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The recent Georgist uprising in the rat-sphere seems to be spreading outward, and gathering steam if anything. Lars Doucet, who wrote the original ACX post that blew up, is now releasing a book called Land is a Big Deal which summarizes his writings thus far.
There was also a major takedown of Detroit land assessment practices by a major land parcel data collector, ReGrid that dropped a few days ago. Major takeaways:
In addition, some fairly mainstream political candidates such as Chloe Brown who's running for Mayor of Toronto, seem to be gaining steam. Land value tax is a large plank in her platform.
I got interested in land reform through the original series of ACX posts, and frankly I'm surprised how interesting the problem is and how overall neglected the topic seems to be. Even extremely intelligent and well read folks I talk to about it are surprised when they learn that land value is usually just pulled out of thin air - the industry standard is to just take 25% of the purchase price and not give a shit about location or any other factors, which seems bizarre upon a critical review.
I've seen some discussion about Georgism/LVT here, but curious if anyone else has been following this?
Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.
Edit: For those new to this idea, a Land Value Tax in it's most basic form simply says we should tax away the value of the land, and only let people who sell land profit off of the 'improvements' they make, such as buildings, restorations, etc. For instance if you bought a piece of land and tried to sell it 1 year later off pure speculation, doing nothing to the land, you would not receive any profit.
My understanding is that this is effectively an opportunity cost tax. I.e., if you are sitting on a valuable plat which could generate 10 M$ in rents with 1 M$ of improvements, the market value of the plat should be about 9M$, and you would be taxed on that value, even if you were only generating 100K$ of rents (including imputed rents).
This is economically very efficient, as it encourages land to be used for its most economically efficient purpose. However, this butts directly up against peoples' real-world desires to "settle" - to establish a home in a place and be able to stay there indefinitely. If, for reasons beyond their control, the price of their property increases, they can be financially forced from their homes, which is about as soulcrushing as being foreclosed upon, while also seeming much more unfair. It destroys a person's ability to make stable long-term plans regarding a very fundamental fact of life. It also destroys residential community, by creating a disincentive to make a community that people want to live in, which has the natural effect of increasing property value. These are already problems with existing property taxes, that would be greatly amplified by taxing away all of the land value (leaving only rents).
After all, most people recoil about applying the same logic in other contexts: should a person's income tax be based on the amount of money they theoretically could be earning, if they worked as much as possible in the most valuable field they are qualified for, in the location with the highest salary? Hard-core utilitarians have seriously proposed this, but the concept of being treated as an economic ends with no function other than to produce social benefit, rather than a sapient being with noneconomic needs and desires makes most people reject this with prejudice.
Is the windfall from selling a house + expensive land gone under Georgism? If my land goes from being worth 200K to being worth $5M, I still get to pocket that $4.8M, right? I think so because the check from the buy er has to so somewhere, but maybe LVT breaks this in a way I cannot understand.
You will be forced out of your home long before that, and all the gains will accrue to the condo developer whose political allies pushed you out (like Dag just explained below).
It's been happing where I live for years, and if "rationalists" want to join in it will mark the point where they became just another parasite class that rationalizes entirely in its self-interest.
Frankly advocating "georgism" is the "break out the guillotines" limit for me, because the victims are my people and the preparators are /r/neoliberal vampires. I know too many retired Microsoft types with two-digit employee numbers who do "land use advocacy" in rural areas to have any illusions about their goals for land ownership, and I'm not going to die a landless serf while they relax in their 2-acre billion-dollar mansions surrounded by a hundred acres of untaxed "nature reserves" that used to be our farms.
If I have to become a neoliberal in order to become a vampire, I may accept.
In all seriousness, yes losing your home to developers sounds terrible but it does promote valuable use of land. At the end of the day it depends on how you fundamentally view land and how it should be used.
From my point of view, having land simply reward whoever squatted there first with no view to their effort on the land is both unfair and a huge waste of potential value. If anything I would say the landowners who get a massive benefit from simply being lucky enough to live in a desirable area are the vampires, as they are sucking away monetary value from the surrounding area by doing essentially nothing.
Pretty amazing how we went from "there's nothing coercive about land use reform" the other day to "the state will seize your land and give it to developers, die in a pod you filthy undeserving squatter"
Merited impossibility happens so fast these days (or is that the wrong name for it?).
I kind of like the LVT on economic grounds but every time I listen to the people who want it I feel a great need to go learn how to use a gun.
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