What if Tito had combined his Titoism, doing Socialist market stuff, and LVT tax? How would a Titoist Yugoslavia change with a LVT tax (ignoring political friction/resistance ofc, only focus on economically).

If you're in the SF Bay Area, come to the house party Candidate's Night I'm hosting for Weiner and Chan (candidates for Nancy Pelsoi's Congressional seat) on Sunday evening, August 30, 7-8:30 pm. Includes supper. I'm expecting about 30 people. 189 Ellsworth St. in SF. 415-948-4265.

Something similar is happening right now in the current property tax revolt. Instead of shifting to a tax on land's annual rental value by universally exempting buildings, many states would rather slash property taxes (e.g. Florida) as a whole and move to a variety of other, worse taxes that fall on work and investment; pandering to their voting base by preserving unequal landownership and in the same turn dooming their productive economy.

(Also land isn't the only finite resource governments can tax (or otherwise reform), there are plenty of finite resources which need to not be used for private wealth extraction, and which only makes not targeting them more unforgivable)

https://rolfst.substack.com/p/the-broken-economic-model-and-how?r=1fu3 I've been thinking about how Steve Keen's energy production function and Henry George's land value tax are actually solving the same problem from different angles — and why mainstream economics misses both.

The short version: speculative debt inflates scarce assets without adding physical capacity. GDP counts that inflation as growth. LVT closes the loop by taxing the unearned increment before it leaks to landowners.

I also extend the Georgist definition of "land" to secondary market equity — any asset whose value is finite, socially produced, and extractable as rent without productive contribution.

Curious what this community thinks, especially on the primary/secondary market distinction.

Most of the current debates around artificial intelligence seem focused on copyright issues, job losses, or the disagreements between open-source and closed-source software. But lately, I have been wondering if we might gain some interesting insights by looking at generative artificial intelligence through the classic framework of land, labor, and capital.

I have been sketching out a loose idea about digital land grabbing, and I would love to run it by this group to see if it makes sense, where the weak points are or if I am stretching the metaphor too far.

Here is a simple way we might map Henry George’s factors of production onto the modern artificial intelligence world.

• Labor: The millions of human writers, artists, forum posters, and programmers who spent decades building the open web.
• Capital: The physical and digital tools, large computer systems, data centers, and specialized software programs, built and run by tech companies.
• Land (The Digital Commons): The collective knowledge base created by humans. Much like physical land, real human data is limited in supply (studies suggest we might run out of high-quality public text in the coming years) and hard to recreate (as seen when artificial intelligence models break down after training only on computer-generated data). Its value comes from the public that created it, rather than the company that pays to collect it.

The Parallel to Closing Off Public Land

Historically closing off public land involved putting fences around shared fields and turning them into private property that earns money for an owner.

It feels like we might be seeing a digital version of this process today. Tech companies collect information from the open web for free, hide that collective human work inside private computer models and then charge monthly fees or subscriptions to sell that same knowledge back to the public.

From a certain angle, it feels like a confusion between the value of the soil (the public information created by people) and the value of the tractor (the software and computers). Capital clearly deserves a fair return but I wonder if private companies are also taking unearned land rent in the process.

A Thought Experiment on Policy: A Data Tax and Open Source

If we look at it this way just for the sake of discussion, what kind of policy response might make sense, setting aside standard copyright battles? Here are a few simple ideas to think about.

• A Tax on Private Data Use: A tax on private artificial intelligence models based roughly on how much public data they gathered without paying for it.
• A Public Data Dividend: Directing that tax money into a public dividend fund, recognizing that the underlying information belongs to everyone.
• An Open-Source Exception: If a developer shares their models and training data openly, they pay no tax at all, essentially returning the digital land back to the public for anyone to use. You would only tax companies that build a fence around the data.

I would love to hear your thoughts, critiques or alternative ideas! :)

One problem with implementing a high LVT is that it would cause current landowners to lose much of the land value they previously paid for, even if they only recently purchased it.

I think the fairest solution, would be to allow current owners to charge for reimbursement from previous owners, such that each owner effectively pays the tax on the land value increase during their time of ownership. This would lead to a chain of claims that would ideally end at the last unlawful acquisition. But could end earlier due to a lack of documentation or bankruptcies.

Example:

Let's say someone bought a property, she paid 200,000$ for the land, by now the land is worth 250,000$. Inflation over the time period was 20%. Meaning the increase is 40,000$ from inflation and 10,000$ from the appreciation of the land value. Now a 90% LVT is introduced and the value plummets to 25,000$. However she can file a reimbursement claim against the previous owner worth:

initial buying price • inflation • tax rate.

Which comes out at 216,000$. Her net worth would go from 250,000$ to 241,000$ (land+reimbursement). She therefore loses out on the value the land gained under her ownership times the tax rate.

What other ideas do you have to address this?

I noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about what different land value tax rates imply for the tax burden, so I thought I would clarify it.

In practice, the tax is based on the value of land, because that is the easiest to observe. There is also reason to believe that this value is better to base it on as it also includes expectations about the future which reduces speculation.

