Honest takes on Georgism

What do lainanons think of georgism and land use tax? I would like to see the resolution of the present crisis of the over-inflated cost of housing and recently encountered Georgism for the first time. I can't believe I haven't heard of it before. As a non-landowner I previously thought some system of land use tax was already in place, but after learning more about it, this is the first time I've heard something that sounded like a common-sense resolution to the current abuses of corporate landownership and predatory landlord-ism without requiring our present system being totally scrapped, as hard line socialists seem to prefer.

You can only end misuse of corporate land useage by ending corporate land ownage

Georgism, *especially* its resurgence in our modern crisis period, is the split-the baby solution to the problem of economics. It sounds necessary in the surface description, because it is correct in all the less-relevant facets of its analysis, but the roots of its execution will necessarily only make more things worse. Value only exists by the negotiations between buyers and sellers, so can only be taxed without distortion at sale time, and the LVT needs to be applied much more regularly than land changes hands to do its work. Thus a substituted/proxy land value must be taxed instead, which will be the same sort of distortion that got us to where we are now in the first place, except it will spread to many people in many sectors instead of affecting just some of one sector. The difference between how people are doing now (or how they were doing in 2019 anyway, since we're backsliding) and how they were doing in 2008/9 hammers home that things must be absolutely dire for a general malaise to be preferrable to a specific crisis. And either way, in the bigger picture, those who recommend Georgism today read to me like a doctor recommending antihypertensives to a patient showing the first signs of organ damage who eats exclusively high salt and sugar foods and doesn't exercise. Even if it's *possible* your external intervention will fix the problem without unintended consequences, why take that risk when we know other changes won't? Today's everything bubble wasn't some chaotic accident of the subtle underground forces of history, it was the intentional, if overshot, outcome of the explicit hypercharged monetary policy of the last three decades. If we know we got here by shooting from the hip on monetary policy, it seems much more prudent to me to try to fix things by putting that back to the way it was than by shooting from the hip on commodity policy, too. Let the proof in the pudding be in the eating. Hike interest rates to more than 10 or 12 percent, and hold them there for a decade, and see if housing prices don't trot back down to their baseline circa 1995, and hold steady there, or my name isn't Hououin Kyouma.

>>76240 Even if you have taxation coming from a good zero-distortion source, you still need it to be spent well. Georgists should consider that they are not all alike for wanting the same funding mechanism. If you are a geoanarchist/geolibertarian sort who wants it to fund UBI and maybe a bit of legal/martial stability you would have very little in common with a geonationalist or geonormal peoplet who want to protect their own people or Israel respectively. >>76253 But lainchad, I have it on good authority that corporate greed was only coincidentally invented in the early 1970s...

>>76253 >so can only be taxed without distortion at sale time, and the LVT needs to be applied much more regularly than land changes hands to do its work I don't see why this would only be an issue with LVT and not with our present system of property taxes (in the US, ofc), though I do understand the concern here. Perfect market efficient doesn't exist either, so even at sale time there is some distortion to the value of the land. In spite of this, I don't think it would be unreasonable or unrealistic to say that we could make a reasonable estimation for the value of most land, as we essentially do already when we calculate total property value for property tax. The role of the land value tax is not to eliminate this market inefficiency, but to not punish land owners by taxing them for the improvements on their land, and instead encourage land owners to use what land they do own as efficiently as possible, with less concern for the long-term costs associated with investing into improvements on that land (at least as I understand it). >which will be the same sort of distortion that got us to where we are now in the first place, except it will spread to many people in many sectors instead of affecting just some of one sector. I'd like you to explain in more detail why you think this to be the case. You seem to be referencing the 2008 housing crisis, which was an unrelated issue of banks over-leveraging on subprime mortgage lending and is only tangentially related to the issue of property vs land value tax. >Even if it's *possible* your external intervention will fix the problem without unintended consequences, why take that risk when we know other changes won't? I'd also like you to elaborate on what alternatives you see that you believe would be totally free on unintended consequences. I personally don't believe such a solution exists, and it would be news to me to hear we were actually acting on any particular strategy to get ourselves out of our present housing affordability crisis, rather than just resigning ourselves to it. >Today's everything bubble The foundation of the everything bubble is in the value of land and the property on that land. >Hike interest rates to more than 10 or 12 percent, and hold them there for a decade, and see if housing prices don't trot back down to their baseline circa 1995, and hold steady there, or my name isn't Hououin Kyouma. Cranking up interest rates to such insane levels doesn't bring housing prices down, it just discourages people from taking out new mortgages on homes, so the only people who can afford to buy will be the ones who don't have to take out loans to do so. No one wants to buy a house on a loan with a 12 percent interest rate, especially if that interest rate is going to stay that high for a decade limiting their options for refinancing. New construction might be less expensive to compensate for this, but there will be less of it and people already sitting on property are in a better position to play the waiting game for interest rates to go back down and housing prices to go back up in order to sell their property without taking a loss, or more likely while still making the gains they initially expected in buying the property, since real estate is considered more for its value as an investment. People who do not currently own property do not have this same luxury. As they say, the house always wins.

