Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism
Georgism and Distributism is interesting but short of a plan to actually transition the tax infrastructure in that direction this article reduces to an unactionable history lesson. Still worth reading, but not powerful enough for those who want economic change.<p>I&#x27;d argue that transitioning is an extremely hard problem.  The Georgist system taxes property at extreme rates. In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property.  This means that people owning property with a mortgage would suddenly be forced to sell their property at the near zero prices that Georgism is designed to foster.  This is likely to lead to many unhappy homeowners as well as significant loss of capital for all the entities banks sell mortgages to.  I think this problem is severe enough that in order to transition to a Georgist society a government might need to absorb every mortgage in the country.<p>Mortgage debt in the US is currently estimated at 17.6 trillion dollars, slightly more than half of the 30.5 trillion US national debt.  Such an expense would be vaguely possible, but extremely sizeable.