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by PaulDavisThe1st 1005 days ago
As much as I am a fan of Henry George's basic take on things, I also have an issue with the fundamental concept of "productive use of land". To require that any use of a piece of land generates sufficient income to pay taxes on that land which reflect the highest financial value it could have ... just seems wrong to me.

I don't want all land in its most productive use, and neither, I suspect, does the rest of the world.
2 comments
whimsicalism 1005 days ago
The government can easily subsidize things that it wants to encourage with the revenue it collects from Georgism.

If we want a thing, we should subsidize it directly rather than as a side-effect of a mostly bad policy.

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PaulDavisThe1st 1005 days ago
Well, that requires (to some degree) majority support for the subsidy and thus the thing. If a minority (or even just 1 person) has a patch of land, and is perfectly sincere about want it to be less-than-maximally (financially) productive, they will have to pay the full price.

It's true that this problem doesn't arise under Georgist tax policies (AFAIU) for public land, so there's that. But I still feel a little uneasy about making land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.

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whimsicalism 1004 days ago
> land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.

Only if that land preservation is in the middle of the city ("land preservation" that typically looks like gated-in parking lots). Nature access can and is subsidized in the city.

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bigtex88 1004 days ago
You're missing the main point of Georgism. The main thing is that community-derived wealth (i.e. the value of land, not the value of the property on that land) should be redistributed to the community, as the community was the one that caused that increase in wealth.

Someone can maintain a piece of land unproductively if they want to. They just have to pay for that right, same as anyone else that would want to own that piece of land.

There is a broad range of situations here. No one should want a blighted property just sitting there in places like NYC or LA where homelessness is rampant. However, no one is arguing to just teardown places like Central Park to put in more housing.

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