All schools of economics and economic thought are fundamentally flawed and in some cases propped up by pseudo-scientific nonsense. The solution to the housing crisis isn't to lower the price of homes for example. People were once perfectly capable of building their own homes. Gradually, the population has been deskilled into crayon eating dum dums who can't actually make their own homes. Nomads in the Sahara desert are far more intelligent, they build and construct their homes by themselves and this allows them to move with the season. Today, anyone can install a decent Linux operating system or build his own, so the price of operating systems is comparatively low and most are free. If the government and corporations had their way, this skill would be lost and we'd go back to being dum dums paying huge prices and premiums for software that should be available to everyone. The design of houses is also insane, excessive use of brick and concrete and cement, fiber and foam, soykaf tons of plastic and other unnecessary, expensive and complex fixtures, most of which are functionally useless or only serve to transform the home owner into a drooling idiot in a padded cell. A moderately wealthy man a century ago lived relatively modestly compared to the average middle class American. He's surrounded by useless junk that he doesn't need and in many cases he could have built himself had he only used his brain. Its almost as if the average suburban house was purposely designed to bleed us dry of valuable and scare resources, which also happens to make these homes unnecessarily expensive. Social breakdown is another problem. Traditionally, most humans have lived in extended family arrangements (multiple generations under one roof) and passed on their homes to their children. However, the average American and European insists on having his own house entirely for himself and maybe a significant other and children. This unnecessary luxury, unknown even to ancient emperors, is massively wasteful. So much space goes unused, many more people need their own homes which creates shortages and high costs and lets not forget Americans insist on having a huge area of space between their houses. Americans are especially happy to increase the living standards (I'd argue its actually a decrease) for the individual if it means lowering the quality of life for everyone else. In the long term this is just suicidal. Economists and brain dead politicians can argue over statistics and baseless theories all they like but the fact is the average American is poorly adapted to survive in his biome, certainly far less than extreme Amish farmers or Indians on the great plains. American and European civilization are unbelievably unsustainable and will not survive if they continue this course. It will end up like the Roman empire, not a dramatic Bronze Age style collapse, but the cities will slowly bleed the resource rich areas until they become completely unable to sustain themselves and everything gradually sinks and dies off. Why do you think America is sending money and weapons to Israel and Ukraine? Because, having bled their own countries bone dry, they are now sinking their teeth into the third world like a bunch of vampires trying to starve off death. Georgism, Ancaps, Stalinists, guys insisting society getting fisted by the "invisible hand" is the solution etc. are all wrong. Western civilization is engineered to fail. It's structurally setup to be like this and no amount of tinkering with a fundamentally soykaf system is going to fix it. Society needs to be redesigned.

>>76272 So uhh... Do you actually have anything constructive to say about Georgism or LVT? How are you actually proposing to "redesign society" beyond making vague allusions to extended family living arrangements and living as Saharan nomads?

>>76275 >have anything constructive to say about Georgism or LVT? LVT can work under certain circumstances within sensible limits but is it something that can be implemented? In America I doubt it. There are too many political obstacles. >How are you actually proposing to "redesign society" That's a big question and not something I'm capable of answering but I have a few ideas. Firstly, we need to re-skill the population. This means, reacquiring the basic living skills that have gradually been lost thanks to corporate consumer products that make people dependent on supply chains, stuff like dishwashers, gas and electric ovens etc. the average American doesn't even know how to light a fire or bake a loaf of bread. This shouldn't be hard. The second task is to reform the minds of people. Westerners, Americans especially, have a corrupt understanding of just what counts as a need. You do not need electric, you do not need gas, you do not need plastics everywhere. None of these are necessary for your living. Instead of attempting to increase productivity and make it more efficient and eco-friendly, we need to quit being so god damn greedy and learn to live without and accept that scarcity is part of life. Of course, people won't like this, so laws have to be enacted to force people to reduce consumption. These should be gradual so its not a shock to the system. Nobody needs to eat meat three times a day. Regulations on housing should be changed to make it easier for people to build their own homes, ban the construction of those classic American suburbs which are a fuarrrking eyesore. Corpos building luxury properties for the pure purpose of trading them should be outlawed. Heavier taxes should be laid on the rich. Instead of using it to fund a healthcare bureaucracy, follow China's barefoot doctors model etc. scale everything down, pour less funding into the cities, reduce the urban population by encouraging them to buy land and become small farmers etc.

