales tax:

(1) If you spend more, you're taxed more. Obviously this is better for poorer people, who spend less, but also for rich yet reserved people, who keep most of their money in the bank (which lends it) and are earning an income (=productive). Both will not penalized.

(2) It's much hard to raise, because people will just stop buying stuff, which is much easier than quitting a job to not pay income tax

(3) Being uniform, it doesn't choose favorites. Everything is taxed the same

blahbhthrow3748• 6 years ago

Sales tax fails to capture the accumulation of capital, so (1) is kind of bogus. If you make 100 billion dollars and invest it you and several generations of your family coild live comfortably without ever working and your tax burden would only depend on your spending.

A sales-only tax incentivized rent seeking, basically, because the rentiers pay the same taxes as the renters while accumulating capital.

geofft3• 6 years ago

rich yet reserved people, who keep most of their money in the bank (which lends it) and are earning an income (=productive) ... will not penalized.

This goes against just about every standard defense of the ability to be rich: that rich people are job creators, that they power the economy by buying things, etc. Why should we discourage them from employing people and buying things? I don't want a loan (that needs to be repaid) from a bank from a rich person, I want the rich person to either employ me or buy goods and services from me.

Actually, that's another point - does employment incur your "sales" tax? If not, it's more advantageous to hire a private chef or driver than to pay for a restaurant meal or a taxi trip, which makes the tax regressive - there's a discontinuity when you're able to hire someone instead of getting a service from a business.

DrAwdeOccarim• 6 years ago

The issue I've always had with the uniform sales tax idea is that poorer you are, the larger percentage of your money you pay in taxes. As a total cost, it's ultimately regressive.

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

Really, the thing is that the whole "single tax idea" is a bit misguided. A consumption tax (sales tax) is great, but there are some sensible reasons to tax capital income/investment to some extent, too. Mostly, because it correlates somewhat with basic ability-to-pay; also, because people might try to disguise income/expenses as investment-related in order to shield them from taxation, and having a more uniform tax base helps prevent this.

But the broad principle that capital investment should bear a lower tax burden is quite correct. And one you've accepted that general principle, it makes a lot of sense to tax rent-generating assets like land and spectrum rights (since those are not really "capital" in the first place), which is pretty much the Georgist idea.

alexmingoia5• 6 years ago

Land value (like all value) is subjective. There is no inherent value to land. What one person is willing to pay is not the same for everyone. Appointing someone to imagine a price for the purposes of taxation doesn't change this fact.

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

Every teardown provides a clear picture of the land value for that neighborhood: the transaction price plus the cost of clearing off the old building. The similar sized lot next door is worth just as much. And the value of whatever improvement is on it is the difference between what the building-plus-land is currently worth, and the value of the land -- pretty much the depreciated value of the existing improvements.

Map these values, and you have a pretty good tool for good land assessments. And for lots a wider or narrower, or deeper or shallower, there have been very usable tables for over 100 years. NYC was doing this in the first decade of the 20th century.

A tax on land values asks us to pay to exclude others from our site. In the middle of nowhere, that price can be $0. On valuable sites, it can be quite high.

Today, a lot of city land is leased, and the tenant pays the landlord for the use of the land. The higgling of the market sets the price. There is a lot of revenue potential there, and collecting it for public purposes doesn't take from anyone something he created.

And that can't be said for sales taxes, or wage taxes, or taxes on buildings.

snidane16• 6 years ago

Property taxes are bad because they punish labor and effort.

Land tax (important to distinguish) doesn't inhibit labor and effort. On the contrary cities implementing land taxes see increase in output because land gets better allocated to who need it. Simply because people sitting on vacant and absent land in the middle od cities drop it and sell it somebody else.

Land is not subjective but perfectly objective. It is a necessary input to all production - whether it is agricultural (obvious) or manufacturing (your factory has to be placed somewhere) or services (you need access to concentrated area for qualified workers in big cities).

You can't even survive without standing on land.

100% of people need land to survive so how can it be subjective? It might be subjective to birds.

