First, apologies for the wall of text that is about to follow.
I agree that many people are irrationally afraid of socialism due to lingering effects of red scare propaganda. I would however say fear of statist forms of socialism are justified, because concentration of so much power in just the direct hands of the state has universally led to authoritarianism. Just like corps shouldn’t have monopoly power, the state shouldn’t either. (It’s bad enough that the state has a monopoly on violence, but I don’t really know a way around that; best we have so far is accountable democracy.) Imo, the best form of socialism is worker-owned coops.
At a high level, Georgism asks the following question: Why and how, in a time of greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? More wealth than ever before is being created (including more wealth per capita), and yet the common folk are not feeling it so much. Clearly, the fruits of all those productivity gains are going somewhere, and it ain’t to (most of) the workers.
Georgism’s answer to this question is rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
Overall, I see the goal of socialists and Georgists to largely be the same: create prosperity felt by all. But I think Georgism is a better approach for 3 reasons:
Economics
Politics
Ethics
Economics
Where Georgism and socialism differ economically is socialists desire social ownership of the “means of production”, typically meaning land + capital, sometimes meaning land + capital + labor. Georgists desire social ownership of just land – aka the commons – via taxes. Abolish taxes on other things – e.g., labor, consumption – as those are taxes on productive things we don’t want to discourage or distort (and thus cause economic inefficiency), and replace them with full taxes on economic rents, most notably a land value tax (LVT):
A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.
Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6]
Oil is a kind of economic land – naturally occurring, and of fixed supply. Accordingly, it generates natural resource rents. The key to Norway’s success in oil exploitation has been the special regime of ownership rights which apply to extraction: the severance tax takes most of those rents, meaning that the people of Norway are the primary beneficiaries of the country’s petroleum wealth. Instead of privatizing the resource rents provided by access to oil, companies make their returns off of the extraction and transportation of the oil, incentivizing them to develop the most efficient technologies and processes rather than simply collecting the resource rents. Exploration and development is subsidized by the Norwegian government in order to maximize the amount of resource rents that can be taxed by the state, while also promoting a highly competitive environment free of the corruption and stagnation that afflicts state-controlled oil companies.
But beyond taxes, Georgism is also in favor of several other reforms/policies:
Lowering barriers to entry and eliminating monopolistic/oligopolistic competition
Universal basic income/citizen’s dividend
For (1), this can be things like building free public transit, funding open scientific research, providing free public healthcare, providing free public education, subsidizing free and open-source software, subsidizing regenerative agriculture, subsidizing carbon removal, etc. Just like Pigouvian taxes charge you money for causing harm to society, Pigouvian subsidies give you money for providing public benefit. If something produces positive externalities, we want to publicly subsidize it.
For (2), exactly how best to achieve this is still a matter of discussion amongst Georgists, but we want to eliminate possession of IP such as patents as a key to economic rent-seeking and monopolism. I’m personally in favor of eliminating patents and replacing them with a combination of a public prize system, publicly-funded research grants, and big projects like the Apollo mission or ITER fusion reactor or Large Hadron Collider. Patents would never incentivize those latter projects anyways.
For (3), this actually covers things like IP reform, but also things like eliminating onerous regulations like restrictive zoning (one of the primary causes of the housing crisis in North America). How will landlords protect their investments if not through artificially limiting supply through high artificial barriers to entry? In general, any onerous regulations that are the result of regulatory capture should be eliminated, as should as many barriers to entry for businesses as possible. Much like Norway subsidized exploration, so as to lower barriers to entry, then taxed exploitation. Monopolism is bad.
For (4), well, I think you’ll probably agree that a UBI is good policy. It eliminates means-checking (meaning it creates no active disincentives to being productive), and it allows people to take more risks (e.g., starting a business) or invest in themselves (e.g., to pursue higher education).
