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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Why's Georgism gone sour for you? I've only been tracking it loosely and casually, not to the point of going hunting for counter-arguments to it, and I'm certainly not qualified to generate them on my own.

I think that its central claim, namely that it's not distortive since you can easily separate out "true" land value and development, is straightforward false. In practice, what we call land value is extremely dependent on the development around it. As a simple toy example, a neighbourhood group that works together to keep the streets clean increases the land value of their own houses, which in a pure georgist world would actively impoverish them.

That said, directionally speaking I'm not entirely opposed to moving into the direction of more georgism, I'm just opposed to going full george. Right now for example we have a questionable NIMBY feedback loop where real estate owners have an incentive to block any development nearby even if it does not actually bother them just to drive up their own land value. This means that you often have a small number of dedicated NIMBYs that genuinely are bothered by something, and a larger associated block of people that are tentatively on their side just because when in doubt, more land value is always better for you. A well-chosen land tax around 1 or 2 % might balance this out a bit better ( assuming 5%+ as full georgism). But you then also need to be dedicated to this tax. In the worst case, you grant extremely common exceptions so that everyone is paying land value taxes from de facto something like 20 years ago, and then it's strongly in everyones best interest again to drive it up.

Similarly, there are some decent georgish models for resource extraction such as the norwegian petroleum tax / oil fund system. I'm also in favor of those.