_0ffh• 6 years ago

Yup, tax sounds problematic. Another way would be to declare all land common property and rent any piece of it out to the highest bidder. The market solves the problem of pegging it to a value.

moreaccountsplz• 6 years ago

There are ways to address value being subjective: use an incentive compatible revelation mechanism. E.g. http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/ where the property-owner appraises his own property, pays a fraction of his given value as a tax, and anyone can buy his property at the appraised price.

Whether it would be /accepted/ is another matter. But it's not impossible in the squaring-the-circle sense.

pydry14• 6 years ago

In my opinion property taxes are terrible because they aren’t in the owners control at all. There’s no way to know what your tax bill will be next year and no way to control for it.

So it's no different to rent in this respect. It IS effectively rent, it just spreads the unpredictability of renting across the whole society instead of concentrating the negative downside among one portion of society.

Unimproved land is pretty fungible. If you have two empty lots across the road or even in the same area they will usually end up costing about the same.

CydeWeys11• 6 years ago

What tax should tech companies pay then, given that the only land they really need is cheap rural land for data centers?

This taxation system does make sense for land, but there's way more economic activity happening that isn't associated with land than there is that is.

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

They generally locate where they can draw on a pool of talented people, and those people are drawn by social amenities, good schools, good infrastructure. All those things contribute to land value.

snidane16• 6 years ago

Tech companies should pay for what they use.

They are efficient at not consuming too many resources while producing a lot of value? Probably shouldn't pay much then.

But this applies not only to big tech companies but to individuals too - they shouldn't pay much if they don't consume or extract from others.

Taxes are only a last-resort mechanism to raise money in absence of proper funding model.

If you can price government provided services appropriately then you don't need taxes.

Eg. to build infrastructure (roads, networks) you can predict that it'll benefit owners of nearby properties. They will benefit by landfall increase to the value of their property because the land on which it stands becomes more valuable.

So you collect the money for the infrastructure project by land "tax" before you begin with construction.

("tax" because it's not a tax but payment for exclusive land ownership rights)

MiroF15• 6 years ago

there's way more economic activity happening that isn't associated with land than there is that is.

First, that is an actively contested claim. Pointing to tech companies as "way more economic activity" is laughable because (even though they occupy a huge proportion of public discourse) tech companies are a very small percentage of economic activity globally.

Second, intellectual property holdings would be considered "land" in the Georgian sense.

bluecalm3• 6 years ago

If they don't pay anything it's not really a problem. Their owners will and their employees will. Corporate income tax is the worst possible tax as it creates incentives for all the things at both don't want and which are very hard to police in a fair way (is this 1M they paid for licensing really a fair price or is it tax evasion?).

pydry14• 6 years ago

An extremely heavy tax on holding patents.

Patents are essentially the "land" of the tech industry. With weaker patents there probably wouldn't be any such thing as "big tech" as it would be constantly disrupted from below.

The exception is google's search index, which is, given its capital intensity and power requirements, practically a form of of heavy industry on a par with aerospace or automotive.

CuriousSkeptic2• 6 years ago

They should be paying wages. Which will the be used to fund other businesses, increasing the value of the land they use.

wnavarre5• 6 years ago

given that the only land they really need is cheap rural land for data centers?

Lots of tech companies are located in Silicon Valley, some of the most expensive land around...

PeterisP• 6 years ago

Some time ago wealth and production of wealth was heavily tied to land, agriculture and various natural resources were key to the wealth of a nation.

This is not the case any more - only a tiny fraction of our economy is tied to the land, primary production (agriculture/forestry/fishing and mining including oil) is just a few percent of the total economy; real estate/rents/leasing is perhaps 15% but most of that is related to the value of buildings, not the value of land. For extremely wealthy people, almost nothing of their wealth or income is in the form of land, because land is not worth that much. The current billionaires aren't major landowners, we're not Victorian age with most of the upper class being rentiers living off the rents of their land estates; the upper class is living off the dividends of their capital which is not tied to land and would be tax-free in a land-tax-only regime.

Extremely large taxes on land (or are we talking about an orders of magnitude reduction in the toal tax burden, and not just about the type of taxation? If we want to drastically cut the total volume of taxes, then that becomes the main topic, not the means of collecting taxes) while not the taxing the other 90% of the economy at all is not really a reasonable solution for modern times. It may have been reasonable in 1870s, but right now all it would just remove pretty much all taxes from all the very wealthy people and corporations, while putting all the tax burden on owners of farms and homes, and the 1.5% of USA economy that handles mining.

