[snidane]

Georgists divide into two categories. They define land differently, or emphasize different aspects of it.

1. Left wing georgists. Land = resource needed for human life. Humans cannot fly, therefore land is a life necessity. Food grows on land and nowhere else, therefore land is necessary for life.

2. Right wing georgists. Land as a monopoly. Electromagnetic spectrum (5g, wifi, radio waves) cannot have too many owners of a band otherwise you get interference. Google.com domain can be owned only by one entity otherwise you get mess. For actual land (geographical parcel) you hold exclusive use rights, that others have to respect, otherwise you get fights for territory. All of these - geo area, name system, electromagnetic spectrum - constitute a form of land. There are grades of it which differently priced and only one owner can operate it at a time.

Land is still the most important section of economy. Real estate is mainly land speculation. You can observe billionaires investing in real estate and land when there is nowhere else to invest, so it definitely is not piece of worthless nothing that only had value in 19th century when majority of population was still employed in agriculture. Except homeless, 100% of population is invested in real estate. Only tiny portion of money is spent on stocks comparatively.

Georgist philosophy lives completely ouside of the current left right spectrum, both on the political and cultural level. However, if it become the next societal paradigm, you'll see this divide again. It is becoming a real possiblity it'd become the next paradigm because after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.

[notahacker]

I think the division between land as natural resources and land as any non-Schumpeterian economic rent source (so broadcast spectrum rights but not brands because the company created those) is more between traditional and modern Georgists.

But it still runs into the same practical problems. The taxable value of "unimproved" Google.com is negligible (the same value as any other domain name, or vaguely pronounceable nonsense word domain name if you're trying to be really specific with your tax assessments), probably less than they're currently paying their domain registrar for.

If you're taxing billion dollar companies and their founders significantly less, you're taxing everyone else significantly more or providing fewer public services (in George's vision where LVT is the only tax). There's an efficiency argument that letting Googles be even richer is good for all of us because we get so much more stuff from it and people who use land to live on rather than to build social networks on deserve penalising for their relatively unproductive use of the land, but it's not one that necessarily corresponds well to the reality of the sort of CRUD-apps with lockin monopolies Silicon Valley VCs tend to build and the sort of employment and development opportunities the average homeowner has

[AnimalMuppet]

So, if you define "land" as including domain names, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and electromagnetic spectrum, then sure, almost all money comes from "land". I would say that at that point, calling it "land" is pretty misleading, though. A right-wing Georgist who wanted to communicate ought to call it something else, like "monopoly control" or something.

> after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.

Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?

[snidane]

It's called "land" because it is one of the three original factors of production in classical economics - labor, capital and land.

Labor is energy, Capital is accumulation of energy. Land is any natural opportunity.

Domains, patents or spectrums are portions of namespace, string space, idea space, frequency band - some kind of space, in other words land.

> Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?

I don't want to defend anything. It's up to people to decide if they want to burn everything to the ground after exhausting all the economic policities with nothing much to show for it. Real estate keeps getting bigger problem than ever, birth rates plummeting. Continuing the trend will result in a collapse by one of 1. depopulation 2. war 3. revolution or similar event. Since real estate is such a big part of it, georgism - the antidote for misbehaving real estate - seems like the next tool to reach for.

Anyways - everybody who spends a bit of time trying to understand it realizes that it is logically the obvious solution, but is politically infeasible.

[AnimalMuppet]

> It's called "land" because it is one of the three original factors of production in classical economics - labor, capital and land.

That makes as much sense as trying to fit all of chemistry into earth, air, fire, and water. There's a lot more going on in economics these days than "the three original factors of production", and trying to shoehorn everything into those terms doesn't make sense.

Your last two paragraphs assume that everything is going to burn to the ground if we don't have a magic fix. I asked for a defense of that; you gave me a restatement.

And in your last paragraph, "everyone who understands knows it's right". Nice. I'm sure that's some flavor of logical fallacy, but I'm too lazy to dig up the right label to put on it.