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A comment on Georgism. Parent comment

Re:Georgism by CydeWeys on Sunday May 17, 2020 @09:58AM (#23212020)
The whole point of taxes is to fund government spending. That is a large amount of money you need to bring in every year. Taxing based on income seems to make the most sense for that, not "taxing based on efficiency". If tech companies have billions of dollars but aren't paying taxes just because their business doesn't happen to use land, how does that make sense? Why is land efficiency the only thing that matters? The government needs to fund its spending, and they're not going to ignore large profitable tech companies for taxation merely because said industries happen to not be land-intensive.
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Re:Georgism by bluecalm on Sunday May 17, 2020 @10:09AM (#23212100)
Who do you think should pay more taxes: someone sitting on 10M worth of land and doing nothing or a factory worker with no assets making 20$/hour? Income tax is unfair. It taxes productive people instead of those who benefits the most from the stable system (land owners).
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Re:Georgism by sudosysgen on Sunday May 17, 2020 @11:33AM (#23212654)
Who do you think should pay more taxes: someone with a house in Brooklyn or a multi millionaire tech worker with a remote SaaS company?
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Re:Georgism by epistasis on Sunday May 17, 2020 @12:38PM (#23213134)
By occupying that space in Brooklyn, that landowner excludes others from the opportunities that they enjoy. The land, which the homeowner didn't create, has tons of benefits that accrue only to the owner that come not from the owner's labor, but from the labor of others that are nearby, merely by being close to all those other people.

So how much does that Brooklyn homeowner owe to the rest of society for excluding others from what they enjoy? How much does the SaaS millionaire exclude others from opportunities?

Many proposed economic systems distinguish between property that comes from your own labor, and profits that come from idly owning an asset and restricting its use by others in certain ways. The slogan "property is theft" doesn't refer to the bookshelf that a person crafted, it refers to real estate and the economic systems of the time that excludes so many people from the opportunity to escape the economic rents of those who were born with more wealth and privilege.

There are many reasons to tax things: to make life more fair, to raise funds for government, to improve economic efficiency, to reduce pollution. It's so hard to say who should be taxed more without baseline values!

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