MiroF15• 6 years ago

"Land" for George is just things you can rent-seek on and are fixed in supply, that includes stuff like intellectual property, etc.

real estate/rents/leasing is perhaps 15% but most of that is related to the value of buildings, not the value of land.

Not at all clear that most of that is related to the value of the building and also you conveniently neglect to mention that that is the largest share of GDP out of any industry in the world.

Further, land includes a lot more stuff that is not counted in the economic measures you are using. [0]

[0] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/03068290...

snidane16• 6 years ago

Land is still necessary for production.

Maybe it will help to think of "land" as "location" since it is not the actual soil but the location which Georgists keep talking about.

If you are a modern services company you need to have access to large pool of qualified people - which happens to be in big cities. So you need a great location for your office to attract people from this talent pool. Location (aka land) therefore is an important input to your business and you will pay a lot for it.

Second, wealthy people park their money (regardless of origin, good or bad) in real estate. That drives living costs for non wealthy people.

It turns out it is non-wealthy workers who pay taxes which fund infrastructure development which benefits wealthy owners of real estate by increasing value of their property.

Georgists promote reversal of the present day funding scheme from nonwealthy workers to wealthy land owners with money parked in real estate. With the alternative being simple "taxing" of locational value to fund government services with two main outcomes

1. reducing tax burden on workers and small business 2. reducing cost of living (rents) by properly allocating land (mostly city land, not agricultural)

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

It is often considered a "narrow" tax base - just not enough for a "single" tax, all things considered. (That's largely because the burden of existing taxes is already being borne by land, at least to a significant extent. They just have additional disincentive effects, quite separate from that sort of final tax incidence.) But even then, it's clearly enough to fund local government expenses, so there's really no excuse for why we aren't using it.

neilwilson• 6 years ago

The primary purpose of taxation in a sovereign economy is to free goods and services up for deployment by the public sphere.

What does the government want with all that land?

Are you sure you have enough fungibility in your economy so that it will free up doctors, judges, refuse collectors or whatever and all the real goods that their salaries actually represent so that you can achieve the public purpose that is the reason you are taxing in the first place?

In any Modern Money informed Targeted Taxation regime what you really want to tax is whoever is using the things government wants to use instead.

And that, paradoxically, means the ideal tax is likely a Wage tax paid by businesses for the use of labour. That reduces the demand for labour in a controlled way, and those people are then hired (directly or indirectly) by government to do whatever the polity asked them to do when they were elected.

Do that and you can probably scrap any income tax completely - meaning whatever an individual earns they get to keep.

Bear in mind that if the labour resource is already free (aka unemployed) then there is no need to tax to free them up in the first place...

tlholaday5• 6 years ago

What does the government want with all that land?

You are correct that the government does not want land. What the government wants is a share of the economic value that control of the land makes possible.

Consider "vacant storefronts." The government does not want to operate stores. The government wants those storefronts put to good economic use, where what is good use is determined by bona fide auctions.

jabl• 6 years ago

Do you have any references for further reading on this topic?

And how is a wage tax different from an income tax? It might not show up on an employee's payroll, but the end result is the same, no?

And if you're not taxing capital/capital gains in any way, won't this cause inequality to shoot up even more than it already is?

logicprog• 6 years ago

Don't know if you'll consider these valid, but here are some critiques of the LVT and Georgism:

- https://mises.org/wire/murray-rothbard-and-henry-george - https://mises.org/library/single-tax-economic-and-moral-impl... - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/a_search-theore.htm...

The best criticism I've found, however, is here: https://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/Critique%20of%20Georgism..... It's from a more mainstream economist POV (I think?) than the other links and is far more fair and detailed.

snidane16• 6 years ago

Thanks for the articles providing feedback to georgist ideas - I've read some of these but some are new to me.

The authors seem not to understand the topic unfortunately and have to use long prose as they are trying to wrap their head around it.

The core problem and idea for solution is actually quite simple. Let me condense the topic into a tweet or two.

