I'm getting downvoted for saying that Marx claimed that capitalism would naturally transition to socialism and that he was wrong.

And then someone is getting upvoted literally saying "Well Marx has a book with evidence".

Marxism is a religion and those books are their bible. The ideas in Henry George's books have been reinforced by modern research. Whether it's Rognlie proving that capital's share of income is flat when you separate land and land's share has increased or Stiglitz Henry George theorems.

Marxism is a religion because almost everything in his books is wrong but his long list of logical fallacies is taken as hard evidence. Labor theory of value. In fact we have better theories today that form the connection of utility to price. Historical materialism. Societies didn't go through the transitions he claimed. Some skipped industrial and went straight to marxism. Some have remained under capitalism that he claimed were ready for marxism. Everything he calls contradictions and tensions are things that can reach equilibrium. The real contradictions are how his system would try to separate the marginal utility of consumption from prices and wages from marginal revenue product.

edit: I find it really funny how in the comments there's people saying I'm wrong and they feel the need to point out that they're not a marxist, they're actually a trotskyist, or a leninist, or a socialist or a social democrat. Or they say that a revolution is inevitable and we need to unite with these marxist revolutionaries. Anyway, 57% upvoted so probably >50% agree, this sub has a toxic leftist problem. If the libertarians were spamming the sub saying we shouldn't subsidize roads, public schools, or healthcare, I'd be saying we have a toxic rightist problem too.

SCOTUS agrees to hear Texas property tax assessment dispute

Video features Mitch Vexler and Travis Spencer discussing their ongoing legal challenges against property tax systems in Texas. They argue that the current system is fundamentally fraudulent and lacks proper legal adjudication.

Posting here since it's LVT adjacent news not mentioned elsewhere.

I've heard that building materials and labour costs were there, but I'm not super sure

Let's take a break from "the right/left is taking over r/Georgism!" and share some memes on topic. What have you got?

We must not lose the meme frontier!

I know that this is a lvt sub but changes in the banking sector have a lot to do with land prices. Mainly by creating new inventive and longer mortgage practices banks created effects where a lot more capital choud flow into housing ( mainly by bidding up the prices of which landprices are a major factor) creating an even more of a affordability problem, where people choud go into more debt just by spreading it for longer. For example a preson who has acces to only 20 year mortgages has almost 20% less borrowing capacity when compared to a person with 30 year mortgages and in a individual comparison its no problem but on the scale of the whole economy that creates upward pressure on both housing and land prices(affordability).

Earth's land is owned between uncountably many different landowners, who compete between each other for buyers.

Yes, any individual plot of land is owned by a single sole seller, just like any individual banana is owned by a single sole seller, but that doesn't make bananas a monopoly.

Yes, each plot of land is unique, but not so unique that it is completely and utterly non-substitutable with any other plot of land. Land is generally substitutable with plots of land nearby. If you're looking at the typical American suburb, the quality of the land of one 150ft x 70ft parcel is not going to be so different from the one immediately next to it, or the one across the street from it, or even the one a few thousand feet from it. The proximity to other locations is not going to be meaningfully different, the views are not going to be significantly different, the topography is not going to be significantly different, the mineral and soil composition is not going to be significantly different, etc.. Land nearby is generally about as unique and substitutable from each other as bananas are. Yes, there are edge cases where this is not the case, but those are edge cases, not the general case.

Hi all, I am working on a grad school capstone that is a policy proposal that we replace all taxes for County and Municipal government in the US with an LVT. I used data from 397 counties in six states that publicly report land values to build an OLS regression that would (hopefully) does a pretty decent job of predicting total land values for almost all of the counties in the US. Then I calculated what a 4-8% LVT (those are the cap rates I see most often in the literature) would return and compared it to the revenue counties and municipalities collect in taxes from the census. What I come out to is that at a 4% rate you’d get 1779/3108 counties and municipalities funding themselves and at an 8% rate you’d get 2525/3018 funding themselves, but all produce a quite sizable surplus such that if we wanted to we could put all of the money into a national pot and redistribute back down so that everyone could fund their county and municipal governments and still have money left over to I guess treat everyone to ice cream or something. Obviously, this is not the “look at a piece of property and tell us the LVT” tool we are all hoping to produce some day, but my hope is that it represents a statistically sound prediction of how much tax revenue the concerned levels of government could expect if they transitioned.

