u/Titanium-Skull

Explanation for those new to Georgism:

Amid the ongoing property tax revolt, it's important to remember that there is a good yolk of necessity in the property tax that should be followed rather than shied away from, that being the need to recompense land.

Right now our property taxes include both the building and land in its valuation. The former has issues since it can discourage building and improving land, but the latter is absolutely necessary because land is finite. Its taxation can both decrease inequality by taking out land values as a source of wealth concentration while discouraging land speculators, making land more available for use and helping the economy. This alongside giving good revenue to reduce taxes on what people make.

But, instead of focusing on shifting the property tax towards fully returning land values to society, states want to abolish or at the least neuter it for the benefit of landowners. The end result is that the burden of taxation is shifted on to work and business while landowners are free to profit from denying everyone else a finite resource, which leads to problems like the housing crisis that kick up the barriers of entry for the young and poor who work to keep the state alive. It's been shown time and time again, but the lesson is still lost across political lines.

Warning! Explanatory yap incoming.

For those not in the know about Georgism:

A big benefit of recompensing land and, more broadly, natural resources is that their supply is finite and they are inherently scarce. Since they are not producible, the returns their owners get isn't attached to any actual production and doesn't encourage more creation, rather just the ownership of a finite bottleneck that the world heavily relies on but only becomes pricier as the demand of the people rise. At the same time, enclosure of these finite resources tends to be a big source of inequality; people need access to these resources but can't get them from anyone other than current owners. So, as the prices for land and nature grows, the gap between the owners and non-owners only widens. Going even further, this idea has been extended by Georgists to argue for reforms to a whole slew of resources and privileges which are finite since no one can make more of them, including patents/copyrights or even controlling naturally monopolistic industries.

At the same time, governments currently get their public revenue, not by recompensing the cost put on society for being excluded from these finite things, but by taxing us on what we produce and trade to and for each other. The result is that we're discouraged from doing exactly that, only raising prices further and adding a new burden on top of the already existing one we get form people being able to enclose on the finite natural world and monopolistic privileges.

What Georgists hope to do is effectively combine efficiency with equity by untaxing the things we produce and trade so that we can do so with far less of a burden, and instead recompensing (or otherwise reforming) the finite resources and privileges take and currently use to grant themselves massive, unearned fortunes while draining the economy of any actual productivity. If money should be made, it should only be from the work, investment, and trade that results in producing and providing for the benefit of others, not through fencing off a finite resource at the expense of others

As a simple explanation for those who want to know:

The value of land is primarily determined by its location and, more specifically, how close it is to amenities and services. Even if a plot of land is completely bare with nothing on it, being close to businesses and people would make it incredibly valuable (which is why urban land is incredibly expensive compared to suburban or rural land).

Unfortunately, due to the socially created nature of land values and that land is finite, no one can make more of it to bring supply up and prices down, landowners can sit on their parcel and wait for its price to rise without actually using it; all the while land's finitude makes it hard to stop increasing land prices and land waste alongside all the problems they bring; only harming the economy and driving up inequality, and the real kick is the value of land didn't come from the landowner themselves, but from the society that is robbed when land values aren't recouped.

This all goes without saying, for the sake of both justice and efficiency, we should return land's value to society while using the proceeds to phase out taxes on the work and investment of the people.

Add too the need to relax current restrictions on using land (e.g. super strict zoning and parking minimums). The housing crisis is in actuality a land crisis, and right now our most needed finite resource is totally constrained by speculation, harmful taxation on work/investment, and over-restriction on its use.

LeBron can't be the GOAT until he fixes the land problem 😔

This quote was found through the website Cooperative Individualism, here's an article from there with a good assortment of quotes of Tolstoy supporting Georgist ideas

A few things to add:

• Henry George included all natural resources in his definition for economic "land", which modern Georgists generally now separate from actual land itself, but still include in schemes for taxation (e.g. Norway's oil fund); among other reforms to deal with finite powers and privileges nobody can replicate
• One of Tolstoy's books, Resurrection, advocated for Georgism as an economic philosophy. Towards the end of his life Tolstoy was also visited by Henry George's son, Henry George Jr.
• Tolstoy even pleaded with the Tsar of Russia to adopt Georgist policies in an attempt to avoid a violent revolution while benefiting Russia's peasant population, he was denied.

