A focus question I keep returning to, partly out of a dark sense of humor, is what kind of slogans I would have to write before people would be willing to shed blood, to fight, in the name of George, or in the name of Approval Voting, or Minor Parties, or any other system whose merits are abstract and which is neither minarchist nor soviet.
I sometimes feel like part of the problem is that there is no villain to get mad at. Our enemy is mostly just ambient incompetence, myopia, legacy systems and institutional sclerosis. Perhaps we can call it Moloch.
I think it is pretty clear who is standing in the way of Georgism: Landowners. They stand to lose the most, and those with a lot of property typically have a larger influence on economic property. The problem is that there is not a single organized landowner you could paint as the bad guy. It is a distributed mass that is hard to counter.
I think you’re right, Georgism doesn’t get passed because it goes against the interests of landowners who have overwhelming political influence. But if the actual problem we’re trying to solve is high rents, maybe that doesn’t require full Georgism? Maybe we just need to make construction legally easier. There’s strong opposition to that too, but not as strong as literally all landowners.
Wait! Is the actual problem we’re trying to solve “high rents”? From everything I’ve read, it’s “inefficient use of land”, in other words, failure to maximize land-rents collected, which are now taxed at a high percentage of theoretical value.
In some sense, bulldozing 10 single-family houses to build a 30-unit apartment does “reduce rent” on a per-unit basis, but it increases it on the land. As designed, as far as I can tell. It’s unclear what bulldozing them to build a datacenter does to rents, but that may be necessary if the powers-that-be decide that’s the income level needed to pay the taxes.
I feel like suburban homeowners are the key group here. They have the most votes among landowning groups, and the strongest motivation to oppose anything that reduces property values because their home represents all of their wealth. There is also the way-of-life question, because the economics of the suburbs seem really difficult under Georgism.
Something like an exemption for the first sale after the tax is passed would be a simple solution to taking some of the sting out, and makes sure no one has to unilaterally lose their investment to a tax.
Actually, in my father’s day, there was this one infamous landlord who people used to point at. Who was it, Claude? “Peter Rachman” yes that was it. People used to talk about “Rachmanism” which apparently just meant “being a cruel and unscrupulous landlord”, but which could probably be expanded to encompass home owner associations organizing to lobby against zoning reform if efforts were made, because when people hear ism they expect to see a civic ideology.
Unfortunately one of his most prominent sins was excessive subdivision, so he wasn’t exactly a nimby.
And also, yeah, in reality — for instance in New Zealand which has it especially bad, where substantially more than half of the families in the country own land — land investment is just a popular way of keeping savings. The last Labour government felt a need to promise, despite confessing the will, not to touch it.
I mean, yes. Real Estate is about the only perpetual bond still available to buy. Current owners stand to lose their entire investment (in the land portion, at least, but also in the improvements because they can’t be separated and bankrupt is bankrupt). Those who hope to invest in real-estate lose their dream, which is a surprisingly powerful factor in public sentiment.
The key seems to be (like other communist nationalizations) painting ALL landowners as the bad guys. Or trying to convince people that “only the big guys” will be impacted, but that’s so transparently a lie that it probably doesn’t fly anymore.
I feel like it’s still Moloch to blame, if a sufficient bribe to landowners would cost less than indefinitely continued rent-seeking.
I don’t have any calculations to offer in support; but I would generally expect an individual landowner’s time preference to be lower than society’s as a whole, so I suspect this is indeed the case.
So the actual reason is that landowners don’t want to be seen taking a bribe, because that would involve acknowledging they have been knowingly rent-seeking since 1879; and the government doesn’t want to openly bribe them for moral hazard whatever; so even though everyone would be better off by their own lights it can’t happen. And that’s fairly moloch-flavored.
if a sufficient bribe to landowners would cost less than indefinitely continued rent-seeking.
Note that if made in public, for legitimately-owned assets, and voluntarily accepted, the term is no longer “bribe” but “purchase”. A whole ton of my objections go away if the government (or even a private entity) is buying land and then figuring out the best use for it, charging optimal rent to the people who own the improvements separately.
