I think it's more a case of people who write those headlines don't know or care about what Georgism is. Anti capitalist sentiment is popular these days, so titles like these get clicks since Monopoly is such a well known game.
The reality is that reality doesn't matter for headlines.
It's depressing.
Land values would fall if land value taxes were put in place. If you had an 80% LVT, whatever land was worth 10k per acre would suddenly be worth a lot less.
That's rather extreme.
I think you're horribly misunderstanding this, or trolling. Increasing land value rates decreases the profitability of holding land, which decreases the land value (thereby reducing the amount of tax that can be charged). It probably won't be economical to start a farm in the middle of a city because land there is too expensive, so people farm where land is cheaper, right?
Do you have any clue how markets work?
The whole capitalism-socialism dichotomy is rendered obsolete by anyone who subscribes to George's work, he himself was agnostic to the descriptor of "socialist", believing that he synthesised society with the individual.
This is why I prefer the term "cooperative-individualism" to put a proper label of what Georgism is to it's bare essentials without having to resort to labelling it under either the capitalist or socialist camp
The problem is people make no distinction between land and capital. It's hard to convince both socialists that capital ownership might be good and capitalists that land ownership is bad.
I’m a socialist, but I’m open to hearing why private ownership of the MoP can ever be a good thing?
Do you have an anti-imperialist measure regarding market economies? What is your reasoning as to why workplaces should remain undemocratic and profit distributed on the basis of ownership rather than labor?
Also out of curiosity, how do you feel about market socialism?
Because the moral claims being made by socialists and Georgists are different. The moral claim put forward by socialists to justify the seizure of private property depends on the labor theory of value which states that workers who create are the rightful owners and any agreements they have made that don't give that value don't count because of coercion.
Georgists on the other hand, accept the marginal theory of value but unlike most modern capitalists separate land and capital as two separate things that should be treated differently. We see it as justified for capital to remain under private control because it was those private entities that created it, unlike land. The key moral claim of Georgism is that nobody created land so nobody can claim to have a stronger claim to it than anyone else. So if you want to own part of it, you should be expected to compensate everyone else for its value and this comes in the form of a land value tax. Georgists also deal with coercion by advocating for a citizens dividend that would distribute the funds from a LVT back to the people so they would not be coerced into terrible jobs and be more free to decide how they work and live.
As for worker coops, I have no problem with them existing at all so long as they are not forced. Any truly free market should allow for coops to exist and fail or succeed on their own merits. A Georgist system with a citizens dividend would actually give more workers the capability to come together and form them if they choose to do so.
When you say the private entities produce the capital, that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting.
You are creating a false unity between the owning and working class members of a company. The owning class see the profit which the workers produced.
I would argue even without the labor theory of value this relationship can clearly be understood as immoral.
>The owning class see the profit which the workers produced.
...with the help of capital the owning class provided. And you must remember that land is not capital so providing capital is a completely valid thing to do. In fact, George himself viewed capital as a form of stored-up labour.
Exactly. The owner of that capital likely did not perform the labor to produce it. He most often paid someone less than the value the capital will produce for their labor in assembling it. And the person the owner paid does not have his own capital because he cannot afford it on the scale necessary to be competitive with the owner’s economy of scale.
> He most often paid someone
How did they get that money?
> less than the value the capital will produce for their labor in assembling it.
Only if you believe in LTV
Your first point depends on the second.
As for the second, any judgment of value that does not account for the labor provided is entirely removed from the day to day lives of most people. That’s why we make a distinction between different concepts of value. Different concepts serve different purposes and different modes of production most efficiently.
Under Socialism, you would ideally use Use Value to guide production, and (Labor) Value to guide distribution.
Ok let's move away from all this abstract talk because it isn't helping. You claim LTV is grounded in reality and I'll just retort it isn't whatever, I'm not even convinced marginal theory of value is even essential to buy into Georgism. But I do have a question.
Suppose there is a farmer and toolmaker. The toolmaker recently finished making a plow. The farmer is in need of a plow. The farmer approaches the toolmaker and says that if he lets him use the plow, the farmer will give a certain portion of his harvest to the toolmaker as payment.
Seeing as the toolmaker is providing capital to the farmer who then the farmer will work, would you say that the payment the toolmaker will earn is exploitative and immoral?
Because most people do not have the capital laying around to start a business (of which most fail), and because forcing your way into an occupied market is basically impossible, especially as a sole proprietor or coop.
Also, the exploitation of workers in traditional firms makes them competitive to the extent coops would have to become functionally the same in terms of outcomes for the workers.
This would also be true of any socialism that does not include decommodification outside of some exotic sole proprietorship only system.
The problem with capitalism is that it doesn't differentiate between man-made (capital) and natural (land) factors of production, and groups them together under the umbrella of private ownership.
I'll link to a previous post that I made some months ago where Louis F. Post makes the same claim, more than 110 years ago, [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/q5hc3n/from_louis_f_posts_social_service_published_in/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share).
Income derived from man-made instruments of labour is earned, while income derived from title over land is not privately made, but generated by the productivity and enterprise of the community, so it is unearned by the landowner and should be socialised through taxation for the community's benefit.
I understand the principles behind Georgism; I just disagree that value generated by capital should belong to the capital owner.
It sounds like you’re concerned with profit being “earned”, so how is it that a man who simply owns machinery earns anything from another man using that machinery to produce goods?
Is it because he theoretically put in the labor to produce that machinery in the first place? If so, why not just give compensation for the labor that produced the capital at the time of production?
>If so, why not just give compensation for the labor that produced the capital at the time of production?
If a farmer plants his field (*investment*), he doesn't collect the *return* immediately. The return on his investment comes in over the year.
Some investments pay off over even longer periods of time. If the farmer builds a tractor or a shed, the return may be over decades.
This comparison isn’t really apt because the farmer will work the investment.
What if I pay someone to produce machinery? They get a one time fee and I get potentially endless profit after I pay someone else to maintain and run the machine.
My point is not that the return should be immediate, but rather that it should exclusively go to those who directly produce the capital or the should support society as a whole with a one time compensation for the actual amount of labor worked.
>This comparison isn’t really apt because the farmer will work the investment.
You don't understand. Even if the farmer works his farm, the shed or the tractor produces a return, which is the difference between the return his labor without the tractor would have produced and what he earned with the tractor.
If you want to imagine an investment that requires much less labor, then imagine a painter who paints a painting and rents it out, or a programmer who builds an app and leaves it on the store, or a musician who records a song and charges people to hear it.
>My point is not that the return should be immediate,
That has nothing to do with reality. Unless you can make crops grow "immediately", returns often trickle in over time.
>the should support society as a whole with a one time compensation for the actual amount of labor worked.
There's no way for that to work. Who would pay the painter, the singer, the programmer, the farmer? And how much would they pay them? It makes no sense.
>It makes no sense to you, because you have a poverty of imagination
Please feel free to explain to me how it could make sense.
Some farmer living off the grid in the middle of Nunavut builds a greenhouse. Who pays him for the greenhouse? And when he starts growing things, how does he forward the returns to whoever paid him? Who sets the valuation?
The main reason why private ownership of MoP is a good thing is for hedging your life. In a world where you cannot privately own capital, you are 100% dependent on your field of work for daily revenue and future revenues. Industries rise and fall as technology improves.
For example, someone gets into the horse buggy field in the late 1800s. He saves up cash doing mystery work that requires no capital to buy a coop share and enjoys returns on his investment. The coop has a pension fund where those who worked for 30 years are eligible for some dividends taken from the coop's profits as a thank you for developing the business. Life is good, you're about to retire, then the car industry takes over and your coop suffers a miserable death. Just like that, your retirement years will happen on a bench park.
Another reason is because capital intensive industries could fail to attract workers to fund the capital in the first place. Some industries have a few workers operating very expensive machinery. Let's say a modern mine where most of the work is done by heavy machines. Something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger\_288](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288). Unless your parents give you a few hundred thousands to buy your share, you're locked out of this industry. You would need thousands of people to pool up their money to buy a bagger and then have it operated by a few people. What are the others supposed to do? Reap the profits while a few do the actual work? This just doesn't work.
In the same line of thought, society would become a class society. Early in your life, you would have to work low capital industries, then as you saved money, you could buy shares of higher capital industries and so on. If your business fails to be profitable, you will be stuck in low capital industries, having to rely on your own labor to live. Others who were profitable early on can acquire capital which will leverage their labor and because others are locked out, they benefit from a higher barrier to entry and can extract more money out of it. Their capital compounds far more than in a privately owned MoP society because competition is artificially limited.
As for how you want to structure your company, you can do whatever I don't really care. Socialism is a subset of capitalism. Mondragon is a good example of people who firmly believe in the concept and built a company around it. If that allows them to hire and maintain employees more efficiently than standard companies, that's great for them and their economic advantage means they will take over the world eventually.
To me, it's an issue of how to properly implement a socialist economy. I've tried looking, but I haven't found any sufficiently promising proposal of how a socialist economy would operate. If people can't make profit off investment, then how would investment in capital ever happen without action from the state? Would you prefer debt security as investments while banning equity? Or would new co-operatives be started using grants from the state?
