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Georgism

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Re: Georgism

#61

Post by CydeWeys »

MiroF wrote: post #51
CydeWeys wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tax should tech companies pay then, given that the only land they really need is cheap rural land for data centers? This taxation system does make sense for land, but there's way more economic activity happening that isn't associated with land than there is that is.

> there's way more economic activity happening that isn't associated with land than there is that is. First, that is an actively contested claim. Pointing to tech companies as "way more economic activity" is laughable because (even though they occupy a huge proportion of public discourse) tech companies are a very small percentage of economic activity globally. Second, intellectual property holdings would be consider…

> tech companies are a very small percentage of economic activity globally.

This flat-out isn't true. Tech companies alone are a significant part of economic activity globally (e.g. they make up the majority of the top 10 largest companies in the world by market cap). Once you include all white collar work, which generally tends to be similarly divorced from land value, you're talking about the majority of the world economic activity at this point.

> Second, intellectual property holdings would be considered "land" in the Georgian sense.

Oh really? How the hell do you value that if not based on the actual income derived from said intellectual property? I.e. this is just the taxation regime that already exists.

Re: Georgism

#62

Post by aww_dang »

tlholaday wrote: post #45
aww_dang wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rather than nationalize land outright, the single taxers would levy a 100 percent tax on the annual land rent — the annual income from the site — which amounts to the same thing as outright nationalization." --Murray Rothbard Georgism is reasonably well known among free-market enthusiasts and libertarians.

Rothbard's error: under land nationalization, state actors decide who uses the land; under single tax, who uses the land is determined by auction.

The single quote is understandably a narrow view of the larger article. My view is that the 100% tax on income from the land removes profit motive and price discovery in a way which is similar to outright nationalization. However, I agree with your assessment of the quote as a stand alone item.

https://mises.org/library/single-tax-economic-and-moral-impl...

Re: Georgism

#63

Post by MiroF »

CydeWeys wrote: post #61
MiroF wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's way more economic activity happening that isn't associated with land than there is that is. First, that is an actively contested claim. Pointing to tech companies as "way more economic activity" is laughable because (even though they occupy a huge proportion of public discourse) tech companies are a very small percentage of economic activity globally. Second, intellectual property holdings would be consider…

> tech companies are a very small percentage of economic activity globally. This flat-out isn't true. Tech companies alone are a significant part of economic activity globally (e.g. they make up the majority of the top 10 largest companies in the world by market cap). Once you include all white collar work, which generally tends to be similarly divorced from land value, you're talking about the majority of the world…

> market cap

Market cap doesn't measure economic activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

Look at this. Among the tech companies that are high, most of those are consumer electronics or something else not purely related to tech.

Re: Georgism

#64

Post by toohotatopic »

MiroF wrote: post #41
toohotatopic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. This can be true for one generation, but the next generation can choose another profession. People don't become farmers if they have to pay too much.

> This assumes that the farmer has to remain a farmer. How does it assume that?

Otherwise it wouldn't be a monopoly and the farmer wouldn't have to accept the offer. The farmer, or rather, the human, can source resources from other markets and sell goods or services that don't depend on farmland.

Once that happens, and nobody accepts the high price, the landlord has to lower the price until somebody accepts his offer.

Re: Georgism

#65

Post by CydeWeys »

xiphias2 wrote: post #54
CydeWeys wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not being concrete. How do you properly tax a tech company whose land allocation is negligible compared to the overall value of the company? Tech companies have less than 1% of their value tied up in land. If they're all-remote and cloud-based, then they have $0 in land. How would you even tax them if the only tax is based on land? Also, I live in an apartment. Should my tax be $0? Or if I owned and lived on l…

The whole point of this tax type is encouraging efficiency. Tech companies are usually efficient, and taxing them less increases their efficiency even more. At the same time their harmful effects should be regulated (GDPR is an example of such regulation). Countries and states that let tech companies thrive are winning the race for capital.