For anyone wondering 🫵:

Property tax cuts are harmful to future generations for the primary reason that they involve cutting taxes on land, a finite resource that doesn't get reduced in supply when taxed. Instead, cutting taxes on land encourages speculation which causes parcels to go to waste, increasing housing prices while widening the gap between those who already own land and those who still need it; among a plethora of other issues. Property taxes also include buildings in their revenue base, and it is good to untax those since buildings require active work and investment instead of just being finite like land with no one being able to make more of them. It follows then that the best solution is to simply transform the property tax into a tax on the value of land by universally exempting buildings.

For rent control, the harm comes from the reduced housing stock and less investment in building improvement as the costs of buildings aren't recouped. The result is that current tenants benefit from lower rents, but the lower housing stock means living spaces are much harder to come by for future tenants looking to find a place to live. In a similar sense to property taxes, the best solution is that, instead of controlling the amount of rent paid, we should be returning the land's value to the public while fully exempting the buildings from taxation. We should recoup as much land rent and unburden as much building rent as practically possible to show those who lease real estate that they can't profit off just holding the land idly and letting it do the work for them, but that they can be rewarded for actually managing the property and putting the work into its improvement.

I got inspired by this meme posted on this sub a few hours ago

Quote from Chapter 11 of The Wealth of Nations

For anyone asking the question: Why did Smith call land a monopoly?

As explained by Georgist economist Fred Foldvary, entry into the market for land is impossible since the creation of new land is impossible and the only way to get land is from previous owners instead, who can charge the full demand for their parcels without fearing new land coming on to the market to undercut them and reduce prices for land buyers. This idea can also be extended to specific locations, each particular GPS coordinate has unique qualities, but we can't add more surface area to that specific location by folding the Earth over or something similar. Both land as a whole and specific plots of land are finite (even reclamation is taking preexisting underwater land and making it usable above water), and so the supply of land remains solidly the same while landowners can charge ever increasing rents and prices without fear of outside competition as our need for land grows; for something they don't even have to work or invest in.

This idea applies to the modern day too, instead of taxing the hard work or helpful investment that people put into land and, more broadly, all finite resources, we should tax (or otherwise reform) the finite resources directly to discourage their idle withholding; all while providing the revenue to untax work and investment and encourage using those finite things well for the benefit of society.

Here's a link to the source article

For anyone wondering, New York City's use of land value capture to recoup the cost of rail lines is a good example of what is known as the Henry George Theorem; the idea that when a government invests in public goods, the value of the land which benefits from it will increase by more than the cost of those public goods. That increased land value can then be recouped by the government, fully covering the costs of spending on public goods without needing to tax the goods and services people make, instead of letting them go unearned to landowners who did nothing to earn that value and will instead use it against future users of the land.

This is all to say, New York's land value capture is a great decision, both economically and in terms of justice, and is part of the Georgist hope to untax the goods and services people make, and instead tax (or otherwise reform) the finite resources people take.

Here's the wikipedia page for Geolibertarianism, which is generally left-libertarian, for those not in the know. More broadly Geolibertarianism is just a flavor of the broader ideology known as Georgism, which holds that we should stop taxing the goods and services people make and instead recompense (or reform) the finite resources and privileges people take. This includes recompensing land and nature, reforming patents/copyrights and other limited legal privileges, and dealing with naturally monopolistic industries.

Georgists don't consider it valid to reap the value of something finite like land for a few reasons. It wasn't created by people, its value is socially created due to the presence of the community and public investment, and due to its inherent finite nature owners can charge as high as people can demand and extract wealth without contributing any actual value through work/investment. To both remediate the issues in our economy and enact justice for society, we shouldn't allow people to reap unearned incomes in owning a resource we demand but can't reproduce to reduce prices and give to others.

