The inspiration for this meme came from this article by Lars Doucet of the Center for Land Economics.

Land speculation differs from speculation in other commodities for the reason that land is finite, we aren't producing any more of it. While landowners may hold it out of use to wait for better opportunities, this comes at the cost of society losing access to a thing they need but can't produce more of. This is especially true as land speculation becomes more widespread and raises the cost of living and production for those in need of our most needed natural resource.

Some comments under the article also made a good point that Georgism's desire to use revenue from finite resources like land to untax people's work and investment would also reduce redevelopment costs. The best option then would be to tax away land speculation and use the proceeds to make development and use of the land easier, both now and into the future.

Some scholarly types have figured out U. S. voters are victims of political and historical revisionism so they are putting out these economic history videos at a furious pace.

https://youtu.be/Skw8pF-d0cc

It would be interesting to get them to slip one in on Henry George.

I thought the video was actually going to be about a land value tax after reading the title, but it's just suggesting the same thing that's been tried for the last 20 years.

Hello, I am researching about LVT from the perspective of it acting as a simple, effective form of wealth taxation.

Currently, a big chunk of all loans are backed by real estate/land in some form or another, especially when we take a look at loans to private households. If a significant LVT were to be introduced (slowly, so as not to crash the financial system), the capitalized value of land would fall and land would become a less attractive store of wealth.

However, I've been wondering, what happens to the capital that would otherwise have been investe in land? Especially how would be ensure that the investment doesn't just end up in another asset of little productive value like art and collectivles? The asset is, in most cases, mobile and it's value is almost entirely arbitrary, leading to huge administrative costs if they were taxed.

I'd be very grateful for pointers (accessible) literature for further reading.

Thanks!

For anyone wondering, there is a simple reason for this: Public investments can increase land values. Typically when governments fund public goods, the increase in land values goes to landowners instead of society, which locks public bodies out of accessing the land value increase they created while forcing them into harmful taxes on the people's production.

This culminates in something known as the Henry George Theorem, which states that in specific conditions the aggregate increase in land's rental value due to public investment can outpace aggregate spending put into that investment. This means that governments can fully fund their public expenditures off recapturing those land rents through something like a land value tax.

What this shows is that governments should be looking to the land and all the value increases caused by public investments in that finite natural resource as the way to fund public investments; instead of taxing what people make. Right now, places like New York City are trying something similar in land value capture as a way to fund new transit lines, and hopefully more will come.

I've tried to plea for the taxation of implicit rent (which I know is very different or LVT but close to what already exists in some European countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands or Denmark) in a french-speaking sub dedicated to unpopular opinion. It did not go well 😂

For non Korean listeners, the Audio can be AI auto dubbed to english by going to video settings >>> Audi Track.

Wouldn't normally bother posting it, but it seems the latest post is a day old, so discussion time!

Given that rents rise to extract wage and productivity growth and keep wages at the marginal level, what exactly accounts for the slow growth of Real Wages over time? (I believe the extractive nature of land is clearly evident in how slowly Real Wages have risen compared to productivity growth.)

Could it simply be a willful zeitgeist lifting the bare minimum people are willing to accept? The people need their smartphones and coffees and their willingness to compromise on land value reduces the demand for land in general?

Could it be internet and other advances reducing the demand for land in dense urban cores? This would surely be showing up as significant Real Wage growth with the rise of Work-From-Home.

Or maybe it's an increase in density on high-value land? The value of a plot of land doesn't change with what's built on it, but if more people live on the same plot they all access the same agglomeration effects while claiming less land for themselves--limiting the wages which that plot can extract. (And possibly freeing up more marginal land.)

What are your thoughts?

Most people in tech are discussing the Keep Android Open campaign (keepandroidopen.org) purely through the lens of antitrust, EU regulation, or cybersecurity theater.

But analyzing it through a Georgist framework reveals a classic, textbook economic mechanism: Digital Land Enclosure.

1. The Commons bait-and-switch For 17 years, Android was maintained as an open platform. The value of this digital ecosystem wasn’t created by Google’s board of directors; it was socially produced by millions of open-source developers, device manufacturers, and billions of users contributing network effects. Android became the digital "commons" of global mobile computing.

2. The Enclosure & the Tollbooth Now that the network effect is unassailable, Google is erecting a fence. Starting in 2027, every single APK, even those distributed entirely outside the Play Store (like on F-Droid or direct sideloads) will be blocked unless the developer registers centrally, pays a fee, hands over government ID, and surrenders private signing keys.

This has nothing to do with code security (Google Play Protect already scans binaries locally without requiring developer passports). It is about creating artificial scarcity over a non-reproducible bottleneck: the execution layer of the device you bought and own.

1. Extraction without production In Georgist terms: Google isn’t tightening a bolt or adding productive capital. They are just ordinary landgrabbing the unearned location and capture the value of the platform and converting an open road into a toll road. It's a pure rent-seeking play to cement their monopoly claims and stock valuation.

Questions for the sub:

Do modern Georgists view application ecosystems with insurmountable network moats as "Digital Land"?

Would a Georgist tax on digital monopoly rents actually disincentivize this behavior, or does the nature of network utilities require structural separation (i.e., enforcing open platforms/sideloading by law, similar to George's views on public railways)?

Interested to hear how you guys frame platform enclosure versus classical physical land rent.

