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Comment by throwno | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason Georgism never took off. It's not a great idea.

The Georgist movement (or Single-Tax movement) had a lot of momentum at the beginning of the 20th century. Major political leaders like Winston Churchill, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Sun Yat-Sen were all Georgists. There are various reasons for why the movement lost traction but I think it can mostly be attributed to:

(1) the automobile which increased the accessibility and productivity of formerly-marginal land, lessening the problem of equitable access to land, and

(2) the introduction of the income tax as an alternative to land value taxes. Notable, land monopolists preferred income taxes because as long as their land is unused or underused they are not producing as much income. The Georgist movement then split between those who thought that income tax was a good enough replacement and those who "knew" it wasn't.

There's also a kind of conspiracy theory which claims that (to a certain extent) neo-classical economics (which developed at about the same time that Georgism become popular) was promoted by wealthy and biased land owners and monopolists at the time with an intent to discredit Henry George and obfuscate the role of land in the economy, folding it under the definition of 'capital' to reduce the factors of production to just two, along with labor.

The wealthiest people in America aren't big landholders though. Georgism does nothing to reduce inequality. In fact, it looks like the people pushing Georgism today (wealthy tech bros) are hoping to avoid paying any kind of income or capital gains, and soak people who own land.

This is a typical effort to obfuscate land’s role in the economy and the goal of Georgism overall. The goal is not to redistribute and create financial equality. The goal is to create economic justice: to give each person as much of what they themselves produce plus or minus what it takes to ensure a reasonable living standard for everyone. There are meaningful conversations to be had in the “plus or minus” part of that, but Georgism is primarily concerned with how to eliminate a substantial violation of the first part which is hidden in plain sight.

That’s all Georgism is. When I agree to pay $3000/mo for a crappy studio to be close to a particular park/subway station/employer/school, some large portion of my rent should go to fund the things that enticed me to move there.

Alternatively, it’s difficult to get there from where we are today (effectively feudalism with security outsourced to the State).

There are lots of reasons great ideas may not take off, including the difficulty of grokking them and/or entrenched interests.

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