Tax the Land

"Taxation is entirely about raising money."

It isn't. Government has no need of it. Taxes are essentially shredded and deleted.

All very simple when you realise there isn't a fixed amount of money and it grows and shrinks as required by the economy.

What is spent and what is taxed are inductively connected, not directly connected. That's how we have 'deficits'. It's a function of the accounting.

"What does "releasing real resources" mean, and how does taxation achieve that?"

If you tax employment directly, private firms offer fewer jobs because there would be insufficient money in circulation to employ everybody (wages are insufficient to purchase output due to the tax take). The public sector then hires those who can no longer get jobs in the private sector.

The LVT fails to target the areas required, and it lacks a countercyclical behaviour. An employment tax, for example, collects more when the economy is hot and less when it is cooler. That's part of the automatic stabilisation mechanism.

"I'm puzzled as to how you conceive of government not needing land, when many government services do in fact need it"

Government is largely service based rather than goods based. What it needs is people.

Georgism is based upon a view of money that isn't actually the case. So it doesn't work.

Neither is positive, both are negative. Also the former does not exist in reality, in fact you often don't have a right to build anything in a township thus you have to get a permission from the local government for almost any construction (with some things implicitly permitted).

> Okay then just die?

Or work near where you can afford to live? If there aren't jobs that support living there, live somewhere else? You're presenting an absurd dichotomy.

> The majority are screwed over by an ultra-rich minority, personally I think that deserves addressing.

No, they aren't. Wealth inequality is not a real problem. It's politicized jealousy. Wealth is not zero-sum, and someone having more than someone else is irrelevant.

> Positive rights for all do not require violence provided those who benefit from others not having simple rights will give up their excess for the greater good.

"Right" means it must be enforced. "provided .. will give up" means taking by that same force if they choose to not turn over what they own.

Taking to support a right absolutely requires violence.

> but that's only because those who, by no greater virtue, have acquired wealth refuse to act justly and recognise the equal dignity of man.

Why should they? What is their obligation? You have undoubtedly acquired more wealth than a subsistence farmer in rural India: why do you refuse to act justly and recognize their equal dignity?

What about the alternative: nationalize the land?

Rather than treating it as an asset owned in perpetuity, it could be leased out both as a direct revenue source and as a means of maintaining control and achieving social/development objectives.

In my city, we had a large shopping centre that had emptied out in the 90s/early 2000s. The landowner spent two decades playing chicken with the city over subsidies to redevelop it, and meanwhile it's crumbling and behind fences, probably hosting all sorts of vermin to infest neighbouring buildings. I'd be unsurprised if its abandonment dragged down the rest of the area (the main shopping mall for the area, directly across the street, declined and finally shuttered in 2018.)

If the shopping centre developer had to lease the land from the city on a "renegotiated/renews every N years" basis, it would have gone differently. Either:

1. Once the centre stops covering its costs in rents, the developer simply abandons the lease, likely in the early 2000s, and the city has a still-in-decent-shape shopping centre they can re-lease or redevelop. It never becomes a crumbling wreck in the first place.

2. The developer can make grand promises of redevelopment, but after one or two renewal periods where no meaningful work is done, the city has a lever to respond to the BS, by refusing to renew the lease. Maybe they have to do some minor refurbishment, but the buildings are still usable. This is a much lower-friction process than having to declare eminent domain or a public hazard.

3. The developer tosses money into the void, keeping up with mandated maintenance and land rent, in the hopes that the neighbourhood gentrifies to the point where the complex is viable again. The city at least gets revenue and can enforce a minimum standard of maintenance to keep the lease. Careful tweaking of rent rates will likely eventually push them into one of the other options.

4. The developer has to actually deliver on his plans to justify continuing to pay the rent.

Bear in mind, this is the a fairly benign model for this: using it primarily as a blight-prevention device. A more assertive government could say things like "we won't renew the lease under your Pollution Factory unless you comply with higher-than-national cleanliness standards" or even "we're discontinuing single-family leases here to enable the construction of higher-density housing."

This also would allow redevelopment to take predictable and manageable waves. Rather than the comical scenarios where people get multi-million dollar paydays because they refuse to vacate the last square metre needed for a new development project, there would be a clear process where the new development could be negotiated in advance and existing leases would simply expire with no renewal option.

Moving land ownership to the state also politicizes it in a good way. The famous "the rent is too damn high" guy now has a means to actually manage it. The state can acquire direct control over residential property by refusing to renew leases to landlords, or asking for untenable sums, and then flip around and direct rent them to the residents at more appealing prices. At the scale this would operate at, there's plenty of opportunities to rob Peter to pay Paul.

A lot of poor families in the Bay Area have their house as their only asset. Take a drive through the Mission district for example and see how a lot of these people live; you’ll see a luxury house next to a house that was last maintained in the 80’s. Many of these families do want to sell their places at market price. However, with a land tax they would be forced to sell under market if they cannot afford the tax.