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Title: Almost Thou Persuadest Me
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: June 30, 2005
Language: en
Topics: Georgism
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/06/almost-thou-persuadest-me-or-why-i-am.html

Kevin Carson

Almost Thou Persuadest Me

I participate in a lot of Georgist discussion forums, and have quoted

quite a few Geolibertarians of various stripes in my blogposts.

Generally speaking, I am on quite friendly terms with Georgists, and

have a lot of sympathy for their ideas. But I’ve never found their

arguments convincing enough to embrace full-blown Georgism.

Of course, the individualist anarchists’ occupancy-and-use ideas on land

ownership have a lot in common with Georgism. Both theories are

outgrowths of the radical fringe of early classical liberalism. They

both, in very Ricardian terms, tend to see landlordism as a form of

parasitism, a sinkhole that absorbs the fruits of progress created by

human labor and ingenuity. Both theories, as distinguished from

mainstream Lockeanism, are premised on the understanding that “land is

different,” because “they’re not making any more of it.” Both mutualism

and Georgism operate on the assumption that, both because of this

limited supply, and the fact that they are not the product of human

labor, land and natural resources are in some sense the common

inheritance of mankind. The Georgists treat the community as steward for

this common heritage in a much more active way, seeing it as the proper

agent for collecting the compensation owed everybody else when somebody

removes a piece of land from the common. Mutualists and individualists

see the common property in land as a much more residual thing, extending

only to refusing to enforce absentee titles on behalf of someone who

wants to exclude others from a piece of land, when he isn’t using it

himself.

Although I don’t (ultimately) go along with the idea of a land value tax

on ordinary commercial and residential land, I am quite favorable to the

Geolibertarian idea of treating especially limited resources (aquifers,

old-growth forest, mineral deposits, coastal and riparian frontage,

etc.) as a common, with the community regulating access to them.

And although I don’t favor the LVT as part of an end-state society, I’m

a lot more open to it as a transitional measure. That is, if we accept

that the state will be abolished gradually, and that some taxation will

take place in the transition period, a tax on the site value of

unimproved land is probably the least unjust tax anybody could come up

with. If my state or local government proposed abolishing sales and

personal property tax, and real estate tax on buildings and

improvements, and shifting it all to an increased tax on site value, I’d

enthusiastically support it.

All this being said, I still haven’t been sold on the full package of

goods. For one thing, I don’t believe there are many (if any) genuine

“public goods” that can’t be funded by user fees on the people actually

benefiting from public services. And when a service can be funded by

user fees, I prefer to do so. People make much more rational use of such

things when they’re priced according to cost and they have to pay for

what they use, than when they’re funded out of general revenue. So

either the rent the community collects will be extremely low, or there

will be an almighty big citizen’s dividend from what’s left over.

I also don’t think the problem of economic rent is that serious, in and

of itself. It would be mitigated considerably under an occupancy-and-use

regime, and a society in which public services were provided on the cost

principle.

For example, a great deal of the present inflated value of favorably

situated land is actually an externality from subsidized infrastructure.

Good schools, subsidized roads, utilities, etc., drive up property

values when the recipients of these goods don’t pay the full cost of

providing them. If they were funded on a cost basis, and the people

using them were assessed the full cost of providing the service, it

would reduce the demand-driven market value of real estate quite a bit.

A lot of inflated site value in urban areas also results from artificial

scarcity: that is, it’s really an indirect result of absentee landlord

rent, not economic rent as such. Nock, despite being a Georgist, himself

noted as much in his discussion of the political preemption of land. A

great deal of the scarcity of land is artificial, resulting from large

parcels being held vacant by absentee owners for speculative purposes.

If all such land in built-up areas were opened to settlement, the rental

value of the rest would go down considerably.

In addition, economic centralization increases the scarcity of favorably

situated land. It’s simple geometry. When industry is small-scale and

for local production, and population is dispersed into lots of

pedestrian-bicycle friendly mixed-use communities of a few thousand

people, it will be a lot easier to find commercial land within a short

distance of one’s customers. Likewise zoning restrictions on mixed-use

development, which artificially increase the distance between where

people live and where they shop and work. When economic activity is

dispersed and local, and neighborhoods include both homes and

businesses, favorably situated land will be a lot less scarce compared

to the general population.