How many older people who own land do you know, who’re happy with CURRENT inheritance taxes? Saying “land value is no longer inheritable, it goes only to the state” seems about as likely as any other implementation of massive tax increases.
I know! I own property myself. Obviously, people don’t like big sudden changes that cost them a lot of money. That’s why I asked for more incremental approaches. Though, I guess the problem is that small changes will not get a lot of support from non-property owners—because the effect is small—but will get opposition from large owners because they see the effect.
people don’t like big sudden changes that cost them a lot of money.
People don’t like ANY changes that cost them a lot of money. The only saving grace of gradual rollout is that it’s easy to continuously delay the next step until it gets fully killed before going too far.
Any proposal that amounts to “nationalize Trillions of dollars worth of land value (or of net present value of future rent streams, same thing), without compensation” is going to face backlash from a lot of people, including me. REGARDLESS of timeframe or gradualness.
Well, there will be compensation, that’s the whole idea of LVT—it’s a more efficient tax, so you can reduce inefficient taxes. But I guess you mean for the same person. And that is the hard to prove point.
I guess the only time to introduce such a tax is after a war.
The only saving grace of gradual rollout is that it’s easy to continuously delay the next step until it gets fully killed before going too far.
This is a bit hyperbolic. As a general matter, gradual rollouts have other important benefits, such as the fact that they allow people to be free to optimize: by maintaining a more transparent, slow-moving pace of change in the background legal system, citizens (and companies etc.) are able to more easily deal with the modifications by “smoothing” their adaptations over time instead of being hit with something they were not prepared for and are unable to deal with in a very short time-frame.
Very rapid rollouts generate more uncertainty and unpredictability, which can sometimes result in a situation that’s even worse than if a bad, but more certain option was chosen (partly because individuals who react rationally to uncertainty generally do so by hedging their bets and wasting resources on preparing for future world-states that seemed possible at the time but were not actually reached, in hindsight).
Socialism / communism is about equally abstract as Georgism, and it certainly inspired a lot of people to fight! Similarly, Republican campaigns to lower corporate tax rates, cut regulations, reduce entitlement spending, etc, are pretty abstract (and often actively unpopular when people do understand them!), but have achieved some notable victories over the years. Georgism is similar to YIMBYism, which has lots of victories these days, even though YIMBYism also suffers from being more abstract than conspiracy theories with obvious villains about people “hoarding” vacant housing or chinese investors bidding up prices or whatever. Finally, Georgism itself was extremely popular once, so it clearly has the potential!! Overall, I don’t think being abstract is fatal for a mass movement.
But I also don’t think that we need to have some kind of epic Georgist popular revolution in order to get Georgist policies—we can do it just by making small incremental technocratic reforms to local property tax laws—getting local governments to use tools like ValueBase (developed by Georgist Lars Doucet) to do their property value assessments, getting reforms in a few places and then hopefully seeing success and pointing to that success to build more momentum elsewhere, etc.
As Lars Doucet tells it, the main problem with historical Georgism wasn’t unpopularity (it was extremely popular then!), but just the technical infeasibility of assessing land value separate from the value of the buildings on the land. But nowadays we have machine learning tools, GIS mapping systems, satellite imagery, successful home-value-estimation companies like Zillow and Redfin, etc. So nowadays we can finally implement Georgism on a technical level, which wasn’t possible in the 1890s. For more on this, see the final part of Lars’s epic series of georgism posts on Astral Codex Ten: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved?utm_source=url
Maybe “abstract” was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It’s possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I’m not sure there’s actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it’s usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)
For grey civics, I don’t know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that’s it. I’ve been considering the slogan “defending zoning isn’t compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don’t believe in progress.”
Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.
On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it’s not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn’t real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.
But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don’t try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don’t think we know what to say to that.
Okay I’ve thought of a class of slogans for georgism. Something about land not really belonging to anyone because no one created it, about land and space and radio spectrum and the realm of ideas being the shared heritage of all of humanity because drawing lines around it and declaring it to belong to whoever got there first is arbitrary and silly and as we know in so many cases economically dysfunctional.
These principles are a bit idealistic, but it seems almost required for a political slogan to overreach its realpolitik basis somewhat, if all we said “supply can’t be increased, so price signals are less important” or whatever, few would be moved to revolt.
