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Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

Here's some empirical research for you then: http://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal

Additionally, property tax rates vary massively from state to state and there's pretty strong correlation between property tax rates and housing supply and housing affordability. The legacy of California's Proposition 13 and its effects on housing supply are very well studied.

Property tax still has inefficiencies (it can punish someone who builds relative to someone who holds an empty lot), and Land Value tax would be more efficient in aligning incentives properly.

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Thanks for the link! Here’s an equally wordy refutation of Georgism

https://dailyanarchist.com/2012/06/12/what-is-georgism-follo...

I read through it and didn't see any refutation, just a description of the historical movement. At least to my understanding, mutualists like Benjamin Tucker have historically agreed with Georgist philosophy to a great extent, including breaking the monopoly on land.

I think he's talking about the second part, which I found linked wayyyyy at the bottom: https://dailyanarchist.com/2012/06/21/the-single-tax-a-refut...

That said I don't find this to be particularly convincing, given that they have mixed up labor and land, as well as failing to remember that Georgists are concerned with the benefit of land ownership (that is, rents) not the thing itself. The remainder is standard anarchist criticism of the state, which is fine I suppose if you are an anarchist but I don't think will convince anyone else (and I am not an anarchist)

Tucker was no friend of George's but the anarchist worldview doesn't really hold up to any serious scrutiny. https://cooperative-individualism.org/andelson-robert_critic...

"The anarchists' vagueness in attempting to define occupancy and use was best exemplified in the correspondence between Tucker and Stephen Byington (who subsequently became a "disciple" of Tucker's).

Byington wanted to know what would happen to occupiers of land or buildings when they would be away from their premises for a period of time.

Tucker, reducing his answer to an absurdity, replied that the very last user and occupier would not only lose his land but his personal property as well."

These are not serious worldviews.

> These are not serious worldviews.

Relativity. You have spent years hearing views that are contrary to Tucker.

Of course they seem insincere and worth scoffing at. Making the entire premise unfalsifiable and hewing to hand me down gossip from the past, as if it has a monopoly on “greater good”.

Meat based tape recorders rambling inanity of the dead.

You should look into squatters rights. Tuckers view is alive and well in some forms in our society. It’s hardly resulted in physics inverting.

Vain people defending hand me down story regarding private property on the other hand tends to result in a whole lot of atrocity.

Is this the kind of critique you're looking for?

>A common explanation of Georgism’s failure is that the philosophy itself is flawed and, ultimately, would strengthen collectivism and the state, not individualism. In this vein Tucker asked a fundamental question: How can a collective like society own land if such ownership is improper for individuals? Either land could be owned by an individual — and, thus, sold or transferred to another individual — or it was not subject to ownership at all. He considered collective ownership to be a contradiction in terms. Or, as Tucker might ask, “Can I sell my share? No? Then I don’t own it either individually or as part of a collective.”

>It is to such critiques of Georgism that Part II of this article will turn.

Granted, that might be a good criticism of Georgism from the perspective of a committed anarchist, but I was expecting, you know, economics.

Such a critique also misses the point of Georgism. A land value tax is pointless if there's no state, because without a state there's no private ownership of land in the first place. Georgism is a reaction to statism - that is, if there's going to be a state using its monopoly on violence to enforce exclusive claims of ownership over that state's sovereign territory, then such statism should at the absolute least benefit society as a whole instead of only benefiting landowners at everyone else's expense.

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