---

Problem: You have a naturally occuring resource which is scarce and which nobody created. How do you allocate it to humans?

Solution: Georgist simply say you can use an auction granting you possession for some amount of time instead of giving you time unlimited rights just because you were first to ask to use it.

---

This is not a theory as it is applied in many systems such as DNS allocation or electromagnetic spectrum allocation. Georgists point out that similar allocation problem is for "land" (think location) and the same auction mechanism can be applied.

Land was considered abundant in the past, especially as new continents were being discovered. Therefore nobody though about allocation, same as nobody considers allocation of air. If air got severely polluted (say by radioactivity) and only small fraction remained usable for humanity, you can be assured that the same allocation problem would exist for air.

After discovering all continents on Earth land ceased to be abundant and now requires a proper allocation mechanism. Otherwise landlord monopolies will continue piling up profits because of their luck in winning the infinitely durable possession rights allocated years, decades and centuries ago in badly structured auction.

Either we start inhabiting new planets or we solve problem of allocation of important scarce resources.

What's funny - you solve this allocation problem and many societal problems disappear as if by magic. Somehow this suggests that land allocation is a major root cause of society.

That's why Georgists dwell on it so much. You should start solving problems from the most serious ones with high impact.

AnimalMuppet11• 6 years ago

And I have yet to see a single valid reason as to why LTV should be the primary tax. I've seen a lot of words, but they all seem to start by assuming that LTV would be fair and the current system is not. That forms a very poor basis for convincing people who don't already agree.

Here's my argument against LTV: Warren Buffet owns one modest house in Omaha. Should he be taxed based on the land value of that modest house, and nothing more? That hardly seems fair.

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

Most of his stock holdings occupy land in very valuable places, and aren't paying much in property tax.

The principle is to pay for what you take, not for what you make. His modest home, likely on a modest lot, in a not-huge city, is worth little.

For a while, he had a couple of places in Malibu, and he told the WSJ what he thought of Proposition 13, keeping the taxes ridiculously low. Arnold Schwarznegger told him to go do pushups. Buffett saw the injustice.

kthxbye123• 6 years ago

Warren Buffet may only live in one house, but he owns literally billions of dollars of real estate.

crazygringo5• 6 years ago

I mean... the objection is that it's incredibly arbitrary, greatly affecting one part of the economy and leaving others untouched.

Why not a radio spectrum tax as the primary tax instead? Or an oxygen tax proportional to your lung size? Or a clean water tax, or a tax on the weight of your grocery consumption, or a tax on the weight of the garbage you produce, or the carbon you consume?

All of those are valuable resources.

That's why it's not found in the political dialog, because it's super-arbitrary and would therefore have grossly distorting effects. Why should a low-margin supermarket which people need, occupying tons of space, pay huge taxes, while a tiny very profitable ultra-luxury boutique hotel pays only 5% of the taxes?

Taxation needs to be applied with some combination of minimizing distortion and achieving some level of progressivism. A land value tax is absolutely terrible at both of those.

balfirevic• 6 years ago

Land value tax is considered among the economists as being one of the least distortionary taxes.

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

The radio spectrum -- those airwaves we say belong to the American people -- should be treated as our common treasure, not purchaseable by corporations. Lease them out for, say, 5 years or 10 years, and then put them up for bids again.

We all need clean air. We all need clean water. Those who use lots of water are usually charged by their local utility for what they take. Some farms and water bottlers deplete the local resource, and they ought to be charged for what they take from the commons, if the carrying capacity can't handle it.

Supermarkets in Manhattan are amazingly inventive in providing a lot of groceries in a space whose smallness would be unimaginable in suburbia -- and is difficult to "social distance" in today.

In the city, that supermarket woudl not be a single-story building; it would have a 20- or 40- or more story building overhead, and all those users would share the land value tax.

And the building would not be taxed, so no downside to fully developing, and regularly redeveloping, the lot to serve human needs.

neilparikh8• 6 years ago

LVT is least distortionary tax, because you can't create or destroy land.

Why should a low-margin supermarket which people need, occupying tons of space, pay huge taxes, while a tiny very profitable ultra-luxury boutique hotel pays only 5% of the taxes?

