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Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

progressandpoverty.substack.com

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Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#91

Post by bombcar »

skybrian wrote: post #84
brightly-salty wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree with you on what will happen in big cities where the land value is already high. The idea is more that in the Montana's and the Kansas's - where they already give land away free to people who promise to build improvements - there will be even more of an economic incentive to move to underdeveloped states, giving more families economic opportunities, which will then cause network effects as more families…

If people move out of bigger cities to rural areas, why isn't that increasing sprawl? (That is, there is more low-density development in those places.) To some extent this already happening. Many people moved out of the city during the pandemic. The people in desirable rural areas aren't necessarily happy about it. They are often upset about all the outsiders with more money moving in. They probably wouldn't be very…

The theory goes that as those new rural communities develop the land value will begin to increase - which will in turn encourage densification to keep up.

We see this historically in frontier towns that had absolutely no limits on sprawl (as land on the outskirts was available to anyone willing to stead it) but still had city centers develop and usually to the construction limits of the time.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#92

Post by bombcar »

geocon wrote: post #16
Apocryphon wrote: post #3

Nice to hear examples of some economic ideologies that didn’t catch on, but speaks to material concerns that still exist today.

Georgism was extremely influential in its time, Progress and Poverty was the second best-selling book after the Bible and 200,000 people attended Henry George's funeral. Only it's been kind of written out of the history books since it doesn't fit easily in the socialist-communist-capitalist narrative people have in mind for the 19th and 20th centuries

The biggest marketing trick of the 19th/20th has been convincing everyone that you have to pick one of those three, or some combination thereof.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#93

Post by anamax »

larsiusprime wrote: post #41
TimPC wrote: post #4

Georgism and Distributism is interesting but short of a plan to actually transition the tax infrastructure in that direction this article reduces to an unactionable history lesson. Still worth reading, but not powerful enough for those who want economic change. I'd argue that transitioning is an extremely hard problem. The Georgist system taxes property at extreme rates. In particular, the taxes on property ownership…

Two things: 1) "In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property." Not true. Only the unimproved value of land is meant to be taxed. This amounts to a complete exemption on taxes on buildings. The current proposal that is often on the table is not to go for classical 100% Georgist LVT, but to simply collect the exact same amount of property taxes we do no…

A shopping center without parking is almost always less valuable than one with parking.

Yet, Georgists think that a shopping center without parking, one with parking, and a parking lot should all be taxed the same.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#94

Post by anamax »

brightly-salty wrote: post #5
TimPC wrote: post #4

Georgism and Distributism is interesting but short of a plan to actually transition the tax infrastructure in that direction this article reduces to an unactionable history lesson. Still worth reading, but not powerful enough for those who want economic change. I'd argue that transitioning is an extremely hard problem. The Georgist system taxes property at extreme rates. In particular, the taxes on property ownership…

I think you might misunderstand Georgism, or maybe I did a poor job explaining it. Georgism does not propose taxing improvements (buildings etc), only the actual land. So many peoples tax burden would be decreased, and if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage, they are the ones paying the tax, not the people taking out the mortgages.

> if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage

In the US at least, mortgages are on both the land and the buildings.

Getting easy details like this wrong suggest that you don't actually understand how property works.

I get that you have a theory with properties that you and some equations, but that doesn't imply that your equations accurately reflect reality.

As the saying goes, reality has a surprising amount of detail.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#95

Post by brightly-salty »

anamax wrote: post #94
brightly-salty wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might misunderstand Georgism, or maybe I did a poor job explaining it. Georgism does not propose taxing improvements (buildings etc), only the actual land. So many peoples tax burden would be decreased, and if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage, they are the ones paying the tax, not the people taking out the mortgages.

