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Seems to me like a hack step gesturing towards Georgism without getting all the way there and losing out on some of its better features. Primarily the economic efficiency, but through it also some of the justification. The country is a meta-market, paying an army to create a safe environment (land) where businesses and marketplaces can exist safely, without fear of disruption by foreign armies. This creates a finite amount of safe land to use. People should pay in proportion to the amount (and desirability) of the land that they use. If someone makes a business that is twice as efficient and earns twice as much money on the same plot of land, then they shouldn't owe twice as much tax. The army doesn't cost twice as much in response to their efficiency, the other people around them aren't being burdened twice as much by their efficiency. They earned extra money by their own cleverness and good business sense, they owe tax only in proportion to what they used from the commons (land, and similar limited resources that are economically defined as "land"). Contrarily, if someone snatches up huge swathes of land and then squats on them, generating basically value but still requiring the same amount of military defense and taking up space that someone else could have used, this "fair tax" wouldn't have them pay any more than a homeless man, while a land value tax would.
How does Georgism avoid the nightmare scenario of giving no rest and pushing everyone to a higher and higher level of efficiency which results in a Malthusian state for all who cannot keep up?
By redistributing the proceeds/profits as a "citizens dividend" which is just UBI except the value is determined based on LVT revenue rather than cost of living. Although not the most economically efficient, the most philosophically/morally sound version of it is that you tax land based on its market rent value as measured via supply and demand, divide it equally into N pieces where N is the number of eligible recipients (which might be all citizens above 18, or all citizens including children, or all permanent residents, the specifics don't matter a ton here) then give each person that money.
It is their birthright as human beings and as citizens of the nation to an equal share of the land. Anyone who owns an average amount of land (not merely surface area, but weighted based on desirability) is net zero. Their LVT and their citizens dividend perfectly cancel out. They are morally entitled to live on or otherwise use a fair and equal portion of the land, same as everyone else. Anyone who owns an above average amount of land (or corporations which by themselves don't receive LVT) has a higher LVT burden to pay for the privilege of hogging up more space than their birthright. Anyone who owns a below average amount of land profits from getting more dividend than their tax burden. Essentially, everyone "owns" an equal share of the land, but some of them are leasing their land to others (or corporations) for money.
Even if efficiency gets really high, and therefore land values, and therefore tax burdens rise, anyone who doesn't want to participate in a Malthusian race for endless efficiency can simply satisfy themselves with an average sized home in an average valued location and pay net zero. This does provide economic pressure to reduce to below average, but the compensation rises accordingly. This is good. This means people can voluntarily downsize and live in a below average area (or out in a rural area that is in low demand) in order to free up valuable land for the high efficiency people and corporations to use, and those people and corporations then compensate the downsizers for the privilege of using their land. This is both just and economically efficient. The people who give up their land are the ones who choose to based on the economic incentive.
There is a potential downside where someone who has lived in the same home for decades might get kicked out if the value of the land around them rises faster than their own income. This is a serious issue, and most Georgists seem kind of cavalier about it. But there are potential solutions such adjusting tax rates slowly in response to rapidly changing prices, essentially grandfathering people in.
It gets slightly more complicated if you're replacing existing taxes with LVT and so not all of it can be redistributed via a dividend. But if you fix the amount of government spending, then in the limit as efficiency and thus LVT increases the excess can still be redistributed via a dividend and simplify to the above dynamics on the margin.
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