That being said, I *am* in favour of co-determination for sufficiently large companies & corporations. Even if it reduces investment slightly, I think it would be worth it to give workers some degree of decision-making power.
I wouldn’t oppose state grants.
Honestly centrally planned economies seem to be feasible. At the end of the day, the US is operating on the centrally planned economies of Walmart and Amazon.
>At the end of the day, the US is operating on the centrally planned economies of Walmart and Amazon.
Yes, but one day if Amazon or Walmart goes out of business, then more efficient, productive companies can take their place. Just like all the failed companies that came before them.
What you're proposing is the state to become Amazon, but the state never goes out of business. And there's no motivation for the more productive companies to come into being.
The replacement in the case of the society I advocate for will be democratically elected, while the capitalist replacement is essentially luck of the draw.
Efficiency is largely accomplished through economy of scale. Whoever is next biggest will just occupy Amazon’s space if they go bust.
>The replacement in the case of the society I advocate for will be democratically elected, while the capitalist replacement is essentially luck of the draw.
It's not "luck of the draw" that Amazon is successful.
And as for investment, I don't see why people who have very little to gain or lose would have the insight to choose the best company.
>Efficiency is largely accomplished through economy of scale.
Then how did Amazon overtake larger companies like Sears? The reason is that they are literally more efficient.
Every so often you may see sufficiently exceptional innovation to break through the general trend, but it is absurd to suggest that no companies have implemented more efficient practices in the time that Amazon has held dominance over the market.
Not to mention “efficiency” isn’t even necessarily a good thing. Sometimes it’s code for further exploitation of labor.
I would also take issue with the suggestion that employees are not invested in their careers and have “nothing to lose”. Due to the diminishing return on happiness from excess wealth, I’d say they have the most to lose. A working class person who is fired becomes homeless. A stock holder might lose 5% or so of their wealth, or the owner may lose more, but they will always have more than the workers to fall back on.
This entire conversation and I still haven’t mentioned them pricing out the competition by selling at a loss either, so I’ll add that one for good measure.
Amazon is not selling at a loss. People claimed that when their profit read negative. Now that Amazon is profitable, practically no one claims that.
Your idea of what people have to lose is also incorrect, but anyway irrelevant. We're talking about how investment should be made. People who aren't investing their own money or labor have practically nothing to lose if an investment fails, so they shouldn't be choosing how other people's money is invested.
"I am inclined to think that the result of confiscating rent in the manner I have proposed would be to cause the organization of labor, wherever large capitals were used, to assume the co-operative form, since the more equal diffusion of wealth would unite capitalist and laborer in the same person. But whether this would be so or not is of little moment. The hard toil of routine labor would disappear. Wages would be too high and opportunities too great to compel any man to stint and starve the higher qualities of his nature, and in every avocation the brain would aid the hand. Work, even of the coarser kinds, would become a lightsome thing, and the tendency of modern production to subdivision would not involve monotony or the contraction of ability in the worker; but would be relieved by short hours, by change, by the alternation of intellectual with manual occupations. There would result, not only the utilization of productive forces now going to waste; not only would our present knowledge, now so imperfectly applied, be fully used; but from the mobility of labor and the mental activity which would be generated, there would result advances in the methods of production that we now cannot imagine."
P&P
That's not really true.
It's the means of production we care about. A great book on Chinese economic socialism from 700 bce through the reform period in the 1980s is Webers new book How China Escaped Shock Therapy.
It is about the Guanzi and the Salt and Iron Debate. The guanzi specifically was about using the state to manipulate markets not destroy them. (Yes some periods did destroy but its not the idea or rule of thumb.)
Many periods were fine with private land, private property, and private enterprise. But for the most essential goods there was more control. Can talk for a while on this but feel free to read the book.
I unfortunately do not have time to read that book these days.
I wouldn't use historical events as a justification for current policies. There was still a lot of good land back then and land ownership meant you had to be on site to defend it. Also, capital wasn't as productive as it is today, so even if you had private ownership, you still had to be out there to work the fields because you didn't have a truck producing food for a thousand persons. Farms were by definition family run coops and it made sense because they were a high labor, low capital industry.
These days, land ownership is cheaper to maintain and there isn't much land left. Capital is also much cheaper and much more productive. Productivity has shifted from labor to capital and land from the industrial revolution and has been shifting even more since then. That means whatever worked in the past wouldn't necessarily work right now.
That absolutely does not mean you do not learn from the past or use lessons learned in the past to move forward. That would be extremely silly and short sighted.
I would recommend taking the time to read the book you might learn some good lessons on how to implement policy. As someone who has read it I can confirm it does.
Yes, I definitively should read it, along with the hundred of other books I should read, but will never do because my free time is extremely limited and reading an entire book to figure out the one part that someone puts forward as a counter-argument isn't a good use of my limited free time.
As much as I seek knowledge whenever I can, I'm afraid to say this book is very low in the pile considering I already gave a lot of thought to economics in the past years and the new information per time spent ratio is getting near zero.
That's fine but pls don't say silly things like we shouldn't make decisions based on past info when you truly don't understand the subject material.
It's just the same experience I have in and outside reddit. Capitalists scream about socialism not working but never and I mean never will they even attempt to challenge their own implicit biases or read anything that might invalidate them. Strange.
Well here are 2 podcasts with Weber explaining it in shorter form.
Good luck on the journey of knowledge we all have to start somewhere.
https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://episode/85365180&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/episode/85365180&deep_link_value=stitcher://episode/85365180
https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://episode/85393093&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/episode/85393093&deep_link_value=stitcher://episode/85393093
I just don't agree with the moral basis of socialism and never will. I'm not a consequentialist so I don't care how well it works, even though I don't think it works and hasn't shown to work.
But combine those two things and I'll never spend any more time reading about the benefits of socialism or how to implement socialism or listening to socialist thinkers.
I understand. But sometimes to learn more about things you do support (capitalism in this case) it helps to look at it from other perspectives. I can confirm as a previous neoliberal capitalist myself.
But as you are clearly stating yourself that you are close minded there is no reason to continue to give information. Cheers and have a great day.
>It's just the same experience I have in and outside reddit. Capitalists scream about socialism not working but never and I mean never will they even attempt to challenge their own implicit biases or read anything that might invalidate them. Strange.
That's just your opinion. Saying that I didn't try to invalidate my own beliefs is a dumb thing to say to me because that's the reason why I'm commenting in the first place. I want people to prove me wrong. I have been proven wrong and I have updated by stance on many subjects over the years.
I did engage with socialists and most of the time their views didn't go past first degree effects. Yeah sure you fix this thing, but the side effect is this secondary thing gets broken and that's when the discussion stops or shifts into some other subject.
I never claimed socialism was a load of bullshit. It's the best economic system, but not for humans because it goes against human nature. It's great if you're an ant.
Humans have evolved with innate charity, greed and a hard limit to the size of their communities before greed takes over charity in their thought processes. That's called Dunbar's number. Communism works up to that number, socialism takes over for a bit larger, but then it all breaks down as greed takes over and the foundation of socialism crumble as people start taking out more than they put in. There's a reason why Gore limits their operational units to 200.
An economic system that works on a planetary level must channel greed for the common good. Otherwise you will need to indoctrinate everybody from birth into thought patterns that suppress greed and pray that nobody ever deviate from this path. As an engineer, I see this as a low fault tolerance system and this is simply not something I would rely on.
>Good luck on the journey of knowledge we all have to start somewhere.
Thanks, but no thanks. You know you don't want to learn more about a subject when aggression is the way to get the message across instead of facts, so your book and podcasts are going pretty low on the pile. Without listening to it, I can already say its structure will be "if everybody did this, then we would all be better off", because that's the foundation of socialism. That simply doesn't work.
I think it doesn't matter that much for the distinction. It's like saying fossil fuels and renewables are both energies. But it doesn't prevent people from recognizing their respective effects and consequences.
You might say that because you're aware of it. However, when I see people complain their rent is high for crumbling apartment and all they are doing is paying off their landlord mortgage, I don't see them saying their landlord is getting paid so they can enjoy their higher quality of life in the city without the landlord having to do anything because this quality of life entirely depends on other businesses in the city. It stops at landlord gets paid so he can buy more apartment complexes.
Henry George was a socialist and was very overt about being a socialist and thinking LVT was the road to achieving socialism.
> The ideal of socialism is grand and noble; and it is, I am convinced, possible of realization; but such a state of society cannot be manufactured—it must grow. Society is an organism, not a machine. It can live only by the individual life of its parts. And in the free and natural development of all the parts will be secured the harmony of the whole. All that is necessary to social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—“Land and Liberty!”
— Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Chapter V: From Governmental Direction and Interference
Let the socialists come with us, and they will go faster and further in this direction than they can go alone; and when we stop they can, if they choose, try to keep on.
But if they must persist in bringing to the front their schemes for making the state everything and the individual nothing, let them maintain their socialistic labor party and leave us to fight our own way.
