|
"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.
If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it. If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success. I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.
Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax. I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin. The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does. I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves. There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:
> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot. But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living. Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes. Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why? [delayed]
A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early reference to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.
When you align one idea with another external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of. It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits. |
|
|