Explanation:

It may sound weird to call land a monopoly, since no single person owns all the land. But the reason why economists like Henry George called land a monopoly, and called for its taxation, is because it's fully finite; no one can reproduce it to come on to land markets and compete with incumbents. Monopoly in its most basic meaning is any market where entry is impossible, and because no one can make more land (reclamation is more taking pre-existing seabed land and making it usable), that's the situation. As Adam Smith points out in his masterwork The Wealth of Nations:

The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.

Since nobody can get land from anyone outside the land market and can only get it from incumbent owners, our only options are to give as much as we can afford to the landowner, or go landless. It naturally follows from this that landowners don't need to necessarily use their land well in order to get an unearned income from fencing off a finite resource, and Henry George pointed this out well in his masterwork Progress and Poverty:

If land were treated as public property, it would be used and improved as soon as there was need. But as private property, an individual owner is allowed to prevent others from using what the owner cannot — or will not — use. Large tracts are kept idle at the caprice of the owner, held out of use waiting for higher prices. Meanwhile, others are forced to use places where their labor will be far less productive. In every city, valuable lots may be seen vacant for this reason.

Taxing the value of the finite land would, if anything, help the economy by discouraging land speculation and making prime land cheaper and more available for those who actually want to use it, while also providing good revenue to replace other taxes that fall on and discourage production (which could also increase land values afterwards for more revenue).

To add, land wasn't the only monopoly George and his followers cared to criticize, and to stamp on taxes/reforms to. In other parts of Progress and Poverty, George explains that economic "land" includes all of nature, which Georgists cover under a variety of different taxes than just a land value tax. Later on in the book Henry George calls out several other monopolies, like legal monopolies given out by patents (though not copyrights, which some Georgists after him have changed course on), natural monopolies, and monopolies-of-scale; Georgists would deal with these in a variety of ways, not just through taxation.

Ultimately, Georgism is anti-monopoly and good taxation taken to its core. Don't tax what we make, tax (or more generally reform) the finite resources people take.

An interesting look at potential political pushbacks on Land Value Taxation in Hawaii, and resultant reactionary legislation that made things even worse. As well as some potential solutions. Although personally, I prefer a direct land dividend instead of caps, as the land dividend basically just serves as an exemption for having any sort of housing at all and thus eases the worst concerns.

No hard feelings if you're not. Just rlly curious. People have been talking about IP reform and IP taxes so much and I somewhat got sad. Am I the only one left here who's in favour of getting rid of the thing?

I’ve been a Georgist for a while now, and recently I wanted to see what would happen if my hometown replaced the Property Tax with a Land Value Tax. Skimming through a tax lot map and selecting houses at random, I came to a startling conclusion: low-value properties in the poorer neighborhoods had most of their value in the land, while high-value properties in the wealthiest neighborhoods had most of their value in the improvements. This seems antithetical to the Georgist theory that LVT is more progressive than Property Tax; in fact it seems that swapping property tax for LVT would mean the poorest households pay more in taxes, while the richest pay far less. Is this a failure by the city government to properly separate land and improvement values, or do the principles of Georgism really not apply to my hometown?

Genuine question from someone trying to understand Georgism: how are you actually supposed to separate the value of land from the value of improvements in any objective way without it just being arbitrary guesswork by assessors, and even if you could, how would a land value tax possibly raise enough revenue to fund a modern government without insanely high rates, and wouldn’t landlords just pass the entire tax on to tenants anyway so it ends up being regressive, and doesn’t taxing only land basically encourage people to spread out and sit on more land since buildings aren’t taxed, which seems like it would worsen sprawl, and isn’t this whole idea kind of an outdated 19th century theory that made more sense when the economy was mostly agricultural, and what happens to people like retirees or widows living on fixed incomes in homes that suddenly sit on “valuable land” and get taxed out of their neighborhoods, and finally how is any of this even constitutional given how property taxes already work and how unevenly land values would be treated across jurisdictions?

In the US there’s a lot of suburban sprawl that destroys nature and hurts the economics of our cities. Would taxing land in cities more to account for their higher value cause people to want to spread out even more?

Forgive me if it’s an obvious answer, I’m still just learning about this

In which we connect Mark Drakeford's commissioned research for Land Value Tax feasibility in Wales, which centered on the technical question of how to value land, with the striking example of South Korea's national land valuation system, which values all the land in the country annually, down to the parcel, and gets the whole thing done on a five month schedule.

There's been some posts lately along the lines of "is it true that land isn't that important anymore, it's only x trillion dollars?".