I can't say I am too familiar with Georgism OP, but it seems like a really diverse set of ideas. I can't tell if they want genuinely socialized land ownership or just a tax on land assessed by land value. Land Value Tax is already a thing in most of the US and it seems to function like most other taxes: anyone who can punts it off to whoever they can. But maybe you mean some specific system of LVT? I am all for the idea of land in particular being treated as collectively owned. This doesn't mean someone can't gain exclusive rights to use a particular piece of land, otherwise you'd just get people arguing constantly over who has the right to e.g. the proceeds of a particular field or live in a particular house, but I think unlike other possessions or titles, land use affects other people around us much more than anything else, and it makes sense that exclusive use of land would be limited in ways that exclusive use of other possessions would not be. In the US we have some really soykafty systems that sort of do this, like HOA's, and I think the idea of land ownership is so deeply ingrained in American culture that it's never going to really get better, we're just going to stack increasingly complicated regulations on top of a legal framework that's just not built for this in the first place. But I could easily see a society built from the ground up with another notion of land distribution and ownership, with an otherwise mostly unchanged economic system, to be desirable. As I understand, the NEP was pretty much like this, and it was probably the most successful economic policy of the USSR's entire existence. >>76272 >People were once perfectly capable of building their own homes. They did so quite poorly. I used to do repair work for old buildings and I never saw one that wasn't a total hodgepodge of quick fixes and poor craftmanship. >Nomads in the Sahara desert are far more intelligent, they build and construct their homes by themselves and this allows them to move with the season. Temporary buildings aren't good as permanent residences. Strong, properly built foundations are necessary to prevent the structure from sinking into the ground and deforming over time, eventually failing, as well as to keep the structure from rotting out from below. If you wanted to make an example of actually good traditional homebuilding practices, you should have mentioned pueblo construction, which is actually illegal in many parts of the US. The thick clay-brick walls are perfect for regulating the temperature inside when the temperature outside varies drastically over the day (such as in the high desert), they're sturdy as fuarrrk, and it's not very hard to build in that style either. >unnecessary, expensive and complex fixtures Like what, running water? Electric lights? Central heating? A dishwasher? Those are all huge quality-of-life improvements that enable us to do things more efficiently. It is not the availability of these amenities that makes people lazy and complacent. >Its almost as if the average suburban house was purposely designed to bleed us dry of valuable and scare resources, which also happens to make these homes unnecessarily expensive. Generally they're designed to be built in large number at low cost, and building codes are there so that you don't end up with a cardboard house with soykaf ventilation that completely falls apart in ten years because that's what they'll build if you let them. They're sold at an inflated cost just because populations of urban areas are booming and there's lots of demand for housing anywhere remotely near them, and all indications point to this trend continuing for at least a few more decades. Now, are building codes often full of stupid bullshit? Yes. Are they often ignored? Yes. But those are not reasons to get rid of the idea of building codes. They're very necessary so that the things that get built are actually inhabitable for a substantial amount of time. >However, the average American and European insists on having his own house entirely for himself and maybe a significant other and children Among younger generations I think this is reverting a little. Since housing is so expensive and wages remain stagnant, many young people are getting used to the idea of living with roommates or family indefinitely. Personally I could imagine myself living with family and/or friends after I get married, and I have no interest in living alone until then. Living alone is just a bad economic proposition as well as a bad social proposition. >It will end up like the Roman empire, not a dramatic Bronze Age style collapse, but the cities will slowly bleed the resource rich areas until they become completely unable to sustain themselves and everything gradually sinks and dies off It is interesting that everyone likes to interpret the fall of Rome as supporting their own theory on why the American empire is declining. Maybe because America is basically New Rome? Unsure. In any case if my (admittedly not that deep, but deeper than many) study of Roman culture and history has taught me anything, it's that Rome followed the trajectory of many empires: it had a few notable golden ages between long periods of tumult and instability, eventually turning into more of an idea than an actual state and being adopted and transformed by the inevitable passage of time and movement of people and spread of ideas.