The whole point of taxes is to fund government spending. That is a large amount of money you need to bring in every year. Taxing based on income seems to make the most sense for that, not "taxing based on efficiency". If tech companies have billions of dollars but aren't paying taxes just because their business doesn't happen to use land, how does that make sense? Why is land efficiency the only thing that matters? The government needs to fund its spending, and they're not going to ignore large profitable tech companies for taxation merely because said industries happen to not be land-intensive.

Re: Georgism

#66

Post by watertom »

All income should be taxed the same.

We should move to a a progressive tax system with zero deductions, eliminate capital gains, and inheritance taxes. Make the top tax rate of over $5M be 54%.

We already know the effective tax rate for each bracket. Once we factor in the additional tax revenue from the top bracket we can adjust the other rates.

I would consider a true capital gain exception. For the investment in new and private busines investment that generates revenue. This horseshit of buying stock and holding it for a period of time is NOT capital investment. The company does not benefit from the purchase of stock once they go public. It’s a scam to allow the rich to avoid taxes.

Re: Georgism

#67

Post by NumberWangMan »

A lot of people focus on the fairness of the Land Value Tax, but the consequences of using one are just as interesting if not more. This tax has been put into practice in some cities in Pennsylvania, and there's evidence that it has a whole bunch of positive effects on the city, due to the way that it incentivises improving your property and making the most of your land (since you're going to be taxed on it pretty much the same either way).

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-g...

I think we should be replacing property taxes with land value taxes pretty much everywhere. Aside from the benefits mentioned in the Strong Towns article linked above, putting the right incentives in place to build more densely in high-demand (aka high land value) areas would be a boon to making cities and towns more walkable and more amenable to public transit, and therefore reducing sprawl and pollution. It wouldn't get us all of the way, but it would help.

Re: Georgism

#68

Post by _0ffh »

alexmingoia wrote: post #25
JSavageOne wrote: post #17

I've yet to see a single valid objection as to why LVT (Land Value Tax) should not be the primary tax, yet it's nowhere to be found in the political dialogue. Such a shame that the majority of the tax burden instead falls on the working class while the landowners get a free ride.

Land value (like all value) is subjective. There is no inherent value to land. What one person is willing to pay is not the same for everyone. Appointing someone to imagine a price for the purposes of taxation doesn't change this fact.

Yup, tax sounds problematic. Another way would be to declare all land common property and rent any piece of it out to the highest bidder. The market solves the problem of pegging it to a value.

Re: Georgism

#69

Post by EGreg »

chii wrote: post #5
EGreg wrote: post #3

There 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.

I upvoted you, to counteract the downvotes.

You are correct... obviously science and technology have improved the lot of the ordinary person, and made us all much, much richer.

The main issue is that automation tends to hurt workers while it helps consumers. And since most people are both — they have to work harder and harder just to stay in place. Until we put in place a UBI and universal health insurance, pass overtime laws to shorten the workweek etc. we will have technology creating demand shocks for human labor, as happened before the Great Depression on farms, and has gradually happened in manufacturing, and is about to happen to white collar jobs and menial jobs.

In the 50s, a single man could support an entire household on one paycheck. Women didn’t compete with men for those jobs, but rather did jobs that now are not valued by the market. Automation didn’t make employers not need their employees, so they would retain them for decades as they built experience.

Today, we have two year stint— wait that was 20 years ago, today we have temp jo— ait no, that was last decade, now it’s the gig economy with no protections. You see where I’m going with this? Automation and outsourcing is once again putting people in a race to the bottom.

Yes, electronics are cheaper than ever. But some things like rent / land just go up in price, they need a UBI. Paid for by land taxes maybe.

Edit: funny, I am getting downvoted also, for agreeing with you

Re: Georgism

#70

Post by tsimionescu »

np_tedious wrote: post #33
nabla9 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is brilliant way to solve it so that value and market-value meet. Keep the land always in market. It's called Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST). Land owner would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a tax on that value. The owner would be required to sell the asset to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price. If you value the land high for any reason and want to keep it,…

The land most people live on does have market precedent so this would be unnecessary. This idea could still be workable for unimproved land

Then we're back to square 1: how do you determine the unimproved land value of improved land, so you can tax it?
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