There isn't much else to say. For those who don't know, high land prices act as a black hole on the economy because land is a thing everyone needs but nobody can produce more of to make cheaper; it's finite. Rising land prices absorb away the gains of what people make, both in terms of pure labor and in terms of investing in capital, while inviting speculators whose speculative demand and removal of parcels from the market bid prices up further. This is only worsened by taxing that same production and trade that's currently being eaten away, making an economy devoid of a functioning economy as inequality between those owners of finite land (and other finite assets) vs. those who don't rises. It's for this reason why standard economics often argues for shifting taxes away from people's work/investment towards land, and why many high end economists support the shift (including recent Nobel Prize winner Daron Acemoglu).

The basic economic principle to reverse this destruction of the economy and of the inequality it creates is to do the reverse: don't tax the goods and services people make, recompense (or otherwise reform) those finite assets people take. Here's a good explainer on the ideology championing this, Georgism, for anyone who wants to know more.

Yes, property taxes include both buildings and land, but the best way to deal with property taxes isn't to drastically reduce their revenue (as California did with Prop 13 and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida wants to do by upping the homestead property tax exemption), but to turn them into taxes on land and universally exempt buildings. Land is finite (i.e. not produced), and its value comes mostly from the public, for the sake of both efficiency and justice taxes on land value are the best tax.

Explanation:

Quotes from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. The classical liberals acknowledged that land and nature was a thing nobody produced and which is limited in quantity (which leads them to use the term "monopoly"), but which landowners still claim ownership too and charge rent for as if they had produced the Earth itself; owning a thing which nobody can reproduce.

While they didn't have very accurate valuation tools to tell just how much wealth is going to land, a modern McKinsey report finds that in multiple developed countries, land forms about 35% of their assets in terms of real wealth. Real estate, which includes both land and buildings, is in general the world's largest asset too, in no small part because of the land.

But land's finite nature, since we can not produce more of it, makes this a massive problem. When people are able to invest in the land, what results isn't more supply to match increased demand, but higher prices to eat up all that new demand without requiring landowners to do any work or investment in their land. They can instead rent or sell a parcel neither they nor any other person made, and which nobody can make more of.

Instead of governments taxing us on our hard work and our productive investment, they should be recompensing us for losing access to the finite land, and more generally taxing (or dismantling if preferred) other assets we can't produce more of (and we shouldn't cap their values either, make their owners pay the full price of exclusion if we go down that route).

Explanation: This is just a meme to segue into this great explanation by Henry Fudge for why land is such an economy-destroying asset as it stands currently. As a brief summary, land is a finite (aka non-producible) asset, an asset that banks use as collateral for lending, and an asset which we don't tax and whose gains we let go almost fully privatized.

Our economy funnels much of its money into land, but the big issue with that is that it doesn't encourage any new production since new production is impossible (only reclamation but that's less production and more working with already exists). Instead, what happens is that the price of land rises, and those who want to work, invest, or just live on the land have to pay more for the privilege. This goes on until people are priced out, and those who own the land extract away all the gains that would've gone to people's hard work and investment. Add too all the taxes we currently levy on people's labor and investment, and the burden only grows.

The land, when treated as an investment instead of a finite resource whose value should be recouped by the people, leeches off the gains of the productive economy and slowly kills it. To resolve the issues of our current economy, we should tax its value (and more broadly deal with all the rents which accrue to finite assets, both natural and artificial) in lieu of taxing the goods and services people make. Let individuals keep the value they produce, and let society recoup (or dismantle) the value of what is finite, what we can't produce more of.

For anyone who's not Georgist wanting the Georgist perspective on this: the best reading on this comes from Greg Miller's article "The Housing Crisis as a Land Crisis". But it's clear that, while the cost to produce housing may have grown steadily, the cost of the bundle of land rights needed to make that production possible has skyrocketed due to acts like land speculation, which adds more demand for the finite land and holds valuable parcels off the market. The solution can come from a combination of two things:

1. Reduce the restrictions on being able to use the land (like eliminating parking minimums)

2. Shift taxes from the work and investment needed to produce housing on to the ownership of land, reducing land speculation and ensuring parcels remain open for use instead of being withheld to extract land rents instead of using it.