A focus question I keep returning to, partly out of a dark sense of humor, is what kind of slogans I would have to write before people would be willing to shed blood, to fight, in the name of George, or in the name of Approval Voting, or Minor Parties, or any other system whose merits are abstract and which is neither minarchist nor soviet.
I sometimes feel like part of the problem is that there is no villain to get mad at. Our enemy is mostly just ambient incompetence, myopia, legacy systems and institutional sclerosis. Perhaps we can call it Moloch.
I think it is pretty clear who is standing in the way of Georgism: Landowners. They stand to lose the most, and those with a lot of property typically have a larger influence on economic property. The problem is that there is not a single organized landowner you could paint as the bad guy. It is a distributed mass that is hard to counter.
I think you’re right, Georgism doesn’t get passed because it goes against the interests of landowners who have overwhelming political influence. But if the actual problem we’re trying to solve is high rents, maybe that doesn’t require full Georgism? Maybe we just need to make construction legally easier. There’s strong opposition to that too, but not as strong as literally all landowners.
Wait! Is the actual problem we’re trying to solve “high rents”? From everything I’ve read, it’s “inefficient use of land”, in other words, failure to maximize land-rents collected, which are now taxed at a high percentage of theoretical value.
In some sense, bulldozing 10 single-family houses to build a 30-unit apartment does “reduce rent” on a per-unit basis, but it increases it on the land. As designed, as far as I can tell. It’s unclear what bulldozing them to build a datacenter does to rents, but that may be necessary if the powers-that-be decide that’s the income level needed to pay the taxes.
I feel like suburban homeowners are the key group here. They have the most votes among landowning groups, and the strongest motivation to oppose anything that reduces property values because their home represents all of their wealth. There is also the way-of-life question, because the economics of the suburbs seem really difficult under Georgism.
Something like an exemption for the first sale after the tax is passed would be a simple solution to taking some of the sting out, and makes sure no one has to unilaterally lose their investment to a tax.
Actually, in my father’s day, there was this one infamous landlord who people used to point at. Who was it, Claude? “Peter Rachman” yes that was it. People used to talk about “Rachmanism” which apparently just meant “being a cruel and unscrupulous landlord”, but which could probably be expanded to encompass home owner associations organizing to lobby against zoning reform if efforts were made, because when people hear ism they expect to see a civic ideology.
Unfortunately one of his most prominent sins was excessive subdivision, so he wasn’t exactly a nimby.
And also, yeah, in reality — for instance in New Zealand which has it especially bad, where substantially more than half of the families in the country own land — land investment is just a popular way of keeping savings. The last Labour government felt a need to promise, despite confessing the will, not to touch it.
I mean, yes. Real Estate is about the only perpetual bond still available to buy. Current owners stand to lose their entire investment (in the land portion, at least, but also in the improvements because they can’t be separated and bankrupt is bankrupt). Those who hope to invest in real-estate lose their dream, which is a surprisingly powerful factor in public sentiment.
The key seems to be (like other communist nationalizations) painting ALL landowners as the bad guys. Or trying to convince people that “only the big guys” will be impacted, but that’s so transparently a lie that it probably doesn’t fly anymore.
I feel like it’s still Moloch to blame, if a sufficient bribe to landowners would cost less than indefinitely continued rent-seeking.
I don’t have any calculations to offer in support; but I would generally expect an individual landowner’s time preference to be lower than society’s as a whole, so I suspect this is indeed the case.
So the actual reason is that landowners don’t want to be seen taking a bribe, because that would involve acknowledging they have been knowingly rent-seeking since 1879; and the government doesn’t want to openly bribe them for moral hazard whatever; so even though everyone would be better off by their own lights it can’t happen. And that’s fairly moloch-flavored.
Note that if made in public, for legitimately-owned assets, and voluntarily accepted, the term is no longer “bribe” but “purchase”. A whole ton of my objections go away if the government (or even a private entity) is buying land and then figuring out the best use for it, charging optimal rent to the people who own the improvements separately.
Would it work if the tax was raised very slowly? Like 10% points per generation.
Would it work if the tax sets in only after death for privately owned property? That might significantly reduce resistance by individual land owners.