>>76277 >Land Value Tax is already a thing in most of the US and it seems to function like most other taxes: anyone who can punts it off to whoever they can. But maybe you mean some specific system of LVT? I guess I should clarify, I mean LVT as a distinct concept from property tax. All 50 states implement some form of property tax, which includes a form of LVT in addition to a tax based on the value of the property on the land. While georgism, like any -ism, has many branches and subtle variations, I am personally relatively new to it, and am mostly interested in what positive effects could be seen from moving to a system of taxation that emphasizes taxation of land value far more than what is actually on that land, which isn't necessarily to say a simple elimination of the property part of property tax. I think the general premise of Georgism seems to make a lot of sense. Everyone should be entitled to the fruits of their own labour, but land is not a product of anyone's labour, and so everyone should have an equal entitlement to that land. If someone wants to lay claim to a piece of land, it only seems to make sense that they should pay some substantial tax to cover the cost of the opportunity they deprive others with their legal and exclusive right to develop and improve it. And similarly, it does not make sense that they should have to pay as steep a tax for the improvements on that land, as those improvements may be a boon to their community, whether they are providing housing, food through agriculture, or something else. Naturally, the LVT should not be so steep as to make such land improvements financially intractable, were it steeper, it may encourage landowners to use their land more efficiently, or otherwise sell it to another party who is willing and able to improve the land efficiently. As it is, corporate landlords, or even independent ones, can buy up and camp on large tracts of housing or land, simply waiting for it to increase in value without consequence, while everyone else is deprived of affordable housing and rising costs of goods. >>76276 >LVT can work under certain circumstances within sensible limits but is it something that can be implemented? In America I doubt it. There are too many political obstacles. To this point, I don't think it's totally unrealistic to have tax reform at the state and local levels, the main challenge is that tax issues just aren't that exciting to most people. I think there could be great benefit to this kind of tax reform, but it's hard to help others to see that benefit when they are facing many of the challenges which are symptomatic of things like unresolved tax issues. That said, I believe on a local level, there are some areas of Pennsylvania which are moving to place more emphasis on LVT over property tax, which does give me hope that it would be possible elsewhere if there were more awareness.

>>76272 >Gradually, the population has been deskilled into crayon eating dum dums who can't actually make their own homes frustratingly, dealing with zoning and licensing and inspections and regulations makes building your own home painful in ways that it should not be. >>76279 >land is not a product of anyone's labor well, land values to a significant degree are. Suppose I have a plot of land, its somewhat rough, covered with trees, hilly and full of rocks. It might be turned into a decent farm, let us suppose, but only though considerable labor. It might also become a highly desirable spot for office space or something, if other people build a city beside it. Maybe the land isn't a product of labor, but I should say its value and quality partially is. >As it is, corporate landlords, or even independent ones OK but suppose you're smart and the world operates under this system. Because you're smart, you know that a specific city is going to grow significantly in the next couple of years, and so it, and the nearby suburbs will see a rise in housing demand, which they haven't seen just yet. So you go there and you buy some farms nearby or something and prepare to turn them into houses when the time is right, and in five years, after paying taxes on land assessed as decent farmland and nothing else, the boom happens and you sell it all at a pretty good profit. I don't see how georgism solves this unless the assessors are just as smart or smarter than the investors. Maybe having higher property taxes would discourage the investor from booting the farmers or whatever first, or maybe encourage a slightly faster timeline on building and selling/renting the houses, but in principal its a similar deal to what we have now just with the weights slightly adjusted. >tax issues just aren't that exciting. USA has bigger problems than tax reform, and changing tax rules are a tax of their own lol.

