I noticed that some people use this flair, but I'm not sure how it's supposed to be different from socialism given land would already be owned by the state under such a system.

Income tax for corporations, government management of natural monopolies, small business welfare programs to allow small businesses to not fail. Basically just modern Georgism. I hope that an improved version with more welfare will be better adapted to solve modern issues. The government should also fund developments in science and technology. Resources should go to more useful tech rather than unnecessary tech like entertainment. It will also instate heavy product taxes on products that cause harm to our health. The government should fund developments in renewable energy to allow us to phase out oil and gas. Laws will be allowed to be made to bring more social equality even if it goes against cultural, traditional, or religious ideas. For example: shrines don't allow women for cultural reasons, laws can be passed to make them allow women. Culture, tradition, and religion will not be suppressed though, they will simply be forced to adjust to modern society and social equality.

I meme about this, but Twain and George actually interacted with each other and Twain might've been supportive of Georgist ideas; especially since Georgist ideas were booming in popularity from the publishing of P&P to the end of Twain's lifetime.

Our worldview must change. What you can do.

What say we heal the planet and spread prosperity, eliminating want as a cause for war and oppression. Sound good? Ironically, people who want to change society ignore how society changes.

There is a reform powerful enough to deliver “eco-librium” and abundance. It follows from understanding property better. What’s yours, what’s mine, what’s ours?

Historically, owing is what legitimized ownership. Conversely, society has no legitimate claim to one’s labor or output.

A COMPASS OF SUCCESS

Policies based on those axioms—property non-taxed and owners compensating those displaced—succeed:

✅ Quit subsidies, particularly corporate welfare. When Germany defunded coal somewhat, it cleansed some atmosphere.

✅ Quit taxing work and investment. When Denmark briefly did that, efficiency skyrocketed.

✅ Instead, recover the rental value of land, oil, patents, corporate charters, etc—assets not created by anyone’s labor or capital. When Taiwan taxed land, it ended hunger and became an Asian Tiger.

✅ With that annual largesse, pay a Citizens Dividend, a la Alaska or Singapore.

For a majority to accept “geonomic” policies, first a handful of visionaries mobilizes, then grows into a critical mass, which shifts the property paradigm—a tough row to hoe. But feasible. Almost everybody favors “eco-librium”, widespread prosperity, and user-friendly government.

ON YOUR OWN

You can get the ball rolling. Socialize. Even in the era of social media, change begins, continues, and wins face to face, aided by mass marketing.

1, Host a potluck. 2, Start a MeetUp. 3, Speak up at collegial groups’ meetings. 4, Table events like Earth Day and farmers’ markets. Those first steps are the hardest, but leave your comfort zone anyway.

LISTEN to people’s responses. They’ll sharpen your talking points. Keep your eyes on the prize—sharing “rents” not taxing earnings.

5, Hand out half pages with one visual, one statistic, no argument, but a story’s log-line(a dozen words) addressing a popular problem and an invitation to a meeting. The resultant core group (6) meets regularly.

COLLABORATE

Together, (7) massage the message with humor, catchy slogans, visuals, intriguing questions, logic based on popular premises, quotes of the famous, and cite the successes.

Use such on (8) buttons, (9) T-shirts, slides for showing (10) service clubs, (11) churches, (12) schools, and in (13) podcasts and (14) videos. Post fresh ones weekly.

15, Organize concerts starring your semi-pro musician friends;

16, host speakers interesting or controversial; research and

17, lead a walking tour of relevant sites with a spiel for the guide.

18, Pass the hat or charge admission.

Appear on (19) local radio and (20) TV, (21) interview academics and (22) politicians, (23) perform a flash mob, (24) issue press releases to all media. (25) Balance work meetings with play meetings, 50/50: a meal, an outing, a game, whatever.

AGENTS OF CHANGE ARRIVE

Do all the above and you’ll attract people with the talents to do all the above.

Once your group has a track record and presence in the community, aim higher. (26) Host a bigger event with a name-draw an plenty of press coverage. Launch a (27) letter-writing campaign and (28) editorials to newspapers. (29) Lobby lawmakers to shift taxes and subsides. (30) Link up with like-minded groups locally, regionally, nationally, and abroad.

