Some people argue no compensation is required but I think in reality an LVT at 100% reduces the price of all land to $0. Given that land is substantial portion of retirement savings in our current economy, completely obliterating land prices without any compensation seems morally dubious. Perhaps if you do it slowly enough that you give everyone time to adjust and make the market adjustments gradual enough that people who need to sell land for retirement can still get something like 90% of the value initially it could work.

Nobody is arguing for a literal 100% LVT. You'd want to still leave a fraction of land rent (say 10% or so) untaxed, since this introduces a desirable market mechanism in property assessment - and George even acknowledges this. What's nutty is to let land speculators capture all of that value for no real reason.

I think the group that is capturing the most value is actually landlords, followed by speculators. I also agree that 90% LVT may be better in practice, although I do know people who still argue for 100% and various auction mechanisms to determine the LVT.

As much as I think LVT makes sense, having to go to some sort of annual auction for my own land does seem worse than just paying taxes. Along with that being a tedious process, that could put you at the mercy of malicious actors who may just dislike you and have enough cash to outbid you.

Any implementation would have to not include this for people to be able to have stable lives.

A yearly auction is overkill. Do it every 5-10 years with a fee the longer you delay the next auction. (Like banks charge more interest the longer a fixed rate loan is)

Eh still sounds pretty terrible really. The assessment people should be able to figure it out however they normally figure out taxes.

You could use "auctions" to capture that residual value if those were long-term land leases. But you'd still want to assess and tax land rent afterwards, because in practice high-stakes leases have proven vulnerable to government corruption.

Silvio Gesell proposed an auction mechanism but I honestly don't care about the details. You can lease land. Tax it or auction it off. There are so many good enough solutions that one does not have to be picky.

That's the gist of it. If land is so worthless even rich people don't want anything to do with it, why would it make someone poor better off to have it?

Because you can put structures on the land and capture the entire value of the structure?

There is a difference between something being intrinsically worthless and the taxes driving the market price to $0.

No, if land was worth $0 people would bid it up until the value of the land is how much they are willing to pay per year in taxes.

> Since all taxes are ultimately borne by land ...

Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.

How is income tax ultimately borne by land? Sales tax? Inheritance tax? Gasoline tax? Corporate income tax on corporations like SpaceX, Goldman Sachs, and Intel?

"Ultimately borne by land" may have made sense a century or three ago, when (almost) all income ultimately came from the land. That's not the world we live in any longer.

How do you plan on existing without a universe, without any laws of physics? Ownership of land extends into the ground and into the sky. You are owning a slice of the universe. The earth is conveniently located near a nuclear fusion reactor the energy it radiates is embodied in the value of land on earth. The value of land on Pluto is very low. Nobody wants to live there. The fossil or nuclear fuels you dig out to power your car or fridge are ultimately born from land. Energy is derived from what is below our feet and extraction rights are literally the ownership of land.

>How is income tax ultimately borne by land? Sales tax? Inheritance tax? Gasoline tax? Corporate income tax on corporations like SpaceX, Goldman Sachs, and Intel?

Gasoline must be refined from crude oil which is extracted from land.

SpaceX needs aluminium, steel and rocket fuel which all must be extracted from land.

Goldman Sachs just manages incomes derived from land.

Intel obviously depends on an uncountable number of chemical compounds derived from the land

If you take the view that "land" is where all the matter on earth comes from, it kinda makes sense. It's the strictest interpretation of materialism I've ever heard, though; there would be nothing of value without input of the sun's energy.

The exact proximity of earth to the sun is what gives the land on earth value. In fact, this implies that humans did none of the work, they just took what was already there and labeled it their own.

Not quite, owners DID the work and labeled it their own.

The username checks out; where do you think wealth comes from if not land? Paper money in the end is just a representation of claims for assets generated from land. Food, minerals, energy, actual things all come from land.

You cannot eat a metaverse.

I apologize for the uncalled snark. My point is that at the end of the day everything valuable at some point came from the land. The Intel factory is just wealth that was extracted and accumulated earlier, it is an actual, valuable asset.

Georgists divide into two categories. They define land differently, or emphasize different aspects of it.

