It's both. You don't want to tax capital and income. VAT and sale tax are a bad idea too, especially since they're regressive.
So, what do you tax? You tax land and land-like things, non-reproducible privileges(like patents and copyright), pollution and other negative externality.
Now, there's an argument to be made that we couldn't possibly be able to fund governments on the back of these taxes. Fair enough, but it should mean we minimize those taxes until the economy grows enough to fund government services.
An ideal LVT would tax the full economic rent of the land, but that's unlikely to happen. We don't want to overshoot 100% because that would cause land abandonment.
So in theory, LVT could collect more tax than the state needs to fund services. If that happen, it would be distributed as a Citizen's Dividend.
I am skeptical that we wouldn't be able to find a productive use for government spending, but that's a discussion for citizens of a Georgist state to have.
Also, Georgist policies would discourage the existence billionaires and other people with extreme wealth simply because a lot of their wealth came out of economic rent.
I never understood this Georgist argument. The richest people in the world today require very little land. Remote working is easily possible and plenty of companies use it, even if managers don't always like it. This feels like a medieval perspective.
Georgists aren't frozen in time, nor had they ever been limited to just taxing "land". We consider any economic "land" fair game. We even discussed network effects that allow companies like instagram retain a monopoly.
In any case, California are where some of the most powerful tech monopoly are located, and not coincidentally it's also where some of the most expensive land there is.
Just my opinion as a Georgist amongst many, I would categorize copyright and patents as non-reproducible privilege rather than economic land though non-reproducible privilege also describes private ownership of land. It's very clear that it's artificial, as ideas do not suffer from the exclusivity problem that comes with owning physical land. What IP has in common with owning land is the extraction of economic rent.
Economic land is anything that's fixed, finite, and not man-made, such as land, the electromagnetic spectrum, and orbitals.
Services like amazon and instagram are something of a puzzle to Georgists, but it's at least clear that Amazon and instagram benefits from labor and effort of the platform users. Without people selling on Amazon, there's no amazon. Without users, there's no reasons to be on instagram. To be perfectly clear, platform companies obviously put in labor to build their services, but the network effect isn't entirely of their own making.
Look at the green blue and red bars on the what happened summaries. Almost everyone here agrees with each other (mostly green) even on the most controversial issues, which what happened let's you sort by.
I can't wait for what happened IN THE WORLD!!!
that green bar is not a coincidence in a codified echo chamber.
Almost no one is allowed to disagree with the consensus here and then only in a particular way. Some dissent is outright banned.
Like for example, try suggesting any of the following ideas: Trump is misunderstood, feminism is bad for women, mrna shots aren't vaccines, vc increases pain, suffering and failure, etc.
No discussion like that, among countless other ideas will get your account immediately shadow banned.
So it appears that there's consensus about what "truth" is, as proven now by what happened's green and red bars, but in reality contrarians are forced to lurk.
And what I just said only touches the surface of the many significant issues with this community.
Go deeper and you find some sinister tactics being used to control the narrative.
Good luck seeing this post. I know it was a waste of time to write it.
If you look at the site in question closer, it states that the "green, blue, and red bars" mean "constructive, technical, and flame war".
If I had to guess, you likely have some heavy premises that blind you from engaging with the content of a post. I'm not going to pretend there isn't some truth in your premises, however I would imagine there would be "many significant issues with [any] community" if we all operated this carelessly.
Land prices are subject to speculative bubbles as well. The only way to get rid of speculation in the real estate market is to drive the price of land down to zero by taxing it.
You also need a lot of money to purchase land, so this effectively allows banks to make a lot of money on overly inflated price of land.
Land by itself doesn't generate wealth, only improvements on top of it does. Only problem is that we tax improvement along with the land, leading to the perverse incentive that building anything increases your tax burden. We call them property tax.
We're getting into the weeds, but the goal is usually to own your home free and clear by the time you retire, reducing your income needs from retirement to death by not having a non discretionary housing payment. The wealth in most homes cannot be tapped until sold, death, or stripping the equity (HELOC or reverse mortgage) and hoping you die with zero.
You can sort of think of a house as an I bond you can live in [1], and the return is the equity gains (historically). You need lots of money to buy land because demand outstrips supply, there is a shortage of ~4M housing units in the US, and the pipeline for building new housing was permanently impaired after the 2008 global financial crisis. We will never build as fast as we used to as we go into structural demographic labor shortages in the US; the value of existing real estate is ancient embodied construction productivity and material costs, similar to how oil is ancient sunlight.
Drive down the price of land to zero via taxation and you cannot use that home to reduce your income need from retirement. It will force them to sell the property to make way for further development, since the cost of land is no longer so high that you need to borrow money from the bank to purchase land, only to pay the ongoing taxes.
"Low risk" unfortunately doesn't mean no risk. I wish to be vaccinated against all disease, but rationally I must acknowledge very low probability event of harm from vaccination. It's why they're recommended only for 50 and older.
Zoning change would spike land value in more populated area much more closely located to metro center, but it will depress demand on locations further away from the urban center.
I don't know what AI native folks will look like. To me, it looks like just replacing skilled labors with unskilled labors as opposed to giving humans new skills.
AI to me will be valuable when it's helping humans learn and think more strategically and when they're actually teaching humans or helping humans spot contradiction and vetting for reliable information. Fact checking is extremely labor intensive work after all.
Or otherwise if AI is so good, just replace humans.
Right now, the most legible use of AI is AI slop and misinformation.
The skilled AI users are the people that use it to help them learn and think problems through in more detail.
Unskilled AI users are people who use AI to do their thinking for them, rather than using it as a work partner. This is how people end up producing bad work because they fundamentally don’t understand the work themselves.
GenAI isn't a thinking machine, as much it might pretend to be. It's a theatre kid that's really motivated to help you and memorized the Internet.
Work with them. Let them fill in your ideas with extra information, sure, but they have to be your ideas. And you're going to have to put some work into it, the "hallucinations" are just your intent incompletely specified.
They're going to give you the structure, that's high probability fruit. It's the guts of it that has to be fully formed in the context before the generative phase can start. You can't just ask for a business plan and then get upset when the one it gives you is full of nonsense.
Ever heard the phrase "ask a silly question, get a silly answer"?
So, what do you tax? You tax land and land-like things, non-reproducible privileges(like patents and copyright), pollution and other negative externality.
Now, there's an argument to be made that we couldn't possibly be able to fund governments on the back of these taxes. Fair enough, but it should mean we minimize those taxes until the economy grows enough to fund government services.
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