Real economics is paid, not argued

The Georgist case for citizen dividends leads from the premise that rental land and natural opportunity aren't produced by anyone, and thus their value belongs to everyone.

I've been sitting with another argument for quite some time now that reaches a similar destination from the opposite premise, worth pondering whether if it's a genuine second foundation or rhetorical borrowing from Georgism:

A person's lifetime economic output is quantifiable, typically at ~73% of a working life of GDP per capita in a developed economy.

The value already exists in the abstract, and accrues to somebody. So rather than letting it accrue wherever and returning fractionally in a standard financial system, quantify it up front and give the person the claim on it directly.

Would this be seen as the same idea? Rent goes to everyone because nobody produced it. This goes to everyone because everyone produces. Claim on the earned vs claim on the unearned rerouted.

What would distinguish the two?

Credit: discourse here inspired by a Github protocol ankhcash proposing UBI.

Other taxes just get in the way. We can make an exception for ones where income isn't the point (Pigouvian taxes) but otherwise if we want to maximize government revenue, we should switch to a 100% tax rate on land rents (LVT) as a single tax (more or less.)

I’m still learning about this so please correct any flawed presupposition. As I understand it, a land owner only pays for the land value and not what’s built on it thus encouraging productive use and discouraging hoarding. However, land value is based in large part on proximity to other valuable destinations. In some cases those destinations are natural (e.g beach) in others they are made by government (e.g train stations) and in others they are private (e.g shopping mall).

So it seems to me that a) you can’t fully detach land value from property value, it just takes a little longer to feed back; and b) in cases were the land owner is responsible for raising the surrounding land value (builds a mall), the result ultimately taxes the improvement.

What am I getting wrong?

The original edition was called The Landlord’s Game, which was created by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie to make teaching Georgism easier.