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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Apparently the UK's entire net worth was £10.7 trillions in 2020 according to the ONS, their chief statistic agency. What's remarkable is that a whopping 60% of that is "non-produced, non-financial assets".

That's a fancy way of saying land. Why isn't this fact more well known? Should we expect it to be different for other countries? And why aren't more people talking about Georgism?

Because Georgism remains a bad idea with a weird appeal to a small subset of smart people? Essentially, there's no difference between Georgism and the government owning all the land outright.

Essentially, there's no difference between Georgism and the government owning all the land outright.

This is so obviously wrong, it's hard for me to think you're serious.

That's like saying

Essentially, there's no difference between income taxes and you being the government's slave.

or

Essentially, there's no difference between capital gains taxes and communism

Like, yes there are. There are enormous, dramatic, obvious differences in all three cases.

In each of the three cases, the government has a duty to seize all you own or earn if you do not pay them part of its value in perpetuity. Any infinite debt is equivalent to non-ownership.

Are you indifferent between paying property taxes (as happens today) and the government literally seizing control of all lane?

If not, they are not equivalent, so stop saying they are equivalent.

You’re zooming out to a ridiculous extent. You may as well say “the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, so they own everything, and we live under communism”

That level of abstraction is so useless as to not even be false.

What indicia of ownership does Georgism grant to the government beyond taxing it? Surely there's a lot more to ownership than the right to tax something -- such as the right to take possession of it.

And if you don't pay taxes in a Georgist system ... what happens?

In the current tax system they often take possession of the things they claim to be owed.

Taxation of a thing is ownership of that thing, including the right/ability to take possession of that thing if the taxed person doesn't pay up.

Ownership also implies the right to take possession of the thing regardless of whether the person pays up. If I own a home and rent it to you, then I can choose not to renew your lease and repossess the house, even if you've never missed a payment.

Sounds like eminent domain.

But I'm not dead set on whether the government owns everything and rents to people, or the people own things and the government just constantly steals from them.

I am not more strongly against a land tax then I am against income tax. I consider them both a bit abhorrent in their implications.

The government has to pay you for the property in order to exercise eminent domain.

It has to pay you at "fair market value" and not what you are willing to sell it at. So it is setting rules for itself on how it uses its own property, but its still their property.

Nonetheless -- if you own property, you don't have to pay its fair market value to take possession of it.

I get that you prefer a more libertarian oriented government (or so I'm inferring), but it feels like you're just trying to catastrophize non-libertarianism with your word choice. Income tax is what it is; insisting that "taxation is theft" or "the power to tax is the power to destroy" doesn't persuade anyone, and doesn't accurately carve reality at its joints. We don't live in a communist society, private property does exist, the state doesn't own everything, we aren't slaves or serfs, taxation is a meaningful burden but not analogous to ownership, there are constraints on the exercise of state power, we have a right of exit, etc.

More comments

There is a vast difference - the government already owns all the land, it is just taxed in a different way. Georgism isn't changing ownership of the land, it's changing the way the government taxes the land.

Georgism isn't changing ownership of the land, it's changing the way the government taxes the land.

I think this strikes at the root of the issue, and it's something many seemingly misunderstand. I have respect for people who want a low-tax regime as possible, but even there you can replace a lot of taxes with a LVT, so in some instances the cumulative tax burden could even be lower than before. High taxes are not in themselves a goal worthy of striving to, but tax efficiency is, even if it happens to land a lower level than before.

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