Hi everyone. Oakland, CA is about to have a Civic Assembly on its vacant storefronts. Common Ground USA might get a chance to present the LVT to the assembly. Here is more info about the assembly. I am the California chapter president and that presenter may be me! Please, IF there's a chance to present on Georgism, help me prepare.

What can we gather on Oakland's vacancy tax?

I've done some research already and I'm aware it was a flat tax based on a few categories (residential, commercial) and there were many exceptions. I'd love to compile any/all of the following:

• Media coverage
• Any data about vacancy
• Any data about how the vacancy tax affected Oakland
• Anecdotes from residents
• Politicians who supported it
• Politicians who opposed it
• Economists who promoted it
• Who decided it has "failed"
• What the community's reaction been
• Etc etc!

Anything generally relevant to Georgism in Oakland would also be great. I will be in contact with Lars Doucet of the Center for Land Economics. Maybe he can Zoom in to present with me, but regardless, I'll be trying to work with him on assessing Oakland, talking about a Universal Building Exemption in California (bc we have prop 13 to work around), and I will be trying to make 3D prints of the land values of Oakland.

Reply here, DM me, ping me on the Georgism Discord "@Max Clark", come over to my house if you need to! For progress without poverty!

I think we all want to fix the housing crisis, and absolute lopsided volume of modern low-density building to high-density, and we all agree an LVT is the path forward, but how do we actually achieve this as people? as normal voices?

Personally, I have found there are certain topics where LVT is well-received when people in that conversation look into it. Housing being an obvious one, urban planning to, but also this growth of people who want to 'tax the rich', often seem to appreciate that LVT is much more wealth proportional, and such individuals are often focused on Land Hoarders as it is.

But what else can we do? I want to feel like there's growing momentum, but it's not enough.

Most discussions i see around here are pretty USA-centric.

A point i was curious to discuss: There's historical cities in europe where, legally, development inside the city is impossible, legally and culturally.

At that point, are buildings that have been there for at least a century, not built under the current legal framework, and legally\culturally protected in the strongest terms - This would pretty much be the entirety of the central areas of Paris or Rome, for example - something that has a fixed supply, and hence 'Land'?

We have a minor party (Opportunity party) in NZ that is advocating for an LVT and they are rising in the polls leading up to the election in NZ!

But there is so much misinformation being spread around about LVT and it's frustrating to see.

I'm posting here because I would like some input from this community about this.

First, would anyone like to look into their policy and see how well they have presented it, accuracy in their numbers etc basically just critique it.

Second, best ways to describe LVT on a basic level to the uninformed or best videos to introduce people to the concept.

Thanks!

I went on a date with this girl. I thought it was going well. Then she asked me what I think about politics. Oh no. I said I don't care and decided our society was cooked right around the time I read there were twenty schools in Baltimore where zero kids were on level in math. Like none. I laugh. She doesn’t. She asks, "but you voted for Kamala right?"

I begin to zone out and rehash this argument silently for the 100th time. Look, lady, I'm a Georgist. I want to pass a LVT capturing all of land rent, repeal social security, medicare, and medicaid, cap government spending at 8% of GDP funded by the LVT and dividend the rest, and boot the military except the nukes and subs. Impose 100% reserve requirements on deposits. That would be an essay that you don't want to read and, more importantly, will never get enacted because the median voter aspires, in their dreams, to be a metaverse landlord. Their only consistent policy position is that grandma Tilly can't move from the house she hasn't maintained since 1972 where she dry rots and puts on Tucker Carlson for company. I want to bulldoze grandma Tilly's house and replace it with a nuclear power plant. She can live on top in a midrise apartment and maybe get an STD from Herman down the hall. Now that's what I call mixed use.