I am looking for an input this community might have on the approach. Anything obvious people are seeing they’d recommend I’d fix or add to the model. If anyone knows of other states or parts of states that publicly report land values like the six states I have (Wisconsin, Washington, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York (minus NYC), and Florida) and a few loose counties from seven other states. I also want to disclose that though the method is mine and is based on work I have done previously, Claude was a big help with the coding and fiddling with the model as it sits currently. Any help you have is appreciated:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRVZbIfj-1dSh9ufExyT94EWAs6Y0FtL767XsB2aYg4etm_xR86obKLkbSOL0GP3w/pubhtml#gid=1172561394

Roughly 70,000 km^2 cost Russia 1 million troops.

Some land is high value but most of it is ag.

It would be good to get the land value/dead Russian.

Reading this subreddit, and listening to people on the internet/social media talk about this idea, LVT seems like the most obvious option with no downsides whatsoever.

And yet no country has done it.

Why is that? Are there downsides to these policies that im unaware of? What exactly am i missing?

Heard the term Parcel Tax recently and realized it wasn't something I'd heard before, did a search of this sub and couldn't find reference of it either.

Apparently in California, to get around Prop 13, some communities have been levying a "Parcel Tax". This is non-ad valorem, or not on the value added to a property, but hits the base parcel. Sometimes it's a flat tax (hitting smaller parcels harder) and sometimes it's per square foot.

While this is not a land VALUE tax, it does seem like a half measure that gets communities closer to the idea of taxing the land instead of the improvements.

Haven't done deep research on it, but am curious where all this might be currently implemented, since many states copied Prop 13 and will be struggling with the same fallout as California

Henry George wrote in his book (and later, on his grave) that truth will find friends. For some reason I can't shake the idea that he was right. There's another quote I love from Andor, that pure ideas occur spontaneously and without instruction. I wonder if we might actually get there after all.

https://cooperative-individualism.org/george-henry_a-remembrance-of-karl-marx-1883.htm

This is more or less a response to someone trying to drive a wedge, between more free market and socialist georgists.

So here I am quoting Henry George.

Yes, he did call Marx "King of the Muddleheads", but they also weren't able to really look into each other's ideas and a difference in opinion is not a difference in the goal you're trying to accomplish.

So I wanted to use this to give my two cents on where I think socialists and free market georgists agree, where we disagree and why I don't think the disagreements are relevant considering our political environment.

Or where I, as a market socialist and fan of George's ideas would argue for socialist policy in the service of making georgist policies even possible.

Generally when talking about a market failure, there are 3 ways of going about it.

1. Do nothing.

2. Tax the bad behavior

3. Let the state handle it.

Georgism is all about option 2, especially in terms of housing, but I also don't think there's anyone here who disagrees with the idea that we should have a carbon tax and other sin taxes, if that means giving us the ability to pay out a citizens dividende.

Socialism is mostly about option 3, and we have a good example to point to in the housing department as well with red vienna.

Point is, both can work if done right.

Where I hope there is an agreement is that we can see cases, where we might prefer one of the solutions 2 and 3, but still agree no solution is worse.

Like... if you think banning plastic or carbon is worse than simply taxing it high enough, I'd agree with you.

But I still strongly prefer a ban on plastics and government managed exit from fossil fuels to what we have in most cases right now, which is an insufficient solution that is going to lead to millions if not billions of deaths in the specific case of climate change.

So I think georgists and socialists fighting is unproductive as long as the status quo is something as stupid as no land taxes in most places and the same with carbon taxes.

And now I wanna make an argument I hope doesn't get misinterpreted, but I think generally speaking the free market georgists here are more technically correct on the economics in a vacuum, but in my opinion end up being wrong on the political effects of the economic policy.

I wanna outline this by talking about two people, one of whom was a fan of Henry George, but not Marx: John Maynard Keynes.

And the other is Albert Einstein, who I know was a Marxist.