Historically, as well as in my experience online, Georgism and Georgist policies have gotten a lot of wide political support, ranging from free-market libertarians to socialists. The book that started Georgism, Progress and Poverty, was the second-best selling book of 19th-century America – second only to the Bible. Henry George himself had the second-most attended funeral in American history – second only to JFK. Many historians credit the publication of Progress and Poverty as the start of the Progressive Era that brought an end to the Gilded Age. The board game Monopoly is a rip-off of a Georgist game, The Landlord’s Game, by a Georgist named Elizabeth Magie. To get a sense for how insanely popular this guy and his ideas were – including their broad appeal – just read through the Legacy section on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George#Legacy
Further, there are aspects of Georgism that can appeal to a lot of people. Urbanists tend to love LVT because it encourages denser cities and less sprawl. Environmentalists tend to love carbon taxes. Capitalists tend to love free trade, no corporate taxes, lower barriers to entry. Socialists tend to love citizen’s dividend + socialization of the commons. Libertarians tend to love eliminating income taxes and high freedom. Economists tend to love that it’s rooted in good economics. The main people who dislike Georgism are the monopolists and rent-seekers it disrupts.
Finally, Georgism can be achieved (and its impacts felt!) incrementally. For example, many places already have some form of LVT, although none have the “full” version envisioned by Georgism. Nonetheless, even milquetoast LVTs have positive effects:
It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.
No risky socialist revolution needed. (Revolutions typically don’t turn out well for the common folk.)
Ethics
This is where it gets deontological. The thing that separates land and capital is you make capital, but you don’t make land. If I make a tool, I spent my own labor and resources to make it. If I use land, I did not create the land; rather, I deprived the rest of society from that land. This difference is why LVT works economically, but it’s also why I think Georgism is a more ethical and fair system.
I have two degrees. I didn’t have to pay for them out of pocket, but I did have to spend significant time, effort, and opportunity cost. In addition, I still had to pay for rent and groceries while getting them. The output of all that, my two degrees, is a form a capital. Does it seem right or fair for society to usurp the value from those degrees? If it does, doesn’t that also decrease the incentive for me to even get degrees in the first place? That capital wasn’t taken from anyone; rather, I created it, and society is better off for me having created that new capital.
But the commons no one has created. I didn’t create the atmosphere nor the air we breathe, so it is just that I compensate society (via carbon taxes) for the carbon I emit. I didn’t create the land, so it is just that I compensate society (via LVT) for the land that I occupy. I didn’t create the earth’s minerals, so it is just that I compensate society (via severance taxes) should I extract the earth’s finite minerals.
I think you suffer from a common problem in the US. Political ideology shouldn’t be used as an affiliation like a sports team. It shouldn’t be treated as a thing where it’s one “system” vs another.
They are nothing of the clean-cut published and established ideals you or most people imagine. They are all merely attempts at solving different specific issues with slightly greater priority.
While you might say, “no duh”, I’d say then stop treating it like these are different frameworks to program a government with. They should not be prescriptions for the government, but instead viewed as a library of different ideas to tackle different problems.
This constant blather in the US of, “well, I’m not a socialist, I’m a +3 wizard of anarchy!” is just… draining. Draining for no good reason.
I mean, I’m incredibly pragmatic in my ideology. Georgism at its core is rooted in pragmatic arguments. Notice how I led first and foremost with the economic arguments in favor of specific policies, followed by political pragmatism, and not some deontological argument. At the end of the day, what I want most is good, effective, technocratic policy. Sure, the full Georgist system as described above is my ideal, but I said as well that one of the key advantages I see in it as an economic ideology is that it can be implemented (and positive effects felt!) in increments. Will we ever achieve a “full” LVT? Probably not. But can we get places to replace property taxes with LVT as well as pass carbon tax-and-dividend schemes? Absolutely!
And trust me, I’m not just doing mental gymnastics so I can avoid the spooky scary socialist label. For several years I was quite into more socdem, leaning towards demsoc politics. It was really only in the last year or two that I learned of Georgism, and I simply think its policy goals are better and more pragmatic, with the nice bonus of having a nicer deontological argument imo. I’ll gladly ally with libertarians, socialists, and others to achieve any policies that I think will improve the status of things.