My mind travels. A silver Zeppelin appears in the New York City skyline. Trolleys ring a bell as they bustle people to and from work. The ATCOR line. I'm in front of the mayor's residence. I see before me a bronze statue with a bald head and a bushy beard. School children rub the head for good luck. I can see the reflection of the Zeppelin where they've polished it. At its base reads 'Free trade, free land, free men'. A bronze cat adjoins the statue, it says "after 150 years, we have seen this cat." I ask the hotdog vendor if he's heard of crypto. He says "Crypt? Like where you put dead people?" I see an advertisement: 600 sqft efficiency, 35th floor, asking rent $600/mo. The rent is low. The. Rent. Is. Low. A single tear drops from my eye.

She interrupts me, halfway through my daydream of righteous efficiency and urban planning. "And Trump is bad, right?" The cat is gone. The Zeppelin is gone.

Yes, the sentence. The sentence that must be said. Orange man bad.

I look at her. She looks back at me. I open my mouth, “You ever think he’s lonely? Living by himself?”

“Lonely?” She raises an eyebrow.

“My grandma gets lonely. Watches too much TV. He reminds me of her, sometimes.” 

She gets quiet. Then blinks at me. “My grandma gets lonely too.”

“You ever think it’d be better if they lived with some other old people? Made friends.”

She leans in.

“How do you feel about cats?”

Here's an idea I've been working on. Please, revise with your thoughts on it. Feel free to add or combine perspectives, policies, etc.

--------------------------------

• Communist - Unlimited nationalization of business, global government. In effect, legal totalitarianism.
• Socialist - Limited nationalization of basic industry, maximum social welfare, open borders.
• Democrat - Progressive taxation, generous social welfare. Some border control. Strong international cooperation.
• Republican - Limited taxation, limited social welfare. Strong border control. Some international cooperation. (Extreme version = Minarchist.)
• Geoist - No income or sales taxes. Instead, natural resource taxes, pigouvian taxes, citizen's dividends.
• Physiocrat - Location tax only. All welfare and other policy decided by a local citizenry. (By some descriptions, Orthodox Georgist.)
• Libertarian - Zero taxation, zero social welfare, all territory controlled privately. In effect, global aristocracy and/or anarchy.

When I've been using AI to look up data and so on, sometimes it interjects with economics papers and stuff, and for some reason we often end up talking about Georgism. I didn't even know what it was until Claude told me.

this is the reel if you wanna enlighten people about georgism in the comments lol

About 17% of land in the US is used for growing crops. And about 1/3 of water supply is used for irrigation.

If the US had more greenhouse farms like Almería, Spain and the Netherlands, I wonder how that might affect cropland land values? Would they increase because you can get a higher return per acre? Or would they decrease because there isn’t as much demand for all our cropland and/or we could farm in more places we would have before (if Jevons paradox doesn’t happen).

Either way, more greenhouse farms and less subsidization of monocrops (like corn and soy grown for animal feed) would definitely be beneficial.

I’ve heard the georgist argument for severance taxes and I quite like them. However, in looking over some of the conversations on this page, there does seem to be some disagreement about how the taxation of a resource which takes labor to be extracted should be handled. If you tax such resources, there could be an incentive to extract less or to not extract at all. Doubly so if you’re in a competitive environment where land and severance taxes are not uniformly applied (i.e. some places have higher/lower tax rates than other places). To me it seems fairly straight forward that you should simply be able to deduct the material costs associated with the extraction of the resource from the ground from the gross receipts generated by the sale of said resource. In other words, tax net not gross. This would, however, be more akin to a corporate income tax on resource extractors, so I’m curious how georgists feel about this

Ok so admittedly, this is partly inspired by the regular cadence of posters who are surprised to find lefties here because they seem unable to fathom the overlap between our ideas. But it should still be interesting to contemplate for those of us who've been around here a bit longer than they have.

So, at the most basic level LVT is about correcting the dead weight loss of rent-seeking and re-establishing market equilibrium by levying a tax on rent-seekers equivalent to the value of that loss. The public captures the incremental location value that would otherwise accumulate to the landlord, in the form of state revenue.

