dog
2yr ago
Many, many people, who'd spent their whole lives investing in their homes, would see most of that value vanished in a puff of smoke.
Agreed, this would be a big violation of the property rights everyone signed up for. The cleanest solution I can think of (which I haven't seen mentioned by Georgists), is to pay everyone out the land value of their properties. Essentially a forced buyout of the LV part of the property.
With every property owner getting a massive tax-free cash windfall, the whole thing starts to look a lot more politically & ethically feasible imo.
It would be a painful transition, but remember the idea of Georgism is that we are constantly destroying massive amounts of value through the taxation of things we want more of (labor, capital, land improvements etc). If we've accepted this idea, we can expect a permanent boost to the economy once we've paid the ticket price. So there should be some clever financial engineering way of pulling back those expected gains into the initial payout.
It wouldn't just be "handed" to landlords, we would be buying something from them. This is how nationalizing assets generally works, you need to pay out the private owners.
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