First, apologies for the wall of text that is about to follow.
I agree that many people are irrationally afraid of socialism due to lingering effects of red scare propaganda. I would however say fear of statist forms of socialism are justified, because concentration of so much power in just the direct hands of the state has universally led to authoritarianism. Just like corps shouldn’t have monopoly power, the state shouldn’t either. (It’s bad enough that the state has a monopoly on violence, but I don’t really know a way around that; best we have so far is accountable democracy.) Imo, the best form of socialism is worker-owned coops.
At a high level, Georgism asks the following question: Why and how, in a time of greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? More wealth than ever before is being created (including more wealth per capita), and yet the common folk are not feeling it so much. Clearly, the fruits of all those productivity gains are going somewhere, and it ain’t to (most of) the workers.
Georgism’s answer to this question is rent-seeking:
Overall, I see the goal of socialists and Georgists to largely be the same: create prosperity felt by all. But I think Georgism is a better approach for 3 reasons:
Economics
Where Georgism and socialism differ economically is socialists desire social ownership of the “means of production”, typically meaning land + capital, sometimes meaning land + capital + labor. Georgists desire social ownership of just land – aka the commons – via taxes. Abolish taxes on other things – e.g., labor, consumption – as those are taxes on productive things we don’t want to discourage or distort (and thus cause economic inefficiency), and replace them with full taxes on economic rents, most notably a land value tax (LVT):
LVT is progressive, basically impossible to evade, encourages efficient use of scarce urban land (thus helping to solve the housing crisis, both by incentivizing housing development and by eliminating land speculation), can grow the economy, can’t be passed on to tenants (both in theory and in practice), doesn’t encourage capital flight, and has been shown to be capable of funding the entire government.
Beyond just LVT, however, Georgists support Pigouvian taxes (taxes on negative externalities, e.g., carbon tax) and severance taxes (taxes on extraction of finite natural resources, e.g., minerals). Regarding Pigouvian taxes, there’s a reason carbon tax-and-dividend is widely considered the best climate policy by economists. And regarding severance taxes, the Norwegian model has shown to be an incredible way to manage finite natural resources for the public good:
But beyond taxes, Georgism is also in favor of several other reforms/policies:
For (1), this can be things like building free public transit, funding open scientific research, providing free public healthcare, providing free public education, subsidizing free and open-source software, subsidizing regenerative agriculture, subsidizing carbon removal, etc. Just like Pigouvian taxes charge you money for causing harm to society, Pigouvian subsidies give you money for providing public benefit. If something produces positive externalities, we want to publicly subsidize it.
For (2), exactly how best to achieve this is still a matter of discussion amongst Georgists, but we want to eliminate possession of IP such as patents as a key to economic rent-seeking and monopolism. I’m personally in favor of eliminating patents and replacing them with a combination of a public prize system, publicly-funded research grants, and big projects like the Apollo mission or ITER fusion reactor or Large Hadron Collider. Patents would never incentivize those latter projects anyways.
For (3), this actually covers things like IP reform, but also things like eliminating onerous regulations like restrictive zoning (one of the primary causes of the housing crisis in North America). How will landlords protect their investments if not through artificially limiting supply through high artificial barriers to entry? In general, any onerous regulations that are the result of regulatory capture should be eliminated, as should as many barriers to entry for businesses as possible. Much like Norway subsidized exploration, so as to lower barriers to entry, then taxed exploitation. Monopolism is bad.
For (4), well, I think you’ll probably agree that a UBI is good policy. It eliminates means-checking (meaning it creates no active disincentives to being productive), and it allows people to take more risks (e.g., starting a business) or invest in themselves (e.g., to pursue higher education).
