When HG was writing, there were taxes on land, on buildings, on personal property such as watches, horses, carriages, umbrellas ... the poor paid the personal property taxes -- and widows and orphans paid them, because their trustee wouldn't swear off on less than the real amount. But on his own holdings, well, they were quite meager. Some interesting news articles compared the personal property of rich decedents to the personal property on which they paid annual taxes.
There were also significant tariffs on imported goods. Sugar and tea, which the poor liked as well as the rich. One of HG's books was "Protection or Free Trade" which Milton Friedman called his favorite book on the topic. (Then again, Friedman repeatedly called land value taxation the "least bad" tax, but never found the motivation to promote its application.) I had occasion to dip into POFT last week, and found it pleasurable and interesting reading. Its at Schalkenbach's website, among other places.
Yes, a shift could be quite gradual, though I suspect that once it was begun, and people began to see the beauty of untaxing buildings, wages, sales, it would likely be sped up.
I don't think there's many people that want what essentially amounts to a 50-year revolution. It seems implausible that something like that would ever succeed; it would be long-aborted before then because citizens (rightfully) will not wait two generations for results.
Re:Georgism
by nostrademons on Sunday May 17, 2020 @08:33PM
(#23216921)
More likely that we'll see a disintegration of the dominant 20th-century political order (anyway; independent of Georgism), and then a number of local communities will try different socioeconomic systems in the rubble. Hopefully some will try Georgism, they'll do better than their neighbors that try say socialism or fascism, and over that 50 year period the best economic system will win. If there's free migration between states then people will vote with their feet; if there's not you'll likely see successive state collapse and revolution in the states that do not have systems that meet the needs of their people.
But what we really care about is what the system looks like a decade in, after property values have massive changes. And what it looks like 50 years in, after cities have been remade to reflect the shift in tax costs. I don't think any modern day Georgist argue for "single tax." Remember that income tax wasn't in place in the US when Henry George started writing!
So any modern plan will Lokey include shifting tax bases, over time, to rely more heavily on LVT and less on sales tax and other regressive taxes. This will require adaptation and policy change over the years and decades, rather than saying ahead of time that they can predict the future with absolute certainty.