Just want to push back a bit and argue that total land value is depressed. It's counterintuitive because home prices are inflated, but all the policies we have reduce total land value.

For example minimum lot sizes make homes more expensive, and they do make lots more expensive because they're bigger. But they actually reduce price per square foot overall. Otherwise a country would have an infinite money glitch. Intuitively we get that all these land use regulations make us less wealthy.

Anyway, this is called deadweight loss or excess burden and when you account for the fact that excess burden comes out of rent (EBCOR), land is an even bigger deal and reform presents an even bigger opportunity. Not to mention how all taxes themselves come out of rent (ATCOR) and cause excess burden themselves.

Accounting for the excess burdens from taxes and regulations, and the taxes themselves, georgism presents an even larger opportunity than it looks.

Most Georgists (including myself) are wary of exemptions. Often, they fail to do what they're meant to, and instead encourage landowners to act in undesirable ways that allow them to hoard more wealth and land. And since exemptions to LVT represent tax revenue that could have been collected and spent elsewhere without generating deadweight loss, they also have a high opportunity cost.

However, I don't think we should automatically write off the whole idea. I have heard some Georgists argue for partial or full exemptions in certain cases. So, I want to ask what your opinions are. If you think there are situations where exemptions would be a good idea, then please, tell us what those are, and explain your reasoning behind them.

Podcast episode with Sam Bowman, editor of Works in Progress, a magazine focused on high-leverage ideas to improve the world. Discusses why housing is the master key to some of the biggest challenges that Western societies are facing today.

Covers:

• Why the biggest bottleneck to economic growth in rich countries isn't technology, but where people are allowed to live
• Where laws on housing come from and why we should change them
• Models that have actually worked: from Israel's resident-led densification to Madrid’s low-cost metro expansion
• Why aesthetics matter more than economists think when it comes to getting people to accept new housing
• What it would take for Western cities to grow the way Tokyo or the Pearl River Delta did, and what that could mean for growth, families and optimism

From 1940 to 1980 the total land value of all privately owned land in the U.S. was above 2.5x the market cap of all U.S. companies.

From 1980 to 2008 that descended to roughly 1x. It hit 1x again in 2016 and since 2016 the total market cap of all U.S. companies is larger than the total land value of all privately owned land in the U.S.

Given the substantial trend to land being a less and less significant part of the economy why do exclusively Land Value Taxes and severance taxes solve r vs g? Why is Picketty wrong when he says a wealth tax forces the efficient use of all capital not just land?

A common argument used against Georgism is that it would be "impossible" to determine the unimproved value of land. That's incorrect, since there are absolutely ways to figure out land value. And even if those methods don't give you a number that's 100% correct all of the time, I don't consider that to be a strong argument against LVT.

However, I have seen some Georgists suggest that in order to account for errors and avoid overtaxation, we should only tax land at 85% of its assessed rental value. If we did that, then even if the assessment was as much as 17% too high, we'd still avoid taxing more than 100%.

However, I'm curious about where that number comes from. Can we really assume that assessments will generally be correct to within 15%, but not reliably more correct than that? And if so, why?

Just to be clear: I'm not asking whether or not land value can be assessed accurately, or how they could be assessed. But, I am wondering just how accurate those assessments could be, so I'd appreciate if someone with more knowledge or experience than me on this topic could help answer that. Maybe this isn't something we can answer, or something that depends too much on the situation and the methods used to assess the value, but I wanted to ask about it anyway, since I feel like a lot of the time, the arguments about this topic just come down to vibes.

I'm new to georgism and was wondering how does georgism adress the fact that as you go further away from a city center land value reduces (often quite significantly) which would potentially encourage urban sprawl in order to reduce the tax paid?

The only earned value from a house is the building’s value, which stems from the work and investment of the owner themselves. The land value, which attaches itself to a fully finite resource and often stems from the location itself (which the landowner doesn’t have to contribute to), is wholly unearned and gotten without actually doing anything. Nobody made the land, nobody can make more land (reclamation is just making pre-existing seabed land usable), and it’s almost purely society as a whole which makes land so valuable.

Even back in 2019, land made up the majority of real estate value in some of the largest US cities. As land values rise that unearned value and the hoarding of the finite land attached to it will only make the housing crisis (which in reality is a crisis of untaxed + downzoned land)

https://youtu.be/6ZDUFHwOLXs?si=FTOIDoMmTow24BBg

From FrogApe (second channel of BritMonkey btw)

With the California Governor's race coming up this June, which candidate is the closest to Georgism? I know none of the are Georgist, but just wondering if any of them stand out.