Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?
It gets the purposes of taxes wrong, and assumes the usual economic myths of a fixed amount of money and a loanable funds structure, with money being a veil over barter.<p>Once you realise the latter are a myth, then the entire concept of taxing land makes no sense. Government, in a country with its own free floating currency, has no need of tax money to spend. In fact spending causes taxation from the induced transaction chain that will, without impediment from people saving some of their income rather than spending it, always precisely match whatever government spends.<p>It&#x27;s like a stone skipping across a pond.<p>Taxing reduces the length of spending chains. You tax to release resources for the public use, and the tax imposer is then morally required to hire all those released to avoid unemployment. There is no other operational purpose for taxation.<p>The natural conclusion of that view is that the best place to tax is to charge business for hiring labour. Then they won&#x27;t hire as much, and government can then hire them to be teachers, doctors, judges, etc.<p>The presence of financial saving means that money has an inductive relationship with physical production, not a direct one. Just like we need reactive power in an electrical circuit so that iPhone chargers work properly, we need reactive monetary circulation to make sure that physical production occurs at the maximum amount.<p>The problem with land is not rent, it is the power of exclusion, which leads to hoarding. Just like any other market. So you tackle the hoard in the same way as any other attempt to corner markets - via anti-trust measures.