Comment by xenotux

So you think each dollar should be tagged when it's minted, so that the first time it gets taxed—whether that's in sales tax, income tax, capital gains, or what have you—it gets marked "this one's done!" and it can never be taxed again?

"Land communism" isn't a bad way to put it.

But I think you need to make a pretty clear distinction between "land" communism and, well, communism. Communism is based on public ownership of the means of production: if you own a steel factory, you don't really "own" a steel factory, the people own the factory and the state appoints a bureaucrat or manager to run it. You can receive no profit from it, you can't sell it, really you have no rights to it other than the state's promise to let you manage it (and whatever they pay you for that).

Georgism explicitly still admits private property: if you own a steel factory, you actually do own a steel factory, you can make decisions about the management of that factory, you can sell it, etc. In many ways it's more capitalist than today's capitalism, because single-tax Georgism also states that there should be no income or capital gains tax, and so you receive 100% of the profits from building that factory. You just have to pay a tax to the state for the land that the factory sits on, set in proportion to what others would be willing to rent the land for.

The distinction is pretty key, because it gets at the heart of human agency and incentives. Georgism does not admit private ownership of the land because the land was here before any humans were; no human suddenly built the land, and no human can destroy it, they can only manage its use. Likewise for other common goods (like pollution, the electromagnetic spectrum, natural resources, etc.) which Georgism seeks to manage. Georgism does admit private property, because when you construct a machine or a factory or invent a new process, that came out of your own efforts. It could be summed up as "private persons own what they build or buy, the public owns what was here before".

Georgism explicitly rejects Marx's class-based analysis and Marx's narrative of zero-sum class conflict. What symptoms Marx attributes to class conflict, George attributes to rent-seeking, something which both Georgists and capitalists agree is a corruption of capitalism, rather than an inherent element. Whereas Marxists conflate economic rent and return on capital - an economically unjustifiable leap in logic.

Marxism explicitly rejects classical liberal principles such as the rule of law, limited government, free markets, and individual rights, Georgism not only functions within those principles, but requires them.

Marxism is incompatible with individual rights due to its hostile position on private property and its insistence that all means of production be collective property. The most fundamental means of production of them all is an individual's labor. Without which, no amount of land would produce a farm, a mine, a house, or a city. And then we wonder why Marxist regimes consistently run slave labor camps.

Henry George argues that society only has the right to lay claim to economic goods produced by society, rather than an individual. Marxism recognizes no such distinction.

Georgism is fully defensible using classical economics and has been repeatedly endorsed by both classical and modern economists. Marxism is at best heterodox economics and at worst, pseudoscience.

Georgism could be implemented tomorrow if sufficient political will existed. Marxism requires a violent overthrow of the state.

Henry George himself rejected Marxism, famously predicting that if it was ever tried, the inevitable result would be a dictatorship. Unlike Marx's predictions, that prediction of George's has a 100% validation rate. And he made that prediction while Marx was still alive.

Economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz have observed that a public levy on land value (Georgism/LVT) does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes.

Suffices to say, you are not sharing a grounded opinion on Georgism.

> Neoclassical economics recognizes, under the standard macro model, that labor taxation is second best. The first-best is capital taxation, once and for all time

Tariffs (or, more generically, consumption taxes) are effectively both. If something is sold, the money is going to some combination of labor and capital, and then the tax is paid either way. Tariffs in particular also create a preference for domestic production, which increases domestic labor demand at the cost of lower economic efficiency and higher prices, which is the primary thing that makes them dumb if you're not a fan of taking that trade off.

In theory the primary disadvantage to consumption taxes is that unless you want to track all of everyone's consumption, it's hard to apply a progressive rate structure. But in practice there is a way to do that -- provide a universal tax credit in a fixed amount. Then everyone pays a uniform marginal rate, lower income people receive e.g. a $10,000 credit and pay $5000 in taxes (which also obviates the need for $5000 in social assistance programs), and middle and upper income people get the same $10,000 credit but pay more in tax.

I'm talking about from a practical perspective including respecting domestic privacy, not theoretical bests.

It is difficult to determine the value of a particular piece of land, particularly if it hasn't been sold for a long time and won't anytime soon.

International trade can much easier be priced, and there is no (additional) privacy concern because it all has to be declared anyway.