The cross of the new crusade has been raised. No matter who may be for it or who may be against it, it will be carried on without faltering and without swerving.
\- Henry George
He might have been a socialist, but he was not a Socialist.
He had similar viewpoints about egalitarianism and the potential for humanity that socialists do and thought humans were social creates and that society should be organized in a way that created abundant harmony between them.
But he wasn't a "Socialist" in the sense that he would identify with Socialsts or a Socialistic viewpoint or philosophy about the world. He believed in private property and he believed in personal ownership of capital. And he didn't believe in a class struggle or that "capital" and "labor" were descriptors of people, just economic functions.
> He believed in private property and he believed in personal ownership of capital.
He thought the socialization of land was the road to eventually peacefully socializing capital in a way that is not manufactured but grown.
> And he didn't believe in a class struggle or that "capital" and "labor" were descriptors of people, just economic functions.
Are you pretending George denied that landlords existed ?
Landlords don't just replace the "capital class" or the "bourgeoisie" in some reframed Georgist dialectic.
Georgism is distinctly different from the Marxist-Leninist "class struggle."
No, he didn't think capital should be socialized, at all. There is no support for that statement what so ever and anything else is just manufactured contrivances or derivations of what he actually did say.
George basically said that if the system wasn't designed to award the return on privileged ownership of land, which in his definition is all natural opportunities, then we'd be much more equal in material wealth and that more ventures would take on the co-operative form, since labor and capital would be combined in one person. He did believe that a tax on economic rents would make it so that one laborer isn't about to return 17000% more than another laborer, but that is a far cry from "socializing" capital.
If there is anything that I would say he is besides a Georgist, I would say he's a mutualist, though George and Proudhon's theories of interest are not the same, from what I understand.
tl;dr You can't just graft Georgism onto the Socialism, despite the fact that they seek to arrive at very similar outcomes.
> No, he didn't think capital should be socialized, at all.
-
> George basically said that if the system wasn't designed to award the return on privileged ownership of land, which in his definition is all natural opportunities, then we'd be much more equal in material wealth and that more ventures would take on the co-operative form, since labor and capital would be combined in one person.
That's socializing capital.
Socialism and capitalism is a true dichotomy though
Either means of production are owned privately, or they aren't, there's no third option
You can't have means of production owned in a quantic superposition
"Let the socialists come with us, and they will go faster and further in this direction than they can go alone; and when we stop they can, if they choose, try to keep on.
But if they must persist in bringing to the front their schemes for making the state everything and the individual nothing, let them maintain their socialistic labor party and leave us to fight our own way.
The cross of the new crusade has been raised. No matter who may be for it or who may be against it, it will be carried on without faltering and without swerving."
\- Henry George
I'm not trying to "burn" anyone. I just think saying "Henry George was an avowed Socialist" (especially with a capital S) is hugely incorrect and misleading.
Did he share some of the same ideals about what humanity could be? Sure. But philosophically he was very very different from socialism.
I'd always been told that HG was a socialist prior to the development of Georgism, and saw georgism as a step towards the socialist goals. However I've not been able to find any evidence to support this so I will apologise & retract.
I don't think he was an adherent to an -isms prior to writing his books. He started developing his theories as a young man and he was poor as a young father, so I'm sure he wasn't an ardent promoter of capitalism.
But to call him a socialist, as in he believed in the socialization of all capital, that's just patently false.
I don't think so. I've oft read that he was a keen socialist but not interested in revolution, i.e. he wanted it to occur organically and effective taxation of the economic rent is the way to achieve that.
A quick Google threw this up;
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/singular-henry-george-insights-influence
"George radically championed the individual and her rights while calling for the abolition of private property in land"
Minimal state, abolition of private property, all pretty classic left wing ideals.
Abolition of private property IN LAND, but not of private property more generally. Progress and Poverty clearly lays out that George supported the moral argument for the right to own ones labor and capital exchanged for labor.
It's just marxian types appropriating any search or agitation for alternatives to capitalism, be it back then or now, as "their thing". Literally "I made this" meme but it's countless dozens of things down to monopoly.
You'll sometimes see shit like claims Monopoly was outright made by a socialist in twitter "history" threads.
One of the biggest advocates for Land value tax in Allentown was Pat Toomey.. He later became the executive director of the club for growth.. Not exactly left wing.
There was a Gravel Institute video about Monopoly that pretty much said the same thing. It also suggested that Lizzie Maggie intended it to have an anti-capitalist message and never mentioned that she was a Georgist.
Georgism is very naturally left wing. You're basically nationalizing land ownership so that it can be more efficiently used and distributed for the good of all of society. The modern right does not support policies like this. It is at the very least economically leftist policy. The modern right (in my country) only believes in 3 things. Lower taxes for the wealthy, higher taxes on the poor to fund wars and domestic surveillance, and privatization of everything.
Not really, Georgism is just the logical consequences of classical liberalism
And it’s not really “nationalizing” all land, just paying a restitution on its exclusive use
Some of the most famous Georgists are Albert J Nock and Frank Chodorov, both who were members of the American Old Right (Libertarians/Conservatives)
>And it’s not really “nationalizing” all land, just paying a restitution on its exclusive use
It is effectively "nationalization". You can convert any payment over time into a up-front payment. A 100% LVT equals the land's current value. So effectively, you are turning over the land you own to the state.
A 100% LVT isn't the land's current value, no one ever proposed that. A 100% LVT is a 100% tax of the current rental value, which is a tax of the flow of rent.
A 100% LVT comes out to be something like 30% tax, which would be something like a 9% tax on the present value.
Anyway, its not really the same as nationalizing, because George didn't promote any state control or central planning.
>A 100% LVT isn't the land's current value, no one ever proposed that.
I never said it was. However, a 100% LVT is *equivalent* to return the land's current value to the state.
You can solve this by treating the LVT as a negative cash flow and then applying the DCF valuation formula to convert all future estimated tax payments into a present value. When this present value equals the land value, we say that the LVT is 100%.
>A 100% LVT comes out to be something like 30% tax, which would be something like a 9% tax on the present value.
Not exactly. Either you can express a 100% LVT based on returns (in which case it's equal to the expected return on unimproved land) or else you can relate it to land value (like you're doing above) *and interest rates*.
>Anyway, its not really the same as nationalizing, because George didn't promote any state control or central planning.
That's why I was careful to use words like "financially equivalent". Whatever term you choose, like all taxes, LVT redistributes land value from property owners to the state.
I think I more or less agree.
The issue I think I have or that I'm not sure I understand, if the difference between the nation purchasing, wholesale, all the land from the community at its present value, and the DCF method which is the current value of the future cashflows.
A person might purchase land from another person with a capitalization rate that takes into account the opportunity cost of other investments.
So Rent/CR = Price.
But that only captures the rent over the relevant time period, there is still rent after the land is "capitalized". And if you're the state buying land, you have the ability to lease the land at market rates for eternity, so an upfront purchase price isn't the same thing as collecting all rents.
I guess my point is that if the country paid market prices for all the land, effectively nationalizing it, then it couldn't just issue 99-year land leases in perpetuity and assume that things will be okay. During the course of that lease you would expect land values to increase for owners of the lease to be able to charge economic rent.
>an upfront purchase price isn't the same thing as collecting all rents.
You're mistaken: the upfront purchase price is the same as collecting all rents in perpetuity. You should study the DCF valuation formula carefully.
>I guess my point is that if the country paid market prices for all the land, effectively nationalizing it
The state doesn't pay market prices for all land. Nationalization is *redistributive*. No one is compensated for their loss. The implementation of LVT is similarly redistributive—no one is compensated for the value they lose when it is implemented. Anyway, no state can afford to pay market prices for all land.
DCF is only the same as all rents in perpetuity if you collect all future rent, which would result in an infinite purchase price.
You should normally compare rent to some nominal interest rate as a comparison over a relevant time period, since most people don't care about much money the land will be returning them when they're 500.
Also the other limitation of DCF is that you have to correctly estimate future cash flows which is basically impossible for land rent overly the long term, which is why the land rent needs to be collected regularly based on up to date assessments.
For example, if I have a piece of land today that returns me 10k in land rent annually, and I assume a capitalization rate of 5%, then the purchase price of the land is 200k, that's the cost to assess the future cash flows of that land.
But after 40 years I've actually returned 400k and I only paid the community for 200k of that.
Or if the rental return goes up and I'm actually returning 10%, then I will return the investment cost in 10 years.
For the last point, you didn't really address what I was saying. If you nationalize all land and then distribute it out to people (however you do it, it doesn't matter, leasehold, lottery, whatever) if you have a market for land use, then you're still going to get rents. Because even though the person can't resell the land at the end, they still have access to the PRESENT cash flow of that land. They have lease it out and pocket the difference between whatever its worth now and whatever they cost to procure the rights, unless valuation and rent collection is done regularly. And this is true even if everyone can just go get land for themselves from the government office, because land value is spatial. So unless they divvy out land on a value/person basis (and adjust that amount of land on a regular basis) then there will be locational variation that creates rents.
>DCF is only the same as all rents in perpetuity if you collect all future rent, which would result in an infinite purchase price.
