[standardUser]

I will take a look at this. But in the past, my (meager) attempts at understanding Georgism have not been very successful.

I'd love to see some examples of what specific laws would be implemented, what taxation would look like (in actual percentages and dollar amounts) and things like that to understand what a system could look like in action.

[peteretep]

"The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value. Georgists argue that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes such as on income, trade, or purchases that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend."

[epistasis]

There's a lot of different forms, and much like Pigoivian taxes that are intended to offset negative externalities, it can be hard to exactly find the right number. But even if one doesn't know the exact number, be it land rent or negative externality, getting closer than the arbitrary $0 can provide improvements.

For real estate, at the optimum land rent, land would exchange hands at a value of roughly $0 (structures on top of the land would modify the total property value). Given the high transaction costs of land, and of changing ownership, there are other forces that shift the true land price away from $0 under a full LVT.

There would need to be exemptions or other ameliorating of the coercive effects of full-land-rent LVT for those living in a primary residence. Nobody wants to force grannies out of their homes, for example. But the coercive effect of land taxation would otherwise mean that land would be used far more productively, with more stable prices and above all more affordable prices. It would also require getting rid of density restrictions that are not based in actual health and safety (ie pretty much all of them). But even somewhat small changes in density can open up massively more land for use.

It doesn't take many homeowners to completely shut off the market for land and corner it all. Not many people watch zoning boards, and fewer pay attention to how limited land use is, and even fewer who are in power do not directly benefit by the massive bubble on land prices.

And we really do have a massive bubble on land prices due to rentierism. So any sane deflation is going to require a gradual phase-in of an LVT, with probably 2+ decades of gentle deflation of land prices. And as soon as that starts in, there are the makings of a tax revolt. In California, we have been suffering from the tax revolt of Prop 13 for 50 years, and we are barely seeing any cracks in the army of anti-tax Prop 13 supporters.

So the politics of a full LVT are extreme, especially in a land where every middle class person is supposed to own a bit of land and defend it like a castle, and often when that defense means stopping any change. A full-on LVT is meant precisely to stop land hoarding, so as long as a majority of people see that land is theirs' to hoard, it's unlikely that an LVT will be passed. Unless imposed from in high by a technocratic elite that's trying to maximize social benefit, rather than individuals looking only to maximize their sole benefit.

[valuearb]

It’s an environmental anti-pattern.

[pgreenwood]

Can you elaborate on how you reach that conclusion? A taxation system than encourages more efficient use of land leads me to the opposite conclusion.

[epistasis]

Edit: I phrased something very very poorly in my comment: "But even somewhat small changes in density can open up massively more land for use.". This should instead say that small changes in density can allow less land accomplish far more use. The entire idea is to make sure that land is not wasted, which means that humans will use less land overall, and will let more of it stay as nature.

No, the anti-pattern is sprawl and living far from other people, impacting huge amounts of land at low density.

Look at any suburb in satellite view, and see how much area it takes to get to, say, 40 houses. Compare that to a standard apartment complex with park space. Now add in all the roads that are needed to service the suburban detached housing, which requires driving for every single trip be it kids going to school or picking up some groceries. Then all the extra insulation, building materials, roofing, needed to create housing that is still far less energy efficient to heat and cool than an apartment building.

There are two efficient living forms: 1) urban life where needs are mostly within walking distance (be it a town of 5,000 or 500,000 or 5,000,000), and 2) isolated farm life where you only go into town infrequently because it takes too long, and you're kids take the bus.

Suburban living promotes daily driving for every task. Check out this map of consumption-based carbon emissions, which roughly track with most other pollution:

https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

Georgist taxes greatly shrink those huge red belts that are in between cities and farmland.

[colinmhayes]

People who live in dense areas use the least energy on average.

[rebuilder]

Do you have numbers on that? The last time I looked it up, over here at least, that wasn't really the case. It seemed that while people in cities use less energy on personal transportation and housing, they consume much more goods and services than people in rural areas.

[epistasis]

Services are usually extremely low carbon, and shifting consumption from goods to services is a form of "carbon degrowth" without economic degrowth. And a dollar spent on "good will typically have far far less environmental impact than cars, and inefficient heating/cooling of houses. It would take an absolutely massive amount of, say, clothes to match the amount of embodied carbon that goes into manufacturing even a single car. Or compare 35 $1000 high end new phones, at 79kg of emissions each [1], to the typical new car which has an average price of $35k. The iPhones are the CO2 equivalent of 16,000 miles driven in a 2017 Prius, excluding the carbon from the manufacture of the car.

It's really hard to spend money to catch up to the carbon emissions from fossil fuel activities like driving, heating, and flying.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-iphone-x-environmental-repor...

P.S. See also this extensive map of carbon consumption per household that I posted in a different comment:

https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps

[mannerheim]

Personal transportation and housing are precisely the source of most energy usage:

> "The average emissions in New York City are about 30 percent less than the U.S. average," said Dodman. "This is because the primary factors contributing to individuals' greenhouse gas emissions are their use of energy and transportation. New York City residents tend to have smaller dwellings than the average American, so their heating needs are less, and they are also more reliant on public transportation."

https://www.livescience.com/13772-city-slicker-country-bumpk...

[jlg23]

Apparently the answer is in the rule book as well (from the WP article):

"The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and a monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game. A win in the anti-monopolist or Single Tax version (later called "Prosperity"), was when the player having the lowest monetary amount has doubled his original stake."

[BirdieNZ]

Let's say you have a current property worth $1,000,000. 75% of the value is unimproved land, 25% is the capital improvements (house etc.) It's being rented out at $40,000 a year ($3,333 a month). 75% of the rent is economic rent of the unimproved value of the land, 25% is for the house.

So a 1% land value tax would be $10,000 a year. A 3% LVT would eat up the entirety of the economic rent.

However, the yield on that property would go down from 4% per annum to 1% per annum, so the value of the land would drop.

Any politically realistic implementation would involve progressively increasing the LVT and reducing other taxes over time, so the first year might be 1% LVT, but eventually the price of the property would drop such that a 100% LVT wouldn't be unreasonable (although an 85% LVT or thereabouts is often thought to work better).

[sokoloff]

A 1% property tax would be $10,000 per year. As I understand LVT, a 1% LVT would be $7500 per year in your example.

[sooheon]

Georgism is a pigovian tax on individual land ownership and rent collection. It would reduce or remove taxes arising from labor or capital entrepreneurship, and purely tax the zero-value-add rent collected by the "landed gentry".

Actual percentages and dollar amounts is impossible to give in general, but the basic idea is that returns to pure ownership of land (without improvements) should approach zero. This should eliminate the risk-free speculative ownership of empty lots downtown that are just waiting to cash out on rising land prices due to improvements made by other capitalists and collected taxes.