[skybrian]

It seems like the US already has widespread ownership of property? Home ownership isn't exactly rare. NIMBYism is a consequence of widespread ownership; it's small land owners exercising political power.

In the cities, converting apartment buildings to condos is another form of this. Of course, many people believe this is inadequate and we need to go further, with low-income housing and the like. But it's been a long time since redistributing agricultural land made sense. Do you really want a hobby farm?

You might say that an apartment isn't productive property, but with increased working from home it seems like it's blurred a bit? You can run an Internet business out of your home.

Meanwhile we have widespread ownership of public companies via the stock market. Again, not widespread enough.

But another issue is that being a stockholder doesn't feel like ownership. It's just an investment; you don't get meaningful control.

It's not all that clear what meaningful control looks like, for large firms. Maybe this is an argument for smaller firms? Company breakups might be the modern equivalent of land redistribution.

[brightly-salty]

I agree that land has to some extent been widely redistributed in the United States because of the frontier, which continued to exist and distribute land ownership up until the 1880s. However, since the frontier died, land ownership distribution has stayed more or less the same. Compare the coasts to England, where land mobility is even more limited because the frontier died even longer ago. What Georgism and a Land Value Tax would do is to re-create the frontier at the margin of production, where land is free and there is no tax to be paid, but the land itself is still workable without profit. Recreating the frontier would re-introduce land mobility and make land more liquid, while also countering NIMBY desires to keep their land and neighborhoods the way they were fifty or a hundred years ago.

Companies are arguably not very widely distributed. The stock market is ownership of companies by those who do not work for it, so the distance between the worker and the owner is still greater than in small businesses, family businesses, worker cooperatives, or even traditional corporations with Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Trust-busting is one way to decrease that distance, although true anti-monopoly policies like a land-value tax or a tax on intellectual property enforcement would truly remove the privileges these big companies have and allow smaller ones to truly compete.

[skybrian]

I'm not sure what you mean by "recreating the frontier?" Are you talking about cities, suburbs, or rural areas?

Changing property tax rates doesn't change cities or suburbs into something else, at least not at first. All the property is still owned by the same people. People still live in the same houses.

[brightly-salty]

Perhaps I'm explaining it poorly, that's entirely possible. The frontier is where land value is zero, at the margin of production. It is possible to get value out of the land, but only with hard work. Currently this land may be held without using it for production, but it largely doesn't exist. This is because the lack of a land value tax incentivizes landholders to own all land for the purpose of speculation rather than production, even if it's economic rent value is low. With a land value tax, people who hold land purely for speculative sales prices would sell it because the sales price would drop to zero, therefore freeing up those pieces of land for families to move to and work upon. The frontier, the margin of production, where only hard work would make the land valuable, reopens and other land also becomes more mobile because there is a disincentive to holding land for speculative purposes, reducing the price of housing in general and contributing to housing liquidity.

[skybrian]

It seems like the idea is to increase property taxes so much that the land value is zero. However, the tax isn't zero. You are effectively paying rent, but to the government. In desirable areas like cities, the rent on the land may be quite high, because the land is desirable.

A Manhattan where the property owners pay huge taxes to the government (because that's what it would take the drive the land value to zero) would still be an extremely expensive place to own property. This might be a good way for the government to raise revenue, but it's not really a "cheap land" situation. It's one where the government is effectively the landlord and everyone pays high "rents" to the government.

It's plausible that such a scheme would lower the cost of living in some places when it's due to speculation, by popping the bubble. But it doesn't lower the cost of living when it's due to the fundamental value of owning property there.

[brightly-salty]

Yes, I agree with you on what will happen in big cities where the land value is already high. The idea is more that in the Montana's and the Kansas's - where they already give land away free to people who promise to build improvements - there will be even more of an economic incentive to move to underdeveloped states, giving more families economic opportunities, which will then cause network effects as more families move out, causing housing prices to fall in the big cities. Housing prices will become more equal across the nation, and vertical development will be incentivized over urban sprawl.

[skybrian]

If people move out of bigger cities to rural areas, why isn't that increasing sprawl? (That is, there is more low-density development in those places.)

To some extent this already happening. Many people moved out of the city during the pandemic. The people in desirable rural areas aren't necessarily happy about it. They are often upset about all the outsiders with more money moving in.

They probably wouldn't be very happy with their property taxes going up either? When there's increased demand for land in a certain town from newcomers, there should be higher land taxes for everyone according to Georgist theory, to keep the price of land zero.

[imtringued]

I am always confused when the idea is that the price of land should be 0. Yes I agree it should be low but let's be pragmatic. It would be enough if the land price is a fraction of a yearly salary. Say $20000.

[pydry]

It doesnt really make sense from a moral or economic perspective to have it be owned it's purely about tradition and the implicit threat of violence.

A tradition that arbitrarily prints free money for some and arbitrarily imbues economic burden on others.

The electromagnetic spectrum is sort of like land from an economic perspective except it "appeared" only recently. Nobody owns that or puts a price on it. Everybody purchases a limited lease from the government via auction. This was, in a sense, a frontier.

The Duke of Westminster didnt inherit electromagnetic spectrum from his ancestors coz they won a war in 1066.

[skybrian]

Georgism isn't different. It relies on an implicit threat of force, too, since it's all about property taxes. Not paying your property tax (which some people might not be able to afford in places where it goes up a lot) would likely have similar effects as eviction or foreclosure. Otherwise, why pay the tax?

[zozbot234]

Large firms can actually be very efficient in select cases. So public control of them should only extend to genuine antitrust concerns, and then mostly by vertically separating any of the inherently monopolistic and non-contestable "platform" components from the remaining firm, that can remain lightly regulated being inherently open to prospective competition from lower-cost entrants.

[Thorentis]

Distributism is primarily about widespread ownership of the means of production, and does not necessarily include home ownership, though this should be a logical down stream effect.

One early way in which this could be easily done - and which tech companies are leading the way in - is to normalise the idea of workers in a company being given company equity. While it is still a long way off from actually owning the means of production, it should become normal and expected for full time salaried employees to be given a share of ownership in the company. Otherwise, full time employees are simply contractors with extra perks. Having a stake in the company you work for means that companies are actually controlled and owned by the workers, not controlled and owned by the highest bidding investors.

[skybrian]

This is not true, or at least not at larger conpanies. Company stock is just an investment; it gives you almost no say in decision-making unless you have a huge amount.

Employees get more influence (not control) over what happens by working at the company and contributing to internal discussions. That's mostly gone when you leave.

[Apocryphon]

> But another issue is that being a stockholder doesn't feel like ownership. It's just an investment; you don't get meaningful control.

Perhaps more employee co-ops would further that goal. Mondragón in Spain is often cited as an example of Distributism in action.

https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited