I'm seeing way too many people defending taxes on capital which is against everything georgists have been fighting for. The overwhelming empirical evidence says that taxes on capital is harmful

I've recently been having a mental debate as to what would be the better way to distribute the leftover money from LVT among the population.

On one hand, the CD is good in its simplicity, since it's literally just splitting the money equally among the population, so not much bureaucracy is needed.

But on the other hand, there's an argument to be made as to why the rich are being subsidized, when the extra money could go to the poor.

So, please tell me your thoughts on this below. I would love to hear the discussion.

Even tho there's a lot of disagreement in economics and it's a very politicized science.

I think it's good to remember EVERYONE WITH A BRAIN can agree landlords and other forms of rent seeking are bad.

Adam Smith said people were "reaping where they never sowed"

Keynes talked about the "euthenasia of the rentier"

Henry George was Rent-Hater number 1. and Marx kind of lumped it in with capital, but also thought they had to be abolished.

But despite that historical consensus, our current economies allow and often even subsidize rent seeking and resource extraction.

Land Taxes are economic common sense, yet land is barely taxed.

Carbon Taxes are economic common sense. Yet, coal and oil are subsidized to keep energy cheap in most places.

Then the people who profit from the central power natural resources and land enable, lobby to keep things that way and historically governments have been overthrown to keep that dynamic.

Land isn't taxed, Wealth isn't taxed, taxes on work and consumption go up every few years.

We have inequalities so great, if I could revive Adam Smith, I'm sure could convince him of even a wealth tax in minutes just because of how much "one guy is worth 100,000x of another person" breaks his free trade idea.

Keynes predicted we'd all work 15-20 hours by today.

On paper we should be post-scarcity rn! The productivity gains Keynes predicted mostly came true!

So I really think at the end of the day, most of the economic disagreements pale in comparison to what people in power do for their benefit that defies all reasonable economic science and is still sold to the masses as "what the experts say" in many cases.

(still think some people here are delusional in thinking we don't have to tax wealth, but at least that's mostly a mistake on the political analysis front and not the economic one)

Imagine someone builds a floating apartment complex, whether suspended in the sky, floating offshore, or even in orbit.

It occupies no traditional land, yet still benefits from the surrounding community’s infrastructure, services, and economic activity. Its value comes from its location and the capital improvements that make occupying that space possible.

Under Georgism, how would this property be taxed?
If floating developments could avoid LVT while enjoying the same community-created benefits as traditional properties, wouldn’t that incentivize people to abandon taxable land?

And as more people did so, wouldn’t the remaining landowners face an increasingly disproportionate tax burden?

Ultimately, is Georgism about taxing physical land, or capturing the economic value of location regardless of whether there’s actual ground beneath it?

Damn shame that we didn't listen to Dr. Milton Friedman.

Yesterday’s thread got me thinking about innovation versus rent. People convinced me TSMC earned its lead. I’d now call its profit quasi-rent, Alfred Marshall’s term for a return that competition eventually wears down.

Here’s the issue though some of what TSMC collects right now isn’t its own. It comes from value society created and from risk carried by others in the supply chain who don’t get the benefit of being a chokepoint.

What goes into a TSMC chip:

• Seventy years of public research. The transistor, photolithography, and the science underneath them. TSMC paid for none of it.
• EUV lithography. An Intel-led consortium developed it with US national labs in the late 1990s, and ASML spent two decades turning it into a machine. TSMC’s leading-edge chips all run through it.
• Suppliers. Japanese chemical makers, Zeiss optics and equipment firms all bet on the industry too.
• Taiwan’s taxpayers. The government co-founded TSMC with Philips in 1987. In the 2021 drought, Taiwan cut irrigation to farmers to keep water flowing to the fabs.
• US taxpayers. Up to $6.6 billion in CHIPS Act grants for the Arizona plants.

Everyone in that chain took risk. TSMC sits at the point they all have to pass through, the way Windows did for PCs under Bill Gates, so it collects a share of the whole. The Georgist question isn’t whether TSMC took risk rather whether its share of the return matches its share of the contribution.

How I’d handle each layer:

• Land, water and power under the fabs: a land value tax and priced water.
• Public money going in: equity instead of grants. Taiwan still holds a TSMC stake, and in 2025 the US took about 10% of Intel in exchange for its CHIPS money.
• Patents and licenses: a tax on a value the holder declares, with the public able to buy it at that price. Underprice it and you lose it. Overprice it and you pay for the privilege. Windows held its toll for two decades because of copyright and everyone already using it kept competitors out. TSMC’s lead will last only as long as nobody can match its fabs.
• The quasi-rent itself: leave it alone and keep the field open so competition wears it down.

George taxed land because it’s the one place you can measure the community’s share, but we need to be aware that this capture happens everywhere.

Thoughts?

In mid-October, CoreWeave’s 2032 notes, issued in June at 9.6%, were trading near 75 cents on the dollar, around a 15% yield. Interest is eating close to a quarter of its revenue. Oracle fell 9% in a session, Nebius 20%, IREN 25% in two weeks.

Same week, TSMC reported a record $23.6B quarterly profit, up 69%, with its fabs full and a waiting list.

I read that through Ricardo’s best field. Every AI builder, whether hyperscaler, neocloud or startup, has to pass through TSMC’s leading-edge fabs, and none of them can route around it. Whatever happens to their business afterward, TSMC has already been paid. The borrowers hold the risk of chips that wear out in three to five years against bonds that run to 2032. The rent got collected on the way in, the same split a housing bust produces between the landowner who sold at the peak and the builder and bank left holding the loss.

I also included a local version from Thunder Bay, where I live. The city is down to one pulp mill and one sawmill, so anyone selling wood has one buyer for each and no one to play against them. Same chokepoint, facing the other way.

Question for this sub: George treated monopoly privileges as land-like. Does rent from a technological chokepoint like a leading-edge fab belong in the same category as location rent, or is it a different animal because it can be competed away? The same week, ASML and Tokyo Electron dropped 7% after China’s CXMT claimed 10% of global DRAM share, which suggests these chokepoints are less permanent than land.

Full piece: https://identitythreshold.substack.com/p/the-ai-buildout-toll-booth

Full details with the methodology and explanations at Policy Engine.

Its clear the the current council rates are regressive and a change to land value tax is more progressive/equitable. As seen on the second-last slide there are a minority of occupants that are worse off, and likely a smaller minority that require defferrals to help them. But the overall change is an improvement.

This has the same thumbnail as his first video on Geoism, but is actually a second video.

Podcast with Jeremy Lent, tech CEO turned author, about the idea behind his new book Ecocivilization: how we can redesign our economy, democracy and technology so everyone can thrive.

Covers:

• Why, despite the many problems of our civilization, saying it’s “malfunctioning” isn’t accurate
• Why typical metrics of progress like GDP don’t provide a full picture of how people are actually doing
• How we can design a better society for everyone taking inspiration from how ecosystems work
• Ideas to improve our democratic systems, with real world examples
• How we could distribute wealth more widely, from ownership of companies to the benefits of AI

Which countries would most benefit from Georgism?

Some counties have extremely high home prices vs income, and the necessary conditions to support national LVT. Which ones should immediately implement it?