> if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage In the US at least, mortgages are on both the land and the buildings. Getting easy details like this wrong suggest that you don't actually understand how property works. I get that you have a theory with properties that you and some equations, but that doesn't imply that your equations accurately reflect reality. As the saying goes, reality has a surprising amount of detai…

I do understand that mortgages are on both the land and the buildings. We were talking about land only though. It is irrelevant to the question of who pays the land value tax that the mortgage also includes the buildings.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#96

Post by [deleted] »

TimPC wrote: post #44
larsiusprime wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: 1) "In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property." Not true. Only the unimproved value of land is meant to be taxed. This amounts to a complete exemption on taxes on buildings. The current proposal that is often on the table is not to go for classical 100% Georgist LVT, but to simply collect the exact same amount of property taxes we do no…

My default reaction to 1) is that I dislike it. I feel like the incentive to labour to accept the tax of unimproved land value instead of property tax is the removal of income and sales taxes that accompany it. Taxing unimproved land value instead of improved land value in a system as close as possible to the current one feels like a massive wealth transfer from homeowners to condo developers. As it is, condos repres…

[deleted]

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#97

Post by ericd »

TimPC wrote: post #73
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the counter examples are things like roads, pipes, wires, and Public transit which make to up a high percent of city and state budgets and scale with density.

These examples are fair. At the provincial level Transport, Pipes and Wires all are small enough expenditures to not warrant their own category breakdown in the budget and are lumped into a 14.6% of budget other category. At the city level it's tricky because the breakdown my city provides in the budget separates into capital and operating rather than other categories. From what I can tell from the 50 page report, wa…

How old is your community? Because road expenses are relatively low when they're new, but many communities aren't being fiscally responsible enough to budget appropriately for road maintenance.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#98

Post by colinmhayes »

anamax wrote: post #93
larsiusprime wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: 1) "In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property." Not true. Only the unimproved value of land is meant to be taxed. This amounts to a complete exemption on taxes on buildings. The current proposal that is often on the table is not to go for classical 100% Georgist LVT, but to simply collect the exact same amount of property taxes we do no…

A shopping center without parking is almost always less valuable than one with parking. Yet, Georgists think that a shopping center without parking, one with parking, and a parking lot should all be taxed the same.

Taxing people for doing good things disincentivizes people from doing good things. Taxes shouldn't be a punishment for being successful. Georgists think real estate should be taxes based off the unimproved value of the land, what the owners do with the land is up to them, but if they don't use it well their taxes will put them underwater and someone else will make better use of it.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#99

Post by anamax »

brightly-salty wrote: post #95
anamax wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage In the US at least, mortgages are on both the land and the buildings. Getting easy details like this wrong suggest that you don't actually understand how property works. I get that you have a theory with properties that you and some equations, but that doesn't imply that your equations accurately reflect reality. As the saying goes, reality has a surprising amount of detai…

I do understand that mortgages are on both the land and the buildings. We were talking about land only though. It is irrelevant to the question of who pays the land value tax that the mortgage also includes the buildings.

"Who pays" was relevant when the claim was that banks holding mortgages would pay.

Let's review: "if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage, they are the ones paying the tax, not the people taking out the mortgages."

You don't understand mortgages in a way that is essential to your argument. Banks holding mortgages don't own the property. At most, they own the right to grab the property if they're not paid, which is a very different thing.

Re: Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

#100

Post by smeeth »

hushpuppy wrote: post #62
clairity wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property." No. once again, invariably, multiple people make this mistake in every thread about the land value tax. 'economic rents' are not the colloquial 'rent' we pay for housing we don't own. economic rents are UNproductive , meaning simply income produced by ownership itself, rather than in the productive del…

> 'economic rents' are not the colloquial 'rent' we pay for housing we don't own. economic rents are UNproductive, meaning simply income produced by ownership itself, rather than in the productive delivery of service (in this case, housing). LVT only seeks to tax away that unproductive part (economic rents). the productive part would include the costs of mortgage(s), insurance, utilities, upkeep, and a small profit (…

You appear to be arguing that if you spend income in a productive way then the income was productive income.

That's simply incorrect, it's not how economics works. For example, if I stole $2000 from you and used it to fix houses/invest it would not magically become productive income.

The comment above you is pointing out that excess income a landlord makes because people are willing to pay a premium to lease a scarce or rare good they own doesn't contribute to the rest of the economy in the same way selling a hotdog does. Ergo, unproductive income.

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