For anyone not acquainted with Georgism, Henry George's ideas involve replacing taxes on production with taxes on finite resources, most importantly land though also including other targets (and among those targets which are artificial, taxation isn't the only option, other reforms have long been proposed as well). By extension, Georgists also consider taxes on emissions and pollution as valid, in the sense that the atmosphere has a finite carbon budget and that pollution destroys the finite natural world, a charge that should be recompensed.

This encourages the protection of nature because it discourages acts which waste natural resources, acts like land speculation where people buy land to hold it and wait for its price to rise, forcing prospective land users to go to other parcels and use more land than necessary. We also have this issue when it comes to other rights to nature, like water sources or mineral deposits. When we allow people to extract wealth from owning the finite natural world, their misuse and abuse of it can go without the full costs put on the rest of society being realized by the owner.

In contrast, taxing the value of nature means forcing owners of natural resources to either use their natural resources efficiently for the needs of society, or lose a ton of money. This would help reduce waste and abuse while possibly opening the way for more sustainable alternatives that can continue giving us the goods and services we want while keeping the natural world as protected as possible. Nature being finite, because we can not produce more of it, means we need to treat it wisely and use it effectively.

Of course, environmentalism isn't the only draw of Georgism, economic efficiency and social equity are big ones as well, but discouraging the misuse and abuse of nature is just one of many benefits a Georgist system can bring by replacing taxes on production with taxes (or other reforms) to finite resources and privileges

Source: https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/wemby-stats-west-finals-stats

Unanimous DPOY in the regular season as well

For reference for anyone confused what this means:

Henry George meant "true free trade" in the sense that we shouldn't levy taxes on what people produce and trade, not just internationally but also domestically. This would entail removing domestic taxes on labor, capital, and trade; some examples being income taxes on workers and businesses or sales taxes. But it wouldn't just be limited to that, but it would also mean decoupling the unearned income of finite assets from their private owners, whose ownership George referred to under the term "monopoly". This would be done mainly through taxation of land and other natural resources but also through taxing/reforming other economic privileges people can not reproduce (in contrast to work or capital investment).

To really drive this point home, here's Henry George's explanation from the 20th chapter of his famous pro-free trade 1886 book, Protection or Free Trade

>Here are two simple principles, both of which are self-evident:

1. That all men have equal rights to the use and enjoyment of the elements provided by nature.
2. That each man has an exclusive right to the use and enjoyment of what is produced by his own labor.

>There is no conflict between these principles. On the contrary they are correlative. To fully secure the individual right of property in the produce of labor we must treat the elements of nature as common property. If anyone could claim the sunlight as his property and could compel me to pay him for the agency of the sun in the growth of crops I had planted, it would necessarily lessen my right of property in the produce of my labor. And conversely, where everyone is secured the full right of property in the produce of his labor, no one can have any right of property in what is not the produce of labor.

>No matter how complex the industrial organization, nor how highly developed the civilization, there is no real difficulty in carrying out these principles. All we have to do is to treat the land as the joint property of the whole people, just as a railway is treated as the joint property of many shareholders, or as a ship is treated as the joint property of several owners.

>In other words, we can leave land now being used in the secure possession of those using it, and leave land now unused to be taken possession of by those who wish to make use of it, on condition that those who thus hold land can pay to the community a fair rent for the exclusive privilege they enjoy — that is to say, a rent based on the value of the privilege the individual receives from the community in being accorded the exclusive use of this much of the common property, and which should have no reference to any improvement he had made in or on it, or to any profit due to the use of his labor and capital. In this way all would be placed upon an equality in regard to the use and enjoyment of those natural elements which are clearly the common heritage, and that value which attaches to land, not because of what the individual user does, but because of the growth of the community, would accrue to the community, and could be used for purposes of common benefit.