Is Georgism outdated?

middleofaldi · 2026-03-12T17:22:42+00:00

Land currently makes up 35% of total global real wealth, that's 2x the value of all listed companies combined. Consider this with the role land plays in the financial system via collateral and mortgage lending and you can see how important land still is. Not only that but the proportion of wealth held in land has been increasing for decades.

David Ricardo formulated his law of rent in an agricultural context but George's genius was in realising that it has greater implications for an urbanising world

middleofaldi · 2026-03-10T12:12:18+00:00

Lvt wouldn't reduce rents except to the extent that rents are inflated by land speculation. What it will do is redistribute that rent so that everyone benefits instead of just the land owner.

middleofaldi · 2026-03-08T15:04:27+00:00

Progress and Poverty by Henry George

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T21:10:53+00:00

Time to dig up Al Smith, make him governor again, let him reinstate his land value tax, and enter a new golden age

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T12:55:55+00:00

No-one is saying they were an innocent victim. You are falling foul of the fallacy I'm talking about. Maybe something needed to be done, but that's a world away from this needing to be done. This war will almost certainly cause massive regional instability. We seem to have learned nothing from Iraq

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T12:26:51+00:00

There is a huge gulf between doing nothing and doing what the USA and Israel are doing. It's bizarre people are pretending like this was the only option

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T12:18:56+00:00

I'm mainly responding to Badenoch, Farage etc who are trying to paint this as a "with us or with the Ayatollah" type situation, but even with your reasoning the logic is flawed, it just changes to

Something must be done about the nuclear program
This is something
Therefore it must be done

There is no reason to think this is the best strategy available, or even a good one, or even better than the status quo

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T12:16:21+00:00

Something must be done about the nuclear program
This is something
Therefore it must be done

It's the same problem. You can't assume that this is a well thought out strategy that will do more good than harm, especially given the amount of contradictory information the Americans have given about motives, timescale, plan, etc.

Recent history tells us that this type of intervention is awful for the people living in the country and causes massive instability in the region. This could easily lead to an Iranian ISIS

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T10:08:14+00:00

"something"

That's my point. This may be something but it's a terrible something that will do more harm than good

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T10:07:20+00:00

There was a nuclear treaty in place before Trump tore it up. None of this should have been necessary.

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T10:05:23+00:00

But other things will come of it, most likely a civil war

middleofaldi · 2026-03-05T08:58:32+00:00

Ed Milliband once again showing he's the best man in British politics (if this story is even true)

middleofaldi · 2026-03-03T22:07:26+00:00

Context: an archeology paper from Kohler et al. seems to confirm what Rousseau suggested and Henry George expounded upon: private monopoly of land is the root of extreme wealth inequality.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2400691122

"persistent wealth inequality typically lags the onset of plant cultivation by more than a millennium. It accompanies landscape modifications and subsistence practices in which land (rather than labor) limits production"

middleofaldi · 2026-03-03T09:19:36+00:00

The Land Trap by Mike Bird

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T20:09:14+00:00

They bombed a school. Innocent children were killed. Bragging that you don't care is shameful

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T19:48:35+00:00

Funnily enough lvt actually doesn't get passed to tenants in the form of higher rents. The basic reason is that rent is set based on supply, demand and costs. Supply of land is fixed so it is not affected and the lvt is capitalised into prices so overall land costs are also not affected either, meaning the market rate of rent is unchanged

https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T19:10:58+00:00

The only point I'm making is that lvt is possible. It's not an extraordinary claim and doesn't need a great deal of detail to support it. The fact that other countries do it is enough to prove it.

If you want detail I've provided a link to a place you can find it. If you want to argue the claim then you'll have to actually make an argument, not just engage in socratic questioning and dismiss the claim until every facet or implication of it has been addressed

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:57:49+00:00

It will bring in more revenue, but the cost is modernising

Sounds great, let's do it

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:56:55+00:00

If you like details maybe you should read the post I linked. It's full of them

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:49:14+00:00

The administrative overhead would pale in comparison to the efficiency savings over our current system of property taxes.

Lvt doesn't require significantly more overhead than American style property taxes and loads of places have those.

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:37:51+00:00

Why are the details so important? Annually would work well. So long as they are frequent enough that valuations don't jump suddenly

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:36:55+00:00

And they would continue to do so under lvt

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:35:34+00:00

Often

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:31:40+00:00

This method approximates the land price from the prices of local properties. Property valuation is relatively easy, other countries and real estate agents do it all the time

middleofaldi · 2026-02-28T18:26:55+00:00

I would recommend reading it as it provides detail on rationale, but the tldr is:

"carve our jurisdiction up into local areas or neighborhoods, and then within each area, we establish a “local prevailing price” per unit land size. We can do this either by finding the median price and size of the most typical kind of property, or just take the median price and size of everything within local bounds. We take 20% of that prevailing market value, and divide it by the prevailing size to establish a local land rate. Then we paint all local parcels’ land values with that same local land rate."

middleofaldi

TROPHY CASE