The ‘Georgists’ Are Out There, and They Want to Tax Your Land
www.nytimes.com
Amid a crisis in affordable housing, the century-old ideas of Henry George have gained a new currency.
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    1•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The notion that land is an undertaxed resource — and that this distorts markets in destructive ways — unites libertarians and socialists, has brought business owners together with labor groups and is lauded by economists as a “perfect tax.” And yet despite all that agreement, there are just a handful of examples of this policy in action, and none in America that match the Detroit proposal in scale.

    When I asked him if he’d heard of Henry George at the beginning of our interview, his answer was “nope.” He was surprised to learn that he had become something of a Georgist hero, and that his plan was being cheered as a step toward restoring Georgism to the American conscience.

    What he saw in India helped inspire his theories on growth, but it wasn’t until George sailed to California — where, after brief run of gold prospecting, he settled in San Francisco and became a journalist — that these ideas found their full expression.

    With mix of wit and fury, and a whole bunch of exclamation points, his writing portrayed speculators as societal leeches grifting the city, profiting by doing nothing at all: “You may sit down and smoke your pipe,” he wrote in “Progress and Poverty.” “You may go up in a balloon, or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community, in 10 years you will be rich!”

    “Progress and Poverty” found a natural audience in an emergent class of artisans, which included printers, journalists and lawyers, who were the 19th century’s version of knowledge workers, said Christopher W. England, a lecturer at Towson University in Maryland and the author of “Land & Liberty,” a new book on the Georgist movement.

    Mr. Duggan’s proposal, while a long way from full-blown Georgism, represents something the movement hasn’t had much of: the hope of a real-world victory and a chance to show how land-value taxes can solve an actual problem — in this case, blight.

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