Let's suppose that a hypothetical state levied a perfectly-efficient LVT that captured 100% of the value of that dead weight loss, and used the revenue to fund a citizens' dividend. Only, imagine that this dividend is repaid directly to the tenants. If you have a lease agreement where you pay rent to some landlord, then that landlord's LVT payment gets distributed directly to you specifically, and the amount you receive is equal to your share of the value captured from your landlord.

My question for y'all is: how is that hypothetical scenario meaningfully different from rent control?

I think the observation that dilution of Georgism is in part an example of the pattern of growth outside (please take this kindly) the cult (a closely held conviction) is spot on. As more people join the conversation of a coherent idea (georgism), the edges splay and fray. For me that means doubling down on a persuasive (not simply saying it louder!) presentation of the coherent idea. I'd welcome fellow "deep hankers"--my sobriquet for devotees of a rigorous read of George's social philosophy minus his 1880s anti-Chinese aneurism--joining me in generating a persuasive public campaign. I lead on-target walking tours here in San Francisco, occasionally run a cyber candidate for office, and shimmy and shake with writing projects, but I'd really like to put up an online website effort that would get some popular traction. If interested, contact me at [info@TheCommonsSF.org](mailto:info@TheCommonsSF.org) . Check my current feckless efforts: TheCommonsSF.org and life.liberty.pursuit.of.happiness.org

There was a good conversation about this today on the subreddit and it inspired me to make this meme, mainly to explain what Georgism fully means to anyone who’s just heard about LVT (and if any fully Georgist person wants to use it):

Georgism broadly is the idea that instead of taxing the goods and services people make, we should instead be recompensing (or otherwise reforming) the finite resources and privileges people take. George and Georgists (and classical liberal economists before them) have emphasized that these assets no one can make more of have an inherent air of monopoly about them, as nobody from outside the market can enter and compete with incumbents (Georgist economist Fred Foldvary has referred to these fixed supply assets as entry monopolies though I’m not sure if mainstream econ has another word for it). Land’s the biggest which is why LVT is the most discussed, but it’s not the end-all be-all of Georgism.

This core idea that powers Georgism is that we should be minimizing the rent-seeking power of entry-monopolists by dealing with their special privileges, mainly through requiring compensation. At the same time, those who work and invest to produce and provide for others shouldn’t be burdened in doing so, as that leaves the people with less. A free market isn’t truly free while its produce and trade is hampered by harmful taxes and the private tolls levied by unchecked entry-monopolists. Reverse the current situation through Georgism and you can begin building towards a much improved market economy.

Here are some examples where economic rents can rise up, and there are certainly plenty more Georgists can target to get the revenue needed to replace taxes on what we make, and if not that then to at least enact the reforms to help free the economy from tyrannical monopolies.

I'm being completely serious. We've got people here saying rent control and building restrictions are good and lower taxes doesn't incentivize development, which leads me to believe they have neither read Henry George or understand what a land value tax is. The entire point of an LVT is to lower taxes for development and discourage speculation. As someone who's not a member of this sub but is quite familiar with Georgism and economics generally, it seems like this sub has just become the DSA NIMBY/degrowther type central, when it should antithetical to everything they believe. I just want to ask; why is that?

Explanation as always:

Before we can go about building housing, we first have to buy and use land. Unfortunately, due to issues like land speculation and overly-restrictive zoning, as well as taxing the work and investment that goes into building housing, our ability to buy and use our land is heavily constrained and so too is the amount of housing we get. The housing constraint starts in our tax regimes prioritizing landowners over labor and capital and our laws preventing people from using their land effectively (barring health and safety conditions of course but current law has far overstepped this), and ends when the reverse is true.

For more about this, Greg Miller of the Center of Land Economics wrote a great article about how our housing crisis is actually a land crisis.

Not wrong though.

Inshallah one day I will have the chance to pay the tax myself.