So why not tax gold or bitcoin or the Mona Lisa if the main difference between taxable assets and non-taxable assets is scarcity?

This isn't connect to just the scarcity of the land. People can live without bitcoin and the Mona Lisa, but you can't live without land. If you want to take this to the extreme imagine if somebody owns the whole country. Housing is a human right.

It is? It’s “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, not life, <deleted> and purported happiness under socialism, where you are assigned housing and a job.

Housing was guaranteed in the old Soviet Union, but if you didn’t cooperate, the housing was in the gulag.

Your daily reminder that not everyone on the internet lives in the United States

Yes, those values are universal, unless the powers that be manage to convince people otherwise.

The post didn't use the word scarcity. Land isn't even scarce, most land is effectively uninhabited compared to the population densities most people live at. Humanity at large is not short of land.

Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it. Gold, for example, requires human labour to be dug up. Bitcoin requires humans to run machines. The Mona Lisa requires humans to paint. Land behaves differently.

Land isn't scarce, but economically viable and productive land is scarce. Economic viability is a moving target, but for the most part pretty steady.

The post I was responding to makes the distinction between things we can't create more of (land) and things we can (paintings). I used scarcity as an (erroneous) proxy for this distinction, even though obviously there are scarce things that we can create more of.

> Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it.

I mean, not really. What about water or oxygen? What about carbon taxes insofar as they're related to the inherent value of the earth's climate? There are plenty of resources that don't require any human effort to produce, but that doesn't make them better suited to taxation. It just seems like an entirely arbitrary distinction to make.

I agree 100%. Originally land taxes were conceived as a correction for a more subtle bit of economic inequality: productivity of fields.

In today's world, where access to a city can dramatically change one's earning potential far far more, they are even more relevant.

The issue is both about the scarcity of access to a resource, such as the economy of a city, but also about where that resource comes from. With urban land, that resource is not the product of the individual land owner, but rather all the other land owners that made the city so prosperous and with so much opportunity.

For what it's worth, it's not uncommon for Georgists to also favor extraction taxes for natural resources like gold.

> Land isn't even scarce

Yes, it is (or, at least important subsets of land are.) If it wasn't, it would have zero value. Nonzero market value requires, and therefore proves, scarcity.

The value of gold is mostly the cost of labour etc. to extract it; to the extent that it's just the value of the land that it was dug out of, sure, I'd support taxing it. Most Georgists support extending the land value tax to other kinds of economic land e.g. slices of radio spectrum. But physical land is the big one that affects society (particularly because everyone needs some land to live on), so it's the most important one to tax.

» Most Georgists support extending the land value tax to other kinds of economic land e.g. slices of radio spectrum.

This makes me wonder, do roads pay land tax? I think railway tracks do but I'm not sure about roads.

Personally I think more of the spectrum should be like 2.4GHz, 5 GHz (and soon 6GHz?). No auctions. No owners.

If we are going full Georgist, yes, even the government would pay taxes on its own land, which includes the land for roads and railways.

But it's important to note that this is a different question than if the roads have tolls on them. (Not that you implied that in any way, but it is a confusion that happens!)

Rather, the tax on the land of the roads is an accounting mechanism to ensure that the land is being used for greater economic efficiency, rather than, say, a way forward wealthy people who live far away to get the public to subsidize the transport to their large mansions.

Everyone needs a certain number of square meters to live, work, and grow food in (or indirectly, for others to grow food for them). The same isn't true for the assets you mentioned.

Fly over the US and observe that the place is mostly empty. Land is not the problem. Lack of economic opportunity and initiative are the problems.

It's almost entirely "used." The places that look "empty" are pasture, fields, private timberland and national parks, and the few remaining pockets of actual nature should probably be left the hell alone.

There are ten thousand small towns (like, say, Bird Island) whose population has been declining for decades, due to lack of economic opportunity. You don’t have to choose between a city and an isolated home.

Those are ten thousand paintings which the public cannot experience or enjoy! In many ways, the paintings are more precious, as they could go on worldwide tours, and be experienced by millions of people; most land has virtually no uniqueness, and cannot be shared.

Most paintings sit in museum storage and are hardly ever seen by anyone (maybe the occasional grad student specialising in that particular artist).

Obviously I'm assuming an equal monetary value of paintings vs land; my point is not about how many acres equal how many paintings but about the impact on other people that taking $1M of paintings vs $1M of land out of circulation has.

I completely agree with you regarding museums holding large collections which they do not exhibit; in fact, I think it highlights how a sort of 'George-ish' tax on paintings might be helpful!

With respect to your second point, I think that taking each out of circulation has different effects. I would guess that most assets have a value of about what they're worth (i.e. the price mechanism works). I think Georgism is at least a valuable paradigm, and would be in favour of at least some pseudo-Georgist measures, such as only taxing land, to encourage higher-value uses rather than land+structures, and taxing all sorts of land at the same rate.

> I completely agree with you regarding museums holding large collections which they do not exhibit; in fact, I think it highlights how a sort of 'George-ish' tax on paintings might be helpful!

I'm not convinced; after all these collections are often already in public ownership. If there was something more beneficial to the public to be done with them, one would hope that would already be happening.

See: Owning huge amounts of land is uniquely antisocial.

The point here is to maintain a society and some things must come first, namely material things which paintings are not. Of course, art history shows us time and time again the vital importance of material sustenance in creating and preserving works of art. If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible.

You emphasize "antisocial", and I am not sure why. I looked it up to double-check, and the main definition is "contrary to the laws and customs of society; devoid of or antagonistic to sociable instincts or practices." Could you please explain what you mean by "uniquely antisocial"?

>"If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible."

I care about all the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that many paintings are worth a lot more than most 10k acres. The paintings also have the benefits of being able to contribute to shared experiences all over the world, and fulfilling more challenging needs.

I'll take the 10k acres, wherever it may be: meadow, forest, desert, wherever, and enjoy not only the ability to sustain myself, but the beauty and meaning that one can only find in nature. The same beauty and meaning that every artist from the first ape to feel artistry to now has tried, and failed, to fully capture.

the thing that is scarce is, depending on the country, not even really land itself but really proximity, connectedness in the graph of resources. price of land goes very high where there are lots of jobs and good schools....