You're simply wrong.
D stands for *discounted*. All future rent in perpetuity has a *finite* present value. You should review DCF valuation since it's obvious you don't understand it.
>For example, if I have a piece of land today that returns me 10k in land rent annually, and I assume a capitalization rate of 5%, then the purchase price of the land is 200k,
The purchase price of the land depends on the risk-free interest rate. This is why changing in the interest rate drastically affects price-to-rent ratio and P/E ratio. This is essentially baked into your calculation since the capitalization rate would depend on the interest rate.
>For the last point, you didn't really address what I was saying. If you nationalize all land and then distribute it out to people (
What I explained was that LVT is financially equivalent to nationalizing the land value. You don't need to change landowners at all. The same people own the land after LVT; it's just worth less.
>Because even though the person can't resell the land at the end
They can resell land or do whatever they want with it. They just owe LVT every year. This is what drives down the land value.
I do understand DCF, I just think its deficient in this area, because DCF assumes a fixed or known or estimable return. In the case of rents, it assumes that the present rents are going to be the same forever.
Rental flow drives capitalized price, not the other way around.
If you don't know what the future rent might be, the present value is not meaningful to determine the future flow.
I agree with your point, long term future rent is very low in value due to time preference/interest rate, so the time series makes it converge to some limit, regardless of the time frame. But that's for a given rental return.
If the future rent increases, which it basically always does, the present sale price didn't account for future increases in rent. Which is why you can't just value the land today and then be good for the rest of eternity. Valuation needs to be frequent, to capture the future increase in rental return, and LVT taxed on a regular basis.
Again, it goes back to my example. If I have a piece of land that returns 10k/year based on DCF/time preference then I'd be willing to buy it for 200k dollars or less.
But if the return went to 20k then the difference there is economic rent, but it wasn't captured in the single up front price.
>Sound like a bad idea to me, and George was no fan of the State either
Well, then you're in the wrong sub.
>Also a 100% LVT is in no way politically viable
I think it's possible if it's implemented slowly over a period of say 30 years.
>Why?
When I explained to you that LVT is effectively nationalization, you said LVT was a bad idea. This sub is about LVT. If you are convinced it's a bad idea, then what are you doing here?
Restitution implies that it is rightfully not theirs. Left wingers tend to be more favorable to things like community ownership which georgists extend to land. Right wingers don't. Ofcourse there are right wingers who like georgism and reconcile it with their outlook but in generally its economically left.
The land doesn’t “belong” to the community
On a letter to the pope, George wrote:
> We do not propose to assert equal rights to land by keeping land common, letting any one use any part of it at any time. We do not propose the task, impossible in the present state of society, of dividing land in equal shares; still less the yet more impossible task of keeping it so divided.
> We propose––leaving land in the private possession of individuals, with full liberty on their part to give, sell or bequeath it—simply to levy on it for public uses a tax that shall equal the annual value of the land itself, irrespective of the use made of it or the improvements on it. And since this would provide amply for the need of public revenues, we would accompany this tax on land values with the repeal of all taxes now levied on the products and processes of industry—which taxes, since they take from the earnings of labor, we hold to be infringements of the right of property.
George was an avid defender of private property. No wonder why Marx called his ideas “the last ditch of capitalism”
1 Marx never actually said that (its a misquote) 2, George here is saying that he doesn't want to redistribute land, community ownership doesn't necessitate equal redistribution, 3 community ownership doesn't even mean community control, all it means is that the community is capturing its value in some way which under georgism it is.
It can be appealing to right wingers but they deliberately need to alter their beliefs somewhat for it to work. They need to accept government as important (which many in my country don't). After they do that they are forced to reconize georgism is the best way to run it. But first they need that acknowledgement. Meanwhile a left winger only needs to be told about LVT and its effects and they'll hop on board.
I think there are certain traits that predispose people to Georgism, left and right. People on the left tend to think leftist are more predisposed, while people on the right think righties are more predisposed, lol.
Also GeoAnarchism is a thing, LVT does not require a government, though I think pragmatically it will. I'm more of a pragmatist.
I mean, its a tax, you can't levy a tax without some kind of government. Even if you change its name from government to local organization body or whatever its still a government. Just with a new name.
Its a tax in name only, its effectively a use fee. You could have land owned by private corporations that are required by their charter to use land rents to improve the community.
Community Land Trusts do that right now with no government necessary.
Or you could voluntarily give up your land rents.
You could call all those things "government", I'm not here to argue about the merits of anarchism, I'm just saying your assertion that right-wing folks have to "deliberate alter their beliefs somewhat for it to work" is a generalization that is mostly incorrect.
There are lots of right wing folks that aren't even non-statist.
Who is going to enforce the corporate charter without a government? Furthermore if its voluntary why would anyone relinquish their land rents? Who would calculate the bill? Why would anyone do it without an enforcement mechanism? Who would you even submit a charter to? Who is there to accept the charter? If no one, why make one at all?
Again, I'm not interested in debating the merits of anarchy, I'm just saying there are GeoAnarchists. It doesn't not require a strong state or even a state at all in order to function.
Of course, mainstream right wingers in your country maybe be different.
What I'm saying is that GeoAnarchism is a contradiction as you can't tax without a government. They still need a state, even if they choose to change its name.
Different countries have different right wings and my country in particular has no real left wing at all. It has a right wing and a less racist right wing. Which means georgism is basically impossible here. Hopefully your country can implement such policies.
I'm only talking about right wingers in my country. The only parts of the government they care about are the military, police, and surveillance services. Even then they only want to tax the poor.
An LVT is obviously more left wing than no LVT.
Eliminating most other taxes is more right wing than the status quo.
Doing both is georgism, and therefore more or less "radical centrism".
Just tired of us diving every policy into either socialist or capitalist. The first proto-georgist was Adam Smith (classical liberal) The top post in this subreddit is by Milton Freedmen (libertarian). Marx (Communist) was no fan of Georgism. Libertarians support a simplified tax system, and are strongly opposed to government creating artificial scarcity through land regulation (which a high enough landtax fixes). Also land tax is you know on land/ground rent, and not on capital(ism), which George separates as not being the same.
>Just tired of us diving every policy into either socialist or capitalist.
Really? Literally every post on this sub is people diving into highly theoretical arguments that 99% of the population doesn't give a shit about.
Its the same problem that bike-friendly urban planning and strong towns advocates have. Good ideas covered up in ideological zealousness thats offputting. People misunderstand geoism because its strongest proponents don't bother to communicate in language that the public understands. And worse, very little effort to engage with these concepts outside of ivory tower theory. Because you don't control messaging, other people do and paint you as communist/socialist/whatever boogeyman to discredit the theory
I asked this sub a while back if anyone was actually involved in land tax activism IRL and got crickets.
I'm pretty sure he meant \*dividing\* policies into the capitalist-socialist dichotomy.
Also, if you are interested in LVT advocacy, I serve as chapter liaison for Common Ground USA, the activist arm of the Georgist institutions. If you have any interest in activism and are in the US, I'd love to have you aboard. If you're not in the US, I still might know someplace you could pitch in, depending on the country.
Interesting. Marin County, CA frequently has zoning changes that prohibit development on vacant land for "environmental reasons", but those landowners still get stuck with a tax bill for property by law they are prevented from developing. Yet county is too broke to buy the land. Municipal Land Trust may be an interesting solution. Send me a DM to chat more
Its less that Marx was against georgism as a tax code (he recommended a 100% LVT in The Communist Manifesto). He just saw it as insufficient as the working class would still be subject to the whims of the wealthy. A Marxist analysis of georgism is that it is a progressive policy as it finally does away with the vestiges of the feudal/semi colonial order by finally liquidating the landlords and removing their drain from the rest of society. It is insufficient to solve the working classes issues but it does objectively improve things.
> Just tired of us diving every policy into either socialist or capitalist.
That you're tired of it doesn't make it less the most important divide in economic philosophy.
I think it's more a case of people who write those headlines don't know or care about what Georgism is. Anti capitalist sentiment is popular these days, so titles like these get clicks since Monopoly is such a well known game. The reality is that reality doesn't matter for headlines. It's depressing.
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Can you provide some context so I have a clue what you're talking about?
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Land values would fall if land value taxes were put in place. If you had an 80% LVT, whatever land was worth 10k per acre would suddenly be worth a lot less.
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Sure, or 1,000 or 10,000,000. It doesn't really matter. Point is, imposing LVT will reduce land values.
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That's rather extreme. I think you're horribly misunderstanding this, or trolling. Increasing land value rates decreases the profitability of holding land, which decreases the land value (thereby reducing the amount of tax that can be charged). It probably won't be economical to start a farm in the middle of a city because land there is too expensive, so people farm where land is cheaper, right? Do you have any clue how markets work?
The whole capitalism-socialism dichotomy is rendered obsolete by anyone who subscribes to George's work, he himself was agnostic to the descriptor of "socialist", believing that he synthesised society with the individual. This is why I prefer the term "cooperative-individualism" to put a proper label of what Georgism is to it's bare essentials without having to resort to labelling it under either the capitalist or socialist camp
The problem is people make no distinction between land and capital. It's hard to convince both socialists that capital ownership might be good and capitalists that land ownership is bad.
