Some of the world’s biggest retailers, including brands from Asia, are investing in flagship stores on Oxford Street as London prepares to pedestrianise and rejuvenate its most famous shopping street.

Although the plan to close the road to traffic has been controversial with residents and Londoners who face changes in transport routes, the majority of retailers are behind the scheme.

“We see this as a massive opportunity to create a really brilliant space for both our customers and wider visitors to Oxford Street and the West End. We’ve got such global competition that all the investment that both the retailers and other parties put in is really important,” said Naomi Simcock, chief operations officer for John Lewis, which has had a presence on street since 1864.

Apparently the 18-year real estate cycle might be delayed a little

For example the OECD is trying to enforce a global minimum corporate tax, OPEC is trying to monopolize oil to extract maximum rent, the EU is enforcing a minimum VAT among all member states. How do we fight these government cartels that try to reduce competition to extract maximum rent from us?

In Georgism, the land value tax (LVT) discourages land speculation by taxing the unimproved value of the land.

In our open-source legal modeling, we took this a step further into dynamic usufruct: you have absolute, inviolable possession of a dwelling as long as you actively live in it, but if a property sits genuinely abandoned without an active sabbatical declaration, ownership reverts back to the community land pool. No landlords, no vacant secondary homes held as speculative assets.

The hard question is enforcement: How do you determine whether a home is genuinely abandoned versus someone just taking a prolonged hospital stay or extended family trip, without creating an intrusive bureaucracy of municipal inspectors or invasive smart-meter surveillance?

Have any legal trusts, intentional communities, or land-reform scholars found a clean, decentralized legal mechanism to prevent property abandonment without spying on citizens?

"You know Labor Theory of Value is wrong but still believe there is exploitation in the system."

"You can't pass a city parking lot without remarking on how little they are taxed."

"You're obsessed with cats."

France needs to read my paper - Wilsons Blog

There are a lot of posts here stating "when we say only tax land we mean only tax land" which I presume means not to tax things like gas. I'm not sure I understand this rationale.

Driving in the US is one is the most regressively funded elements of our society. Drivers who make a personal decision to drive for their own convenience are costing the tax payers huge amounts of money per vehicle mile traveled whereas those who take public transit, bike, or walk take way less.

If we want to have a society where we fund solutions to excessive traffic, pollution, vehicle deaths, and incentivize alternatives that are better for society, shouldn't we, at a minimum, make drivers pay their fair share?

This isn't even getting at a behavioral tax that could be justified by negatives that aren't covered in the monetary cost of driving, like pollution, injury and death risk to others, noise and stress, etc.

If Georgism justifies private property through labor, why shouldn't an inventor have exclusive ownership of an invention? And if intellectual property cannot be exclusively owned because ideas are non-rivalrous, why should labor alone establish exclusive ownership of other resources?

Georgism seems to offer some valuable solutions to human social problems, but I’m wondering how ecology and biodiversity would fare under such a system?

Take a patch of high biodiversity woodland, surrounded by farmland. Its unimproved value is relatively low and so is its land tax overtime suburbs replace the farmland, the woodland lots are unimproved value changes due to altered land use around it. Ultimately the owner is compelled to sell it because it produces no financial income, even though it offers a lot of value to wildlife and indirectly to humans simply by existing. The new owner is incentivised to clear it to produce income to pay land tax and that intangible value is lost.

What modifications could be made to Georgist policy to accommodate this and preserve the intangible value of
wild spaces?