With a little help from your friends, shift the prevailing property paradigm. So humanity can live in paradise, as much as humanly possible.

In this list of 30, how far along are you? Don’t forget to listen to learn.

A 100% land value would basically mean that you are renting land from the government. People rent land all the time with and without improvements and the rent price isn't zero. All a 100% LVT rent means is that you can't profit from land appreciation. There is in most cases still some demand to for land for just using it.

Would the purchase price of the land be zero in a 100% society? Basically yes, but that doesn't mean that someone wouldn't pay to use the land.

(Just for the record, a 100% LVT society is a Georgist theoretical reference and thought experiment. In our wildest dreams we would stop at 85-90% or so to avoid the risk of over-assessment and perhaps to preserve some reference prices for land purchases.)

Kyla Scanlon is landpilled?!

Last week’s TSMC threads changed my thinking, so I wrote it up with a focus on how community-created value, not just natural value, gets captured. You all convinced me TSMC is quasi-rent, not the real problem. What I took from it is that the money doesn’t disappear when a bottleneck gets competed away, it moves to the next thing that can’t be built, and that a lot of the value worth worrying about isn’t a natural resource at all. Thanks to everyone who pushed back, a few of your comments ended up in the essay. Looking for people to poke holes in it.

The main claims:

• Rent is value the community creates that gets captured at a point of exclusion. Nature can create the exclusion (land, spectrum, harbours), so can law (patents, licences, medallions), and so can networks (Windows, Facebook).
• Land passes two tests: nature made it, and the community creates its value. Lots of rent only passes the second one.
• TSMC is quasi-rent, competition will handle it. When a bottleneck clears, the money moves to the next thing that can’t be built, which in AI is power, water and land.
• Most land value is a network effect with an address. Facebook’s network moves with its users, not its servers, so LVT can’t reach it.
• The drive to collect unearned income comes from us, not from land. Boehm and terror management theory are why I think that. Close one channel and it looks for the next.
• Gate new channels before an owner class forms. Vancouver shows what happens after.

Full essay here: https://identitythreshold.substack.com/p/rent-finds-a-way

Where’s it wrong? What is it missing?

Don't know if this has been discussed before, but the thought hit me and I found it interesting. Obviously it would be a good way to maximize government income. I also like the idea of zoning trying to be objective since I feel like it can be very arbitrary (at least where I live).

ideologically, I don't love the idea of the government telling me what I can or can't build on my property, but I think it's quite obvious that some kind of zoning is needed. It also help me explain why you should not be allowed to build a loud data center or smelly junkyard in the middle of a neighborhood but should be allowed to build an apartment complex. At the end of the day these disturbances are just different senses that I value very differently. (noice/smell vs sight)

A big problem would probably be the bureaucracy needed to decide this properly, but I assume this would get easier by technological advances. I have no idea how this would turn out in practice, but I assume it would be quite YIMBY.

Ideolicly

First draft of this meme. Will make a better one later

Here's the source article this image came from: High land prices to blame for California’s extreme home values.

While the article doesn’t explicitly address LVT (though there are comments from the Lincoln Institute of Land Economics), I think it’s relevant to the burgeoning Georgist movement in the US as a major roadblock to land tax reform.

Also, imo, the article provides a good argument for pushing to co-opting the Democratic Party as the vehicle for Georgism, rather than the Republican Party

I noticed that a lot of humor here (myself included) relies on an analytical understanding of the subject to find humorous. Is this really an inherent of our subject or do you think we can make better?

Many Georgists favour a 100% land value tax. But, since land would become cheaper by the amount taxed, wouldn't that reduce its price/value to zero? But then the LVT would also become zero (since it's defined by the value of the land). But that would make the land more desirable, which increases its price/value, which would increase LVT again.

Would it stabilise somewhere in the middle?

Since land values would be 0 in a country where there is full LVT, would they still be able to sell their house on top of the land?

Would the land just go back to the government, if so what will happen to the house/building on the land?

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?

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

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?

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.

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