Because the supermarket is using more land compared to the hotel. Every bit of land the supermarket owns is land you and I can't use. It's only fair that the supermarket compensate the community for this, since the land could have been used for something else instead (like an apartment building, or an office building).

It's also not a given that the ultra-luxury hotel will pay less tax. It's likely that a luxury hotel will be in a more desirable area of town, where land values are higher, and so tax there will be higher.

JSavageOne4• 6 years ago

Any tax is "arbitrary" in the sense that there's no natural law dictating what should or should not be taxed, it is up to our best judgement. Carbon taxes and garbage taxes make sense, thus why I stated in my comment that LVT is logical as a primary tax, not the only tax.

Currently most federal tax revenue comes from wage/payroll taxes (65%). There is nothing less arbitrary about taxing wages than land value. In fact, taxing wages is more harmful as I will explain.

In general the more you tax something, the less of it you get. So by increasing income taxes, we discourage working - something that is presumably beneficial to society, while also encouraging more people to evade the law to avoid the taxes (working under the table). Land value however doesn't have any of these distortions because land supply is fixed and nobody creates it. Unlike income or sales taxes, land value tax is impossible to evade.

The reason to tax land value is because nobody is more entitled to the land and commons than anyone else, land value gains are pure unearned income, and taxing land has no negative distortions. By not taxing land value, we give a free ride to the landowning rentier class, and encourage the zero sum economic waste of playing land speculation, leading to housing booms/busts like the 2008 Great Recession and 1986-91 Japan housing bubble.

Why should a low-margin supermarket which people need, occupying tons of space, pay huge taxes, while a tiny very profitable ultra-luxury boutique hotel pays only 5% of the taxes?

Land value is largely determined by location. That supermarket may have a lower tax bill than that boutique hotel in the city center if the supermarket is located in an area with lower land values. LVT promotes denser and more efficient development, and thus a supermarket could be located in the basement of a residential apartment complex or mall and pay less in land value taxes by sharing the tax burden with the rest of the land property.

acd2• 6 years ago

I think commons like fish in the ocean and air quality in cities should be priced. If of you fish its not free you pay to the country whos fish you fish. If the fish is extinct or heavily MSC on the red list the price is sky high in the millions this is to protest the species and our eco system so future generations can enjoy that fish.

By pricing eco systems and sustainable common resources. We avoid tragedy of the commons where few extract all value from common resources for free.

Ie such a new economic system would price the rain forest at its true value to humans and earth eco systems.

Carbo emissions would also be priced differently.

Tradegy of the commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

travisporter• 6 years ago

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an independent non-profit organization which sets a standard for sustainable fishing.

spangry• 6 years ago

Sounds like you're describing Pigovian taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

acd2• 6 years ago

Thanks for point out Pigovian taxes!

It seems to be a field of Environmental Economics.

revnode2• 6 years ago

The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value. Georgists argue that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (for example, on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient.

Fine in theory, the reality is that you get nailed for property taxes AND income taxes AND sales taxes AND everything else. If a government CAN tax it, it will and will not restrain itself.

tanzbaer2• 6 years ago

Depends on the state. Several state have no income tax. New Hampshire lacks income and sales tax.

revnode2• 6 years ago

All states have federal income taxes and all states have federal sales taxes (by way of tariffs).

watertom• 6 years ago

All income should be taxed the same.

We should move to a a progressive tax system with zero deductions, eliminate capital gains, and inheritance taxes. Make the top tax rate of over $5M be 54%.

We already know the effective tax rate for each bracket. Once we factor in the additional tax revenue from the top bracket we can adjust the other rates.

I would consider a true capital gain exception. For the investment in new and private busines investment that generates revenue. This horseshit of buying stock and holding it for a period of time is NOT capital investment. The company does not benefit from the purchase of stock once they go public. It’s a scam to allow the rich to avoid taxes.

perilunar3• 6 years ago

All income should be taxed the same.

Why?

There's a big difference morally between earned and unearned income.

NumberWangMan4• 6 years ago

A lot of people focus on the fairness of the Land Value Tax, but the consequences of using one are just as interesting if not more. This tax has been put into practice in some cities in Pennsylvania, and there's evidence that it has a whole bunch of positive effects on the city, due to the way that it incentivises improving your property and making the most of your land (since you're going to be taxed on it pretty much the same either way).

