Why the Georgist Movement Has Not Succceeded
Rating :: 5
Completed :: 2024-12-17
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487812?seq=10
Great summary and take on history of Georgism (though I would love to learn more about the "minor successes" of small implementations of Georgist policy in history). Some thoughts below.
For Georgism, I have realised that I cannot effectively advocate for it without understanding government spending. If one appeal of (approximately) single-taxing land is generating huge tax revenues with which to spend on things like Universal basic income, then I need to understand what the barriers to UBI are now (namely, "why don't we have enough" or "why don't we spend the money on it"). I suspect that convincing land owners to permit land tax on their properties will require guaranteeing a benefit through the way the government spends this collected revenue; people will want some guarantees that all this extra taxed money won't be "wasted" if it's going to cost them a bit more (especially the landlords).
However, the urgency of convincing landlords that the tax revenue will be spent "properly" or "better-ly" is not as high in order to pass political support as long as landlords are in the "political minority" (ie there are enough people, probably tenants or landless, who would vote along pro-Georgist lines within Australia's seats, to bring a legislative majority into parliament). Basically; the longer we go without Georgist policy, the fewer the landlords, the greater the tenants, and the greater the pool of more-easily-persuadable voters.
The Open Letter to Gorbachev was a 1990 petition from many renowned western economists to then president of the Soviet Union to adopt Georgist principles to transform from its then centrally planned system to a free market economy. This quote sums it up:
"(in your transition to a free-market economy we perceive) a danger that you will adopt features of our economies that keep us from being as prosperous as we might be. In particular, there is a danger that you may follow us in allowing most of the rent of land to be collected privately."