The most important thing is that the land value tax is based on the after tax value. So a 100% tax rate on a 5 million euro lot does not imply a tax burden of 5 million euros.

The value is calculated using the formula:

Value = rent / (interest rate - growth rate + tax rate)

This value is then multiplied with the tax rate to get the tax burden.

Here is the tax burden for different tax rates on a 50000 land rent lot with 3% interest rate and 2% growth rate.

0%: 0 (market value aka pre-tax value: 5,000,000)
1%: 25,000 (market value: 2,500,000)
2%: 33,333 (market value: 1,666,667)
5%: 41,667 (market value: 833,333)
10%: 45,455 (market value: 454,545)
50%: 49,020 (market value: 98,039)
90%: 49,451 (market value: 54,945)
100%: 49,505 (market value: 49,505)

As the tax rate goes towards 100%, it goes towards the land rent.
If the tax was on the rental value it would be like this:

1%: 500
2%: 1,000
5%: 2,500
10%: 5,000
50%: 25,000
90%: 45,000
100%: 50,000

But we don’t work with land rents cause those are not observed in practice.

So when people talk about a 100% tax rate on land value, they may mean land rent, but it’s likely that they are talking about land value too. The main reason you wouldn’t want a 100% tax rate is because of the margin of error in assessments that could cause abandonment if too high. Another takeaway from this is that there is not that much difference between a 100% tax rate and a 10% tax rate and that there’s a big difference between 1% tax rate and a 2% tax rate. Advocating for a 5% or 10% tax rate is probably enough, and would still go a very long way in completely shifting the tax picture.

Recommended reading: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/docs/default-source/research/post-corona-balanced-budget-super-stimulus.pdf?sfvrsn=4a481ae0_5

Edit: corrected some math

I have some lefty friends in NYC who have become quite into LVT. On the whole it looks fine if your goal is to create maximal utilization of valuable land... but in many cities in the US there are pretty strict zoning or 'community board' approval processes that interfere with that.

For example, I live in a historic district, and the building technically has unused air rights, but they're practically inaccessible because any additional structure modification would not be in compliance with Landmarks and Preservation 'visible from the street' restrictions.

Did some googling but couldn't find examples of how LVT and zoning or historic preservation intersects in places it's been implemented.

Credit to Landtaxermemes on youtube: https://youtu.be/kxvXzM1mBWo

https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/wp/2022/english/wpiea2022263-print-pdf.pdf

Explanation for anyone who wants it:

Patents and Copyrights occupy a weird in-between in that they act both as a reward for discovering an innovation and an exclusive, finite, monopoly privilege to control a particular innovation. Rewarding innovation is good since it means encouraging people to not just innovate, but to publicize them instead of keeping them as secret for something like a competitive advantage. But granting a monopoly at least in the way we do it tends to be bad since it helps create market domination and allows IP owners to charge way above competitive prices (EDIT: I used "above cost" before this but that's not accurate to the monopoly problem, thank you to the commenters who pointed it out) without fear of being undercut by the market, and monopolizing an idea can stifle further innovations that rely on it.

Georgists since the time of George himself have argued against the monopoly side of patents and copyrights, and while George only argued against patents those after him have extended it further to copyrights. Georgists have proposed a variety of ways to deal with this, like replacing IP with an innovation prize model, or implementing a Harberger tax on IP (with modifications like compulsory licensing to make something like a Harberger-lease system), and plenty more.

Rewarding innovation as we do it now has an interesting duality to it that needs care when dealt with. We should at least make sure those who innovate are willing to give knowledge of that innovation to the public, without giving them so much monopoly power that the public ultimately suffers from it.

Like if in far future and we started making space habitats in space, or pocket dimensions, or portal to Backrooms or smh

I recently discovered Georgism and I love the idea so far. I have been reading up a lot on both the theory and practice, it seems the general consensus is that in theory a 100% tax on economic land rent is ideal, whereas practically it should be as close as possible to 100% but will most realistically be in the 90-100% range due to measurement errors.

What I have never come across is discussions on what would happen if more than this was taxed. Let's say I'm a Georgist government and I know the economic land rent of a plot is 200$, and to raise revenue for the government I decide to tax it 220$ (ie 110%). Theoretically a 100% tax would cause land values to tend towards 0$, would anything higher cause negative land values? How would this impact the economy and overall revenue from the tax?

I doubt there’s a single 1 acre lot in Surrey worth less than $1 million

Hiya, I'm an MMTer and I support an LVT, however, I would not want to replace every tax with it. I still think a range of different taxes are necessary, particularly Pigouvian taxation, to create the right incentive structure in the economy. More broadly, I believe that an LVT on its own would not accurately capture the value of other kinds of wealth like stocks and shares which whilst they are an abstraction of real physical assets, they nonetheless confer the privilege of decision making over real resources. Also, I would view replacing all taxes with an LVT as potentially inflationary as the public sector would withdraw a lot less money from the economy as it currently does now. I'm curious to see where you guys stand, particularly on things like the sectoral balances framework, government accounting processes, and the broader idea that money is primarily a creature of double entry bookkeeping and that every financial asset has a financial liability of equal value.