While it’s easy to lump them all together as one, not all means of production are built the same. Land, nature, and legal privileges can not be produced, due to either the laws of nature or stature. In contrast, capital can be produced. The former is zero-sum and represents only taking a bite out of other people’s pie to get one’s own wealth, while the latter can represent getting wealth by helping grow the pie of the economy (assuming workers have the mobility to eschew bad business, a right that would heavily be strengthened with a Georgist economy). This distinction was made by the fill-in for Drake in this meme here, Henry George, and there’s a good reason why.

The mega-corporations and elites we often point to for their extractive nature today are in large part insulated by their ownership of finite resources that no one can produce more of to offset their high prices and costs. At the most basic level, guys like Bill Gates own a ton of farmland. Then we have many glaring examples of companies getting in on it as well, like the McDonalds corporate entity leasing land and buildings to franchisees, oil wells held by extraction companies like Exxon (whose value has been successfully recouped by countries like Norway while avoiding the inequality and inefficiency of Dutch Disease and taxes on capital investments),patent/copyright portfolios that fuel Big Tech, alongside factors like naturally monopolistic network effects. This is only direct ownership too, the financial system is also heavily intertwined with the privatization of the value of these things, most importantly land (e.g. mortgage-backed securities; sale prices for land play a massive role in the high costs for housing and loans to access them). As stated near perfectly by Georgist and former Ontario Greens leader Frank de Jong:

Taxing incomes makes people more expensive to hire, taxing capital increases the cost of borrowing, taxing profits pushes marginal enterprises closer to bankruptcy, and taxing consumption raises prices. Economists refer to these taxes as dead weight taxes, because they stifle economic vitality and exacerbate unemployment and poverty.

Alternately, funding government programs by capturing the community-generated, “unearned income” (that accrues to desirable finite assets) increases economic efficiency, reduces poverty and unemployment, checks suburban sprawl, conserves resources, and minimizes pollution.

Recouping the value of finite resources like land (or reforming them if recouping isn’t in the cards), and untaxing the rewards of production can deliver a powerful punch to inequality while strengthening the economy by kicking out hoarders and strongly de-fanging monopolists; making beneficial investment far easier and less costly; breaking down the large fortunes and big businesses by opening the flood gates for competition and, very importantly, strengthening the mobility and benefit of workers that have far less to fear from the monopolistic companies we’re cursed with currently. It eliminates much of the unjust distribution of wealth while unleashing the prowess of production by actually rewarding doing something helpful for the economy and society, whether by work or investment, instead of just taking what no one could produce without giving anything back.

This post isn’t meant to rule out market socialists or any further economic reform in general, Georgism is ultimately a free market ideology that doesn’t have much to say about corporate governance, and doesn’t solve all problems. Market socialists and market capitalists alike would benefit mightily from being able to find the business of their choosing under a truly free Georgist market economy, and to build their policies on it from there. Georgism’s ultimate goal is to simply find an elegant way to take away that core, double-headed evil of rent-seeking and needlessly, overtly harmful taxes; giving way for the good things to grow greatly. If we’re on the path to making the perfect economy, Georgism provides an incredibly strong foundation for it.