John Maynard Keynes in 1930 argued in "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" that we might be able to have a 15 hour work week by today and that due to the growth inherent in capitalism. Made points against the extremes (communists and fascists) and also said

"Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth – unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them."

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm

Whereas Einstein argued only 19 years later that "The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature."

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/why-socialism/

I think Einsteins perspective has aged better relatively speaking.

But had the people in power implemented the kind of sensible georgist policies that we advocate for, Maynard Keynes would have been vindicated, he was completely right on the economics, he didn't consider the politics tho.

Yes, many of us have enough to live economically speaking, but we can't exactly ignore Elon Musk, can we?

And this is fundementally, why I believe, socialism and social democracy are useful or even necessary to implementing georgism.

As long as landlords have outsized political power, implementing the kinds of land taxes we advocate for is not feasible.

As long as fossil fuel lobbies lie and propagandize, we won't have a carbon tax high enough to stop the worst case if climate change.

And in my opinion, as long as inequality is as great as it is right now, with Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. buying up media left and right I don't think we can expect any competent georgist economic policy to happen.

So reducing their power, through wealth taxes above 1 billion dollars for example is good for georgism.

(Also... under Georgism I doubt anyone could get this rich in the first place...)

But more importantly, these people threaten democracy.

Papers like Automation and Repression (by a 2024 economic nobel prize winner) even make the argument that under current economic conditions the uberwealthy will always be encouraged to destroy democracy.

https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/Automation%20and%20Repression.pdf

So I believe you free market georgists need us socialists and wealth tax advocates like Gabriel Zucman etc. so we someday can call each other Muddleheads in a society where we argue option 2 and 3 on a case by case basis, without the threat of option 1 destroying our planet and our democracy.

In light of recent posts, I think it's important that people actually read the literature on this stuff rather than just support a wealth tax because "rich people bad". I disagree with their conclusion that we should instead tax consumption, but the article gives a good overview of all the drawbacks with wealth taxes and the empirical evidence we have for it.

So I'm currently writing an alternate history timeline for Successful Reconstruction. I personally later post Reconstruction with different national and party politics, a Land Value Tax would be possible in this America to be in the 16th Amendment. I'm not an expert on Georgism or the ins and outs of the LVT but I don't think a LVT BY ITSELF would last as long as it could like the Income Tax can. I was wondering how feasible is a, Pure LVT 16th Amendment or a Hybrid/Dual LVT and Income Tax 16th Amendment between the 1890s-1913 in our timeline? What are some considerations i need to take in and what wording would be realistic?

Edit: I can give you the rough ideas of my timelines I'm currently leaning towards.

There's been some discussion here and everywhere about wealth taxes recently so it was a good time to whip this one out.

The reason why wealth taxes have problems at least from the perspective of Georgism is that they target all assets broadly. Georgists would consider actually produced assets like capital goods to be stored-up labor that should be rewarded just like the general labor we think of, so we see that a wealth tax is harmful because it can discourage the creation of those actually productive assets that people make. But where taxing land fixes this is that land is finite, it's not produced and is non-producible, and so taxing it can reduce inequality without hurting the economy (it could even help by discouraging speculators who hold good land out of use at the cost of productive workers and businesses) while keeping the tax base stable. It's the wealth we can actually tax.

But while land is the biggest example, it's not the only thing we can target to combine both efficiency and equality while providing a way to shift off taxing actually productive labor. Anything else which like land is finite, in that no one can make more of it, is prone to efficiency-reducing, inequality-increasing wealth extraction that we can target in different ways. For example, taxing all natural resources other than land (ore deposits, waterways, and all); mitigating (whether by taxation or abolition/replacement) exclusive legal privileges like patenting a particular innovation (e.g. patent trolls) or controlling a limited professional license; dealing with naturally monopolistic industries; etc. Another way to describe it is that any market where no new production makes entering it impossible (a good term for it is an entry monopoly) is prone to bad zero-sum behavior and is a target in the Georgist sights.

This all goes to show that we can differentiate between wealth production which stems from making new things and wealth extraction which stems from just controlling finite things. If we want to heavily reduce inequality while fully strengthening the economy: Don't tax the things we make, tax (or mitigate) the finite things we take.