Georgism
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Georgism
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Re: Georgism
#2Is it what Norway is doing with their Sovereign wealth fund financed by nationalizing oil surplus?
Re: Georgism
#3There was a time - for over half a century - when Progress and Poverty was the best known economics book in the world. If you buy one, it has a who’s who of people endorsing it, from famous economists to writers to presidents.
And somehow, in the last 50 years, we have all forgotten it, and some people only remember the land tax. Not only that, but the same debates rage today, about why there is still so much poverty even while there has been so much progress. Libertarian people know Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard before they know Henri George, about whom Milton Friedman had a lot of good things to say.
Re: Georgism
#4Back in a different life, I worked on the Lyons Inquiry which looked at English Local Government finances. Final report was issued in 2007[1]. As part of the work we had to look into Land Value Taxes as a supplement/alternative to Council Tax and Business Rates.
There's nothing wrong with the idea. The big issues were mainly around introducing a new tax system and the massive upheavals and uncertainties businesses and people would face as part of the change. Winners and losers, etc. Given the uproar surrounding the later introduction of Universal Credit I'm glad Sir Michael chose not to recommend LVT in his report.
Anyway - anecdote time. One of the big questions we asked at the start of the Inquiry was: "Why tax property?" After long consultations with the most senior Experts and Gurus across Government and Academia the answer came back: "Because it's there."
[1] https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20070411120...
(I'm mainly commenting because it's an opportunity to show off the Inquiry's website. I built that! I had to do it in my "spare time" because we didn't have a budget for the work. This version is from 2007, but the original code was written in 2004 in PHP and after that most of the work was adapting the site to add events, display responses received, etc. Simpler times!)
Re: Georgism
#5There was a time - for over half a century - when Progress and Poverty was the best known economics book in the world. If you buy one, it has a who’s who of people endorsing it, from famous economists to writers to presidents. And somehow, in the last 50 years, we have all forgotten it, and some people only remember the land tax. Not only that, but the same debates rage today, about why there is still so much poverty…
> why there is still so much poverty even while there has been so much progress
there's been an objective improvement to the % of people in poverty over the past few centuries.
It's just that there's an even larger improvement to those who were rich, relative to the improvements to the poor.
If you had a choice, you would choose to be poor today, than to be poor a century or two ago.
Re: Georgism
#6There was a time - for over half a century - when Progress and Poverty was the best known economics book in the world. If you buy one, it has a who’s who of people endorsing it, from famous economists to writers to presidents. And somehow, in the last 50 years, we have all forgotten it, and some people only remember the land tax. Not only that, but the same debates rage today, about why there is still so much poverty…
> why there is still so much poverty even while there has been so much progress there's been an objective improvement to the % of people in poverty over the past few centuries. It's just that there's an even larger improvement to those who were rich, relative to the improvements to the poor. If you had a choice, you would choose to be poor today, than to be poor a century or two ago.
Why does this matter?
Re: Georgism
#7Back in a different life, I worked on the Lyons Inquiry which looked at English Local Government finances. Final report was issued in 2007[1]. As part of the work we had to look into Land Value Taxes as a supplement/alternative to Council Tax and Business Rates. There's nothing wrong with the idea. The big issues were mainly around introducing a new tax system and the massive upheavals and uncertainties businesses an…
> The big issues were mainly around introducing a new tax system and the massive upheavals and uncertainties businesses and people would face as part of the change. Winners and losers, etc.
It's funny how we introduce massive upheavals all the time - ending this social program here, injecting trillions of dollars there, but this one addition is considered infeasible.
I suspect that the primary problem with George's theory is that he underestimated the political power of rent-seekers.
Re: Georgism
#8There was a time - for over half a century - when Progress and Poverty was the best known economics book in the world. If you buy one, it has a who’s who of people endorsing it, from famous economists to writers to presidents. And somehow, in the last 50 years, we have all forgotten it, and some people only remember the land tax. Not only that, but the same debates rage today, about why there is still so much poverty…
> why there is still so much poverty even while there has been so much progress there's been an objective improvement to the % of people in poverty over the past few centuries. It's just that there's an even larger improvement to those who were rich, relative to the improvements to the poor. If you had a choice, you would choose to be poor today, than to be poor a century or two ago.
Yes, and peasants under feudalism were much better off than they were as cavemen - none of that justifies economic/social stagnation
Re: Georgism
#9The founding father of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was heavily influenced by Georgism. He believed all income derived from land, including appreciation of the land, should be heavily taxed. He incorporated it into three principle of the people, which is the cornerstone Kuomintang ideology.
But nobody would argue Taiwan is a Georgism heaven right now. Why? Rich and political powerful people own the land. Georgism as a practical matter is very difficult to push through.
Re: Georgism
#10This part about Georgist economics is quite startling.
You have an economical theory following in the footsteps of classical economists at the beginning of industrial revolution like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It becomes incredibly popular with massive amount of followers. You were not an intellectual back then unless you knew about this school.
Somehow it offered a way out of the societal mess, but costing great fortunes to the economical parazites - monopolies (neo-aristocracy).
Some people in the school argue it was strategically removed from the society by funding a competing economical theory which removed land from the 3 factors of production and kept only 2 - labor and capital. Thus divert the attention from the real parazite (monopolist, rentier and landlord - someone who monopolizes land) to the conflict between employer and employee as depicted in the Marxist view on societal problems - which actually never existed.
So the new aristocracy (Rockefellers, Carneggies and others) decided to fund and found universities with the main purpose of destroying Georgism and promoting red herring economical theories instead - such as Marxism and neoclassical economics, both of which remove the parasitic monopolist and landlord out of the picture.
By not fighting with their enemy directly and thus making the georgist theory indirectly more popular it was a smart move for them to silence it down by promoting other theories instead, which is exactly what happened - from the most popular theory of economics to nonexistent to this day. No mention of it in economics curricula around the world - which suggests economics as taught in universities today is a fraudulent wannabe science or form of propaganda or both.
http://dollarsandsense.org/blog/2017/04/the-dissing-of-henry...
Mason Gaffney (famous Georgist) wrote a lengthy piece on this topic - Neoclassical Economics As a Stratagem against Henry George
http://masongaffney.org/publications/K1Neo-classical_Stratag...