How many older people who own land do you know, who’re happy with CURRENT inheritance taxes? Saying “land value is no longer inheritable, it goes only to the state” seems about as likely as any other implementation of massive tax increases.
I know! I own property myself. Obviously, people don’t like big sudden changes that cost them a lot of money. That’s why I asked for more incremental approaches. Though, I guess the problem is that small changes will not get a lot of support from non-property owners—because the effect is small—but will get opposition from large owners because they see the effect.
People don’t like ANY changes that cost them a lot of money. The only saving grace of gradual rollout is that it’s easy to continuously delay the next step until it gets fully killed before going too far.
Any proposal that amounts to “nationalize Trillions of dollars worth of land value (or of net present value of future rent streams, same thing), without compensation” is going to face backlash from a lot of people, including me. REGARDLESS of timeframe or gradualness.
Well, there will be compensation, that’s the whole idea of LVT—it’s a more efficient tax, so you can reduce inefficient taxes. But I guess you mean for the same person. And that is the hard to prove point.
I guess the only time to introduce such a tax is after a war.
This is a bit hyperbolic. As a general matter, gradual rollouts have other important benefits, such as the fact that they allow people to be free to optimize: by maintaining a more transparent, slow-moving pace of change in the background legal system, citizens (and companies etc.) are able to more easily deal with the modifications by “smoothing” their adaptations over time instead of being hit with something they were not prepared for and are unable to deal with in a very short time-frame.
Very rapid rollouts generate more uncertainty and unpredictability, which can sometimes result in a situation that’s even worse than if a bad, but more certain option was chosen (partly because individuals who react rationally to uncertainty generally do so by hedging their bets and wasting resources on preparing for future world-states that seemed possible at the time but were not actually reached, in hindsight).
Socialism / communism is about equally abstract as Georgism, and it certainly inspired a lot of people to fight! Similarly, Republican campaigns to lower corporate tax rates, cut regulations, reduce entitlement spending, etc, are pretty abstract (and often actively unpopular when people do understand them!), but have achieved some notable victories over the years. Georgism is similar to YIMBYism, which has lots of victories these days, even though YIMBYism also suffers from being more abstract than conspiracy theories with obvious villains about people “hoarding” vacant housing or chinese investors bidding up prices or whatever. Finally, Georgism itself was extremely popular once, so it clearly has the potential!! Overall, I don’t think being abstract is fatal for a mass movement.
But I also don’t think that we need to have some kind of epic Georgist popular revolution in order to get Georgist policies—we can do it just by making small incremental technocratic reforms to local property tax laws—getting local governments to use tools like ValueBase (developed by Georgist Lars Doucet) to do their property value assessments, getting reforms in a few places and then hopefully seeing success and pointing to that success to build more momentum elsewhere, etc.
As Lars Doucet tells it, the main problem with historical Georgism wasn’t unpopularity (it was extremely popular then!), but just the technical infeasibility of assessing land value separate from the value of the buildings on the land. But nowadays we have machine learning tools, GIS mapping systems, satellite imagery, successful home-value-estimation companies like Zillow and Redfin, etc. So nowadays we can finally implement Georgism on a technical level, which wasn’t possible in the 1890s. For more on this, see the final part of Lars’s epic series of georgism posts on Astral Codex Ten: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved?utm_source=url
Maybe “abstract” was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It’s possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I’m not sure there’s actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it’s usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)
For grey civics, I don’t know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that’s it. I’ve been considering the slogan “defending zoning isn’t compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don’t believe in progress.”
Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.
On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it’s not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn’t real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.
But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don’t try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don’t think we know what to say to that.
Okay I’ve thought of a class of slogans for georgism. Something about land not really belonging to anyone because no one created it, about land and space and radio spectrum and the realm of ideas being the shared heritage of all of humanity because drawing lines around it and declaring it to belong to whoever got there first is arbitrary and silly and as we know in so many cases economically dysfunctional.
These principles are a bit idealistic, but it seems almost required for a political slogan to overreach its realpolitik basis somewhat, if all we said “supply can’t be increased, so price signals are less important” or whatever, few would be moved to revolt.