Comment by tomrod
2 days ago
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%...
You're on a lonely island there, and despite the followup edit for a reference to the Mises Institute, your thoughts represents neither mainstream nor, especially recently, what their own Pete Boettke would declare, mainline economics. Thanks for your thoughts, I've reviewed them and found them inaccurate.
Smith, Adam (1776). "Chapter 2, Article 1: Taxes upon the Rent of Houses". The Wealth of Nations, Book V.
Tideman, Nicolaus; Gaffney, Mason (1994). Land and Taxation. Shepheard-Walwyn in association with Centre for Incentive Taxation. ISBN 978-0-85683-162-1.
You're quoting how Adam Smith hated landlords/rent, yet you seek to enslave all of society by making the government the landlord of everyone. From Smith's citation you have here, you would seek to exacerbate the problem he identifies.
2 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.
In my understanding, the reason LVT/Georgism would work is because the base stock is fixed for the very long term (geologically, barring land reclamation projects from the ocean). Software has no similar basis, and thus would devolve to taxation like current stocks or bonds today, where growth of the capital stock can occur.
And that is another weakness of Georgism: it causes the base stock to be fixed.
Land speculators play an important role by introducing unimproved land into the market at a delayed point in time, adjusting the stock of available land to market demands, preventing economically inefficient prior improvements from happening which then make it even more expensive to use the land productively in the future.
The incredibly vital task of land speculation that adjusts available stock to market conditions, is virtually impossible under a LVT.
Please note George himself said his land scheme would "accomplish the same thing (as land nationalization) in a simpler, easier, and quieter way."[] It was well understood by George that what he was doing was communism.
[] Henry George, Progress and Poverty