>>76280 >Suppose I have a plot of land, its somewhat rough, covered with trees, hilly and full of rocks. It might be turned into a decent farm, let us suppose, but only though considerable labor. That's a good counterexample I hadn't considered, though, I don't think it discounts the larger point that the landowner should not be, in a sense, punished through higher taxes for the improvements they make to their land. Perhaps for the next landowner, it may make sense to tax them for those improvements, as the land itself has at that point changed and the improvements upon it have become part of the land and thus part of its value. If there is a part of the land value that should change over the term of ownership, I think market changes and infrastructural improvements not made by the landowner, such as a city installing utilities to the property and so forth should be allowed to influence the land's valuation for taxation. >you buy some farms nearby or something and prepare to turn them into houses when the time is right, and in five years, after paying taxes on land assessed as decent farmland and nothing else, the boom happens and you sell it all at a pretty good profit. >I don't see how georgism solves this I believe this is where the other part of georgianism comes in with land value tax as the *only* tax. Running a country is expensive, and with LVT as the only tax, I expect tax rates on land would need to be significantly higher, which would discourage owning land for long periods just to keep someone else from having it. The tricky part with that is that your entire economy is now hinged on a single number that you have to keep in some sweet spot so people can reasonably afford land when it's used properly, but not so easily that they can hoard land. This is where my skepticism of this extreme form of georgism comes from and why I've limited most of the discussion up to this point specifically to the LVT itself. >USA has bigger problems than tax reform, and changing tax rules are a tax of their own lol. Money is ultimately at the root of all problems. Many of the USA's biggest problem at present have their solutions rooted, at least partially, in tax reform. The dollar is the global reserve currency, the value of the dollar depends heavily on how the US government decides to spend its money, and how the government decides to spend its money depends heavily on what money it has and where it comes from, not to mention the quality of life for Americans depends heavily on how that money is spent. If you can improve how taxes are levied in the US, there is a compounding effect with global reach. While Georgism may not seem so radical on its face, with all its talk of taxes and land, and generally seeming a little old and dusty, I do think easily has the potential to precipitate radical changes while functioning within our present framework. As someone who would like to see some radical changes in my lifetime, I consider this to be a positive feature of Georgism, as it doesn't require a risky revolution to work, and as an idea, it has features that appeal to people on both sides of the political aisle without falling into a compromise of stagnation or rhetorical 'both-side-isms'.

>>76283 To expand on this, I think Georgism could be a valuable tool to open the door to things like UBI, other tax reforms such as a wealth tax, education reform, climate policy, and all those other things we want that we currently have no plan to pay for, while remaining somewhat palatable to more conservative-minded folks. A lot of leftists I've talked to always talk about how we need some way of working outside and against the present systems and institutions to accomplish their goals, and I think there's value in that, but in general I see a significant lack of any concrete long-term goals, and a significant lack of institutional progress. This reluctance to work within the present framework I think limits our ability to use it to our advantage to accomplish our goals, and we end up placing targets on things far out of our reach, like Capitalism itself, or we often find ourselves simply wishing upon a star for someone to come along and fix our broken healthcare system, or nationalize this or that. Georgism may not itself be the gay space communism every young socialist dreams of, but a stepping stone should not be mistaken for a compromise. If you want the world to be a better place, you actually have to have a plan to do something you think will improve things, not just a loose collection of complaints about the present state of affairs. Georgism is as good a plan that I've ever seen, and far more actionable in the context and framework of US politics and policy than Marxism alone.

>>76284 I think it's possible to let decent be the enemy of good. Especially if you are trying to change things through the government processes, the only way to get a real win is to have such overwhelming popular support, and to be non-threatening enough to the owners, that legislators take on little risk and can get great rewards by implementing your bills. Otherwise you'll just get mired in processes that are designed to confound and redirect any effort for significant change. There are some very realistic plans that have come out of leftist spaces. I think syndicalism is one of the most realistic, although it requires leftists to get off their asses and actually participate in the labor movement, which means the loose mob of radicalized middle-class internet addicts which is the "modern American left" will never do it. It's also totally compatible with (as I understand it) Georgism, anarchism, and many other -isms, since it's really more of an organizational framework than an end goal.

>>76285 >the only way to get a real win is to have such overwhelming popular support I think you underestimate the power of local politics. I won't deny governmental process is sticky and totally stacked against you, but it's still possible to make effective change when participating in local politics instead of worrying about how to change the entire nation at once. That's why movements like syndicalism have been able to gain traction in the first place, so I see no reason not apply a similar strategy to georgism, or why it would be unrealistic to do so.

