Monopoly’s precursor “The Landlord’s Game” was invented by Lizzie Magie in the early 1900s to demonstrate why Capitalism needs Georgism to actually have any semblance of fairness, competition, and longevity.
Georgism is roughly the idea that ALL tax should come from land ownership, and that taxes on labour/wages should be abolished.
The game was created to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”. She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
Georgeism would not increase your overall tax burden, it would shift taxation away from things like income and sales tax and toward land value (excluding improvements like your home). Your overall tax burden would only increase if you occupy a larger then average share of the total land in existence (by value, not physical area), and for the large majority of people it would decrease appreciably.
It does seem like it would be a reasonable tax scheme but it would have to be carefully balanced for the type of use for the land. It’d make sense to charge more for a factory making a lot of value for the economy compared to a high density residential building occupying the same area. I personally prefer mixed use zoning to make land use more efficient though so it’d be interesting to see how that’d go.
Personally I think the landlords would just increase the rent while saying their interests are literally the only ones that need protection from the state because they generate all the revenue but can’t blame them for trying.
Monopoly’s precursor “The Landlord’s Game” was invented by Lizzie Magie in the early 1900s to demonstrate why Capitalism needs Georgism to actually have any semblance of fairness, competition, and longevity.
Georgism is roughly the idea that ALL tax should come from land ownership, and that taxes on labour/wages should be abolished.
I’m already paying taxes for owning a small parcel of land to live on on top of income and sales taxes. It hurts from so many sides. 🥲
Georgeism would not increase your overall tax burden, it would shift taxation away from things like income and sales tax and toward land value (excluding improvements like your home). Your overall tax burden would only increase if you occupy a larger then average share of the total land in existence (by value, not physical area), and for the large majority of people it would decrease appreciably.
It does seem like it would be a reasonable tax scheme but it would have to be carefully balanced for the type of use for the land. It’d make sense to charge more for a factory making a lot of value for the economy compared to a high density residential building occupying the same area. I personally prefer mixed use zoning to make land use more efficient though so it’d be interesting to see how that’d go.
Personally I think the landlords would just increase the rent while saying their interests are literally the only ones that need protection from the state because they generate all the revenue but can’t blame them for trying.
Generally speaking landlords charge as much in rent as the market will bear. If they could get away with charging more they would already be doing so.
Counterintuitively, a LVT wouldn’t distort prices because the supply of land is fixed.