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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?
I made a top-level comment here a couple of weeks ago that tried to outline some of the major updates on the Georgism discussion in the ratsphere.
(Editing for less strawmanning.) I think that a lot of the problem is that Georgism strikes at the heart of fundamental value differences for folks. Many people seem to equate Georgism with Communism, or redistribution of wealth, which I don't find convincing.
For instance:
@bnfrmt:
@Brannigan:
@laxam
@Westerly
@naraburns
@The_Nybbler
@MeinNameistBernd
These are not cherry picked responses - all of these had at least 10 upvotes, and in many cases 25+.
Some of the responses were less charitable, which has led to me getting heated on this topic, such as people literally calling me a vampire (and getting 15+ upvotes) for arguing for a type of land reform.
It sounds like you believe that discussing a proposal rationally must involve decoupling values from policy?
As I understand it, Georgism is a particular type of tax policy. As such, it is trying to achieve a particular end (funding government) via a particular method (land value taxation). There are many possible approaches to evaluating policy; because of the particular field, I'll start with what a professor of mine called "tax logic." It states that the overarching goal of a scheme of taxation is to maximize revenue while minimizing nth-order disruptive effects. (This is why you get so-called "tax loopholes;" it's an attempt to achieve a better fit between revenue-extraction and tolerance for revenue-extraction.)
However, the "nth-order disruptive effects" that we're trying to minimize covers a ridiculously broad field of types--we're looking at everything related to tax-tolerance, from the direct and mechanically obvious (taxing everyone at 100% of wealth crashes the system pretty immediately) to the squishy, intuitive, values-laden metrics of "taxing [activity A] at triple the rate of [activity B] seems unfair; double the rate might be justifiable, but triple is excessive." The whole point of measuring against tolerance is the insight that tax systems operate most efficiently with a high rate of buy-in; unless a high percentage of people find the overall system generally acceptable (with low-level grumbling), you're going to lose more from enforcement costs than you gain via enforced compliance.
Values-based evaluations of tax policy are essential, because if a policy does not adequately map to the values of those taxed, you don't get that buy-in, enforcement costs skyrocket for less and less return, and your shiny theoretically-perfect tax policy collapses in ruin. Tax logic is exceedingly pragmatic, and one of its cornerstones is recognizing that optimized tax policy evaluates for the society you have, not the one you want.
Interesting point, I hadn't heard of tax logic laid out in this manner before. It's not something I have thought much about, I am attracted to Georgism more on the economic basis. The idea of a tax without deadweight loss etc.
That being said I think if you take a look at the political will of the people in the U.S., with regards to land ownership, there is a growing clamor and need for housing reform. I don't know if Georgism will fix the problems we have, but it certainly seems useful enough to try. Landowners are a powerful political bloc though, so your point makes sense.
So much of that is a problem of zoning and environmental laws. Which don't seem directly related to a Land Value Tax.
Environmental laws are one thing, which leads to a whole different rabbit whole.
I'd argue that restrictive zoning laws are often the result of strong blocs of landowners, aka NIMBYs, lobbying against changes to zoning that would lower their property value. Thus creation a vicious circle.
Upzoning single-family-residential land would radically increase the price of individual lots. Under restrictive zoning a developer could only build a 0.60 FAR single-family-home with a white picket fence and a back yard for a golden retriever on that lot. Upzoned, that lot can now hold a much larger apartment building, with each unit renting for less than the house would have, but exceeding the value of the house in total.
What upzoning does is drastically increase the pressure on single-family-home owners to sell, and subject those who want to stay in the area to increased density, traffic, sight-lines into their yards and homes, loss of green space, strain on existing schools and other public services, and, to be blunt, the presence of people not rich enough to be able to afford a single-family-home in that neighborhood. Some of these worries are more morally-acceptable than others, but all of them are real, and unrelated to greed.
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