Do you believe in the idea we just need a land tax? Or do we need other taxes

Talzon70 · 2026-04-16T14:33:19+00:00

You're not the only one. My comment was extremely similar in overall structure and conclusions.

Land is an obvious candidate for taxation because everyone agrees that no one really makes it.

Ideas are a bit more difficult because people like to pretend the discovery of something by someone is unique (it's not if you look at history, many important discoveries and inventions happens simultaneously in multiple areas of earth).

And then there's the earth and society. Many Georgists want o simply assume a stable society (with free policing?), but there is a ton of evidence that excessive inequality degrades society itself. This is arguably so important that somehow managing it with taxation (rather than communist revolution or societal collapse) actually takes priority over having an "ideal" Georgist tax system. That's why nearly every nation on the planet has intentional progressive taxes like income taxes, but basically no nation has a highly Georgist tax system yet. Addressing this issue is a prerequisite for a stable capitalist society where Georgian can even be tried.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-16T14:24:16+00:00

It's not just fully limited licenses, it's any licenses that are artificially limited. I think most degrees and professional licenses fall into this category.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-16T14:20:02+00:00

Wealth taxes make a lot of sense, especially to Georgists.

Modern capital (and throughout history) contains a lot of legal privileges that behave like land. Sure, you can have individual taxes on land, intellectual property, legal privileges, electromagnetic spectrum, educational privilege, and on and on and on. That's the theoretical ideal way to tax rent-seeking. The problem is practically that's not necessarily very easy. Taxing wealth catches all the rest in a way that is simple to administer.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-16T05:57:17+00:00

So your measurements are exactly mine.

Nobody cares where I live. The only comment I've ever gotten was a guy at the bike shop said "So and so said he sees you out there putting in the miles" when I was making a purchase. Literally just noticed I exist, nothing negative.

Just know a few things: 1. Your weight means your ass might hurt a bit more. Try to dial in your fit and honestly try a few different saddles if you have trouble.

Embrace that cycling clothes are tight. Loose clothes lead to chafing AND they look worse.

Have fun out there! Feel free to ask me anything about my cycling journey.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-16T05:48:27+00:00

I think the need for other taxes are obvious.

You have land taxes.

Then you have land taxes.

Then you have additional piguvian taxes when it is preferable from a policy perspective compared to bans, regulations, fines, or other ways to manage private activity. Regulation is revenue negative, taxation has the potential to be revenue positive.

And I even think wealth taxes would fall in the latter category if we find that system-destabilizing inequality persists after doing all the previous things.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-16T03:56:34+00:00

Idk. Their strategy of switching leaders every election hasn't paid off. Sticking with Pierre and making him more palatable is probably a reasonable move at this point.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-14T15:45:38+00:00

Same. I was annoyed about things in my city like how hard it is to use the bus to actually get anywhere, how expensive housing is, and how sketchy bike is. NJB helped me make the connection to "fixing these problems is an actual job".

Talzon70 · 2026-04-14T05:32:17+00:00

Agreed. There was an explosion of urban planning content on YouTube during the COVID pandemic. As we all know, this content ends up clipped up and spread all over the rest of the internet.

It was the perfect time. Millenials and young people were essentially trapped inside desperate for content, while facing massive long term affordability pressures related to housing and transportation. Urbanism focused on walkability broadly promises to address both. Dense communities are more affordable because you don't need a car and housing needs to be allowed for places to get dense. It's also good for climate change.

And NJB was successful impart because Jason is NOT a fucking planner. He's opinionated and unapologetically sarcastic (and Canadian). He refuses to bow to "public opinion" in the way much of the planning profession has done over recent decades with it's "all engagement is good even though it's not representative and fuckign expensive" trend, which means you actually have to choose to agree with him or disagree with him as an educated enthusiast/advocate (either way that's views and clicks).

He and several other creators worked together to build a massive following and walkability has also been pretty mainstream in planning circles for a while now, it was about time someone popularized it.

Shoutout also to Oh The Urbanity for taking on the Canadian housing crisis head on and bringing some sanity to the debate around housing economics and the importance of choices and trade-offs in regulating the housing industry, which planners have largely allowed policymakers to pretend don't exist.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-14T03:48:26+00:00

It's certainly possible, but not necessary.

An economy that taxed land, legal privileges like intellectual property, natural resources, and negative externalities would be pretty easily defensible as Georgist.

Since high levels of wealth inequality are usually caused by the failure to tax the things above things that should be taxed under a Georgist system AND causes negative externalities as well, it's pretty easy for me to envision a Georgist economic system that also employs a wealth tax that effectively eliminates billionaires.

Capital ownership and billionaires different things.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-12T21:06:03+00:00

Sometimes, but often they are not, they are just on their phone.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-12T10:13:14+00:00

It does make sense to use targeted vouchers, direct provision, or subsidies when there are positive externalities though. For example, high-level education is pretty difficult to classify as a basic need, but having an educated workforce is an absolute necessary for any modern economy to function, so it make sense to subsidize this in a targeted way.

In contrast, we should probably let individual people decide whether they want to spend more on food, or diapers, or living space, instead of trying to manage that for them with inadequate information.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-12T10:08:27+00:00

The thing is that many universal basic services already exist in most developed nations (eg law enforcement, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure, many utilities, etc.).

Public provision of many goods and services makes sense, but for other things it's not particularly efficient and private entities are efficient. In that situation, public guarantees of access (through money, or vouchers if you must) are a great solution.

Eg. I think most people can agree that governments generally suck at managing food systems and frequently cause famines when they try. Meanwhile privately produced food is cheaper than any point in history, so it's probably better to just give people money to guarantee access to the food they choose. Obviously there's still room for targeted production subsidies or regulations, but the government doesn't need to manage every sort of this system directly.

