After reading the Progress & Povertyreview at ACX, it seems to me that land is the original Bitcoin. Find a city that has a future, buy some land, and HODL.
If you can rent the land (the land itself, not the structures that stand on it), you even have a passive income that automatically increases over time… forever. This makes it even better than Bitcoin.
So, the obvious question is why so many people are angry about the Bitcoin, but so few (only the Georgists, it seems) are angry about the land.
EDIT: A possible explanation is that land is ancient and associated with high status, Bitcoin is new and low-status. Therefore problems associated with Bitcoin can be criticized openly, while problems associated with land are treated as inevitable.
While I think much of the anger about Bitcoin is caused by status considerations, other reasons to be more upset about Bitcoin than land rents include:
Land also has use-value, Bitcoin doesn’t
Bitcoin has huge negative externalities (environmental/energy, price of GPUs, enabling ransomware, etc.)
Bitcoin has a different set of tradeoffs to trad financial systems; the profusion of scams, grifts, ponzi schemes, money laundering, etc. is actually pretty bad; and if you don’t value Bitcoin’s advantages...
Full-Georgist ‘land’ taxes disincentivise searching for superior uses (IMO still better than most current taxes, worse than Pigou-style taxes on negative externalities)
Oh, that’s an interesting point: in Georgist system, if you invent a better use of your land, the rational thing to do is shut up, because making it known would increase your tax!
I wonder what would happen in an imperfectly Georgist system, with a 50% or 90% land value tax. Someone smarter than me probably already thought about it.
Also, people can brainstorm about the better use of their neighbor’s land. No one would probably spend money to find out whether there is oil under your house. But cheap ideas like “your house seems like a perfect location to build a restaurant” would happen.
Maybe in Georgist societies people would build huge fences around their land, to discourage neighbors from even thinking about it.
After reading the Progress & Poverty review at ACX, it seems to me that land is the original Bitcoin. Find a city that has a future, buy some land, and HODL.
If you can rent the land (the land itself, not the structures that stand on it), you even have a passive income that automatically increases over time… forever. This makes it even better than Bitcoin.
So, the obvious question is why so many people are angry about the Bitcoin, but so few (only the Georgists, it seems) are angry about the land.
EDIT: A possible explanation is that land is ancient and associated with high status, Bitcoin is new and low-status. Therefore problems associated with Bitcoin can be criticized openly, while problems associated with land are treated as inevitable.
While I think much of the anger about Bitcoin is caused by status considerations, other reasons to be more upset about Bitcoin than land rents include:
Land also has use-value, Bitcoin doesn’t
Bitcoin has huge negative externalities (environmental/energy, price of GPUs, enabling ransomware, etc.)
Bitcoin has a different set of tradeoffs to trad financial systems; the profusion of scams, grifts, ponzi schemes, money laundering, etc. is actually pretty bad; and if you don’t value Bitcoin’s advantages...
Full-Georgist ‘land’ taxes disincentivise searching for superior uses (IMO still better than most current taxes, worse than Pigou-style taxes on negative externalities)
Oh, that’s an interesting point: in Georgist system, if you invent a better use of your land, the rational thing to do is shut up, because making it known would increase your tax!
I wonder what would happen in an imperfectly Georgist system, with a 50% or 90% land value tax. Someone smarter than me probably already thought about it.
Also, people can brainstorm about the better use of their neighbor’s land. No one would probably spend money to find out whether there is oil under your house. But cheap ideas like “your house seems like a perfect location to build a restaurant” would happen.
Maybe in Georgist societies people would build huge fences around their land, to discourage neighbors from even thinking about it.