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-g...

I think we should be replacing property taxes with land value taxes pretty much everywhere. Aside from the benefits mentioned in the Strong Towns article linked above, putting the right incentives in place to build more densely in high-demand (aka high land value) areas would be a boon to making cities and towns more walkable and more amenable to public transit, and therefore reducing sprawl and pollution. It wouldn't get us all of the way, but it would help.

CydeWeys11• 6 years ago

I sort of agree that replacing property taxes with land-value taxes would make sense, so long as you can actually do the value assessments fairly and impartially.

What doesn't remotely make sense to me is the suggestion that LVT should be the primary or even only tax, which you see others arguing for here in the comments.

tlholaday5• 6 years ago

What doesn't remotely make sense to me is the suggestion that LVT should be the primary or even only tax

When you were new to arithmetic, did it remotely make sense to you that the number of integers and the number of even integers was the same?

If you find a surprising conclusion, consider reading the argument. Perhaps you will discover that you agree with the premises and the reasoning, and the conclusion will seem less surprising.

pydry14• 6 years ago

I think a lot of people don't really realize how much free money is creamed off by property owners and resource extractors.

Not least because of their constant attempts to disguise what they do as productive.

It's not like people are in a coffee shop and seeing "% of this product that goes to rent" built into the prices. They tend to assume that the price of the cup is basically the ingredients (which is why people balk at paying for tap water in restaurants).

NumberWangMan4• 6 years ago

I agree. I think the single tax was conceived in a time where most productive activities took the same amount of land. Nowadays, you have farms on the one hand, and something like tech companies on the other. It would be kinda crazy to tax them both based on the amount of land they use.

DubiousPusher• 6 years ago

The reason Henry George thought it should be the only tax is because of the economic consequences. Since land is by and large fixed in quantity and a society's productive uses of land are largely dictated by the technology of the times then a Land Value Tax would not create inefficiencies in the market the way other taxes like tariffs or an income tax do.

naravara2• 6 years ago

You would probably want to include some tax advantaged incentives to maintain a bit of public space, public art, parks, or just green spaces. Giving over some portion of your land for public benefit, even if limited use, should be encouraged rather than penalized. It would also encourage more interesting usage patterns and development than pure land-use maximization would do. The latter might have you end up with block after block of square high rises, which might glide us past the point of diminishing returns to density.

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

Frederick Law Olmsted realized early on that even a huge project like Central Park could be funded from the increase in land value it created in the neighborhoods surrounding it.

Palomides• 6 years ago

some cities already do this, with, it seems, mixed results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space

https://cooperativecity.org/2017/11/01/privately-owned-publi...

vertex-four• 6 years ago

The problem with “privately owned public space” is that it tends to reduce demand for actual public space; the majority of people never do anything that would offend the land owner, so never see the problem, while e.g. political speech, actual freedom, and all the other great things we get out of public space are silenced.

nostrademons4• 6 years ago

There is a theorem (called the "Henry George Theorem", but ironically discovered by Joseph Stiglitz in 1977) [1] that an LVT in the presence of democratic government results in an optimal tax rate and allocation of public/private benefits, and that an LVT can solely fund government.

The idea behind the theorem is that all of these public benefits - open space, parks, museums and cultural attractions, mass transit, transportation, safety, etc. - increase the relative attraction of living in a location. Hence, they raise the rents that landlords can charge. Places like NYC or the Bay Area are attractive in a large part because of public investments in social goods there. The increase in rent due to public goods is specifically the increase in land value - private improvements to an individual property are not reflected in the LVT, but that portion of the property's value that is common among all properties in the area is.

Therefore, every landowner has an incentive to pass a tax increase iff it will raise the rent they can collect (or the implicit rent, for an owner-occupied property) by greater than the amount of the tax. And they have an incentive to ensure that the tax is spent on benefits that actually improve the appeal of living in a place, because otherwise they're losing money on the deal. Hence the theory implies that a LVT is not only the optimal way of collecting revenue for a government, but also leads to an optimal size of government, making it popular among many left-libertarian types.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

emilfihlman• 6 years ago

Why should only bigger communities together own something? If I want to fuck out in the middle of nowhere and do my own thing, why should others be allowed to harass me there?

