<- Back
Comments (97)
- tptacekI’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
- noduermeIt's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.Serendipity, I guess.
- skew-aberrationI think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
- bombcar"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it.If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success.
- bariumbitmapThere's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
- GodelNumberingGeorgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.
- PeterHolzwarthA compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.
- anonundefined
- lifeisstillgood>>> boring scut work of implementation. Now I realize that the boring scut work is actually what precedes, and even leads to, changing the consensus.See every enterprise project. The code for s written, the app is promoted as working in this department and the the project gets funded and approved. Under some other manager
- marcosdumayEh... After finishing the article, did I miss the section where the author discuss if Georgism actually works?Did it actually increase the amount of housing? Reduce wealth disparity? Got enough taxes so cities can make commutes better?
- anonundefined
- tclancy[flagged]
- cyberaxYes, it works. It makes childless gloomy cities that are now also going bankrupt (see: Austin, TX).Because why would you move into a shoebox-sized apartment that costs as much as a single-family home and doesn't have any grocery stores nearby (see: Manhattan)?But don't despair! Your unit 31E will be allowed an individualized door knob and a space for a whimsical 4x5 inch placard.
- throwitaway222I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.
- GimpeiThe LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.