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by imtringued 1893 days ago
You either have a sufficiently large land value tax or let the government rent out land instead of selling it.

In both cases the land would become a liability that you constantly have to take care of instead of being an "investment".

Productive work like building on top of land should be rewarded, waiting for a train station to be built in your neighborhood is not productive work that should be rewarded.

Pretty much every economist thinks that the work <-> reward relationship should be as tight as possible. However, most of them don't think of anything other than cutting taxes and strangely enough they insist on being able to take advantage of negative externalities (CO2 or illegal waste disposal in general).

2 comments

Hi fellow Georgist! What a great summary.

And yes it does not stop at LVT which encourages useful development and discourages speculation and keeping land/homes empty. It extends to anywhere where society/the public/the commons is not being adequately compensated by private interests for the benefits they take. Goes from natural resources to pollution and paying for the waste processing of the products you produce (no more saving 5c by using a plastic bottle which costs the public 10c to dispose of).

> However, most of them don't think...

That’s not the impression I get. They seem to have all kinds of broad beliefs.