#henrygeorge — Public Fediverse posts

This isn't a crazy branch of reality, this is the reality where we still don't touch the economy causes behind this craziness.

#TaxTheRich #LandValueTax #DemurrageOnMoney #HenryGeorge #SilvioGesell

I wonder if #OpenStreetMap has urbex tags, I could tag the closed-down shell that used to be a Circuit City lol

#TaxTheLand #HenryGeorge

@benlockwood The environmental movement is just a negative application of the labor movements principle that workers ought to get the fruits of their labor. Nature isn’t the fruits of anyone’s labor, but everyone has an equal claim to it including future generations. #HenryGeorge had the right idea.

#Georgism #Georgist

"As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce." - Adam Smith

"Rent is the secret tax the wealthy charge the poor." - Joseph E. Stiglitz

"Solving the land question means the solving of all social questions." - Leo Tolstoy

#singletax #henrygeorge

If we had the #singletax of #henrygeorge of 100% of #landrents and basically nothing else (except perhaps a few targeted pigouvian ones) you wouldn't have this farcical budget speculation. All this tinkering is destructive. Spend what you have or choose to borrow to invest and nothing else.

Recently learned that Half Price Books in Berkeley is closing on Nov. 30th due to a lease dispute with the landlord.

This is a real tragedy—Half Price is one of the best bookstores in the Bay Area. Many gems on my bookshelf came from Half Price.

I've long tired of great shops and stores across the Bay Area closing due to landlord rent increases w/ no property improvements. This is the kind of thing that makes me sympathetic to Georgism.

#Berkeley #BayArea #Bookstore #HenryGeorge

#Enshittification. #UnitedHealthcare, and your monthly bills all have one huge thing in common.

#Business under #Capitalism will always attempt to turn returns from #Capital into returns from #Rent.

I think #HenryGeorge and #Marx both missed this. If a capitalist can artificially constrain supply, or make demand non-optional, then they are no longer engaged in a classical or neo-classical - not even #Marxist - mode of #capitalist production.

They are engaged in #rent extraction.

The entire reason why tech investors want companies to lose money and grow as quickly as possible is that they want to:
1. Push any competition out of the market
2. Get their users hooked on their product.

To the extent that those two things are accomplished.

Likewise, drug companies would rather you have a drug you have to take forever, than one that cures you.

@Dianora There are a few other economic concepts which are IMO key to developing any remedies and/or alternatives. I'll try to touch on the major ones here.

Wage/Rent pricing, mentioned above, is a key stumbling point. Smith:

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AThe_wealth_of_nations%2C_volume_1.djvu/135

The Law of Rent and Iron Law of Wages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages) dictate that these dynamics are always in conflict and play, and crush the working class, most especially those who live by wage labour (or worse: piecework pay, see Smith's discussion of this for an eye-opener), and rent rather than own their domeciles. Both concepts date to the 18th / early 19th centuries, but are largely ignored in contemporary orthodoxy.

The "obvious" solutions, of, say, providing free/subsidised essentials to the working class or of critical goods and services (food, clothing, housing, education, healthcare) largely further exacerbate the existing perverse market dynamics. I am not saying DON'T help those in dire need. What I am saying is that if this is the sole and widespread remedy, that the underlying problems get worse: wages fall (because "welfare" benefits subsidise its costs rather than employers paying a living wage), education, housing, healthcare and other services get more expensive (because subsidies provide additional revenues).

Winston Churchill (another unlikely champion) noted this in 1906:

Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public conscience, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!

https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can

Instead, a dual strategy of taxing rents (generally: providers of the goods/services above or those acting similarly economically), and providing for increased labour bargaining power though an improved best alternative to negotiated agreement (BATNA) and coordinated negotiation power (a/k/a Labour Unionisation) is necessary. Both of course run into the Wealth is Power and Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson, 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action) problems.

Direct subsidies / contributions as emergency measures directed at dire immediate circumstances are ABSOLUTELY of value. **But they should result in direction to directly addressing the rents/wages dichotomy.

A business which cannot pay a living wage and survive economically is a charity conducted to the benefit of its owner at the cost of its workers, or is provisioning public goods which should see a subsidy in their provision through tax revenues and transfer payments. Below-subsistence wages and labour supports only exacerbate the underlying problem.

