Conversely, carriages (and other pre-automobile machines) were also surprisingly complicated. Steering mechanisms, leaf springs, brakes, and a variety of linkages including the horse harnesses themselves (which had to account for the animal's gait).
287 karma · joined April 30, 2026
You even pay rent when you buy a house. The value of the land is the market expectation of the value of future rents.
You can have a less than 100% LVT to get some of the advantages without upsetting the apple cart. Common in many jurisdictions.
19 year-olds on the other hand already compete with businesses for land (especially corporate landlords - who pay more than datacenter owners) and are losing rapidly.
You do lose the option of speculation - buy early before a town or region is built up. In the current system, speculation is not an option, it is compulsory.
Also you can't force everyone out of their houses - people could simply reserve land for residential purposes (as is already the case). It is still a democratic system, after all.
Finally, western governments already use eminent domain to repurpose land. It's already a part of our system.
Surprisingly, this system was created by bankers and politicians, rather than economists /s
There are also many sources of 'cost of living' which are not related to money supply and therefore not directly related to monetary policy.
That's the biggest obstacle but also the biggest motivation for increasing land tax. The number is barely 50% currently and falling fast. Of those 40% are owned outright, the rest have mortgages.
This isn't even accounting for commercial real estate and farmland. People complain about grocery price gauging where I live but supermarkets are no more profitable than before covid - they don't realize the main expense change has been land rent.
Once you take out a mortgage you're committed to speculating on that land's future value. If that expectation doesn't pan out, you get a GFC. A gradual land tax would remove some fuel from that fire.
> If you incorporate and don’t pay yourself a salary you still owe corporate taxes
Well yes but actually no - e.g 'buy borrow die'. Regardless, my point is avoiding a land tax isn't as simple as living somewhere with cheap land (it requires consuming less), and people (companies) do also avoid income taxes (it doesn't require consuming less).
> Athletes have the highest tax rate in the country, why do you think people don’t care about their tax rate?
I've never heard anyone talk about this. If I search 'taylor swift tax rate' vs 'elon musk tax rate' I think it's clear.
> As far as I know the only tech billionaire with significant land holdings is gates
Why limit to tech billionaires (who do own lots of land)? The class that specifically didn't make their money from land monopolies, and who pay little effective tax under current system anyway? Trump, Kushner, Witkoff come to mind.
If you're concerned about taxing tech specifically - well George is one of very few people in the 1800s who genuinely considered the full AI + robotics case.
If you buy company x, restructure the business, start turning a profit, then sell the company -> that income (capital gains under current system) is untaxed in Georgism
If you buy an empty lot, wait 10 years to sell it to someone at a higher price, then all that profit is taxed (before it is realized too).
Yeah that's the exact distinction I was drawing. The article says Georgism but talks about land tax in general, which is popular with many non-Georgist economists.
However, I have to take issue with your example
1) Land is effectively nationalized under 100% LVT. Worker likely own (the profits of) more land than before
2) The value of the land where the tradesman works is already used against him, to extract the majority of hte profits of his labor. He already pays the land value tax - to his landlord. From his perspective, the burden changes little while the wealthier lose an avenue to make money without working.
3) A luxurious house / lifestyle still requires paying land tax on the things you consume (the land of course and notably energy sources, minerals, timber, building materials, etc). The kind of spartan lifestyle required to truly avoid this tax works now too - incorporate as a company and don't pay yourself a salary.
4) I think very few people care about a $500k salary tech workers, or footballers, or what have you. It's the billionaire oligarchs influencing politics who attract the most attention.
5) Current day oligarchs derive a lot of their wealth from land and other monopoly rents, not from simply 'working more' or 'contributing more value'. This is resented by many. When people get rich by contributing (relatively more) value, they are usually widely praised
If you're talking about an individual not using the land commercially - well theoretically the tax burden lowers the sale price. You don't pay both. At 100% land tax, the sale price would be zero. You pay only as you use the land. That also seems just to me.
How much of the land value of your country do you currently own? A land value tax is likely to increase the amount of land you own (the profits of). I don't think US tracks land values as accurately as countries with some kind of land tax.
It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.
Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
If you can comfortably afford it, highly urban is usually better.
I resent the idea of masses of people spending their whole lives just transferring money from their boss to their landlord. Small cities with drivable suburbs dispersed over a great continent is to me a symbol of escape from millennia of tyranny. Each to their own, I guess.
I'll struggle to explain myself concisely.
Basically, the Urban ideal is gatekept - you can't access the benefits without paying for them. The general public is better of moving to smaller cities where land is affordable. They will earn a bit less but keep much more for themselves.
