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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36221 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?

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:

LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale.

@Brannigan:

Georgism at heart is about identifying what is often the most precious possession a person can have, that most of the middle class has spent 30 years of their lives working to pay off, to render to their posterity, and stealing it from them despite the fact that they haven't really done anything wrong.

@laxam

"We know better than you how you should use your land", is roughly analogous to, "We know better than you what you should put in your body".

@Westerly

This strikes me as rationalists rationalizing their own class self-interest. The same way EA just so happens to only support democrat politicians, rationalism coincidentally just so happens to work out extremely well for the types of people that are rationalists. Easy to be YIMBY when you are 25 and living in a rented apartment in San Francisco.

@naraburns

My concern with LVT is that I regard most kinds of property tax (as well as income tax) as fundamentally immoral

@The_Nybbler

Still low-effort is "it's communism, but only with land". But given how bad communism has turned out, I think it's sufficient. The Georgist LVT is equivalent to the government owning all the land and leasing it out to the highest bidder.

@MeinNameistBernd

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.

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.

But isn't it rather distorting and unfortunate that people are "spending their whole lives investing in their homes" in the first place?

Agree LVT as you describe it would be very bad (although wouldn't it still be in a world w/o income tax and with 'investing in homes'?)

The point I was trying to make is - LVT or not - having a significant part of peoples' wealth be "in their homes" just seems strange? Like if you're designing an economy from scratch, nihilist governance or w/e, why would you have that? Whatever part of that isn't construction costs averaged across ownership duration just seems like misdirected economic attention, kinda? Econ 101 will explain how 'markets give efficient outcomes, which is good for all parties, so markets are good and we should have them everywhere'. How are high home prices and 'having value invested in your home' efficient, as a way of organizing the economy, vs having less expensive homes and investing in stocks or savings or smth?

The only thing I can think of is as a sorting mechanism where people use money to prove they're worth being around to other people with that much money, but surely that could be done more efficinetly.

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