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Does Georgism work? Five years later

514 points · 522 comments · silveraxe93

  1. noduerme · · focus · HN ↗
    It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.

    Serendipity, I guess.

    1. EA-3167 · · focus · HN ↗
      This place has always had a soft spot for Scott Alexander, and in turn he loves to talk about Big Systemic Fixes.

      It never ends.

      1. epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
        This piece was not written by Scott Alexander.

        I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.

        1. noduerme · · focus · HN ↗
          Honestly, a week ago after I got deeply into Georgism and totally apart from this, I was like:

          This is the hack that fixes inequality in the 21st century, provides for a UBI, fixes the housing shortage, lowers inflation, ___and___ is astonishingly libertarian in a way that would still achieve a lot of those progressive goals, but could be embraced by self-employed / founder / developer / capitalist / middle-class and upwardly mobile non-bitching people like myself... even those of us who do own land.

          Next thought was that I should start a political campaign based on it. It probably would function as a sort of systemic broad-spectrum antibiotic for our current monopolist "late capitalism", at least on a street level.

          Then a week later it's topping HN, so why bother ;)

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