> Any "savings" I would have moving to the suburbs would be cancelled out by the thousands in commuting costs
Absolutely.
1) Within a city, these tradeoffs are balanced by the market 2) If there's more cheap land outside city (outer suburbs), this balancing brings prices in the inner city down 3) As that outer land becomes exhausted (new outer suburbs too far to commute), inner-city prices skyrocket 4) A small city is surrounded by more underdeveloped land and hence workers capture a larger share of their own production 5) Improved public transport helps to rebalance inner and outer suburb prices
If there's a fixed amount of land and a large population, best you can do is lots of 5) (urban ideal). It's not a bad thing. If there's land available though, you also have the option to spread out further into more small cities (suburban ideal). There's obviously a continuum between the two.
Within a big sprawling city like Toronto, public transport investment would be a net positive. But people would be even better off IMHO if they instead spread further out into new cities.
> The fact that the American cities that are closest to the urban ideal are so expensive does signal that people would like to live like that
Desirability is a function of price. What's desirable at 100k might not be at 1M.
People living close together with good transport is economically far more efficient than the alternatives. That's the value - everyone is more productive. To access that benefit though, you have to live there. So the people who own the land have leverage to charge you more for it. You earn more but pay more for housing/land.
If you can afford it comfortably, highly Urban cities are almost certainly better for you. Working people though left high-value European cities en masse for dirt cheap land in America, Canada, Australia, etc. They earned much smaller salaries yet ended up wealthier - because they kept more for themselves.
The sad truth is time lost to commute is no different to time lost paying for a more expensive apartment closer to work. They are balanced by the market. Unless you're wealthy, you have to trade to time to survive.
Looking in that area, there's some amazing cheap houses with lots of space
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8741-County-Road-863-Prin...? https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/131-Avalon-Dr-Princeton-T...? https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5682-Orchard-Pkwy-Fairvie...
It's not for everybody, but options like this simply don't exist at all in Europe.
As for me, I paid around 400k in Australia and I'm near / walking distance to parks, rec centers, aquatic centers, cinemas, all kinds of sports facilities, libraries, shopping centers. Many high paid jobs for engineers nearby. I don't commute every day, and when I do I listen to podcasts, or think about ideas I've been working on, or make phone calls.
In my sprawling Australian city, the nation's median earner would need about a 45-minute commute to get to an affordable 800 sqm block with detached house. I'd say that's about the smallest block which justifies suburban life. Until covid, it would have been about 30 mins. I've got a backyard, veggie garden, sheds, greenhouse, large patio, and I live walking distance to trainline, multiple parks, multiple shopping centers.
Simply not an option in London, Paris, etc. Gemini suggests Leipzig or Bordeaux might compare. But although salaries are lower in Bordeaux, I was not able to find a listing online for over even 600 sqm which was comparably priced to my own house. There's a few castles/manors in need of some tlc if you have deep pockets though.
Often called 'land value uplift' these days, or 'unearned increment'/'land monopoly rents' in days gone by.
Theoretically in a free market, the landlords will be able to increase rent in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the tenants (short commutes, etc). Likewise, homeowners will sell for a higher price - capturing the value that would be conferred to new owners. A city with good transport demands higher rents in outer suburbs serviced by that transport.
Your workplace likely also rents their premises too. They now have a convenient train station 5 minutes' walk away - and guess what, their landlord ups the rents too. Once again, in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the workplace. The nearby cafes will now increase their coffee price to cover their increased rent.
Although this is the position of most economists, politicians are often reluctant to draw attention to it. Instead, where I live, they use models like commute time saved per person' x 'number of people' x 'average hourly wage'.
You can verify all of this yourself by viewing residential and commercial rental listings in your city.
Many economists have proposed solutions to this problem, often in the form of land value taxes.
Tillman cites $1M of costs, of which $200k were 'city fees' (not itemized) and the rest were presumably normal costs for developers/engineers/architects/etc (of course, these would potentially be smaller if there was less regulation). The development start to approval time of 3.5 years is not crazy for a first time 'accidental developer' working on such a large project.
After approval, there seems to have been a~12 month period of bad faith activists slowing down the project. Tillman filed a lawsuit, did a media campaign, and the project was re-approved later in 2018.
He then sold the pre-approved project to a Cresleigh Homes for $13.5 million in early 2019.
So we've had 6 years of financial delays as Cresleigh tries to fund the build vs maybe 1 year of 'bad faith' development approval delays 2017-2018.
And of course - funding the build would have been much easier if the landowner didn't want $13.5 million for an empty lot! (or $12 million if you subtract the development costs). So arguably Tillman did more to delay housing than anyone else.