[anamax]

> A buy or sell offer system works pretty well for determining value.

Georgists, which are the subject of this thread, explicitly say that taxes should not be NOT based on improvements, just the "land value". So if the improvements have significant value, buy sell doesn't work.

I'll let you fight that with them.

> Profitability (no matter whether your abstraction for ownership is property or political favour) as a fundamental concept is a tax on the poor to the benefit of the wealthy.

Twaddle. The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid.

To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free.

[Schroedingersat]

>The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid.

>To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free.

That's pay.

Profit is proportional to capital, not effort (even if it requires effort to materialise). Wage or earnings don't prodce the same pathological effects as profit, even if one person earns $500/hr and another earns $5/hr, the inequity and power imbalance is a constant and relatively quite small compared to exponential inequity entailed by making earnings proportional to wealth.

The assertion that a factory, or a 1000 hectare farm, or a house that you don't live in can be owned is a positive statement, not a brute fact of the world, or a necessary consequency of commerce and trade. As soon as you maoe that statement you are saying that owning these things entitles the owner or shareholder to an exponentially increasing share of control over the world and other people while your farmer and garbage man slowly go bankrupt.

[anamax]

"exponentially increasing share of control"? "Exponential" has a meaning and the situation you're describing isn't consistent with it.

If there's an exponential at work here, it has a vanishingly small exponent.

People who don't get paid for access to their capital don't make said capital available to others.

Note that all capital starts as "I made x but I'm going to spend less."

[Schroedingersat]

d/dt(wealth) = a * wealth - constant

This is the definition of an exponential and the definition of profit. If under your system you can profit in terms of proportion of a real, finite commodity which is essential for life (ie. control more land in proportion to how much land you control on average with a known strategy available to anyone) then your system definitionally has runaway wealth inequality and will necessarily end in violent collapse or totalitarianism.

The inclusion of the constant prevents entry to the system by people with less than a threshold level of wealth and skews the benefits towards wealth levels where the constant is small. The result also holds as long as the term on the right is polynomial or larger.

[salawat]

Except Georgists determine your unimproved land value by looking at the improved land value of everyone around you. Otherwise, the proximity to Disney wouldn't mean squat in the post-upthread.

[anamax]

> Except Georgists determine your unimproved land value by looking at the improved land value of everyone around you.

How, exactly, do you get from improved land value to unimproved land value?

It's arguably possible to approximate the value of a hotel+land across the street from Disneyland. How, exactly, do you determine what fraction is hotel (improvements) and what fraction is land?

Looking at other hotels in the area just tells you (an approximation of) the difference between the hotel values. That's not enough to determine the absolute value of any hotel.