In which I continue to build out my rhetorical framework for second-wave Georgism. Feedback welcome!

Those of you who are Georgists already know but for those who've never heard of Georgism before:

Land speculation is the act of buying land in the hopes that its price will rise shortly after it's been brought. The inherent problem with speculation in land is that land is finite, we can't produce more of it. So unlike other assets where speculation can be overcome or act as a benefit by encouraging more production of that thing, speculation in land raises prices for both work and living. This brings about several problems (best covered by Lars Doucet and Greg Miller over at the Center of Land Economics), but the result is the straining of the economy and increasing inequality between owners and non-owners and raising the barriers to life for the latter.

Land speculation only lives because speculators expect to get profitable returns on fencing off the finite resource, it follows that the best way to remove land speculation then is to have that land revenue go to society instead, which can then be used to further benefit workers and businesses by untaxing labor, investment, and trade while funding public services (which tend to increase land values that can then be recouped).

Land is the biggest example of it, but more broadly serves as an example of the core idea of Georgism: don't tax the goods and services people make, compensate (or otherwise reform) the finite resources people take

2nd Part

“But let a man get property he doesn’t see, or can’t take time to get his fingers in, or cant’t be there to walk on it-why, then the property is the man. He can’t do what he wants, he can’t think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big-and he’s the servant of his property.” (Steinbeck 37).

I'm not sure if it's been posted here already but CityNerd goes into great depth covering the very poor incentives created by Prop 13 and some of its addons. He doesn't mention LVT explicitly but the video does show how slashing property taxes is a terrible idea, especially when we can just universally exempt buildings and focus on recompensing the land.

Source: José Martí, Henry George, and Cuban Possibilities - Bill Batt

It's over. The Spectator has come out again LVT (unless boomers can skip paying it on their existing houses...).

I was watching Nimesh's latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3olcPRDGLW0) and saw this diagram. Is this an example of ATCOR? If it is, it would be great if someone with more artistic skill than me could make a clean up version of this to show how all these different taxes have to be made up in order to fill the gap by not taxing land properly.

If anyone wants it, I was just searching around for it and found this online copy of Henry George's last work before his death, which was left unfinished after his death in 1897.

I’ve been thinking a lot about property rights lately. On one hand, I strongly believe that when you own land, it should be your sacred space of personal freedom and privacy, safe from the government. On the other hand, I know our country needs modern infrastructure like power grids, roads, and data lines to grow.

Right now, the government uses eminent domain to force people off their land, treating a home like a line on a spreadsheet. To me, that feels un-American.

How do we build what we need without taking away people's homes and land? What is a fair way to do that?

For those who don't know:

The reasons for this is that unearned increments in land invite land speculators who hold the land in hopes that its value will increase soon in the future, instead of actually working and investing in it. This withholding of parcels and speculative demand all to not use the finite land drives up land prices while preventing valuable parcels from being used to provide the goods and services people need. In addition to this, not recouping land values allows financial institutions to use land as a collateral, adding more fuel to the fire of speculative landownership. This in turn leads to more land speculation, more use of land as financial collateral, and an eventual snowballing of the whole process that drives the price of land (and the cost of living and production) way up until the economy can't handle it anymore and the bubble bursts.

Land is unique in that it's finite, we can't produce more of it. When we treat the act of owning land itself as an investment because it doesn't grow or strengthen the economy, and because we aren't producing any more land. Instead what happens is that land eats away a greater chunk of the economy until actually productive work and business is crowded out for the benefit of landowners. Governments need to return land values to society instead of taxing work/business, not just because doing so massively strengthens the economy and can reduce inequality, but because the alternative is mired with severe social and economic problems.

Does anyone know if there any Georgist clubs in the NYC area?
Reading or discussion clubs, advocacy orgs, research groups, etc?

I know the Henry George School is in the city, but I don’t know much about it

Is there a way to get involved?
Thanks