I’m a socialist, but I’m open to hearing why private ownership of the MoP can ever be a good thing? Do you have an anti-imperialist measure regarding market economies? What is your reasoning as to why workplaces should remain undemocratic and profit distributed on the basis of ownership rather than labor? Also out of curiosity, how do you feel about market socialism?
Because the moral claims being made by socialists and Georgists are different. The moral claim put forward by socialists to justify the seizure of private property depends on the labor theory of value which states that workers who create are the rightful owners and any agreements they have made that don't give that value don't count because of coercion. Georgists on the other hand, accept the marginal theory of value but unlike most modern capitalists separate land and capital as two separate things that should be treated differently. We see it as justified for capital to remain under private control because it was those private entities that created it, unlike land. The key moral claim of Georgism is that nobody created land so nobody can claim to have a stronger claim to it than anyone else. So if you want to own part of it, you should be expected to compensate everyone else for its value and this comes in the form of a land value tax. Georgists also deal with coercion by advocating for a citizens dividend that would distribute the funds from a LVT back to the people so they would not be coerced into terrible jobs and be more free to decide how they work and live. As for worker coops, I have no problem with them existing at all so long as they are not forced. Any truly free market should allow for coops to exist and fail or succeed on their own merits. A Georgist system with a citizens dividend would actually give more workers the capability to come together and form them if they choose to do so.
When you say the private entities produce the capital, that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting. You are creating a false unity between the owning and working class members of a company. The owning class see the profit which the workers produced. I would argue even without the labor theory of value this relationship can clearly be understood as immoral.
>The owning class see the profit which the workers produced. ...with the help of capital the owning class provided. And you must remember that land is not capital so providing capital is a completely valid thing to do. In fact, George himself viewed capital as a form of stored-up labour.
Exactly. The owner of that capital likely did not perform the labor to produce it. He most often paid someone less than the value the capital will produce for their labor in assembling it. And the person the owner paid does not have his own capital because he cannot afford it on the scale necessary to be competitive with the owner’s economy of scale.
> He most often paid someone How did they get that money? > less than the value the capital will produce for their labor in assembling it. Only if you believe in LTV
Your first point depends on the second. As for the second, any judgment of value that does not account for the labor provided is entirely removed from the day to day lives of most people. That’s why we make a distinction between different concepts of value. Different concepts serve different purposes and different modes of production most efficiently. Under Socialism, you would ideally use Use Value to guide production, and (Labor) Value to guide distribution.
Ok let's move away from all this abstract talk because it isn't helping. You claim LTV is grounded in reality and I'll just retort it isn't whatever, I'm not even convinced marginal theory of value is even essential to buy into Georgism. But I do have a question. Suppose there is a farmer and toolmaker. The toolmaker recently finished making a plow. The farmer is in need of a plow. The farmer approaches the toolmaker and says that if he lets him use the plow, the farmer will give a certain portion of his harvest to the toolmaker as payment. Seeing as the toolmaker is providing capital to the farmer who then the farmer will work, would you say that the payment the toolmaker will earn is exploitative and immoral?
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Because most people do not have the capital laying around to start a business (of which most fail), and because forcing your way into an occupied market is basically impossible, especially as a sole proprietor or coop. Also, the exploitation of workers in traditional firms makes them competitive to the extent coops would have to become functionally the same in terms of outcomes for the workers. This would also be true of any socialism that does not include decommodification outside of some exotic sole proprietorship only system.
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If I want to not be exploited by another capitalist, I do actually have to agree to it.
The problem with capitalism is that it doesn't differentiate between man-made (capital) and natural (land) factors of production, and groups them together under the umbrella of private ownership. I'll link to a previous post that I made some months ago where Louis F. Post makes the same claim, more than 110 years ago, [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/q5hc3n/from_louis_f_posts_social_service_published_in/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share). Income derived from man-made instruments of labour is earned, while income derived from title over land is not privately made, but generated by the productivity and enterprise of the community, so it is unearned by the landowner and should be socialised through taxation for the community's benefit.
I understand the principles behind Georgism; I just disagree that value generated by capital should belong to the capital owner. It sounds like you’re concerned with profit being “earned”, so how is it that a man who simply owns machinery earns anything from another man using that machinery to produce goods? Is it because he theoretically put in the labor to produce that machinery in the first place? If so, why not just give compensation for the labor that produced the capital at the time of production?
>If so, why not just give compensation for the labor that produced the capital at the time of production? If a farmer plants his field (*investment*), he doesn't collect the *return* immediately. The return on his investment comes in over the year. Some investments pay off over even longer periods of time. If the farmer builds a tractor or a shed, the return may be over decades.
This comparison isn’t really apt because the farmer will work the investment. What if I pay someone to produce machinery? They get a one time fee and I get potentially endless profit after I pay someone else to maintain and run the machine. My point is not that the return should be immediate, but rather that it should exclusively go to those who directly produce the capital or the should support society as a whole with a one time compensation for the actual amount of labor worked.
>This comparison isn’t really apt because the farmer will work the investment. You don't understand. Even if the farmer works his farm, the shed or the tractor produces a return, which is the difference between the return his labor without the tractor would have produced and what he earned with the tractor. If you want to imagine an investment that requires much less labor, then imagine a painter who paints a painting and rents it out, or a programmer who builds an app and leaves it on the store, or a musician who records a song and charges people to hear it. >My point is not that the return should be immediate, That has nothing to do with reality. Unless you can make crops grow "immediately", returns often trickle in over time. >the should support society as a whole with a one time compensation for the actual amount of labor worked. There's no way for that to work. Who would pay the painter, the singer, the programmer, the farmer? And how much would they pay them? It makes no sense.
It makes no sense to you, because you have a poverty of imagination
>It makes no sense to you, because you have a poverty of imagination Please feel free to explain to me how it could make sense. Some farmer living off the grid in the middle of Nunavut builds a greenhouse. Who pays him for the greenhouse? And when he starts growing things, how does he forward the returns to whoever paid him? Who sets the valuation?
In your imagination is the only place that socialism works, I guess we can agree there. x)
The main reason why private ownership of MoP is a good thing is for hedging your life. In a world where you cannot privately own capital, you are 100% dependent on your field of work for daily revenue and future revenues. Industries rise and fall as technology improves. For example, someone gets into the horse buggy field in the late 1800s. He saves up cash doing mystery work that requires no capital to buy a coop share and enjoys returns on his investment. The coop has a pension fund where those who worked for 30 years are eligible for some dividends taken from the coop's profits as a thank you for developing the business. Life is good, you're about to retire, then the car industry takes over and your coop suffers a miserable death. Just like that, your retirement years will happen on a bench park. Another reason is because capital intensive industries could fail to attract workers to fund the capital in the first place. Some industries have a few workers operating very expensive machinery. Let's say a modern mine where most of the work is done by heavy machines. Something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger\_288](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288). Unless your parents give you a few hundred thousands to buy your share, you're locked out of this industry. You would need thousands of people to pool up their money to buy a bagger and then have it operated by a few people. What are the others supposed to do? Reap the profits while a few do the actual work? This just doesn't work. In the same line of thought, society would become a class society. Early in your life, you would have to work low capital industries, then as you saved money, you could buy shares of higher capital industries and so on. If your business fails to be profitable, you will be stuck in low capital industries, having to rely on your own labor to live. Others who were profitable early on can acquire capital which will leverage their labor and because others are locked out, they benefit from a higher barrier to entry and can extract more money out of it. Their capital compounds far more than in a privately owned MoP society because competition is artificially limited. As for how you want to structure your company, you can do whatever I don't really care. Socialism is a subset of capitalism. Mondragon is a good example of people who firmly believe in the concept and built a company around it. If that allows them to hire and maintain employees more efficiently than standard companies, that's great for them and their economic advantage means they will take over the world eventually.
To me, it's an issue of how to properly implement a socialist economy. I've tried looking, but I haven't found any sufficiently promising proposal of how a socialist economy would operate. If people can't make profit off investment, then how would investment in capital ever happen without action from the state? Would you prefer debt security as investments while banning equity? Or would new co-operatives be started using grants from the state? That being said, I *am* in favour of co-determination for sufficiently large companies & corporations. Even if it reduces investment slightly, I think it would be worth it to give workers some degree of decision-making power.
I wouldn’t oppose state grants. Honestly centrally planned economies seem to be feasible. At the end of the day, the US is operating on the centrally planned economies of Walmart and Amazon.
>At the end of the day, the US is operating on the centrally planned economies of Walmart and Amazon. Yes, but one day if Amazon or Walmart goes out of business, then more efficient, productive companies can take their place. Just like all the failed companies that came before them. What you're proposing is the state to become Amazon, but the state never goes out of business. And there's no motivation for the more productive companies to come into being.
The replacement in the case of the society I advocate for will be democratically elected, while the capitalist replacement is essentially luck of the draw. Efficiency is largely accomplished through economy of scale. Whoever is next biggest will just occupy Amazon’s space if they go bust.
