Deutschmania wrote:I think that the main problem here is that @Truth To Power has launched into an immediate self righteous personal attack
How dare you, maggot!
upon all whom
who
dare to critique their notion of the land value tax ,
That's not my notion.
and has neglected to first define what in the world Geoism , also known as Georgism , after it's originator , Henry George , even is .
I realize most of the few people who have even encountered the issue think of geoism as a land value tax (LVT) or Georgism, but I have reasons for eschewing those terms in favor of location subsidy repayment (LSR):
1. LVT assumes land is privately owned and taxed
ad valorem, so a system of leasing publicly owned land, as in Hong Kong and China, is not included. LSR is more inclusive.
2. The goal is to recover the publicly created unimproved rental value of land for public purposes and benefit rather than giving it away to private landowners in return for nothing; but if LVT is imposed at a low rate, land value is dominated by the expected
future relationship between the land rent growth rate and the discount rate, not the current rent. If it is imposed at a high rate, land value is dominated by pre-paid tax, not the current rent. Either way, LVT does not achieve the desired goal. LSR is thus also more accurate.
3. Henry George was the best-known proponent of LSR-like arrangements (principally for his first and by far most successful book, "Progress and Poverty," in which he first advocated the famous "Single Tax" on the unimproved rental value of land), but he was not the originator of the idea, so calling LSR "Georgism" is ahistorical. The French physiocrats had proposed a single tax on land rent ("l'impot unique") more than a century before George, and classical economists including Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill had advanced arguments for similar methods of raising public revenue. Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" can be understood as one long argument for taxing land rent. Patrick Edward Dove advocated recovering land rent as the principal if not exclusive source of public revenue in his book, "The Theory of Human Progression" nearly 30 years before George wrote "Progress and Poverty."
4. I do not call or consider myself a Georgist because Georgism is about Henry George, just as Marxism is about Marx, and Christianity about Jesus, and I differ with George on some substantive points:
- Pigovian taxes are useful in addition to LVT, so I don't advocate George's Single Tax on land rent.
- People must rightly be compensated for the forcible removal of their natural individual liberty rights to use land, so I advocate a universal individual exemption (UIE) from LSR, rather than repayment of 100% of land rent as George advocated.
- George favored abolition of patents but not copyrights; I would abolish both.
- George advocated free trade because it is in consumers' interests, but there are valid reasons to impose tariffs and other trade sanctions on countries whose governments and elites exploit and oppress their own populations, damage the environment, etc. to obtain competitive advantages.
- Like George, I advocate government issue of fiat money, but George did not understand the necessity of also requiring private commercial banks to hold 100% reserves to cover their demand deposit liabilities.
Now I have heard of it , as I happen to be a weird autistic geek , for whom radical social theories such as these constitute a restricted interest of mine . But I don't suppose that all that many other people would have ever known of such a set of ideas . After all , Georgism hasn't caught on in influential impact , the way that Marxism has . And as Marx himself asserted , Geoism is an overly simplistic reductivism , in that it focuses on the value of land , to the exclusion of the value of labor.
Marx was (surprise!) incorrect. In fact, it is amusing that Marx would call George overly simplistic when Marx was trying to pretend that no one but the workers contributes anything to production. Marxism is
all about overly simplistic refusal to make the crucial distinctions: it essentially consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker.
George was more of a traditional classical economist than Marx, and accepted the labor Theory of Value, which Jevons had already refuted in 1871. Like the classical economists -- but unlike Marx -- George was aware of the fact that providing tools, buildings, machinery, training, etc. to initiate and enable the production process is a contribution to production that earns a return, just as labor is a contribution that earns a return. What
isn't a contribution and
doesn't earn a return is owning the land, as it would have been there, just as available for productive use, had the land's owner and every previous owner never existed.
It is ironic -- and tragic for all humanity -- that Marxism has been so much more successful than geoism because deep in the bowels of Vol III of "Capital" where no one would ever read it, Marx actually admitted that Henry George was right -- but said this fact should be ignored, as it would remove the rationale for violent seizure of factories by the proletariat!
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- By GandalfTheGrey
- By Puffer Fish