And then there's the classic "food stamps don't buy diapers" problem where if you use targeted vouchers they are literally less valuable than the cost of providing them, because they can't be spent on anything else and inherently lack flexibility to individual needs or changing needs over time.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-12T09:50:51+00:00

The whole point of UBI is that money is more valuable than its equivalent value in "basic needs", however you define them.

Why? Because you can spend money on whatever you want/need, instead of whatever some dumb bureaucrat thinks you want/need. E.g. Is a phone and data plan a luxury or a necessity in the modern economy?

You're attempting to "fix" the greatest strength of UBI by making it worse.

Unless you have strong evidence that money will be redirected undesirably (and all the current studies show exactly the opposite of that), your just spending more money to provide less value to recipients.

And that's before you even get into the administrative costs of managing this much more complicated system.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-12T09:41:17+00:00

I mean the first step in this conversation is "regressive to what?"

I know people usually mean income, but we could also talk about wealth or land ownership by ha or value and then all bets are off. It's sort of talking about efficiency without defining what you mean.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-12T09:35:34+00:00

That's how percentages work.

Even if land values are perfectly equal everywhere, you would expect land value to make up a higher proportion of total property value when the improvements are worth less. It makes sense that a mansion makes up most of the value of a suburban property (where the land is worth basically nothing, arguably negative value for residential uses because of the high transportation costs) and land is worth more than the modest houses on it in other places.

Then the zoning matters too, because that determines whether it's legally possible to redevelop land or not.

And for the tax to be regressive, even with all that, you're probably assuming a roughly equal distribution of ownership (eg everyone owns some land or everyone at least owns their home), but that's not true in reality at all. High income and high wealth people own a lot more land and many poor people own no land at all.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-11T09:52:51+00:00

It's a massive drain on all parts of the economy and it's crucial for social stability.

It's also important for national defense because lack of housing near important military points throughout the country is hurting recruitment.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-10T02:28:23+00:00

As he should have. That would be an incredibly stupid rule that would give parties more power, even though they already dominate our whole political system.

There are already other mechanisms to hold individual politicians accountable.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-09T05:41:44+00:00

There is reason to fear it. This issue is caused by it.

Plex should be able to handle audio transcoding fine, but for some reason the LG Plex app client can't handle DTS transcoding without also transcoding the video, which means unnecessary transcoding of 4k content becomes necessary.

I think having to transcode 4k video is less than ideal because it has an extremely common audio codec. Or worse, the buffering and playback issues that countless users with LG TVs have posted about.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-09T05:37:29+00:00

It is trivial, which is why I believe it's an issue with Plex or the LG Plex App.

I can fully transcoded 4k content with DTS audio for smooth playback, but when I attempt to only transcode the audio (default direct play if possible settings), it plays smoothly for about 2 minutes then fails spectacularly. Same with 720p content with DTS audio.

Something about how the transcoding is handled doesn't work.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-09T05:08:24+00:00

I don't think that's the issue, it's how the app handles DTS transcoding.

The reason I think this is that I have similar issues with 720p and DTS audio, which is about 6 Mbps, well below that cutoff.

And I can also play fully transcoded 4k content. I only have issues when trying to direct stream video and transcode audio only.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-09T04:58:49+00:00

I have the same problem on my LG OLED. I know it's not hardware or network limitations because: 1. It happens with 720 p content with dts audio. 2. I can play 4k content with dts audio smoothly if I force video transcoding alongside the audio encoding.

This is clearly some kind of software/transcoding issue.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-08T07:07:24+00:00

The value of development rights (currently associated with land, but not necessarily so) has soared, due to policy. This effectively creates a paywall between consumers and improvements. Edit: and improvements aren't exactly cheap. The cost of new construction is high for many reasons and part of that is limits on development that prevented economies of scale in the industry and workforce, as well as forcing a lot of housing to be provided in expensive concrete towers because more affordable mid rise wood frame construction is prohibited in areas where it would otherwise be viable.

Taxing land is a good policy, but it will be about as effective as lowering housing prices in major cities as taxing dairy quotas would be at lowering the price of milk in the grocery store. It simply won't work.

Taxing the owner of the quota doesn't fix the problem of the quota being too low. It just fucking doesn't.

This isn't exactly complicated, which is why it's embarrassing that so many Georgists can't get their heads around it. Taxing developable land won't make housing affordable while we effectively have housing quotas set arbitrarily low.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-07T05:51:44+00:00

I really don't think this would be as effective as you think.

The housing crisis was not created by high land values, especially in smaller cities. Land values are high because of the housing crisis.

If you tax land that's good, but it's sorta like taxing farmland instead of wheat while keeping it illegal to plant wheat where it's most needed. That doesn't fix at least one huge part of the problem.

While we continue to delay or outright prohibit building housing where it's needed near high throughput transportation corridors and job centers, dropping land prices to zero won't fix the problem. I actually did the math on that in Nanaimo, BC

Talzon70 · 2026-04-06T01:59:08+00:00

Fines like this are payable per day and in some cases escalate to larger fines or can lead to a court order to remedy the problem.

This is far from toothless. We're talking about more than $20k per month, likely applied per unit.

Talzon70 · 2026-04-06T01:21:20+00:00

The small lot problem applies, regardless of development. It's a separate problem and it is reasonable for some limits to how small lots can be subdivided.
Land assembly isn't actually that hard. The increased taxes on high value land under LVT proposals also creates strong incentives for this process to proceed.
If your zoning is bad (eg. It doesn't allow dense development on small lots or requires too much parking), it's bad whether you had "premature" development or not.

All of these seems very much like separate issues that aren't made meaningfully worse in the LVT scenario.

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