>>76240 I don't think there's any defending landlords or rent seeking from a market perspective. Adam Smith considered rent seeking parasitic because it is, it's a feudal holdover that is unproductive in the economy. Leaseholds and land taxes don't solve the problem, there are georgist towns in America and they have the same problems. Lord is literally in the name, landlords should have their property seized for the same reason a feudal lord should. How we distribute is a different question, probably through some kind of claim system based on if people are already living there that the landlord was exploiting already and then anything left over could be put up to lottery or something for private citizens who are not landowners already to win. Landlord as a practice should just outright be derezzed. As for outright monopolistic ownership where land isn't being rented out? If the company violates anti-trust laws axe them and break them up, if the anti-trust laws need to be expanded or aren't being enforced due to political corruption it's time for some guillotines. There's no reason to try to preserve any part of a broken system, just destroy it and start over. A 300k mile engine isn't going to get any better no matter how much you tune the sucker up.

>>76286 >you underestimate the power of local politics while there's significance to local politics, many of the things I'd like to do if I could locally, are illegal because of the state and or federal governments. Apparently this is why georgist taxes in texas are not a thing. And every so often some city or county or state tries something and then gets shut down in court. >>76288 I like landlords because they make it easier to move without the large risk, uncertainty, and commitment of buying a house. They provide a real service. Who would provide this service if you were king, and how ? >>76283 >the tricky part its also getting good and true and consistent assessments of value. On the one hand income/sales tax requires massive surveillance or accounting and auditing, on the other hand at least these are real measurable things with specific cash value, if the data is correct and complete you can compute the actual amount owed with certainty. Land value....not so clear cut. >money is ultimately at the root of all problems this is just by virtue of being everywhere. People also have ideologies and convictions, if it was all about money no one would be willing to die for the cause, and they clearly are.

>>76288 Honestly I used to care about this stuff, but the world has ground me down to the point where I just see a bunch of people doing less work than me and making more money and I just want to be on their side of the fence for once. Also what is going on in the pic you posted? Looks wild.

>>76296 The image is of the assassination of the Francoist politician Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid in 1973 by a commando unit of the Basque Nationalist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna. They had posed as sculpting students for 6 months tricking their landlord in a nearby apartment complex as they dug out an underground tunnel and filled it with 80kg of high explosives they stole from a government munitions facility. In the Basque Nationalist movement this event is endearingly referred to as the "Spanish Space Program." Blanco's first launch was a roaring success as his car flew over 20 meters into the air over a nearby church landing on its terrace. The only thing I'll say is that freedom through the oppression of others doesn't lead to true freedom. But I understand what you're saying, I'm trying to become financially independent myself but I'd never do it through extracting rent. The other issue here is that people on the bottom do not have equitable access to credit that would even allow them to become landlords to begin with even if it's considered an ethical practice. The real estate industry isn't buying most of these properties with their own money, they buy them on credit propped up by the federal reserve while normal working people are denied the same access. In essence people in positions of economic power are generally using the corrupt political system to use our taxes and the devaluation of our currencies to fund their operations. They are stealing from us not just by denying us the ability to own anything but also by stealing from us directly through government policy that they control. I wish you luck though and hope you build your own freedom through some genuine contribution to the world.

>>76294 There are a few angles to your question to answer here. Transient housing can still exist in some capacity and is useful for people who are students or moving cities during different stages of their lives. There can certainly be a conversation over how much of it is desirable and what practices around it are healthy for the marketplace. But for the majority of people transient housing is a forced condition that traps people in poverty and destroys communities. Humans were never meant to constantly be moving around every year or two without their communities moving with them. Being an isolated alone individual forced to move dozens of times over your life is different from a nomadic community. Moreover, rent is charged at astronomically high fixed rates that are divorced from the market reality. There's no good reason for rent to be double, triple, or even higher than the cost of an enterprise low interest rate mortgage for the renter, and that divorced cost has nothing to do with supply and demand and everything to do with parasitic rent seeking behavior. Rent is charged strategically at the rate which the landlord can extract the maximum amount of value from a renter without causing him to default on his rent. This combined with hoarding vacant properties, theft through currency devaluation through federal reserve policy supported by the real estate industry, theft through taxation which funds grants for the real estate industry, class-based denial of credit to working class people supporting by the real estate industry, monopolistic control of the market, and collusion between monopolistic actors in the industry all are market fixing practices. Market economics are meant to accomplish two goals. The quality of a service and or product should rise as the price falls due to the pressure of competition in the marketplace. Demand is always present but competition over the supply should always tend to drive quality up and price down as much as possible while maintaining efficient but not gouged profit margins. The purpose of permitting profit as a social construct is to encourage this beneficial phenomena in the market, not enrich the wealth of any given person. (Usury and much profit seeking used to be derezzed in many societies for non-nobles.) However, when the market is not producing this effect and conditions are consistently getting worse in a given sector in economics this is called a market failure. Examples of market failure in the US are apparent, there are more homes than homeless people which means that supply and demand are completely divorced from the sector and the market isn't even determining prices here. People should be rioting, they should be putting the heads of those responsible on pikes. It's not about me being king, it's about not being dominated by other people who color themselves petty lords and improving everyone's liberty so that we all can flourish and own our own property should we choose.