Private ownership of real estate is a surprisingly recent development, displacing earlier feudal or monarchical rents (often very long-term leases) largely in the late 19th century. Among the few explorations of this history I've found is Simon Winchester's Land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(book)). And of course there's Henry George's Progress and Poverty (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty_(George,_D._Appleton_%26_Company,_fifth_edition)), championing the Land Value Tax (along with: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Milton Friedman (!!!), to name just a few. Social housing has its failures, but also successes, including the Fuggerei (Augsburg, Germany, created by the Fugger family in 1516 and continuing to serve to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei), Vienna, and Japan (through both market and government actions, in part through some idiosyncratic practices).

Housing cannot be both affordable and an investment asset. And of the two, the first function is primal.

Incidentally, I suspect that a large part of the US growth in homelessness may be directly attributable to going off the gold standard, itself a response to the country's peak-oil moment and reliance on foreign energy imports, driving banks and financial institutions to find an alternate asset class: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304603.

Next are some more obscure economic principles, somewhat addressed in the mainstream, but highly underappreciated ...

2/

#economics #orthodoxEconomics #critique #wages #rents #LawOfRent #IronLawOfWages #MancurOlson #UBI #unions #LogicOfCollectiveAction #RealEstate #homelessness #OilCrisis #PeakOil #Fuggerei #ProgressAndPoverty #HenryGeorge #DavidRicardo #SimonWinchester #AffordableHousing #AssetHousing #BusinessAsCharity #tootstorm

@Heliograph Yes, she was a follower of #HenryGeorge and believed that we should work to build a better society by shifting taxes to land and off of consumption and production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

"The story goes that Magie intended her game to be a teaching tool about the injustices of #capitalism. She was a fan of the theories of political economist #HenryGeorge, who thought landlords were parasites and advocated a “single tax” on them to replace all other taxes.

You’re thinking: what an exciting premise for a board game. Depends on how it’s handled. If the idea was that the players, beaten down by exorbitant rents, were supposed to rise up and feed their evil landlord’s intestines to him with a fork, this might indeed make for a diverting family game night."

#boardgames #monopoly

https://www.straightdope.com/21344078/was-monopoly-originally-meant-to-teach-people-about-the-evils-of-capitalism

@Heliograph She was a fan of #HenryGeorge and advocated for full Land Value Taxation. The game of #Monopoly always ending in ruin, is an attempt to show the principles of @Georgism.

https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/tax-lessons-for-governments-from-henry-george/id3082594/ “governments should ensure that super-profits benefit their citizens. International tax co-operation is the way to do this” #equity #taxation #HenryGeorge

As we in the U.S. enjoy the last moments of #freetrade for some period of time, I'd like to point out that we had this same #tariff mania over a century ago and discovered that it was a disaster. The definitive book on the subject was written by a writer named #henrygeorge . The book was called "Protection or Free Trade". I did not imagine that this 1886 book would be necessary reading in my lifetime #economics #protectionism #history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_or_Free_Trade

Which way #liberal?

#meme #philosophy #liberalism #libertarian #libertarianism #Georgism #HenryGeorge #Georgist #LibertarianLeft #LeftLibertarian #DavidEllerman #leftism #leftist #EconomicDemocracy #WorkplaceDemocracy #WorkerCoops #coops #cooperatives #selfmanagement #ThomasHodgskin #ElizabethAnderson #FrankKnight #Bastiat #mutualism #capitalism #capitalist #anticapitalism #anticapitalist #postcapitalism

So what does this all mean?

It means that #Marx and #Riccardo, and #HenryGeorge were all correct.

There is no workable system of #Capitalism that will not become some form of #Manorialism then #LateStageCapitalism and finally #Fasicsm.

Here I'm defining Capitalism specifically a any system that allows arbitrarily large wealth accumulation.

I do not think there is any possible purely #political nor purely #economic solution. Rather, every solution proposed must inherently be a #PoliticalEconomy that is resistant to the accumulation of power and a political system that is resistant to the accumulation of power.

Do I think #Marxist #Socialism is such a system? No! Absolutely not. I think #HenryGeorge was prescient when he called #Marxism a recipe for #Authoritarianism.

Marx never proposed a political system that was even moderately robust to corruption.

Likewise, I think preventing returns to capital is bad. We _want_ individual people to invest their surplus into making bursts of short term profit. That is the actual value add capitalism brings.

Assuming you had a political system resistant to corruption, then #Taxes are a possible solution. One could, for example, place a small tax on wealth, creating gravitational pressure of the returns to capital. Set to the right level, this should be able to resist massive wealth accumulation.

I'll have to save my thoughts on political systems to later.

4/4

@ned

#HenryGeorge pointed out the problem 150 years ago.

The thing you'll see economists puzzled by is that the interest rate (meaning profits) hasn't grown either. So where is the money?

