Since all taxes are ultimately borne by land (specifically, by resources in fixed supply), it's not at all clear that compensation is required for a neutral tax shift.
Any implementation would have to not include this for people to be able to have stable lives.
There is a difference between something being intrinsically worthless and the taxes driving the market price to $0.
Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
How is income tax ultimately borne by land? Sales tax? Inheritance tax? Gasoline tax? Corporate income tax on corporations like SpaceX, Goldman Sachs, and Intel?
"Ultimately borne by land" may have made sense a century or three ago, when (almost) all income ultimately came from the land. That's not the world we live in any longer.
You cannot eat a metaverse.
I gave several examples of wealth that doesn't come from land. I asked for an explanation of how, in those examples, wealth came from land. You reply with an insult to my chosen username. That's... not a very good argument.
> Paper money in the end is just a representation of claims for assets generated from land.
Here you're using the assumption that all wealth comes from land (the exact assumption I was questioning) in your argument. That's circular, and therefore flawed. You can't assume X and use that in your proof of X.
> Food, minerals, energy, actual things all come from land.
The silicon that goes into Intel chips comes from land. The chips themselves? Not so much.
The single biggest factor in Google's prosperity is the google.com domain name. How big a real estate footprint does that have?
I hear that Taylor Swift has a pretty big income. How much of her income is based off of land? It's derived from a musical imagination.
> You cannot eat a metaverse.
This I will grant you. All food (currently) is derived from land. There's a lot more to wealth than food, though.
1. Left wing georgists. Land = resource needed for human life. Humans cannot fly, therefore land is a life necessity. Food grows on land and nowhere else, therefore land is necessary for life.
2. Right wing georgists. Land as a monopoly. Electromagnetic spectrum (5g, wifi, radio waves) cannot have too many owners of a band otherwise you get interference. Google.com domain can be owned only by one entity otherwise you get mess. For actual land (geographical parcel) you hold exclusive use rights, that others have to respect, otherwise you get fights for territory. All of these - geo area, name system, electromagnetic spectrum - constitute a form of land. There are grades of it which differently priced and only one owner can operate it at a time.
Land is still the most important section of economy. Real estate is mainly land speculation. You can observe billionaires investing in real estate and land when there is nowhere else to invest, so it definitely is not piece of worthless nothing that only had value in 19th century when majority of population was still employed in agriculture. Except homeless, 100% of population is invested in real estate. Only tiny portion of money is spent on stocks comparatively.
Georgist philosophy lives completely ouside of the current left right spectrum, both on the political and cultural level. However, if it become the next societal paradigm, you'll see this divide again. It is becoming a real possiblity it'd become the next paradigm because after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.
> after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.
Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?
Labor is energy, Capital is accumulation of energy. Land is any natural opportunity.
Domains, patents or spectrums are portions of namespace, string space, idea space, frequency band - some kind of space, in other words land.
> Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?
I don't want to defend anything. It's up to people to decide if they want to burn everything to the ground after exhausting all the economic policities with nothing much to show for it. Real estate keeps getting bigger problem than ever, birth rates plummeting. Continuing the trend will result in a collapse by one of 1. depopulation 2. war 3. revolution or similar event. Since real estate is such a big part of it, georgism - the antidote for misbehaving real estate - seems like the next tool to reach for.
Anyways - everybody who spends a bit of time trying to understand it realizes that it is logically the obvious solution, but is politically infeasible.
That makes as much sense as trying to fit all of chemistry into earth, air, fire, and water. There's a lot more going on in economics these days than "the three original factors of production", and trying to shoehorn everything into those terms doesn't make sense.
Your last two paragraphs assume that everything is going to burn to the ground if we don't have a magic fix. I asked for a defense of that; you gave me a restatement.
And in your last paragraph, "everyone who understands knows it's right". Nice. I'm sure that's some flavor of logical fallacy, but I'm too lazy to dig up the right label to put on it.
But it still runs into the same practical problems. The taxable value of "unimproved" Google.com is negligible (the same value as any other domain name, or vaguely pronounceable nonsense word domain name if you're trying to be really specific with your tax assessments), probably less than they're currently paying their domain registrar for.
If you're taxing billion dollar companies and their founders significantly less, you're taxing everyone else significantly more or providing fewer public services (in George's vision where LVT is the only tax). There's an efficiency argument that letting Googles be even richer is good for all of us because we get so much more stuff from it and people who use land to live on rather than to build social networks on deserve penalising for their relatively unproductive use of the land, but it's not one that necessarily corresponds well to the reality of the sort of CRUD-apps with lockin monopolies Silicon Valley VCs tend to build and the sort of employment and development opportunities the average homeowner has
>How is income tax ultimately borne by land? Sales tax? Inheritance tax? Gasoline tax? Corporate income tax on corporations like SpaceX, Goldman Sachs, and Intel?
Gasoline must be refined from crude oil which is extracted from land.
SpaceX needs aluminium, steel and rocket fuel which all must be extracted from land.
Goldman Sachs just manages incomes derived from land.
Intel obviously depends on an uncountable number of chemical compounds derived from the land