>>76240 Georgism hits small landowners and those of lower income harder than the wealthy. In its purest form, it means even an acre of land with a small house would get taxed even if the owner earns little and tries to grow his own food instead of relying so much on hyperindustrialized society. I believe in universal property tax deductions if property tax is to exist to protect smallholders. The tax should be applied to the difference between the amount of land owned and the cutoff. Separate tax deduction standards would be applied to agribusiness.

The idea's existed for a while, and we don't live in a georgian world. Probably it was tried, and found unfit in the ecosystem of systems we live in. Perhaps it was better for everyone involved, but failed to motivate them to fight for it so much as other systems. If a system can't keep itself going, what use is it? The hope I think is in changing human nature and acceding into a super mind. Everything else is kicking the can of human conflict down the road.

>>76312 Why'd they blow him up? What did he do to them?

>>76314 If I understand you correctly, then you wish for more people to own their own land and not rent, and are under the impression that this sort of tax system will encourage that. What these actually do is make everyone a tenant with the government (or 'the people' haha) their landlord, and call this tenancy 'ownership'. You may continue to live on 'your own' land provided you pay your master your yearly tithe, the threat of eviction forever hanging over your head. And should your lord come to the conclusion at any time that he could very well get more money if he installed someone else on 'your' land, he may demand as much more as he considers reasonable until you either leave or figure out how you may better serve him. This is not ownership!

>>76446 >What these actually do is make everyone a tenant with the government (or 'the people' haha) their landlord Maybe in analogy, but the landlord-tenant relationship is defined by a particular contract. For instance, many rental contracts forbid subletting or substantial modifications to the property, while also holding the landlord responsible for basic upkeep (a requirement that many landlords do the absolute bare minimum to deal with) and also restricting what tenants can do in their own home (e.g. no pets, no smoking, etc.). Either party is also allowed to decide not to renew the contract, typically on a yearly basis. The landlord in particular is allowed to decide who they rent their land to. None of these are implied by taxation; you pay taxes so that government operations *external* to your property can be carried out, and you are required to follow the law whether you own land or not, it's not contingent on any contract with the government. Furthermore taxation doesn't mean that the government has the right to decide who owns a piece of land and there is no option for the government to "not renew"; ideally, as long as you bought the property and you pay taxes you own the land and the government can't say anything about it. But of course, in the good ol' US of A the government changes its mind on that all the time (just ask the indians). Basically, restrictions on land ownership and land taxation aren't at all the same as actually being a tenant. Some people actually do rent land from the government and they're in a very different situation from a typical property tax payer.

>>76447 >The landlord in particular is allowed to decide who they rent their land to. in the USA this is not the case fwiw. Its illegal to discriminate based off all sorts of factors. also very difficult to evict tenants legally and forcefully. Maybe you describe an ideal system of renting but its not what happens at all.

>>76448 >Its illegal to discriminate based off all sorts of factors. Mild restrictions != no choice at all. The government, normally, does not get to decide who you sell your land to, which makes them different from a landlord who normally *does* get to make the decision of who uses their land. Additionally, you can only sue for discrimination after the fact, and unless the landlord is sloppy af it's really easy for them to dodge discrimination charges. >also very difficult to evict tenants legally and forcefully. Eviction is when you are kicked out for non-performance of a contract. It's very easy to simply not renew a lease. Just recently in my area a big apartment block was sold for luxury condo development and hundreds of people were forced to move when their leases were up, even though they tried to block the sale through the courts and by other means. Though enforcement is sometimes lax, the law is definitely on landlords' side in that situation. >Maybe you describe an ideal system of renting but its not what happens at all. I'm also describing an ideal system of taxation. This seems reasonable if you're going to be talking on such abstract terms as to equate the two. In the US we have neither freedom nor a functioning government, so everything having to do with rights or laws is hypothetical.