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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.

Serendipity, I guess.

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If you ever played Monopoly, you were intended to learn a bit about it whether you knew you did or not.

This place has always had a soft spot for Scott Alexander, and in turn he loves to talk about Big Systemic Fixes.

It never ends.

This piece was not written by Scott Alexander.

I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.

So… a big systemic fix in other words.

Allow to me cite another beloved HN blog by way of explanation for why this mostly appeals to people without a strong understanding of the systems they want to “fix”.

https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising...

I directionally agree! I grew out of Big Systemic Fixes in my 20s. The great thing about LVT is that it can be implemented piecemeal at the small scale. I think we should do that; have some tolerance while we thrash out the bugs; then let matters progress as they will.

While i don't agree with Big Systemic Fixes, i certainly agree with - or rather, acknowledge the existence of - Big Systemic Problems. We should tackle those when we can, with appropriate caution. LVT's viability, IMO, is predicated on gradual rollout and low cost of reversal.

I would not call a "hack" a "systemic fix" in fact quite the opposite.

And those who work on understanding the systems (economists) universally agree that the hack is a great hack, across all sorts of schools of thought, something that's pretty much unheard of in economics.

I hope you are as interested in detail as you purport with your link, and go and look at the real world examples of doing this hack in practice!

Honestly, a week ago after I got deeply into Georgism and totally apart from this, I was like:

This is the hack that fixes inequality in the 21st century, provides for a UBI, fixes the housing shortage, lowers inflation, ___and___ is astonishingly libertarian in a way that would still achieve a lot of those progressive goals, but could be embraced by self-employed / founder / developer / capitalist / middle-class and upwardly mobile non-bitching people like myself... even those of us who do own land.

Next thought was that I should start a political campaign based on it. It probably would function as a sort of systemic broad-spectrum antibiotic for our current monopolist "late capitalism", at least on a street level.

Then a week later it's topping HN, so why bother ;)

Georgism has been mentioned many, many times in the 15 years you've been on HN. How could you not know about it?

shrug I must've missed it. I guess the fact that I was enchanted when I read it last week, and I've been here 15 years, illustrates something about common zeitgeist that I had stopped ascribing to HN awhile ago.

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