1. Left wing georgists. Land = resource needed for human life. Humans cannot fly, therefore land is a life necessity. Food grows on land and nowhere else, therefore land is necessary for life.

2. Right wing georgists. Land as a monopoly. Electromagnetic spectrum (5g, wifi, radio waves) cannot have too many owners of a band otherwise you get interference. Google.com domain can be owned only by one entity otherwise you get mess. For actual land (geographical parcel) you hold exclusive use rights, that others have to respect, otherwise you get fights for territory. All of these - geo area, name system, electromagnetic spectrum - constitute a form of land. There are grades of it which differently priced and only one owner can operate it at a time.

Land is still the most important section of economy. Real estate is mainly land speculation. You can observe billionaires investing in real estate and land when there is nowhere else to invest, so it definitely is not piece of worthless nothing that only had value in 19th century when majority of population was still employed in agriculture. Except homeless, 100% of population is invested in real estate. Only tiny portion of money is spent on stocks comparatively.

Georgist philosophy lives completely ouside of the current left right spectrum, both on the political and cultural level. However, if it become the next societal paradigm, you'll see this divide again. It is becoming a real possiblity it'd become the next paradigm because after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.

I think the division between land as natural resources and land as any non-Schumpeterian economic rent source (so broadcast spectrum rights but not brands because the company created those) is more between traditional and modern Georgists.

But it still runs into the same practical problems. The taxable value of "unimproved" Google.com is negligible (the same value as any other domain name, or vaguely pronounceable nonsense word domain name if you're trying to be really specific with your tax assessments), probably less than they're currently paying their domain registrar for.

If you're taxing billion dollar companies and their founders significantly less, you're taxing everyone else significantly more or providing fewer public services (in George's vision where LVT is the only tax). There's an efficiency argument that letting Googles be even richer is good for all of us because we get so much more stuff from it and people who use land to live on rather than to build social networks on deserve penalising for their relatively unproductive use of the land, but it's not one that necessarily corresponds well to the reality of the sort of CRUD-apps with lockin monopolies Silicon Valley VCs tend to build and the sort of employment and development opportunities the average homeowner has

So, if you define "land" as including domain names, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and electromagnetic spectrum, then sure, almost all money comes from "land". I would say that at that point, calling it "land" is pretty misleading, though. A right-wing Georgist who wanted to communicate ought to call it something else, like "monopoly control" or something.

> after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.

Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?

It's called "land" because it is one of the three original factors of production in classical economics - labor, capital and land.

Labor is energy, Capital is accumulation of energy. Land is any natural opportunity.

Domains, patents or spectrums are portions of namespace, string space, idea space, frequency band - some kind of space, in other words land.

> Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?

I don't want to defend anything. It's up to people to decide if they want to burn everything to the ground after exhausting all the economic policities with nothing much to show for it. Real estate keeps getting bigger problem than ever, birth rates plummeting. Continuing the trend will result in a collapse by one of 1. depopulation 2. war 3. revolution or similar event. Since real estate is such a big part of it, georgism - the antidote for misbehaving real estate - seems like the next tool to reach for.

Anyways - everybody who spends a bit of time trying to understand it realizes that it is logically the obvious solution, but is politically infeasible.

> It's called "land" because it is one of the three original factors of production in classical economics - labor, capital and land.

That makes as much sense as trying to fit all of chemistry into earth, air, fire, and water. There's a lot more going on in economics these days than "the three original factors of production", and trying to shoehorn everything into those terms doesn't make sense.

Your last two paragraphs assume that everything is going to burn to the ground if we don't have a magic fix. I asked for a defense of that; you gave me a restatement.

And in your last paragraph, "everyone who understands knows it's right". Nice. I'm sure that's some flavor of logical fallacy, but I'm too lazy to dig up the right label to put on it.

You can't eat sunlight or the wind either yet both seem pretty useful.

And where do you plant the crops or build the wind turbines and solar plants to harness these?

And to add, and where do you get the materials to build the wind turbines and solar plants?

You're begging the question here. Currently we need land for these but that can change.

No, I'm simply asking the inconvenient question, that's different. How can it change?