Georgist Rent, Housing, Economy & Policy News
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Patents and Copyrights occupy a weird in-between in that they act both as a reward for discovering an innovation and an exclusive, finite, monopoly privilege to control a particular innovation. Rewarding innovation is good since it means encouraging people to not just innovate, but to publicize them instead of keeping them as secret for something […]
This post came a couple days late, sorry about that. Explanation: When I say other finite resources, I’m also including non-land natural resources as well as exclusive legal monopolies like patents and copyrights over a particular innovation, or the ability to control naturally monopolistic industries like utilities (check out this list for some more good […]
Explanation as always: Before we can go about building housing, we first have to buy and use land. Unfortunately, due to issues like land speculation and overly-restrictive zoning, as well as taxing the work and investment that goes into building housing, our ability to buy and use our land is heavily constrained and so too […]
Context: As has been mentioned many times before, the best way to reform property taxes to make housing affordable is to universally exempt buildings and transform them into taxes on the value of land. Doing so removes the burden placed on making new buildings while keeping the onus on landowners not to hold the finite […]
For anyone who wants to see, here are some good links to lists of what Georgists would like to target: Overall, there are a lot of finite (in other words non-reproducible) resources (both natural and artificial) which create economic rent that Georgists can either recoup or deal with in other ways. Land remains the biggest, […]
Sorry for the hiatus, MOTW postings are making a comeback Explanation: Amid the ongoing property tax revolt, it’s important to remember that there is a good yolk of necessity in the property tax that should be followed rather than shied away from, that being the need to recompense land. Right now our property taxes include […]
A new online multiplayer game called Prosperity officially opened to the public on June 15, 2026, entering an already crowded digital gaming landscape with an unusually explicit ambition: to make economic philosophy playable. The browser-based title reframes property competition through the lens of Georgist economics, drawing direct inspiration from the early 20th-century board game The […]
A common group of questions I’ve seen Georgists get asked on the internet relates to how Henry George’s ideas would impact the use of nature. Some question if a land value tax would encourage sprawl and the development of every parcel under the sun, others if it would entail the destruction of public parks. The […]
A new report modeling a property tax building exemption in Spokane rebalances incentives toward community goals, encouraging homebuilding and discouraging in-city vacant land speculation.
Disclaimer: To avoid any confusion, the term rent in the title refers to economic rent, the returns to finite assets. It does not mean the contract rent gotten from leasing out any asset to another person. When it comes to the market economy, there exists a fundamental distinction between the goods and services, be it […]