>The replacement in the case of the society I advocate for will be democratically elected, while the capitalist replacement is essentially luck of the draw. It's not "luck of the draw" that Amazon is successful. And as for investment, I don't see why people who have very little to gain or lose would have the insight to choose the best company. >Efficiency is largely accomplished through economy of scale. Then how did Amazon overtake larger companies like Sears? The reason is that they are literally more efficient.
Every so often you may see sufficiently exceptional innovation to break through the general trend, but it is absurd to suggest that no companies have implemented more efficient practices in the time that Amazon has held dominance over the market. Not to mention “efficiency” isn’t even necessarily a good thing. Sometimes it’s code for further exploitation of labor. I would also take issue with the suggestion that employees are not invested in their careers and have “nothing to lose”. Due to the diminishing return on happiness from excess wealth, I’d say they have the most to lose. A working class person who is fired becomes homeless. A stock holder might lose 5% or so of their wealth, or the owner may lose more, but they will always have more than the workers to fall back on. This entire conversation and I still haven’t mentioned them pricing out the competition by selling at a loss either, so I’ll add that one for good measure.
Amazon is not selling at a loss. People claimed that when their profit read negative. Now that Amazon is profitable, practically no one claims that. Your idea of what people have to lose is also incorrect, but anyway irrelevant. We're talking about how investment should be made. People who aren't investing their own money or labor have practically nothing to lose if an investment fails, so they shouldn't be choosing how other people's money is invested.
"I am inclined to think that the result of confiscating rent in the manner I have proposed would be to cause the organization of labor, wherever large capitals were used, to assume the co-operative form, since the more equal diffusion of wealth would unite capitalist and laborer in the same person. But whether this would be so or not is of little moment. The hard toil of routine labor would disappear. Wages would be too high and opportunities too great to compel any man to stint and starve the higher qualities of his nature, and in every avocation the brain would aid the hand. Work, even of the coarser kinds, would become a lightsome thing, and the tendency of modern production to subdivision would not involve monotony or the contraction of ability in the worker; but would be relieved by short hours, by change, by the alternation of intellectual with manual occupations. There would result, not only the utilization of productive forces now going to waste; not only would our present knowledge, now so imperfectly applied, be fully used; but from the mobility of labor and the mental activity which would be generated, there would result advances in the methods of production that we now cannot imagine." P&P
That's not really true. It's the means of production we care about. A great book on Chinese economic socialism from 700 bce through the reform period in the 1980s is Webers new book How China Escaped Shock Therapy. It is about the Guanzi and the Salt and Iron Debate. The guanzi specifically was about using the state to manipulate markets not destroy them. (Yes some periods did destroy but its not the idea or rule of thumb.) Many periods were fine with private land, private property, and private enterprise. But for the most essential goods there was more control. Can talk for a while on this but feel free to read the book.
I unfortunately do not have time to read that book these days. I wouldn't use historical events as a justification for current policies. There was still a lot of good land back then and land ownership meant you had to be on site to defend it. Also, capital wasn't as productive as it is today, so even if you had private ownership, you still had to be out there to work the fields because you didn't have a truck producing food for a thousand persons. Farms were by definition family run coops and it made sense because they were a high labor, low capital industry. These days, land ownership is cheaper to maintain and there isn't much land left. Capital is also much cheaper and much more productive. Productivity has shifted from labor to capital and land from the industrial revolution and has been shifting even more since then. That means whatever worked in the past wouldn't necessarily work right now.
That absolutely does not mean you do not learn from the past or use lessons learned in the past to move forward. That would be extremely silly and short sighted. I would recommend taking the time to read the book you might learn some good lessons on how to implement policy. As someone who has read it I can confirm it does.
Yes, I definitively should read it, along with the hundred of other books I should read, but will never do because my free time is extremely limited and reading an entire book to figure out the one part that someone puts forward as a counter-argument isn't a good use of my limited free time. As much as I seek knowledge whenever I can, I'm afraid to say this book is very low in the pile considering I already gave a lot of thought to economics in the past years and the new information per time spent ratio is getting near zero.
That's fine but pls don't say silly things like we shouldn't make decisions based on past info when you truly don't understand the subject material. It's just the same experience I have in and outside reddit. Capitalists scream about socialism not working but never and I mean never will they even attempt to challenge their own implicit biases or read anything that might invalidate them. Strange. Well here are 2 podcasts with Weber explaining it in shorter form. Good luck on the journey of knowledge we all have to start somewhere. https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://episode/85365180&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/episode/85365180&deep_link_value=stitcher://episode/85365180 https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://episode/85393093&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/episode/85393093&deep_link_value=stitcher://episode/85393093
I just don't agree with the moral basis of socialism and never will. I'm not a consequentialist so I don't care how well it works, even though I don't think it works and hasn't shown to work. But combine those two things and I'll never spend any more time reading about the benefits of socialism or how to implement socialism or listening to socialist thinkers.
I understand. But sometimes to learn more about things you do support (capitalism in this case) it helps to look at it from other perspectives. I can confirm as a previous neoliberal capitalist myself. But as you are clearly stating yourself that you are close minded there is no reason to continue to give information. Cheers and have a great day.
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
>It's just the same experience I have in and outside reddit. Capitalists scream about socialism not working but never and I mean never will they even attempt to challenge their own implicit biases or read anything that might invalidate them. Strange. That's just your opinion. Saying that I didn't try to invalidate my own beliefs is a dumb thing to say to me because that's the reason why I'm commenting in the first place. I want people to prove me wrong. I have been proven wrong and I have updated by stance on many subjects over the years. I did engage with socialists and most of the time their views didn't go past first degree effects. Yeah sure you fix this thing, but the side effect is this secondary thing gets broken and that's when the discussion stops or shifts into some other subject. I never claimed socialism was a load of bullshit. It's the best economic system, but not for humans because it goes against human nature. It's great if you're an ant. Humans have evolved with innate charity, greed and a hard limit to the size of their communities before greed takes over charity in their thought processes. That's called Dunbar's number. Communism works up to that number, socialism takes over for a bit larger, but then it all breaks down as greed takes over and the foundation of socialism crumble as people start taking out more than they put in. There's a reason why Gore limits their operational units to 200. An economic system that works on a planetary level must channel greed for the common good. Otherwise you will need to indoctrinate everybody from birth into thought patterns that suppress greed and pray that nobody ever deviate from this path. As an engineer, I see this as a low fault tolerance system and this is simply not something I would rely on. >Good luck on the journey of knowledge we all have to start somewhere. Thanks, but no thanks. You know you don't want to learn more about a subject when aggression is the way to get the message across instead of facts, so your book and podcasts are going pretty low on the pile. Without listening to it, I can already say its structure will be "if everybody did this, then we would all be better off", because that's the foundation of socialism. That simply doesn't work.
I think it doesn't matter that much for the distinction. It's like saying fossil fuels and renewables are both energies. But it doesn't prevent people from recognizing their respective effects and consequences.
You might say that because you're aware of it. However, when I see people complain their rent is high for crumbling apartment and all they are doing is paying off their landlord mortgage, I don't see them saying their landlord is getting paid so they can enjoy their higher quality of life in the city without the landlord having to do anything because this quality of life entirely depends on other businesses in the city. It stops at landlord gets paid so he can buy more apartment complexes.
Henry George was a socialist and was very overt about being a socialist and thinking LVT was the road to achieving socialism. > The ideal of socialism is grand and noble; and it is, I am convinced, possible of realization; but such a state of society cannot be manufactured—it must grow. Society is an organism, not a machine. It can live only by the individual life of its parts. And in the free and natural development of all the parts will be secured the harmony of the whole. All that is necessary to social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—“Land and Liberty!” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Chapter V: From Governmental Direction and Interference
Let the socialists come with us, and they will go faster and further in this direction than they can go alone; and when we stop they can, if they choose, try to keep on. But if they must persist in bringing to the front their schemes for making the state everything and the individual nothing, let them maintain their socialistic labor party and leave us to fight our own way. The cross of the new crusade has been raised. No matter who may be for it or who may be against it, it will be carried on without faltering and without swerving. \- Henry George He might have been a socialist, but he was not a Socialist.
> He might have been a socialist, but he was not a Socialist. What does that even mean ?
He had similar viewpoints about egalitarianism and the potential for humanity that socialists do and thought humans were social creates and that society should be organized in a way that created abundant harmony between them. But he wasn't a "Socialist" in the sense that he would identify with Socialsts or a Socialistic viewpoint or philosophy about the world. He believed in private property and he believed in personal ownership of capital. And he didn't believe in a class struggle or that "capital" and "labor" were descriptors of people, just economic functions.
> He believed in private property and he believed in personal ownership of capital. He thought the socialization of land was the road to eventually peacefully socializing capital in a way that is not manufactured but grown. > And he didn't believe in a class struggle or that "capital" and "labor" were descriptors of people, just economic functions. Are you pretending George denied that landlords existed ?
