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You’re welcome!
1·1 day agoSolution anonymous leaders? Or leaders as groups/institutions rather than individuals.
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.
3·2 days agoSolution is to tax the land instead
You can’t watch tv or film on Zen cause it doesn’t have license for that
27·3 days agoI just wish that the narrative would focus more on the anti-competitive behavior of these firms to make sure we don’t fall into the same monopolistic trap in Europe. We need variety, we need competition. Focus on standards, low switching costs, and allow reverse engineering.
1·3 days agoAre you sure it benefits him to say that? I think its not even a left vs right issue to recognize this is an issue. At least it sparks discussion and makes people criticize him.
Don’t you think it has some privacy concerns? And how does it affect small businesses relying on cash? I’m asking genuinely, these are intuitive and not well thought out concerns.
I think it still supports Google. If someone wants a Pixel and one less is available second hand, thats one more person buying it in store. Probably not 1:1 relationship there, but still.
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
Hmm, in mean time I prefer buying Fairphone over supporting Google.
I see, and it can’t be installed on Fairphone?
So if I were to choose graphene over eOS it would mainly be to be more protected from malware?
1·11 days agoBut here we are talking about the guys being paid to do something immoral.
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.