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Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.
A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature. One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same. In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land. Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both). Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values). And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference. But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value. (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)
Georgism is just communism by another name. And it is theft of workers wages. It assumes create land value isn’t work. But I can find expensive land a mile away from free land in many major US cities.
What Georgism is; it’s a solid internet gospel for a certain group of people.
Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital. If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise. People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents. Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.
Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen. Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them. It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work. Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.
At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.
I just don’t deny that real estate people create value. It’s not some zero deadweight costs thing. Building communities which is what real estate developers do creates value and that is largely captured thru land appreciation.
There are people who just get lucky in the stock market too. Then there are security analysts that get capital to the right firms and hold management accountable. Just because some people are free riding doesn’t mean the people doing good work aren’t creating value and deserve to be compensated.
Most the people who are Georgists seem to be in tech. And there’s a lot of zero productivity going on there. People focused on making products more addictive, bitcoin, HFT etc. Zero sum games for the most part.
If we ignore the stuff about the workers creating the value (which makes this real labor-theory-of-value communism, not just Georgist land communism), the issue is that one landowner improving his land increases the land value of adjacent parcels. But then if you look again, you see that typically multiple landowners have improved their land, and each is providing a positive externality to all the others. Georgism proposes to tax away not only all the positive externalities, but also all the value the landowner contributed to their own land. It's hard to see how this is better for the landowner than just losing the value of the externality!
We want people to create positive externalities. Which is why Georgism doesn’t work. You don’t want to tax good things.
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