Comment by Imustaskforhelp
2 days ago
Man I wanted to write about georgism (see my comment on the parent's post where I talk about land parasites)
I am such a big georgist. Seriously, I might genuinely cry seeing how georgism isn't being implemented. it is one of the most superior policy systems but the parasites own so much that we don't even discuss about it
I was talking to my friend about georgism when he asked me if I was a capitalist/communist.. Basically in the end he just said, that he doesn't know about economics... so he doesn't know and they wanted to change the topic I feel like this might be a major hurdle where people think that economics is some huge mumbo jumbo when I feel like georgism and (index funds?) are two things that almost everyone should know given how simple they are.
Georgism is land communism. The 'community' or whoever is collecting the taxes (LVT) owns all land and rents it out. Ideal LVT puts the market value of all land at $0 after tax liabilities, so even if you could 'own' land under Georgism it would largely be economically meaningless.
It's straight up marxism hidden as a capitalist market measure. Vacant land portion of property taxes are essentially georgism-light where the land capital is mostly under a capitalist model but with a % owned by the community (or more likely, a government that commonly works against community interests) and rented out in the form of property tax (in georgism the % is 100).
"Land communism" isn't a bad way to put it.
But I think you need to make a pretty clear distinction between "land" communism and, well, communism. Communism is based on public ownership of the means of production: if you own a steel factory, you don't really "own" a steel factory, the people own the factory and the state appoints a bureaucrat or manager to run it. You can receive no profit from it, you can't sell it, really you have no rights to it other than the state's promise to let you manage it (and whatever they pay you for that).
Georgism explicitly still admits private property: if you own a steel factory, you actually do own a steel factory, you can make decisions about the management of that factory, you can sell it, etc. In many ways it's more capitalist than today's capitalism, because single-tax Georgism also states that there should be no income or capital gains tax, and so you receive 100% of the profits from building that factory. You just have to pay a tax to the state for the land that the factory sits on, set in proportion to what others would be willing to rent the land for.
The distinction is pretty key, because it gets at the heart of human agency and incentives. Georgism does not admit private ownership of the land because the land was here before any humans were; no human suddenly built the land, and no human can destroy it, they can only manage its use. Likewise for other common goods (like pollution, the electromagnetic spectrum, natural resources, etc.) which Georgism seeks to manage. Georgism does admit private property, because when you construct a machine or a factory or invent a new process, that came out of your own efforts. It could be summed up as "private persons own what they build or buy, the public owns what was here before".
Georgism explicitly rejects Marx's class-based analysis and Marx's narrative of zero-sum class conflict. What symptoms Marx attributes to class conflict, George attributes to rent-seeking, something which both Georgists and capitalists agree is a corruption of capitalism, rather than an inherent element. Whereas Marxists conflate economic rent and return on capital - an economically unjustifiable leap in logic.
Marxism explicitly rejects classical liberal principles such as the rule of law, limited government, free markets, and individual rights, Georgism not only functions within those principles, but requires them.
Marxism is incompatible with individual rights due to its hostile position on private property and its insistence that all means of production be collective property. The most fundamental means of production of them all is an individual's labor. Without which, no amount of land would produce a farm, a mine, a house, or a city. And then we wonder why Marxist regimes consistently run slave labor camps.
Henry George argues that society only has the right to lay claim to economic goods produced by society, rather than an individual. Marxism recognizes no such distinction.
Georgism is fully defensible using classical economics and has been repeatedly endorsed by both classical and modern economists. Marxism is at best heterodox economics and at worst, pseudoscience.
Georgism could be implemented tomorrow if sufficient political will existed. Marxism requires a violent overthrow of the state.
Henry George himself rejected Marxism, famously predicting that if it was ever tried, the inevitable result would be a dictatorship. Unlike Marx's predictions, that prediction of George's has a 100% validation rate. And he made that prediction while Marx was still alive.
Economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz have observed that a public levy on land value (Georgism/LVT) does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes.
Suffices to say, you are not sharing a grounded opinion on Georgism.
The Trojan Horse of Georgism does all the things you disdain, for land, which is the most vile of all because land creatures can't escape it. The genius is Georgism pretends like it's not Marxist by using market principles, but zeroing them out so you don't actually own it and you end back in land communism.
>Economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz have observed that a public levy on land value (Georgism/LVT) does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes.
This is not an accurate portrayal, there is an extensive list of problems with Georgism that destroys much of the important methods of allocating and using land, even if you could tax it accurately.[]
[] https://cdn.mises.org/Single%20Tax%20Economic%20and%20Moral%...
4 replies →
Yes, this was such a wonderful read. I think I maybe mentioned in this post or some other how I was discussing georgism with my friends and I couldn't really articulate the difference b/w georgism and communism partially because I had gotten into in depth about georgism some time ago, and I will admit that I had forgotten quite a bit of details.
This was such a beautiful ,might I say article on georgism. I would genuinely prefer if you could write it as a standalone article that I might share with my friends or can refer to.
Its such a nice read. Thanks for giving me the pleasure to read it.
Edit: I went further into the post and it seemed that mothball isn't having this discussion in good faith and wants to have a last word and yes they feel so right, almost being stupid might I say. But your way of recognizing it and saying it up front really both surprised me and made me respect ya since you actually went through their sources when they sent some and are doing this discussion in good faith.
I am maybe georgist because I feel like it genuinely made the most sense to me and uh maybe it makes also sense because land price seems to have gone so high that I can't hold land so maybe that's a bias but still georgism is such a good take yet landlords have such a lobby that I wonder if we can break it.
We really need to get more georgist thoughts.
Might I say,though this isn't strictly georgism but taxing/patching billionaire loopholes since software businesses are built on open source and is almost like land in the sense that community owns it, plus I feel like that concentration of power into such people is wrongful but I also know that its a really really tough issue as to taxing billionaires, do we tax their stocks? do we do what exactly??
Yet georgism is a right step in that direction except it is more quantifiable and (almost universally?) agreed to be a good taxation strategy.
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