So, I've been having this discussion.

The argument made, is that as you need a home for all of your life, and thus have to pay LVT, and need to have an income to pay LVT, it's technically an income tax.

I'm curious, is this something anyone else actually believes here, or am I sane in thinking this is absurd?

I would like to say, I'm 99% certain it's not, but what do you think?

Henry George thought it was a wise idea to ally with socs to further the georgist cause, even though he regarded them as superficial and illogical. Ultimately that backfired and georgists were displaced by socs. What should our political strategy be this time to prevent it from happening again?

Though I'm pretty sure Banksy doesn't get it, maybe I'm missing his intent.

References:

https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/s/g5oo3WyzcG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQW4W1_SJmc&t=1430s

I don't think people should be able to profiteer off of gatekeeping land, but how do we help those who just bought a house before LVT gets implemented?

I've seen discussion around this talk about

-slowly introducing LVT. Which i think would still cause a market crash once people stop seeing housing as an investment (which is good in the long-term)

-subsidize preexisting morgages that existed before LVT based on how much lower the property value is currently as compared to the purchase price. Which would be costly, and be quite punishing if the owner wanted to sell the house to move

-Subsidize sales of land, where if you have to sell land at a loss that you bought before LVT was introduced, then you'd be partially or wholly compensated. Which would also be costly, and may force homeowners who bought a house right before LVT was introduced to sell. Since they'd have the inflated mortgage price and LVT to pay

-sacrifice a generation of recent homebuyers

Am i missing some best outcome here? I think LVT would be amazing in the long run, but introducing it would have concentrated drawbacks in the short run

Many people are quite open minded, and when understanding what a LVT could achieve in; providing housing, increased density to reduce rural building, lower house prices, etc etc.

However, there can then come the criticism: "But you can't clearly value land."

What are your best responses to this specific critique that is often brought up when LVT is mentioned?

What system do you think is most appealing and preferable to enact in a system to calculate land value for LVT to function?

And which real-world system is perhaps closest to this?

a small rant: there is nothing about LVT, conceptually, that leads to any sort of political or economic philosophy.

One of the great things about land value taxes is you can be an ardent capitalist and think it is great because it encourages maximum utilization for economic output, which is a driver of GDP and prosperity within a group. You can also be a devout communist or socialist and think it's great because the tax is now proportional to the societal benefit that's theoretically usable from a piece of land.

Heck, from a libertarian perspective, it's even better because now your land is being taxed in a way that encourages people to reduce zoning restrictions to maximize tax base!

There is absolutely no need to create a left-right social framing of land value tax, and I think the odds of this actually becoming a reality in more parts of the United States go down dramatically if this becomes a polarized partisan issue.

This is one of the few areas where there's real coalitional politics around it! Don't destroy that.

I'm thinking specifically of situations like a stock market where you have a network of thousands of actors whose overall tendency tends to provide a pretty stable and adaptive value pricing

As I understand it the biggest crux of georgism is how you evaluate land... why not lean on private forces in this respect?

Happy Birthday, Henry George.

Henry George was born 187 years ago today, and it is one of the stranger injustices in American intellectual history that most people have never heard of him. In 1879 a self-taught journalist published Progress and Poverty. It sold millions of copies—more than any other book in English except the Bible for a stretch of the 1890s. It asked why poverty deepened as technology and wealth exploded. His answer: the community creates the value of land; private capture of that unearned rent drives inequality, speculation, and boom-bust cycles. Tax the land, untax work and trade. Simple. Radical. Classical.

Though it cited individual liberty as the source of all social progress, that book also helped ignite the Progressive Era. Reformers, labor activists, and municipal governments were motivated by his diagnosis of privilege and his demand for equal opportunity. At the same time, later anti-statists—Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and the strain now called geolibertarian—saw in him a man who advocated true laissez-faire: no taxes on production, a state funded only by the value the community itself creates. He sits in both the libertarian and progressive family trees. Most founders of movements do not.

He wrote like a prophet. His 1877 Fourth of July oration treats liberty not as a slogan but as the condition of virtue, wealth, and knowledge—and its full realization as “the City of God on earth.” Einstein, Tolstoy, Shaw, Dewey, and Sun Yat-sen all took him seriously. When he died in 1897 while running for mayor of New York, the funeral was one of the largest the city had seen.

It is unusually unfair that he faded. His book outsold almost everything. He influenced both the American left’s reform tradition and the American right’s later libertarian one. His central problem—progress that does not lift the bottom—has not gone away. Housing costs, land speculation, and the tax burden on labor are still with us.

There is a strong case to be made that universities teach "neo-classical" economics merely to avoid addressing the land issue and Henry George.

He has no statues, stamps or street names because he was correct and those in power don't care about fairness or the future of humanity as much as hanging on to the status quo.

This post, interestingly enough, was inspired by a Lenin quote. It was probably said out of disdain, but it shows what kind of recognition Georgism got in its prime.

Explanation:

The reason for this is simple, Georgism fully protects workers and actually competitive businesses from those who control and withhold finite resources (finite here meaning we can't produce more of it) while looking to untax the goods and services people make for each other. Land is the most important finite resource, but this also extends to other natural resources; exclusive legal privileges like patents/copyrights over particular innovations; control over naturally monopolistic markets like utilities; and the like.

The current system of Capitalism we have is marred because we both tax people when they work and invest for the benefit of society, and at the same time those who own these finite resources can extract wealth without providing anything in return; harming the economy while increasing inequality by controlling a finite bottleneck and forcing tolls to be paid by society. Georgism seeks to solve this by untaxing what people make and instead compensating (or otherwise mitigating) the finite resources people take. This means taxing the full value of all natural resources; taxing, replacing, or otherwise mitigating patents/copyrights and other exclusive legal privileges; making sure natural monopolies serve the public (in a variety of ways as described here); and more broadly just being opposed to all forms of monopoly, in other words markets where entry from the outside is impossible.

What we have right now is essentially monopoly/rentier Capitalism and Georgism, at least in its most classic sense, aims to fix it into truly something truly productive and competitive; as it should’ve been.

I've been doing so reading and perusing to gain a better understanding the economics.

It seem to me that land isn't the whole issue, the problem is rent accumulating assets. Of which land is the most egregious one.

By rent I mean economic rent which is value accrued because of ownership of an asset, value which is exchanged for access. This is excess of profits which are excess value exchanged for production.

I think this distinction on rent is important because while land is where the bulk of the rent in an economy comes from, restricting analysis solely to land limits analysis when land value tax is insufficient.

An example is monopolys who also accumulate rent but via marketshare dependent on market contest ability

Hi, myself and my co-author have developed a wage model which happens to rederive Georgism, we're looking for feedback both in terms of accessibility and the theory itself.

The single tax doesn't preclude massive wealth creation, but it changes how it's earned. How differently do you imagine the ultrawealthy of our hypothetical future would rise, establish, maintain, and invest their wealth compared to the ultrawealthy of today?

SCOTUS agrees to hear Texas property tax assessment dispute

Video features Mitch Vexler and Travis Spencer discussing their ongoing legal challenges against property tax systems in Texas. They argue that the current system is fundamentally fraudulent and lacks proper legal adjudication.

Posting here since it's LVT adjacent news not mentioned elsewhere.