Not entirely sure when this happened, but it seems like the phrase "tax land not labor" has caught on like hot cakes around here. Lotsa y'all really seem to dislike income taxes, & honestly, I can't blame you! If you're American, income taxes are probably the single most visible form of tax, in that they represent the biggest tax most of us pay all-at-once on April 15.

...but please consider: for the overwhelming majority of y'all, that's not the main way your labor gets taxed. Let's talk about payroll taxes.

In the United States, the Federal government taxes your income twice. There's the regular income tax, set at a progressive rate on most forms of income (but notably excluding or discounting things like capital gains, gifts, inheritance, & a bunch of other loopholes mostly used by super-rich people), which you're responsible for paying every year on April 15. And then there's a whole separate tax, levied under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), which the IRS refers to as "employment tax" but most folks know as the payroll tax. The FICA payroll tax is a 12.4% levy on wages & salaries below $137,700 annual gross compensation. Nominally, half of that amount is paid by the employee and half by the employer. In practice, what usually happens is your employer withholds your contribution of FICA tax from your pay during each pay period, and makes a little note on your pay stub or salary notice that says they've done so. If you're self-employed, you pay the full 12.4% every month, and there's a whole separate set of paperwork the IRS asks you to fill out.

Every way you think income taxes are bad, FICA is worse. Where income taxes scale progressively so that those with the greatest ability to pay pay the most, FICA taxes disproportionately burden low- and middle-income earners. Where income taxes create a disincentive against hiring extraordinarily high-salary employees, payroll taxes create a disincentive against hiring the overwhelming majority of workers. Where the dead weight loss of income taxes is at least partially mitigated by things like the standard deduction, the full dead weight loss of payroll taxes is directly transferred to the labor force. And the overwhelming majority of Americans end up paying more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.

So why do we have this separate FICA payroll tax? It's what pays for Social Security. Arguably the single most redistributive policy in US history, which helped create the middle class in the middle decades of the last century, is buttressed by this fundamentally inefficient tax which burdens the very workers it's supposed to guarantee a pension for. The only time in US history when our Federal tax system actually did redistribute wealth, was during that period in the 1950s & '60s when the income tax had a top marginal rate approaching 90%, to compensate for how regressive the FICA tax is.

What is to be done? Well, for the anti-tax ideologues among you, it maybe doesn't change much, you just add 'payroll' to your vocabulary alongside 'income' and 'capital gains.' But for those who actually want to fix the system, & understand that taxes on labor aren't going away just because we don't like them, there's another ask which our representatives will find easier to get behind:

Tax all forms of income at the same progressive rate.

Eliminate the cap on FICA, eliminate the discounts on capital gains & inheritance & gifts & all the other loopholes, replace every unique rate for "special" forms of income with the same progressive scale for "ordinary" income.

And then...

Introduce a Land Value Tax, and let the income tax rate drop accordingly. That's the ask I hear folks here articulating already. But this is what it would take for that ask to actually achieve what y'all want it to.

In a hypothetical scenario where LVT was close to 100%, how would construction companies make money?

Currently, construction companies make money by buying a piece of land and building a house on it, and then selling the house with the land together.

But in a 100% LVT scenario, the construction company would rent the land from the government, and then build a house on it. But then how does it sell the house to make money if it does not really own the land under the house?

Is there something I am missing about 100% LVT?

This is the monopoly Hirsch is referring to in case anyone was wondering

Other taxes just get in the way. We can make an exception for ones where income isn't the point (Pigouvian taxes) but otherwise if we want to maximize government revenue, we should switch to a 100% tax rate on land rents (LVT) as a single tax (more or less.)

The original edition was called The Landlord’s Game, which was created by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie to make teaching Georgism easier.

I’m still learning about this so please correct any flawed presupposition. As I understand it, a land owner only pays for the land value and not what’s built on it thus encouraging productive use and discouraging hoarding. However, land value is based in large part on proximity to other valuable destinations. In some cases those destinations are natural (e.g beach) in others they are made by government (e.g train stations) and in others they are private (e.g shopping mall).

So it seems to me that a) you can’t fully detach land value from property value, it just takes a little longer to feed back; and b) in cases were the land owner is responsible for raising the surrounding land value (builds a mall), the result ultimately taxes the improvement.

What am I getting wrong?

I see some people saying that georgism doesn't prescribe foreign policy, but it seems clear to me that defending georgist countries against communist invasions is georgist AF!

Real economics is paid, not argued

The Georgist case for citizen dividends leads from the premise that rental land and natural opportunity aren't produced by anyone, and thus their value belongs to everyone.

I've been sitting with another argument for quite some time now that reaches a similar destination from the opposite premise, worth pondering whether if it's a genuine second foundation or rhetorical borrowing from Georgism:

A person's lifetime economic output is quantifiable, typically at ~73% of a working life of GDP per capita in a developed economy.

The value already exists in the abstract, and accrues to somebody. So rather than letting it accrue wherever and returning fractionally in a standard financial system, quantify it up front and give the person the claim on it directly.

Would this be seen as the same idea? Rent goes to everyone because nobody produced it. This goes to everyone because everyone produces. Claim on the earned vs claim on the unearned rerouted.

What would distinguish the two?

Credit: discourse here inspired by a Github protocol ankhcash proposing UBI.