Why isn't Georgism more popular than Marxism?

I'm getting his Progress and Poverty book in the mail soon.

:D Anyone read?

Bump

Georgism is more popular than Marxism among actual economists

Like who?

Like ME

>the most perceptive output from this system into general culture is a mediocre board game

Have you played it?

Since no human being creates land and the amount is fixed (kind of a dubious assumption nowadays I guess) nobody can have property lands to the value of land itself, which is separate from the value of improvements to it which are created upon it and thus the state should be funded by a single tax on the value of unimproved land to reclaim the value which rightly belongs to all mankind

As I recall, it's experienced something of a revival among Mutualists (which is itself experiencing something of a revival among anarchists).

None of these ideologies ever had mass popularity; the idea of a revival is silly.

Mutualism was an anarchist current that among anarchists quickly fell out of favor by being supplanted by more communistic forms of anarchism (though it puttered along in an odd form among American individualist anarchists). It experiencing a revival among anarchists isn't silly except along the lines that anarchism has always been a fringe.

But the amount of land isn't fixed. See: the Netherlands. Additionally, seasteading (which while impractical still exists).

And, of course, extraterrestrial planets.

tbqh Georgism just seems like a bunch of arbitrary normative statements.

like I said nowadays it's a pretty dubious assumption but he was writing in the 19th century.

>except along the lines that anarchism has always been a fringe.
Exactly. It's gone from being on the mainstream of the fringes to the fringes of the fringe back to the mainstream of the fringe.

Rampant geolibertarian here. I will try and answer any question about this, seeing as OP seems to have vacated.

The paradigm I'm arguing within is basically:
>All taxes should be abolished
>All land should be taken into common ownership
>People should be allowed full private ownership of what they create with their own labour
>Rent according to the (ideally market determined) value of said land should paid to society
>Proceeds should be used to finance a limited state apparatus, with the excess being paid pro rata to the citizens as a basic income (in lieu of any kind of welfare state)
>Maybe some severance/Pigovian taxes if you want to be autistic

You're not. If you sow the land that's an improvement, you only have to pay for the unimproved cost of the land, which you did not create with by your own labour and is therefore considered commonly owned.

>Not already owning first editions of his works

Land doesn't refer to land in that sense. It refers to land in the economic sense, which is "factors of production not created by man". This includes the sea and so on. Also, for the record, the Dutch had been reclaiming land for a long while before George was writing.

Also me [spoiler]:3[/spoiler]

Yeah, don't expect to be entirely blown away by the first few chapters but it gets there.

It's still not even mainstream there, it's just back to actually existing as an alternative among theorists.

>None of these ideologies ever had mass popularity
Before the first international mutualism was huge, and it was still a force afterwards. Marx had to specifically try and takedown Proudhon because of the threat it posed. Many of the anarchists in Catalonia and Ukraine were mutualists.

Why are Pigovian taxes autistic?

Also what do you mean by paying basic income proportionally to the citizens? What parameters are in play here?

Because if I didn't mention them I imagine the only person who'd bring them up would be someone with a massive rod up their ass about externalities

Not that I disagree with the mentality, it's just the knowledge and calculation problems are a can of worms

For all intents and purposes it would be equal per head but, for example, if you were owning land which was valued at less than your basic income the simplest administrative route would probably just be to deduct the former from the latter

My mistake but that still means it's currently on the fringe.
Fair enough>Also, for the record, the Dutch had been reclaiming land for a long while before George was writing.
Doesn't that weaken the georgist argument?
>knowledge and calculation problems are a can of worms
no more so than a lot of either legal issues

>Doesn't that weaken the georgist argument?
How so? It just means that the owner of reclaimed areas would be paying very little for them because it was presumably almost worthless before reclamation. I suppose the Pigovian taxes might come into play if the act of reclamation was causing any ecological damage

>no more so than a lot of either legal issues
Couldn't agree more. I am somewhat eager to avoid introducing more worms where possible though, or at least to do so in the most elegant way possible

>My mistake but that still means it's currently on the fringe.
No doubt. I'm not exactly in the loop with current academic trends, but even that might be a bit generous

