Ah I see. Idk for me it was kinda opposite. My headphones wires got fucked up every three years or so. I still haven’t replaced my earbuds. Or do you mean how batteri waste is worse for the environment?
Exactly, it gives them too much market power. The problem with big American tech is not that it’s American. It’s that it has too much market power preventing competition - also through law. So the solution is not to repeat the same mistake in Europe.
Do you think there are no consequences of creating more currency? Or do you think the consequences don’t matter?
Also the question of “wanna build housing?” seems to simplify the complexity of urban development. How much space should the housing have? How should it be designed? How much garden should it have? How many bedrooms? What about special needs like for handicapped? What about unique design preferences? All of these questions are fundamentally decentralized in nature. They exist in the preferences of the people. No one centralized unit can make sure most people get their preferences met. There are people who don’t care about their house but care a lot about community offerings and there are people who only care about their house. Should they get the same type of house? Where do people get allocated? Who chooses who gets to have what housing and where?
I’m not going to go deeper into the historical discussions here, I am not that much of an expert on those.
I also don’t find it very useful to discuss which “system” is superior. I think we need a mix of ideas from each. And that’s how all countries function anyways. I’m neither a Georgist, socialist or capitalist. I don’t think it’s helpful in deciding on an ideology and work from there. The only reason why I’m bringing forward Henry George’s ideas is because most people are not aware of them and how important they might be.
Socialism: We need unions, public investment in infrastructure and innovation, public ownership of natural monopolies, antitrust regulations, welfare state, workers rights.
Georgism: We need to fund these public investments and innovation, and welfare mostly from land value taxes. For many reasons; they are the most efficient taxes. They avoid the steady increase in inequality from land ownership as populations grow. They help us make better use of land. They help prevent housing bubbles. They incentivize investment in innovation instead of land. They fund public goods fairly via the benefit principle. They are justifiable in all fairness principles an natural law justice principles.
Capitalism: We need decentralized decision making and some freedoms of property rights to harness the potential individuals to come up with new ideas and to unleash their creativity. We need to use the power of competitive businesses to cover the needs of the citizens.
Edit: this is of course just my opinion. I’m not saying it as objective truth
And in general we need to make sure our rights are upheld by making sure elections cannot be bought.
We have countless authors with many ideas who each built on each other’s ideas. We should not fall into the trap of just relying on one author.
I like this, but how do you avoid people making bad decisions because they think it will benefit society but then it makes things worse? Like the kind of questions experts are better suited to know. For example rent control is repeatedly proven to be a bad policy, but people tend to think its good cause logic shows that “prices high, lets make them less directly”. Experts would maybe look at the underlying causes of prevention of construction, height restrictions, land speculation, and expansions of credit supply as a cause of housing unaffordability.
Georgism isn’t a about seizing land; it’s about socializing rent through taxation while keeping private use and markets intact.
Socialist revolutions “eliminated landlordism” by abolishing private land ownership, but often replaced it with state landlordism and political allocation which equally involves rent seeking behavior.
Georgism aims to eliminate unearned rent, not ownership, by making it unprofitable to hold land. The absence of “Georgist revolutions” isn’t evidence against the idea. It reflects that Georgism works through fiscal reform, not regime change. In both Soviet Union and China land was collectivized, which removed incentives for land use, agricultural output fell and a famine followed. Private landlordism was replaced with regulatory capture and misallocation. Now, China and many east Asian countries have switched to a land lease system, which is essentially a land value tax.
Where land value taxation has been used (e.g., in parts of Australia, Taiwan, Pennsylvania, Denmark, Estonia, South Africa, New Zealand), land appropriation fell without needing a regime change and with less potential for regulatory capture.
No place has fully adopted it though. It remains with very small tax rates. Scholars have argued this is because economists like John Bates Clark (foundational to the still dominant school of economics: the neoclassical school) was paid by landlord lobby to make “land, capital and labor” into “capital and labor”. Land was forgotten, and the legacy still lives on in academia. I studied spatial economics and never heard of Henry George.
Wasn’t Israel the country that has killed the most journalists in the world?