Ultimately the argument from me is “you didn’t build that!”
Premise 1
Houses barely if ever appreciate in value only land does.
Two simple proofs. Firstly empty plots appreciate in value all the time by similar %s to land with stuff on it. Secondly rents and prices often rise above inflation even though there are no changes to the physical structure of a house (and usually there is deterioration thanks entropy)
Premise 2
Only invisible sky friends and crazy dubai billionaires “create” land.
Landlords may have “built the house” (they didn’t) but the actual valuable part only “belongs” to them because of happenstance not because of any virtue
Premise 3
In general it is more moral when the people who generate value retain most of that value rather than people who had nothing to do with generating the value
This is an opinion but seems to be widely shared in the abstract
Premise 4
Increases in land value are generated by local communities, local states, infrastructure, network effects, and luck not by the person who happens to “own” the land.
If your local council builds an awesome new leisure centre in your town your house is likely to go up in value but we paid for that shit.
Conclusion
Landlords get assigned trillions in value that they had zero hand in creating and we should find a way to more equitably distribute that value back to the people who actually created it.
A Georgist club is quite a mix of ardent socialists and anti-socialists. eg
A Georgist who wrote what seems like a precursor to The Road to Serfdom called Democracy v. Socialism.
Otoh, Leo Tolstoy, Upton Sinclair.
Marx hated it and
referred to Georgism as “Capitalism’s last ditch”.[96] Marx argued that, “The whole thing is … simply an attempt, decked out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one.”
Just a reminder that you read the bolded earlier ITT, saw that it supports your worldview and began championing it, then chickened out of even describing how you came to believe that. You don’t support science, you support the I Fucking Love Science FB page.
Fair point I was cognizant of which is why I added “evidence-based”.
I do think this is a dumb debate though as social science is clearly science. It’s just people wrongly giving the so called hard sciences a superior status.
Nah, you absolutely did exactly that, your cowardice and dishonesty just go on the pile with your hypocrisy (the word ‘whataboutism’ is not a magical totem which wards off that charge, your peasant superstitions notwithstanding).
You’ve already responded to geewhysee’s post, which I cheerfully assume means you’ve realised no-one is “loling science”, now to take big sip of coffee and read your reply lololol.
Hang on. He’s not a Trump supporter. He would only support him by implication (by not voting Biden in the general) were he not a citizen of Eurolandia.
Well, yes, I maintain a frankly somewhat affected tone of insouciance as part of my broader programme of replicating in message-board discourse the ineffable qualities of real-life discussion, so sorely lacking in most online interaction. But I’m sure whatever you’re thinking of is desperately clever and devastatingly insulting etc.