>It just means that the owner of reclaimed areas would be paying very little for them because it was presumably almost worthless before reclamation. I suppose the Pigovian taxes might come into play if the act of reclamation was causing any ecological damage
Makes sense. You'd be paying for the value of the sea I suppose?
>Couldn't agree more. I am somewhat eager to avoid introducing more worms where possible though, or at least to do so in the most elegant way possible
So you're not against them in principle?
>exactly in the loop with current academic trends, but even that might be a bit generous
Of course academia is on the fringe

>Makes sense. You'd be paying for the value of the sea I suppose?
Yep. Depending on the fishing productivity or whatever that might not be a negligible sum, but it's likely that it's more valuable as dry land. If someone fucks up so hard that the value decreases then I guess Pigou comes in

>So you're not against them in principle?
Not at all. I'm hopeful that we can come up with a more efficient solution than clunky taxes eventually, but in the meantime it's a problem that should probably be addressed by the best tool we have

Stupid Flanders

That's in Belgium, not the Netherlands

Yes. I admit, I established my opinion when I only knew houserules. But, after playing the way meant to be played, it's still not something I'd recommend to get people into boardgames.

well shit nigga, post a picture or tell us what it is or something

Monopoly.

It was based on an old game called the The Landlord's Game. This older game was created with a Georgist agenda.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game

Funny how the game evolved into a glorification of unchecked Capitalism.

How can you call Monopoly "mediocre"? It's one of the most popular board games EVER. Sure it's simple and family friendly, but that doesn't make it mediocre.

But I didn't know that it was based off of Georgist economics. Thanks for sharing

So it's social democracy with taxation only on income through capital and not labor?

Marxism is one of the most sophisticated and developed philosophical traditions. It isn't just the work Marx, but also of Kautsky, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Bukharin, Benjamin, Bordiga, Mao, Zhou Enlai, Adorno, Fanon, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bookchin, and Badiou. More recently, Zizek and Richard Wolff have brought Marxism back into the realm of political discourse by analyzing contemporary issues through a Marxian lens.

Georgism does not constitute a full tradition, but instead the writings of one guy. If it was a more developed philosophical tendency, it would get more attention and traction.

The burden is on the Georgists to produce works of philosophy and political economy in this tradition.

>Marxism has proven to be a catastrophic failure.
But wasn't. The marxists have failed.
> So why does no one today worship Henry George the way they worship Karl Marx?
Maybe because his theory doesn't differ much from other non-marxist thinkers of the time?

>The burden is on the Georgists to produce works of philosophy and political economy in this tradition.
As both a Georgist and someone who waded through Capital I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said.

Before your copy of Henry George [1] arrived I had already received two others, one from Swinton [2] and one from Willard Brown; [3] I therefore gave one to Engels and one to Lafargue. Today I must confine myself to a very brief formulation of my opinion of the book. Theoretically the man [Henry George][1] is utterly backward! He understands nothing about the nature of surplus value and so wanders about in speculations which follow the English model but have now been superseded even among the English, about the different portions of surplus value to which independent existence is attributed--about the relations of profit, rent, interest, etc. His fundamental dogma is that everything would be all right if ground rent were paid to the state. (You will find payment of this kind among the transitional measures included in The Communist Manifesto too.) This idea originally belonged to the bourgeois economists; it was first put forward (apart from a similar demand at the end of the eighteenth century) by the earliest radical followers of Ricardo, soon after his death. I said of it in 1847, in my work against Proudhon: “We can understand that economists like Mill” (the elder, not his son John Stuart, who also repeats this in a somewhat modified form) “Cherbuliez, Hilditch and others have demanded that rent should be paid to the state in order that it may serve as a substitute for taxes. This is a frank expression of the hatred which the industrial capitalist dedicates to the landed proprietor, who seems to him a useless and superfluous element in the general total of bourgeois production.”

>It's one of the most popular board games EVER.
So are Candyland and Shoots and Ladders.

Monopoly isn't bad (first definition for "mediocre": dictionary.com/browse/mediocre), I just wouldn't put it on my wishlist if I didn't own it.

The failure of the Soviet bloc doesn't refute Marxism any more than the ascension of Napoleon refutes liberalism t b h

As a radical socialist I think it would be awesome for Georgism to become a powerful economic tendency. Georgism seems so much better than liberalism, and Marxism needs a serious ideological challenge from the left.

Not quite. It's taxation on the rent extracted from capital. Capital that is being invested into production would not (necessarily) be taxed.

Not an argument.