Context:

If I could define Georgism in a single line, it’s this: stop taxing the things we produce, and instead tax (or otherwise reform) things that are finite; things we can’t produce more of.

Why do this? Well the idea is simple, when the government taxes us on what we produce, they discourage us from producing more of that thing. Tax incomes, people work less; tax investment, people invest less; tax food, people grow less and we starve. Currently we actively punish people for working, investing, and hiring for the benefit of society, and in turn introduce wrenches into the gears of our economy that slow down our ability to provide for each other ludicrously.

At the same time, when we allow people to profit freely and untaxed from finite resources like land, we invite hoarders who enforce artificial scarcity on the rest of society by withholding these resources and waiting for their price to rise, instead of using them well to match the needs of society. There is no way to overcome this artificial scarcity through the market because, of course, we can’t produce more of the thing being hoarded to offset that scarcity. Be it farmland hoarders who want to cash in on, and in turn drive up, farmland prices that kick out young and working farmers; or be it patent trolls who use monopoly rights over new technologies, with each monopoly right for each specific technology being finite and limited to one holder, as a legal weapon to trip up true innovators (Georgists advocate a variety of policies to remediate the issue of rewarding innovation, from taxing IP to replacing it with something else).

Most prominently it’s the high price to access the land that all shelter is built on (especially in high-end cities like Los Angeles); it can not be understated just how big of a role untaxed land plays in the housing crisis which plagues us. Other examples too include non-land natural resources like mineral deposits; as well as natural monopolies like utilities that are reliant on rights-of-way or even the beneficiaries of network effects that allow them to agglomerate and enact enshittification (which ties back into patents and copyrights legally blocking competitors from using these giants’ technology against them).

The wealth extraction brought forth by these examples also functions like taxes that drain our economy, except they’re paid to private pockets instead of public coffers.

What results is a two way press that makes actually producing and providing for others incredibly costly, while rewarding hoarders who actively harm the economy by taking away vital resources that we need but can never make more of to compete; a bottleneck that gets tighter and chokes society and the economy unnecessarily. Some will blame the market and wage labor, some will blame “not working hard enough”, but really the answer is that we punish producers while protecting withholders of the finite. It’s a system that curses those of us unlucky enough to not own land or any other finite resource or privilege to poverty despite how much our technology may progress. Those on the other side can grow rich without effort, including becoming some of the richest people to live, like Big Tech’s CEOs.

If we want to end this problem, the simple reform I mentioned in the first paragraph, which constitutes the core idea of Georgism, is the solution.

For real life examples, Singapore captures a hefty portion of its land values to keep taxes on its work and investment low while funding mass public housing for the people, giving it a homeownership rate around 90%. Norway has recouped the value of its nature-given oil deposits for decades and now has a 2 trillion dollar wealth fund. Taiwan implemented a land value tax amidst other land reforms to ignite the Taiwan Miracle (Sun Yat-Sen was a staunch supporter of Georgism. and his belief in using land for revenue was carried forward after his death). With all this in mind, it’s about time a country sees Georgism through fully in its economy, to set things right.

(P.S. that symbol you see covering the super cool Georgist hot dog man is the old school Georgist campaign button from the late 1890s)