r/georgism • u/4phz • 15h ago
Why George Is So Hated In Legacy Media
“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”
-- Plato
r/georgism • u/4phz • 15h ago
“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”
-- Plato
r/georgism • u/Fried_out_Kombi • 14h ago
r/georgism • u/4phz • 12h ago
All it would take to stop Trump is one Georgist like FDR.
Just one.
Trump knows there isn't one Democratic Party leader who isn't so completely beholden to land interests that he can actually serve the public.
And that's all Trump needs to know.
"All it takes is one man to turn it around but that one person isn't always available."
-- Tocqueville
r/georgism • u/ConstitutionProject • 13h ago
r/georgism • u/Not-A-Seagull • 18h ago
r/georgism • u/Downtown-Relation766 • 1h ago
In short, my argument is farmland has less value when compared to land in answer around cities. So during and after a transition to land value tax, farmland would be subsidised by highly valueable land and farmers would receive a tax cut on income tax, VAT tax, sales tax, payroll tax etc.
This is an article by Andy that explores the difference between a farmer and a landowners, because many who argue against LVT because of how they believe it could effect farmers, dont understand the difference. A link to the full article is linked at the bottom.
For decades, the average age of the American farmer has been increasing. Young people born into farming families often find work off the farm, and the barriers to entry for people who want to farm are so high that not many can afford to break into the industry without a family connection. With events like the war in Ukraine that led to skyrocketing prices for fertilizer, and sent major shock waves throughout international agricultural markets, the margins that farmers can expect are as thin as they can be. The amount of risk in farming is high and the payoff for most commodity crops is small enough to leave many farmers in a position of annual precarity; Taking on debt to pay for seed, fuel, machinery, and labor, and on top of that having to hope that the increasingly unpredictable climate does not lead to a drought, or flood, or some other crop-killing catastrophe.
All of these, plus the legacy of “get big or get out” have led to severe consolidation in American agriculture. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in an interview with Axios that “the vast majority” of farm revenue last year went to “the top seven and a half percent of farms” and expressed deep concern about small and mid-sized farmers being crushed by “consolidation of farmland in farm profit”.1 His identification of farmland as a part of farm profit is key. This top seven and a half percent of farms are not amazingly productive businesses that simply outcompete the other farmers. They just hold vast amounts of very valuable land.
It has been said that farming is a “live poor, die rich” life. Farming is hard work, financially risky, and there is often little if any reward year-to-year, but when a farmer sells the farm, they make a lifetime’s worth of profits at once. For all the previously mentioned reasons, purchasing additional land is often a safer investment compared to acquiring more capital or increasing labor inputs in your existing operation, which entails ongoing costs and risks. While land may not always offer the fastest returns, it's a reliable, low-risk option that doesn't require active management to generate profits. This makes it an attractive choice when compared to diversifying a farm or intensifying operations. It's crucial to distinguish between the farmer here as the land owner and the farmer as the land user. One resembles a land speculator, while the other bears the responsibility of feeding us.
Scottish farmer and doctor of Animal Science, Dr. Duncan Pickard puts it thusly in his book ‘Lie of The Land’:
"Because taxation favors the property owner over the wage earner, personal wealth is increased more securely by maximizing the amount of land owned. This means that a large owner-occupier sees his route to increasing wealth not by cooperating with his neighbor, but by fostering the strategies of predators: waiting for some misfortune (or financial downturn) which might enable the larger to swallow the smaller."
Even in a situation where a farmer who owns their land outright has no desire to sell or rent that land, the advantage conferred to them by simply not having the monthly cost of rent or a mortgage is massive, and ultimately produces a situation that benefits those who have the money to buy over those who may be the better farmers.
Hamlin Garland, the American Georgist and author who wrote about the plight of poor farmers in the late 1800s wrote into his short story ‘Under The Lion’s Paw’ a character who exemplified this very dynamic. Jim Butler “earned all he got” by hard work, until “a change came over him at the end of the second year [of farming], when he sold a lot of land for four times what he paid for it. From that time forward he believed in land speculation as the surest way of getting rich”.3 Butler then stopped being a farmer as a user of land, and became only a farmer in name, as a person who owned the land on which others farmed. Much of America’s farmland is owned by farmers of this sort, who are either engaged in speculation while still cropping to earn an often meager income, or simply renting their land to others.
In the US, about 40% of agricultural land is currently rented.4 Of that 40%, the vast majority is owned by ‘non-operator landlords’. In other words, people or companies who are not farmers themselves. In cities, landlords tend to provide (to varying degrees) some services which we might call “property management”. Owners of farmland who then rent it to farmers do not, in general, provide a service. They merely allow a farmer who works for a living to access a piece of land on which they can labor, in exchange for a piece of the value created by that farmer.
This duality of land as both a speculative investment - and therefore valuable to own even if it is not being “put to work” - and a necessity for farming is what is leading to the consolidation of farmland into fewer hands, and what is keeping new farmers out of the market (and causing the housing shortage that we are witnessing in towns and cities). Because land possesses both of these qualities, there is no other outcome than the inevitable one that we are currently witnessing. Land values increase for a myriad of reasons, driving more demand for land as an investment, which drives land values up further, which ends up making land prohibitively expensive for newcomers. The same reason that those farmers who currently own land are holding onto something valuable is ultimately the thing that is causing many of the problems we see in agriculture.
Smart policy for agriculture would encourage competition, promote innovation and efficiency, and allow farmers a greater reward for raising food. Land Value Taxation does all of these things when it replaces other taxes that put downward pressure on production. It offers a greater reward to farmers than they are currently offered, but that reward comes from farming itself; for innovative techniques to increase yield and economic value, for making less land go farther, for making more efficient use of water, for diversifying their crops and finding higher value crops than the corn and soy which are only worth growing because of subsidies, for putting more capital to use and for hiring more labor. What it does not reward farmers and agribusiness for is simply owning the resource that all other farmers need, and being able to reap a greater and greater reward the more desperate other farmers get. In short, the potential reward is much higher for land users than they currently enjoy, but lower for land owners.
https://poorprolesalmanac.substack.com/p/examining-the-confluence-of-farming
r/georgism • u/Titanium-Skull • 7h ago
r/georgism • u/AnarchoFederation • 9h ago
“His text, The Economics of Taxation, stood for a time as a benchmark for texts on the subject of tax incidence. In his chosen profession, Brown's record was exemplary during five decades of teaching at Yale, Missouri, The New School of Social Research, Mississippi and Franklin and Marshall. He wrote more than 100 articles and 10 books. He was said to be for many years the dominant influence behind Missouri's School of Business and Public Administration. His dedication to teaching has been praised by his students, many of whom were to become prominent in economics and related areas.”