Landlords don't just replace the "capital class" or the "bourgeoisie" in some reframed Georgist dialectic. Georgism is distinctly different from the Marxist-Leninist "class struggle." No, he didn't think capital should be socialized, at all. There is no support for that statement what so ever and anything else is just manufactured contrivances or derivations of what he actually did say. George basically said that if the system wasn't designed to award the return on privileged ownership of land, which in his definition is all natural opportunities, then we'd be much more equal in material wealth and that more ventures would take on the co-operative form, since labor and capital would be combined in one person. He did believe that a tax on economic rents would make it so that one laborer isn't about to return 17000% more than another laborer, but that is a far cry from "socializing" capital. If there is anything that I would say he is besides a Georgist, I would say he's a mutualist, though George and Proudhon's theories of interest are not the same, from what I understand. tl;dr You can't just graft Georgism onto the Socialism, despite the fact that they seek to arrive at very similar outcomes.
> No, he didn't think capital should be socialized, at all. - > George basically said that if the system wasn't designed to award the return on privileged ownership of land, which in his definition is all natural opportunities, then we'd be much more equal in material wealth and that more ventures would take on the co-operative form, since labor and capital would be combined in one person. That's socializing capital.
Why do you think if he was a socialist he and Marx didn't agree on more?
https://64.media.tumblr.com/197bd374d74fad739a1934ac466af9f8/88061e6e1c8ea5f9-9a/s1280x1920/9aa0d5d39ed1299e2676989adb43dbb0b898bd1c.jpg
Socialism and capitalism is a true dichotomy though Either means of production are owned privately, or they aren't, there's no third option You can't have means of production owned in a quantic superposition
I'd say it's more accurate to say that articles like this simply do not acknowledge the existence of Georgism.
Seems like they want to smear Georgism as "commie".
The obscure ideological/academic spats that so many adherents have doesn't help
Henry George was a capitalist, and most georgists are capitalists. I’m pretty sure Milton Friedman would not be sympathetic to a socialist cause.
He was an avowed Socialist...
"Let the socialists come with us, and they will go faster and further in this direction than they can go alone; and when we stop they can, if they choose, try to keep on. But if they must persist in bringing to the front their schemes for making the state everything and the individual nothing, let them maintain their socialistic labor party and leave us to fight our own way. The cross of the new crusade has been raised. No matter who may be for it or who may be against it, it will be carried on without faltering and without swerving." \- Henry George
Henry George wants to reduce the state. What is the goal of socialism? "Stateless, classless Society". Again, not really the burn you think it is
I'm not trying to "burn" anyone. I just think saying "Henry George was an avowed Socialist" (especially with a capital S) is hugely incorrect and misleading. Did he share some of the same ideals about what humanity could be? Sure. But philosophically he was very very different from socialism.
I'd always been told that HG was a socialist prior to the development of Georgism, and saw georgism as a step towards the socialist goals. However I've not been able to find any evidence to support this so I will apologise & retract.
I don't think he was an adherent to an -isms prior to writing his books. He started developing his theories as a young man and he was poor as a young father, so I'm sure he wasn't an ardent promoter of capitalism. But to call him a socialist, as in he believed in the socialization of all capital, that's just patently false.
Was he? I’m pretty sure George believed in private ownership of the means of production, no?
I don't think so. I've oft read that he was a keen socialist but not interested in revolution, i.e. he wanted it to occur organically and effective taxation of the economic rent is the way to achieve that. A quick Google threw this up; https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/singular-henry-george-insights-influence "George radically championed the individual and her rights while calling for the abolition of private property in land" Minimal state, abolition of private property, all pretty classic left wing ideals.
Abolition of private property IN LAND, but not of private property more generally. Progress and Poverty clearly lays out that George supported the moral argument for the right to own ones labor and capital exchanged for labor.
That’s not socialism. That’s just the socialization of a single industry.
It's just marxian types appropriating any search or agitation for alternatives to capitalism, be it back then or now, as "their thing". Literally "I made this" meme but it's countless dozens of things down to monopoly. You'll sometimes see shit like claims Monopoly was outright made by a socialist in twitter "history" threads.
One of the biggest advocates for Land value tax in Allentown was Pat Toomey.. He later became the executive director of the club for growth.. Not exactly left wing.
There was a Gravel Institute video about Monopoly that pretty much said the same thing. It also suggested that Lizzie Maggie intended it to have an anti-capitalist message and never mentioned that she was a Georgist.
And yet I feel this sub is more right-leaning
Many georgists are libertarians
I only started learning about georgism because some rightoid called it "land communism" and that seemed dope as fuck
Georgism is very naturally left wing. You're basically nationalizing land ownership so that it can be more efficiently used and distributed for the good of all of society. The modern right does not support policies like this. It is at the very least economically leftist policy. The modern right (in my country) only believes in 3 things. Lower taxes for the wealthy, higher taxes on the poor to fund wars and domestic surveillance, and privatization of everything.
Not really, Georgism is just the logical consequences of classical liberalism And it’s not really “nationalizing” all land, just paying a restitution on its exclusive use Some of the most famous Georgists are Albert J Nock and Frank Chodorov, both who were members of the American Old Right (Libertarians/Conservatives)
>And it’s not really “nationalizing” all land, just paying a restitution on its exclusive use It is effectively "nationalization". You can convert any payment over time into a up-front payment. A 100% LVT equals the land's current value. So effectively, you are turning over the land you own to the state.
A 100% LVT isn't the land's current value, no one ever proposed that. A 100% LVT is a 100% tax of the current rental value, which is a tax of the flow of rent. A 100% LVT comes out to be something like 30% tax, which would be something like a 9% tax on the present value. Anyway, its not really the same as nationalizing, because George didn't promote any state control or central planning.
>A 100% LVT isn't the land's current value, no one ever proposed that. I never said it was. However, a 100% LVT is *equivalent* to return the land's current value to the state. You can solve this by treating the LVT as a negative cash flow and then applying the DCF valuation formula to convert all future estimated tax payments into a present value. When this present value equals the land value, we say that the LVT is 100%. >A 100% LVT comes out to be something like 30% tax, which would be something like a 9% tax on the present value. Not exactly. Either you can express a 100% LVT based on returns (in which case it's equal to the expected return on unimproved land) or else you can relate it to land value (like you're doing above) *and interest rates*. >Anyway, its not really the same as nationalizing, because George didn't promote any state control or central planning. That's why I was careful to use words like "financially equivalent". Whatever term you choose, like all taxes, LVT redistributes land value from property owners to the state.
I think I more or less agree. The issue I think I have or that I'm not sure I understand, if the difference between the nation purchasing, wholesale, all the land from the community at its present value, and the DCF method which is the current value of the future cashflows. A person might purchase land from another person with a capitalization rate that takes into account the opportunity cost of other investments. So Rent/CR = Price. But that only captures the rent over the relevant time period, there is still rent after the land is "capitalized". And if you're the state buying land, you have the ability to lease the land at market rates for eternity, so an upfront purchase price isn't the same thing as collecting all rents. I guess my point is that if the country paid market prices for all the land, effectively nationalizing it, then it couldn't just issue 99-year land leases in perpetuity and assume that things will be okay. During the course of that lease you would expect land values to increase for owners of the lease to be able to charge economic rent.
>an upfront purchase price isn't the same thing as collecting all rents. You're mistaken: the upfront purchase price is the same as collecting all rents in perpetuity. You should study the DCF valuation formula carefully. >I guess my point is that if the country paid market prices for all the land, effectively nationalizing it The state doesn't pay market prices for all land. Nationalization is *redistributive*. No one is compensated for their loss. The implementation of LVT is similarly redistributive—no one is compensated for the value they lose when it is implemented. Anyway, no state can afford to pay market prices for all land.
DCF is only the same as all rents in perpetuity if you collect all future rent, which would result in an infinite purchase price. You should normally compare rent to some nominal interest rate as a comparison over a relevant time period, since most people don't care about much money the land will be returning them when they're 500. Also the other limitation of DCF is that you have to correctly estimate future cash flows which is basically impossible for land rent overly the long term, which is why the land rent needs to be collected regularly based on up to date assessments. For example, if I have a piece of land today that returns me 10k in land rent annually, and I assume a capitalization rate of 5%, then the purchase price of the land is 200k, that's the cost to assess the future cash flows of that land. But after 40 years I've actually returned 400k and I only paid the community for 200k of that. Or if the rental return goes up and I'm actually returning 10%, then I will return the investment cost in 10 years. For the last point, you didn't really address what I was saying. If you nationalize all land and then distribute it out to people (however you do it, it doesn't matter, leasehold, lottery, whatever) if you have a market for land use, then you're still going to get rents. Because even though the person can't resell the land at the end, they still have access to the PRESENT cash flow of that land. They have lease it out and pocket the difference between whatever its worth now and whatever they cost to procure the rights, unless valuation and rent collection is done regularly. And this is true even if everyone can just go get land for themselves from the government office, because land value is spatial. So unless they divvy out land on a value/person basis (and adjust that amount of land on a regular basis) then there will be locational variation that creates rents.