Additionally the government printing money, giving it to us and then requiring us to give it back does not create value, it creates a loop that causes work for nothing.

neilparikh8• 6 years ago

Under Georgism, in practical terms, you would still be able to do that. The value of land in the middle of nowhere would be essentially 0, so you wouldn't need to pay much LVT. You may still need to pay some LVT, to reflect that the state is still providing you some services (in particular, enforcing your claim to the land).

perilunar3• 6 years ago

For a libertarian take on Georgism, see Geolibertarianism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

badrabbit• 6 years ago

Ends justify means?

wazoox• 6 years ago

An interesting and derived point of view is geolibertarianism : http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

May I suggest that if you've not read Henry George's thought yourself yet, you take some time with them? There are two sections of the Schalkenbach site devoted to them -- first, the books, articles and speeches themselves, and then an introduction to HG's thought, with perspectives from a number of writers, mostly recent. With the latter group is a short version of Progress and Poverty entitled "Significant Paragraphs."

His vision and clarity are remarkable and inspiring. 120 years ago, his ideas were widely understood throughout the English speaking world. (There were also a lot of hilarious misinterpretations by people who hadn't read, as is often the case.)

And if you explore a bit, you'll find some good websites and blogs devoted to his thought.

wnavarre5• 6 years ago

One of the most superficial ways that Georgism obviously beats Marxism is that Georgists will tell someone interested exactly what to read, will acknowledge very explicitly the few parts that are incorrect or misguided.

Marxists meanwhile hem and haw about what an aspiring Marxist should read and will hand-wave away any contradictions.

heymartinadams• 6 years ago

https://www.progress.org/articles/a-more-prosperous-vancouve...

firloop• 6 years ago

A great essay on Georgism:

“Georgism is an accelerationism, as it attempts to unchain capital—not from the restraints of humanity, but those of land, which eats cake in the stands as it watches capital and labor fight over crumbs.”

https://gravitylobby.club/trashcan.html

yesbabyyes2• 6 years ago

Allegedly, Karl Marx called Georgism "capitalism's last ditch ". I can't find a source, but this was an interesting collection of historical thoughts: https://merionwest.com/2019/06/02/through-letters-the-gap-be...

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

Many people who were first influenced by Henry George's ideas became impatient with the "organicness" of them, and moved to promoting socialism because they thought it would achieve their objectives more quickly. But George was convinced that it had to grow organically.

George's simple reform would provide the level playing field, and not involve "command and control." George was very much the small-d democrat and very much the capitalist -- but a purer capitalism, not land monopoly capitalism. And he could accurately be called a mensch!

George Bernard Shaw was perhaps the most famous of them.

Henry George had public debates with several socialists (Serge Shevitch was one - 1887; Henry Hyndman another). They're great reading.

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

George Bernard Shaw was perhaps the most famous of them.

Henry George had public debates with several socialists (Serge Shevitch was one - 1887; Henry Hyndman another). They're great reading.

JadeNB• 6 years ago

Monopoly was based on, or one might say perverted from, a game created to inculcate Georgist ideas in children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game .

pharke3• 6 years ago

So this seems all well and good for urban areas but what about rural land ownership? Or is that not a concern here?

LVTfan31• 6 years ago

Rural areas don't need the kinds of infrastructure that urban areas need, but they need some. They need schools, they need roads and maintenance. They'd love to have broadband. They may need drainage or water systems that serve undense communities. They need emergency services, courts, and a variety of other things that civilized people who live in communities find valuable. (My use of "civilized" is in no way a criticism.) We are social beings, and there are things that are more efficiently done by the community as a whole.

Earlier, someone referred to the Henry George Theorem. I think it holds in rural places, too. And unimproved land value seems to me to be the reasonable "tax base."

pharke3• 6 years ago

My question was more to do with how the improved value would scale for rural land that had a lot of use but can't generate as much income. Many rural businesses require a lot of land area but only produce a modest income which is possible under the current setup because land prices and taxes are low. There would have to be a lot of consideration given to the population density and the types of improvements made.

Georgism

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