(continued in reply)
Politics
Historically, as well as in my experience online, Georgism and Georgist policies have gotten a lot of wide political support, ranging from free-market libertarians to socialists. The book that started Georgism, Progress and Poverty, was the second-best selling book of 19th-century America – second only to the Bible. Henry George himself had the second-most attended funeral in American history – second only to JFK. Many historians credit the publication of Progress and Poverty as the start of the Progressive Era that brought an end to the Gilded Age. The board game Monopoly is a rip-off of a Georgist game, The Landlord’s Game, by a Georgist named Elizabeth Magie. To get a sense for how insanely popular this guy and his ideas were – including their broad appeal – just read through the Legacy section on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George#Legacy
Further, there are aspects of Georgism that can appeal to a lot of people. Urbanists tend to love LVT because it encourages denser cities and less sprawl. Environmentalists tend to love carbon taxes. Capitalists tend to love free trade, no corporate taxes, lower barriers to entry. Socialists tend to love citizen’s dividend + socialization of the commons. Libertarians tend to love eliminating income taxes and high freedom. Economists tend to love that it’s rooted in good economics. The main people who dislike Georgism are the monopolists and rent-seekers it disrupts.
Finally, Georgism can be achieved (and its impacts felt!) incrementally. For example, many places already have some form of LVT, although none have the “full” version envisioned by Georgism. Nonetheless, even milquetoast LVTs have positive effects:
https://osf.io/54q68/
No risky socialist revolution needed. (Revolutions typically don’t turn out well for the common folk.)
Ethics
This is where it gets deontological. The thing that separates land and capital is you make capital, but you don’t make land. If I make a tool, I spent my own labor and resources to make it. If I use land, I did not create the land; rather, I deprived the rest of society from that land. This difference is why LVT works economically, but it’s also why I think Georgism is a more ethical and fair system.
I have two degrees. I didn’t have to pay for them out of pocket, but I did have to spend significant time, effort, and opportunity cost. In addition, I still had to pay for rent and groceries while getting them. The output of all that, my two degrees, is a form a capital. Does it seem right or fair for society to usurp the value from those degrees? If it does, doesn’t that also decrease the incentive for me to even get degrees in the first place? That capital wasn’t taken from anyone; rather, I created it, and society is better off for me having created that new capital.
But the commons no one has created. I didn’t create the atmosphere nor the air we breathe, so it is just that I compensate society (via carbon taxes) for the carbon I emit. I didn’t create the land, so it is just that I compensate society (via LVT) for the land that I occupy. I didn’t create the earth’s minerals, so it is just that I compensate society (via severance taxes) should I extract the earth’s finite minerals.
I think you suffer from a common problem in the US. Political ideology shouldn’t be used as an affiliation like a sports team. It shouldn’t be treated as a thing where it’s one “system” vs another.
They are nothing of the clean-cut published and established ideals you or most people imagine. They are all merely attempts at solving different specific issues with slightly greater priority.
While you might say, “no duh”, I’d say then stop treating it like these are different frameworks to program a government with. They should not be prescriptions for the government, but instead viewed as a library of different ideas to tackle different problems.
This constant blather in the US of, “well, I’m not a socialist, I’m a +3 wizard of anarchy!” is just… draining. Draining for no good reason.
I mean, I’m incredibly pragmatic in my ideology. Georgism at its core is rooted in pragmatic arguments. Notice how I led first and foremost with the economic arguments in favor of specific policies, followed by political pragmatism, and not some deontological argument. At the end of the day, what I want most is good, effective, technocratic policy. Sure, the full Georgist system as described above is my ideal, but I said as well that one of the key advantages I see in it as an economic ideology is that it can be implemented (and positive effects felt!) in increments. Will we ever achieve a “full” LVT? Probably not. But can we get places to replace property taxes with LVT as well as pass carbon tax-and-dividend schemes? Absolutely!
And trust me, I’m not just doing mental gymnastics so I can avoid the spooky scary socialist label. For several years I was quite into more socdem, leaning towards demsoc politics. It was really only in the last year or two that I learned of Georgism, and I simply think its policy goals are better and more pragmatic, with the nice bonus of having a nicer deontological argument imo. I’ll gladly ally with libertarians, socialists, and others to achieve any policies that I think will improve the status of things.
Edit: wording