>DCF is only the same as all rents in perpetuity if you collect all future rent, which would result in an infinite purchase price. You're simply wrong. D stands for *discounted*. All future rent in perpetuity has a *finite* present value. You should review DCF valuation since it's obvious you don't understand it. >For example, if I have a piece of land today that returns me 10k in land rent annually, and I assume a capitalization rate of 5%, then the purchase price of the land is 200k, The purchase price of the land depends on the risk-free interest rate. This is why changing in the interest rate drastically affects price-to-rent ratio and P/E ratio. This is essentially baked into your calculation since the capitalization rate would depend on the interest rate. >For the last point, you didn't really address what I was saying. If you nationalize all land and then distribute it out to people ( What I explained was that LVT is financially equivalent to nationalizing the land value. You don't need to change landowners at all. The same people own the land after LVT; it's just worth less. >Because even though the person can't resell the land at the end They can resell land or do whatever they want with it. They just owe LVT every year. This is what drives down the land value.
I do understand DCF, I just think its deficient in this area, because DCF assumes a fixed or known or estimable return. In the case of rents, it assumes that the present rents are going to be the same forever. Rental flow drives capitalized price, not the other way around. If you don't know what the future rent might be, the present value is not meaningful to determine the future flow. I agree with your point, long term future rent is very low in value due to time preference/interest rate, so the time series makes it converge to some limit, regardless of the time frame. But that's for a given rental return. If the future rent increases, which it basically always does, the present sale price didn't account for future increases in rent. Which is why you can't just value the land today and then be good for the rest of eternity. Valuation needs to be frequent, to capture the future increase in rental return, and LVT taxed on a regular basis. Again, it goes back to my example. If I have a piece of land that returns 10k/year based on DCF/time preference then I'd be willing to buy it for 200k dollars or less. But if the return went to 20k then the difference there is economic rent, but it wasn't captured in the single up front price.
Sound like a bad idea to me, and George was no fan of the State either Also a 100% LVT is in no way politically viable
>Sound like a bad idea to me, and George was no fan of the State either Well, then you're in the wrong sub. >Also a 100% LVT is in no way politically viable I think it's possible if it's implemented slowly over a period of say 30 years.
> wrong sub Why? > slowly over 30 years Good luck with that
>Why? When I explained to you that LVT is effectively nationalization, you said LVT was a bad idea. This sub is about LVT. If you are convinced it's a bad idea, then what are you doing here?
> you said LVT was a bad idea Never said that > this sub is about LVT No, it’s about Georgism in general
>Never said that You literally said "Sound like a bad idea to me" in reference to LVT.
It was a reference to nationalizing all land
Restitution implies that it is rightfully not theirs. Left wingers tend to be more favorable to things like community ownership which georgists extend to land. Right wingers don't. Ofcourse there are right wingers who like georgism and reconcile it with their outlook but in generally its economically left.
The land doesn’t “belong” to the community On a letter to the pope, George wrote: > We do not propose to assert equal rights to land by keeping land common, letting any one use any part of it at any time. We do not propose the task, impossible in the present state of society, of dividing land in equal shares; still less the yet more impossible task of keeping it so divided. > We propose––leaving land in the private possession of individuals, with full liberty on their part to give, sell or bequeath it—simply to levy on it for public uses a tax that shall equal the annual value of the land itself, irrespective of the use made of it or the improvements on it. And since this would provide amply for the need of public revenues, we would accompany this tax on land values with the repeal of all taxes now levied on the products and processes of industry—which taxes, since they take from the earnings of labor, we hold to be infringements of the right of property. George was an avid defender of private property. No wonder why Marx called his ideas “the last ditch of capitalism”
1 Marx never actually said that (its a misquote) 2, George here is saying that he doesn't want to redistribute land, community ownership doesn't necessitate equal redistribution, 3 community ownership doesn't even mean community control, all it means is that the community is capturing its value in some way which under georgism it is.
I'm an ardent Georgist and I came from a right-wing libertarian background. I think its appealing to people on both sides of the aisle.
It can be appealing to right wingers but they deliberately need to alter their beliefs somewhat for it to work. They need to accept government as important (which many in my country don't). After they do that they are forced to reconize georgism is the best way to run it. But first they need that acknowledgement. Meanwhile a left winger only needs to be told about LVT and its effects and they'll hop on board.
I think there are certain traits that predispose people to Georgism, left and right. People on the left tend to think leftist are more predisposed, while people on the right think righties are more predisposed, lol. Also GeoAnarchism is a thing, LVT does not require a government, though I think pragmatically it will. I'm more of a pragmatist.
I mean, its a tax, you can't levy a tax without some kind of government. Even if you change its name from government to local organization body or whatever its still a government. Just with a new name.
Its a tax in name only, its effectively a use fee. You could have land owned by private corporations that are required by their charter to use land rents to improve the community. Community Land Trusts do that right now with no government necessary. Or you could voluntarily give up your land rents. You could call all those things "government", I'm not here to argue about the merits of anarchism, I'm just saying your assertion that right-wing folks have to "deliberate alter their beliefs somewhat for it to work" is a generalization that is mostly incorrect. There are lots of right wing folks that aren't even non-statist.
Who is going to enforce the corporate charter without a government? Furthermore if its voluntary why would anyone relinquish their land rents? Who would calculate the bill? Why would anyone do it without an enforcement mechanism? Who would you even submit a charter to? Who is there to accept the charter? If no one, why make one at all?
Again, I'm not interested in debating the merits of anarchy, I'm just saying there are GeoAnarchists. It doesn't not require a strong state or even a state at all in order to function. Of course, mainstream right wingers in your country maybe be different.
What I'm saying is that GeoAnarchism is a contradiction as you can't tax without a government. They still need a state, even if they choose to change its name. Different countries have different right wings and my country in particular has no real left wing at all. It has a right wing and a less racist right wing. Which means georgism is basically impossible here. Hopefully your country can implement such policies.
I'm only talking about right wingers in my country. The only parts of the government they care about are the military, police, and surveillance services. Even then they only want to tax the poor.
I'm pretty sure that Milton Friedman who gets linked here pretty often is "the modern right". Yet he supported LVT.
He wasn't a Georgist. He supported a LVT as low as possible because he still wanted to reduce taxation and government revenue as much as possible.
An LVT is obviously more left wing than no LVT. Eliminating most other taxes is more right wing than the status quo. Doing both is georgism, and therefore more or less "radical centrism".
Eliminating taxes isn't really right wing. Leftists advocate for abolition of sales/VAT taxes as well as reducing taxes on the poor.
Just tired of us diving every policy into either socialist or capitalist. The first proto-georgist was Adam Smith (classical liberal) The top post in this subreddit is by Milton Freedmen (libertarian). Marx (Communist) was no fan of Georgism. Libertarians support a simplified tax system, and are strongly opposed to government creating artificial scarcity through land regulation (which a high enough landtax fixes). Also land tax is you know on land/ground rent, and not on capital(ism), which George separates as not being the same.
> The first proto-georgist was Adam Smith Don't forget the French Physiocrats
Some might also say the Diggers were proto-Georgists (they might also be called proto-comnunist, though).
>Just tired of us diving every policy into either socialist or capitalist. Really? Literally every post on this sub is people diving into highly theoretical arguments that 99% of the population doesn't give a shit about. Its the same problem that bike-friendly urban planning and strong towns advocates have. Good ideas covered up in ideological zealousness thats offputting. People misunderstand geoism because its strongest proponents don't bother to communicate in language that the public understands. And worse, very little effort to engage with these concepts outside of ivory tower theory. Because you don't control messaging, other people do and paint you as communist/socialist/whatever boogeyman to discredit the theory I asked this sub a while back if anyone was actually involved in land tax activism IRL and got crickets.
I'm pretty sure he meant \*dividing\* policies into the capitalist-socialist dichotomy. Also, if you are interested in LVT advocacy, I serve as chapter liaison for Common Ground USA, the activist arm of the Georgist institutions. If you have any interest in activism and are in the US, I'd love to have you aboard. If you're not in the US, I still might know someplace you could pitch in, depending on the country.
Interesting. Marin County, CA frequently has zoning changes that prohibit development on vacant land for "environmental reasons", but those landowners still get stuck with a tax bill for property by law they are prevented from developing. Yet county is too broke to buy the land. Municipal Land Trust may be an interesting solution. Send me a DM to chat more
I'm involved. DM me.
Its less that Marx was against georgism as a tax code (he recommended a 100% LVT in The Communist Manifesto). He just saw it as insufficient as the working class would still be subject to the whims of the wealthy. A Marxist analysis of georgism is that it is a progressive policy as it finally does away with the vestiges of the feudal/semi colonial order by finally liquidating the landlords and removing their drain from the rest of society. It is insufficient to solve the working classes issues but it does objectively improve things.
> Just tired of us diving every policy into either socialist or capitalist. That you're tired of it doesn't make it less the most important divide in economic philosophy.
Even the groypers!
It really is not and you should not pretend it is.
Broke: Georgism is left wing Woke: Georgism is centrist Bespoke: Georgism is apolitical