Not even our far left parties in Europe are socialist

I think the word is mostly used by the far right anyways

I wonder what New York would have been if Henry George had become mayor back then

Do you think there are no consequences of creating more currency? Or do you think the consequences don’t matter?

Also the question of “wanna build housing?” seems to simplify the complexity of urban development. How much space should the housing have? How should it be designed? How much garden should it have? How many bedrooms? What about special needs like for handicapped? What about unique design preferences? All of these questions are fundamentally decentralized in nature. They exist in the preferences of the people. No one centralized unit can make sure most people get their preferences met. There are people who don’t care about their house but care a lot about community offerings and there are people who only care about their house. Should they get the same type of house? Where do people get allocated? Who chooses who gets to have what housing and where?

I’m not going to go deeper into the historical discussions here, I am not that much of an expert on those.

I also don’t find it very useful to discuss which “system” is superior. I think we need a mix of ideas from each. And that’s how all countries function anyways. I’m neither a Georgist, socialist or capitalist. I don’t think it’s helpful in deciding on an ideology and work from there. The only reason why I’m bringing forward Henry George’s ideas is because most people are not aware of them and how important they might be.

Socialism: We need unions, public investment in infrastructure and innovation, public ownership of natural monopolies, antitrust regulations, welfare state, workers rights.

Georgism: We need to fund these public investments and innovation, and welfare mostly from land value taxes. For many reasons; they are the most efficient taxes. They avoid the steady increase in inequality from land ownership as populations grow. They help us make better use of land. They help prevent housing bubbles. They incentivize investment in innovation instead of land. They fund public goods fairly via the benefit principle. They are justifiable in all fairness principles an natural law justice principles.

Capitalism: We need decentralized decision making and some freedoms of property rights to harness the potential individuals to come up with new ideas and to unleash their creativity. We need to use the power of competitive businesses to cover the needs of the citizens.

Edit: this is of course just my opinion. I’m not saying it as objective truth

And in general we need to make sure our rights are upheld by making sure elections cannot be bought.

We have countless authors with many ideas who each built on each other’s ideas. We should not fall into the trap of just relying on one author.

Georgism isn’t a about seizing land; it’s about socializing rent through taxation while keeping private use and markets intact.

Socialist revolutions “eliminated landlordism” by abolishing private land ownership, but often replaced it with state landlordism and political allocation which equally involves rent seeking behavior.

Georgism aims to eliminate unearned rent, not ownership, by making it unprofitable to hold land. The absence of “Georgist revolutions” isn’t evidence against the idea. It reflects that Georgism works through fiscal reform, not regime change. In both Soviet Union and China land was collectivized, which removed incentives for land use, agricultural output fell and a famine followed. Private landlordism was replaced with regulatory capture and misallocation. Now, China and many east Asian countries have switched to a land lease system, which is essentially a land value tax.

Where land value taxation has been used (e.g., in parts of Australia, Taiwan, Pennsylvania, Denmark, Estonia, South Africa, New Zealand), land appropriation fell without needing a regime change and with less potential for regulatory capture.

No place has fully adopted it though. It remains with very small tax rates. Scholars have argued this is because economists like John Bates Clark (foundational to the still dominant school of economics: the neoclassical school) was paid by landlord lobby to make “land, capital and labor” into “capital and labor”. Land was forgotten, and the legacy still lives on in academia. I studied spatial economics and never heard of Henry George.

You’re welcome!

The problem isn’t landlords, it’s private landownership. Landlords are just actors within a system that is flawed.

Henry George saw that land is fixed in supply and because of this any profits in companies and wages from workers get swallowed up by rents. If people start making more money, rents will rise. If businesses start making more profit, rents for them will rise. The beneficiaries of all progress and investment, including public infrastructure, are landlords.

This is not the case for capitalists if there is competition (unless they are also landlords, which many are).

The matter is that all landlords extract rent, but only capitalists with market power or land extract rent.

This doesn’t mean we don’t need antitrust and public ownership of natural monopolies, but it illustrates our severe undermining of land. Land makes up almost 50% of all wealth. It’s much more efficient to tax than capital and much harder to evade. It will likely increase housing affordability, reduce urban sprawl, limit impact of housing bubbles, increase investment in innovation (instead of land), and reduce inequality. It also has support from scholars in both ends of the political spectrum.

This is more of a critique of private landlords than of capitalism. So it’s more of a Georgist than socialist argument.

Done. https://doi.org/10.1353/eca.2016.0002

It might actually be Georgist, cause if you remove housing (i.e. land) from the equation, the statement is no longer true. At least in a 2014 study by Rognlie.

Fun fact, when you remove real estate from that calculations, the claim is no longer true (Rognlie, 2014). Land is a severely underrated cause of this. Edit: citation: https://doi.org/10.1353/eca.2016.0002

Great, and I also hear that the amount of nuclear waste is tiny in comparison to contemporary nuclear reactors.

Alright, the more you know

For example when Russia invaded Ukraine and they attacked Chernobyl. Maybe it’s not founded in real risk. But I imagine it could be a security threat for someone to bomb a nuclear facility.

That’s my point. The social benefit of renewables are environmentally and temporally differentiating. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in them! We definitely should, and likely more than we do. But all I’m saying if you were to calculate the environmental and societal long run costs, I believe there must be places and situations where fission/fusion is preferred sometimes.

Thanks for sharing!

I’m not saying they are bad or not preferred. I’m just saying there are cases for fusion/fission sometimes.

I’m thinking more in terms of warfare