Taxes are theft
You can't own land
You might like Georgism.
Let's hijack this thread shall we?
George believed that although
scientific experiments could not be performed in political economy, theories could be tested by comparing different societies with different conditions and by
thought experiments about the effects of various factors.
I agree. Normally people just throw up their hands if there is more than one variable, but I do think that by modeling enough variables you can see clear correlations and that is why I believe and will readily assert that all economic history has been completely consistent on one point: Economic liberty makes people wealthy, wealthy people are more peaceful than non-wealthy people, non-wealthy people get jealous, disrupt the supply chains (economic liberty) of the wealthy people and thus unnecessary suffering results.
War is just one such example.
The end of war and poverty, our golden age, awaits us just as soon as we can get the envy out of our eyes. Or in other words, if there is such a thing as too much economic liberty, an incremental change towards more liberty that resulted in a society that was worse than what existed before; I've never seen the example pointed out.
Societies become less free not because freedom wasn't working, but because it was working "too well". When you become strong, someone will want to enslave you. When you get something nice someone will want to steal it.
Applying this method, he concluded that many of the problems that beset society, such as poverty, inequality, and economic booms and busts, could be attributed to the private ownership of the necessary resource: land rent.
The boom and bust cycles have nothing to do with land rent. It is caused by irrational speculative investment prompted by government theft, spending, and later reinforced by keynesian economic theory which erroneously considers savings to be inefficient.
Inequality is partially due to differences in productive capacity. Some of course is due to theft, fraud, and equivalent actions like currency manipulation. It's not an inherent problem because people have a right to do the bare minimum if that's the kind of life they want to lead.
Poverty is relative. The only absolute poverty is starvation and exposure. People having what they want is a good, and we don't want people on average to have less quality of life than previous generations that's a very bad sign; but to the extent that this is just a synonym for inequality it is not an inherent problem.
George argues that the appropriation of land rent for private use contributes to persistent poverty in spite of technological progress
Easy to see why someone could come to that conclusion. Renting is what poor people do to make sure they stay poor, and in the case of pure ground rent it's especially easy case to argue. That's a thing in the USA for those who aren't aware. You can rent land and then plop a trailer home on it. You own the home, but not the land; and it's really the worst of everything since you still can't easily move the "house".
However, if it's the concept of rent in general simply saying you don't own the land doesn't remove it. You can rent a car, and if you rent an apartment that's not much different. If a government made it illegal to rent an apartment (besides being immoral) people would stop building apartment buildings. Then they could build condos I suppose but still since a building is something that a person (or many persons) produce it can be owned according to me and presumably according to the georgians.
George believed there was an important distinction between common and collective property.
I agree, but I wouldn't even call "collective property" property. It's just a natural resource. When you call it "property" you invoke a bunch of concepts like who owns it and how that collective entity decides things yada yada.
I would favor an entirely different conception. The only real question that needs to be answered is: How are disputed claims resolved. I wrote a draft of an example system that would work more or less by bidding with a loanable but non-alienable "claim credit", 1 per person.
I think this especially should be "written in stone" because you really do not want a government having arbitrary authority to decide what is important for what reasons just because a slight majority has an opinion. You absolutely need the wonderfully stabilizing/rationalizing effect of "put your money (or claim credit) where your mouth is".
the privilege to exclude others from locations
Yes, that is precisely the correct words to use. It's a privilege, to gain a privilege you need consent from others. Most of us want exclusive use of some land, and we certainly all trade with people who want or need this. We basically just need a system to auto-negotiate that and the only reason the normal market doesn't work is because it is premised on the concept of ownership. The free market can be rehabilitated simply by assigning every human equal stake in the natural resources of the planet.
Of course in the real world context there are national borders to be aware of, and the system would need to be considerably more complicated without the premise of a global legal framework. So you can have each county run their own version so as not to encourage any country to spam their population to take over the world.
Benjamin Franklin and
Winston Churchill made similar distributional and efficiency arguments for taxing land rents. They noted that the costs of taxes and the benefits of public spending always eventually apply to and enrich the owners of land.
I don't think Franklin could have been so stupid as to say "always", and if he was boy did he not see what was coming.
Ecological economists might price pollution fines more
conservatively to prevent inherently unquantifiable damage to the environment
"unquantifiable damage" is never going to be a legitimate factor.
An early criticism of Georgism was that it would generate too much public revenue and result in unwanted growth of government, but later critics argued that it would not generate enough income to cover government spending.
It's almost like somehow governments operated at 3-8% GDP and now they are like 40-60% GDP
Almost like there is something wrong with the theories that are causing people to think government expansion is a solution.
