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by whimsicalism 1001 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.

1 comments

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.

> 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.