It's in you #rent

The wrong way to think about universal basic income is that it is a free handout given to the government to people who don't deserve it, paid for by illegitimate taxation of the earnings of others.

The true basis for universal basic income is the moral fact that Nature belongs by right and in common to all the living, and that reclaiming the value of land for the common wealth is not taxation, because it is not assessed against anything which can be called private property in any legitimate sense.

There is no and there cannot possibly be any moral claim to private ownership of any part of Nature. It is not logically possible to "tax" something which is inherently not owned because it is unownable.

Land values are created solely through the aggregaate competitive demand for advantageous locations. They are not and cannot be created by any individual's actions, only via communal or community action, and therefore land values cannot possibly belong to any individual, but only to the community which creates them.

No moral stigma should attach to anyone who chooses to live solely off of their rightful share of the common wealth, without contributing in any way to any productive effort, since that share represents the portion of Nature which they have been denied by the artificial, but necessary, grant of exclusivity of occupancy by society.

In any advanced society, our labor saving inventions necessarily produce more than the input of human hands, or they would not be "labor saving devices", in the first place. The advanced of technology makes location more valuable and labor less valuable. It is neither possible nor desirable to have "full employment" in a technological society, but technology does not and cannot rescind the pre-existing common and equal right to the gifts and produce of Nature.

#Georgism #UBI #LVT #JustRent #economics #taxation #HenryGeorge

RE: https://hachyderm.io/users/scottsantens/statuses/112445770449726691

There's really no legitimate reason for import #tariffs. Economists have been pointing out for well over a century that import tariffs only hurt us, not the people who we mistakenly believe are going to be burdened by them.

' Trade is not invasion. It does not involve aggression on one side and resistance on the other, but mutual consent and gratification. It is not from foreigners that protection preserves and defends us; it is from ourselves.

If I trade with a Canadian, a Mexican, or an Englishman it is for the same reason that I trade with an American—that I would rather have the thing he gives me than the thing I give him. If I did not want the thing I am to get more than the thing I am to give, I would not wish to make the trade.

There is no one who in exchanging his own productions for the productions of another would think that the more he gave and the less he got the better off he would be. Yet to many men nothing seems clearer than that the more of its own productions a nation sends away, and the less of the productions of other nations it receives in return, the more profitable its trade.

What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war. '

— #HenryGeorge, "Protection or Free Trade" (1886)

https://www.econlib.org/.../y2017/Hooperprotection.html

#trade #economics #USpol #Biden #FreeTrade #China

@joriki #GeorgeDidNothingWrong

#Georgism #LandValueTax #HenryGeorge

"It's not your own fault. It is the fault of the way we have organized our #economy, the way we've allowed certain things to develop unchecked and uncontrolled. There's no reason for anybody to be poor in #America." – #ProgressAndPoverty, 1879, by #HenryGeorge

We've long known yet nothing fundamentally has changed.

#TheGildedAgePBS #PBS #AmericanExperience

#link: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-vote-part-1-3kph5d/?continuousplayautoplay=true

#link: https://youtu.be/yjpYzFtxfjU?si=3SwIhgMBKhp0ZzuM

@Mulgrew I would highly recommend #HenryGeorge 's #ProgressAndPoverty. It starts out dry, but if you push past that, it is a really engaging book. You can listen to the whole thing for free here...
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3MzLmFtYXpvbmF3cy5jb20vYXBsdDFyc3MvNzUwNS5yc3M?ep=14

#Georgism #LandValueTax #LVT #HenryGeorge

Quote from Progress and Poverty https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/zml179/quote_from_progress_and_poverty/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

You may have heard that #Monopoly was invented by Lizzie Phillips and then stolen by a man and sold for profit. She designed the game to raise awareness of the single #LandValueTax as popularized by #HenryGeorge. If you haven't heard of it, I would highly recommend checking it out. The idea is that no one made the natural resources and land that we all depend on, but by monopolizing these, the wealthy shrink the employment and housing opportunities for everyone else. https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE

@Sheril I've heard that she designed the game to raise awareness of the single #LandValueTax as popularized by #HenryGeorge. If you haven't heard of it, I would highly recommend checking it out. The idea is that no one made the natural resources and land that we all depend on, but by monopolizing these, the wealthy shrink the employment and housing opportunities for everyone else. Want a Monopoly? You owe rent to everyone else in the form of a tax. https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE

“The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.” Henry George #Georgism #LandValueTax #LVT #HenryGeorge

#Georgism #HenryGeorge

From Protection or Free Trade; Chapter 28: Free Trade & Socialism https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/ywl699/from_protection_or_free_trade_chapter_28_free/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf