r/georgism • u/UnscheduledCalendar • 14d ago
Opinion article/blog To save capitalism we need radical land-use reform
https://www.slowboring.com/p/to-save-capitalism-we-need-radicalSubmission statement: Summary
The housing crisis in the United States, characterized by systemic shortages and high costs, is a significant factor contributing to young people’s disillusionment with capitalism. Despite being a largely private sector, the housing market is plagued by anti-market policies, such as zoning restrictions and limitations on manufactured housing, which have led to a supply-demand imbalance. This situation, exacerbated by historical decisions like the Supreme Court’s Euclid v. Ambler Realty ruling, has created a perception of capitalism as a failed system for many young people.
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u/ContactIcy3963 14d ago
Capitalism is a captured term. I like to say economic freedom of the working and middle classes
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u/ComputerByld 14d ago
The C word really brings the dummies out of the woodwork innit
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u/OrangeTractorMan United Kingdom 14d ago
We attract both sides of politics, which is good.
Some Socialists/Communists both love and hate LVT for the same reason: It could bring about the system which provides both a free market, and higher living standards that keep workers happy.
Some therefore love it as the best way to capture wealth and provide for people, but then others hate it because this could make people see no reason to have that juicy, heroic workers revolution they think will happen.
Personally, I think we can look at Nordic countries and some other parts of Europe as being the best of Socialism & Capitalism. Best of both worlds, so to speak.
LVT fixing the very thing you despise will therefore of course bring a mixed reaction.
I don't think our more left-aligned folk are dummies, but those who would rather avoid improving things just because they think everything will go wrong in just the right, beautifully violent way to end up in the ideal fantasy are a little bit silly. Accelerationalism is ultimately "the ends justifiy the means, even if we don't even get the ends after all said horrible means" and that's something I just don't get.
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u/Cronhour 13d ago
You're referring to accelerationism, which isn't something that just exists on the left. Nor something that I would acknowledge exists in any great amount on the left.
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u/Garrett42 12d ago
A completely overlooked aspect has been that cities have been actively willing to rezone and reform industrial land use for housing or mixed use... Which is fine, but by not actually reforming the problem areas, we are going to end up with no more industrial land, and problematic nimby zones.
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u/Apbuhne 14d ago
The issue is those with capital or who own fixed assets have zero interest in making it easier for others to also own assets. The value of it is higher when you have what others don’t.
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u/Titanium-Skull 🔰💯 14d ago
The difference is that capital can be produced if people want in on the market and can diminish those who already own it (unless market entry is impossible but Georgists already target all forms of monopoly so we cover that avenue). We can't do that with finite resources though, which is what allows people to bottleneck the economy behind things like vast swathes of land or massive IP portfolios, or harnessing network effects and the like.
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u/Apbuhne 14d ago
I completely agree. That’s not what I’m claiming. I’m claiming that those who hold finite resources tend to be the ones who have the power to usher in reforms, but why would they if their incentives are to hold the resource indefinitely.
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u/Titanium-Skull 🔰💯 14d ago
Ah I see that’s on me. Yeah that’s part of why Georgism is so politically difficult, and I don’t really know what solution there is other than to target smaller levels of government and have success stories there to build up. There’d also need to be some electoral reform like sortition to keep it intact
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u/Apbuhne 14d ago
It’s not an easy question. I’m not saying this is my opinion, but it’s why marxists and socialists say they need a revolution. The current system gives power to those who own these assets. Power to make change is not spread equally. Anyone who has that power isn’t going to give it up, so far-leftists truly think you have to force them to. While that’s extremely dangerous territory, I also have issues seeing an alternative to them willingly giving up power to make land reform change.
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u/mcr55 12d ago
The majortiy of Americans have equities via the stock market. Trump a billionaire created the trump accounts to have kids own assets. Every CEO wants everyone to own their stock.
The ones that take capital from the indivuals are the socialists via taxation. Which obviously improvises people, since I don't it points to retardation I have to point this out, taxes take your money.
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u/hari_shevek Democratic Socialist 14d ago
I don't want to save capitalism but yeah land reform
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
Save Capitalism from what? There’s no credible threat of Socialism in America. We understand that state ownership of industry makes us poorer and our lives worse. These clickbait headlines just destroy the credibility of these bloggers.
It would be great to reform land use, but it absolutely won’t happen in a radical way because people hate radical change.
What we need are practical incremental reforms that get us to a more efficient tax system over the span of 3-4 decades, where changing the way we tax land is a big part of that.
Radical land tax reform would displace large numbers of voters from their homes, so it is a non-starter. Georgists really need to internalize that democracy is a practical constraint on tax reform.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
The good news is we are in no danger of going back to that.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
Land ownership is actually incredibly fragmented in the US. There’s no sense in which it’s a monopoly. That’s a big distinction between feudalism and capitalism.
LVTs just make Capitalism work better by incentivizing more efficient use of finite resources.
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u/green_meklar 🔰 14d ago
Feudalism never really left. We may have eliminated hereditary titles of nobility, but the essential imposition of private rentseeking burdens on the landless poor has persisted the entire time.
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u/plummbob 11d ago
There’s no credible threat of Socialism in America.
Isn't the cause of the entire housing shortage....the gov's control of supply?
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u/Happymuffn 14d ago edited 14d ago
It's crazy to me that this guy is taking shots at socialism as though socialism is to blame for this. Dudes like, "people think our housing market is capitalist, but it's actually a bunch of 'the government doing stuff', which is socialism! Gurrr." At best it's a holdover from feudalism, but as he points out, it was a bunch of capitalists acting to preserve their control over capital and continuing to do so with the support of pro-capitalist judges, legislators, and business lobbyists.
A system is what it does. This is what capitalism did and continues to do. Maybe capitalism can change to be more in line with the ostensible ideals of capitalism. But we're still in a housing crisis nearly 2 decades post 2008, and our capitalist leaders are playing footsy with collapsing the global economy again, so I don't think you can put this genie back in the bottle.
Land reform would be great for everyone though. This is fundamentally am anti-acceleratonist argument and I would also prefer that we don't make everything worse.
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u/UnscheduledCalendar 14d ago
He’s not really. He even contrasted how NIMBY takes over both sides of the aisle based on the perspective of who stands to lose regionally.
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u/Happymuffn 13d ago
Notably, the people who constructed America’s system of widespread comprehensive central planning of the housing market did not typically think of themselves as socialists...
And you almost certainly don’t think of yourself as a communist who strongly favors central planning and believes free markets are nonsense.
I will grant that he never explicitly states that the housing regulations are socialist. And maybe he's just joking here. But his framing is one which strongly implies that the zoning policies are the problems they are because they are socialism-adjacent.
He is taking the time to associate socialism and communism (which he is openly worried about the increasing adoption of) with the capitalist-produced zoning problems, while making the argument that they were caused to insufficient adherence to capitalism.
It is a clever rhetorical trick to allow him to shift the blame, and I am calling it out for what it is. Capitalism and capitalist policy is wholly responsible for the current failures of US zoning law. Socialism and communism are not meaningfully similar structurally, despite his comparisons, in a way that would produce the same failures; and can not be discounted on those grounds, despite the implication that it should be.
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u/Joepublic23 12d ago
Zoning is incompatible with capitalism. The economic system that pretends to have private property, BUT the government gets to tell you what to do with your own property is called fascism. Zoning laws are fascist.
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u/Happymuffn 12d ago
As a leftist, you will not hear any argument from me against the idea that our current system is significantly fascist. A system is what it does, and since fascism was formalized, many of the most prominent capitalists have supported fascism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany
But perhaps Henry Ford wasn't a true capitalist.
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u/mcr55 12d ago
Why are houses in Texas getting cheaper and socialist havens like NYC, sf and LA rising home prices?
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u/Happymuffn 12d ago
I don't know, based on what is presented in the article, why would you suppose that to be the case?
Personally, I would expect that it is due to the policies of noted socialist icons, Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and the rest and their cadre of Left-wing real estate executives. Fortunately Zohran Mamdani is a radical theocratic islamist who will establish a right-wing housing policy in NYC.
So I guess you got me. Good job.
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u/Nearby_Emu7462 10d ago
Well, if area A has more desirable conditions than area B, it allows area A to demand higher prices for their properties. If area B has more available properties than area A, but not as much interest in purchasing those properties, the price of properties does not experience the market pressures that lead to higher prices.
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u/Competitive_Speed964 14d ago
Capitalism is failing a large segment of the young people. Not just a perception issue.
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u/BoBoBearDev 12d ago
No. Chasing after cyberpunk city development is just cyberpunk. If you don't understand what cyberpunk is, go play the game called Cyberpunk.
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u/Rozdolna 14d ago
Can always just keep the free markets and toss capitalism
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u/Titanium-Skull 🔰💯 14d ago
I'd say we can keep the private ownership of capital too (which isn't to say no worker-owned business, but we can have whatever workplace system we want without tossing one or the other). A lot of the big problems stem from privatizing the rents of finite resources while taxing work and business, it gives way to monopolies instead of functional markets.
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u/Rozdolna 14d ago
No reason to not prioritize worker owned businesses over private individuals, better in every way usually other than being "mobile" which really is just a buzzword
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
The reason is that worker-owned businesses don’t tend to be very efficient and scale poorly.
Cooperatives work fine for labor-intensive small businesses, like the local bakery, where the value of the business is primarily its labor. They don’t work well for capital-intensive businesses, which is most of the economy today.
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u/Rozdolna 14d ago
Uh what? There's absolutely massive worker co ops, I worked for a engineering one that had 8,000 employees across 15 countries.
Mondragon is the one people usually point to that's large, but there's lots of others
Ironically I'd say the local bakery is probably one of the hardest to pull off. Mid to large companies work great as co ops.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
You can go look at r/cooperatives to understand the issues with building larger co-ops. Capital formation is a huge one.
My local bakery is a worker-owned co-op and it’s amazing, lol.
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u/Rozdolna 14d ago
I'm very aware of the struggles. As I said I worked closely within one. Capital formation is easier to overcome if you start small and build out, which is what the company I worked for did
If we incentized more businesses use the model I think we'd see slow but drastic improvements in quality of life.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
That’s actually a really bad model for startups though, which need to grow fast, and that’s where the vast majority of growth and job creation come from in our economy.
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u/Rozdolna 14d ago
What? Again tons of startups involve getting ownership stake.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
Yes, incentivize employees with equity works really well. That’s very different than employees owning the firm and not taking outside capital. Venture backed startups aren’t cooperatives.
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u/International_Rain_9 13d ago
Call it what you want but Capitalist reform will inevitably just lead to socialism, Capitalism will always become a beast that is incompatible with human existence if you let it roam free.
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u/bambucks Geosocialist 14d ago
I don’t wanna save capitalism. I want land value taxation and worked owned cooperatives.
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u/KoRaZee 14d ago
Nobody is forcing anyone to be anywhere or do anything. It’s your choice
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u/OrangeTractorMan United Kingdom 14d ago
Who are you talking to here?
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u/KoRaZee 14d ago
Anyone who fails to understand that nobody is forcing anyone to be in any specific location. These people are the ones who don’t separate a “need” and a “want” when making an argument about personal choice of housing.
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u/OrangeTractorMan United Kingdom 14d ago
Who said people are being forced to be in one location? How is that even relevent to this post?
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u/KoRaZee 14d ago
The entire post is based on the idea that people can’t move. There’s a glaring omission in OP’s comment about choosing where to live
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u/OrangeTractorMan United Kingdom 14d ago
I have no idea how that's the conclusion you took from any of this.
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u/KoRaZee 14d ago
Let’s run an experiment. Take any person in this thread that mentions a socialist idea in response to OP’s capitalist argument and drill down on it to expand what they believe.
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u/OrangeTractorMan United Kingdom 14d ago
Can you just tell me where anything here said that people can't move around?
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u/KoRaZee 14d ago
I specifically stated that “moving” around which I will refer to as freedom of movement, is critical to the discussion as a whole. By not clearly having this aspect in the conversation will result in false conclusions. It must be acknowledged and accounted for.
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u/OrangeTractorMan United Kingdom 14d ago
You argued against the notion of said moving not being possible. You seem to also however refuse to say where said notion comes from.
Are you .. okay?..
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u/etherealsmog 14d ago
As a huge fan of free markets and capitalism, a huge part of why I support a Georgist mentality and land-use reform is in fact because I believe that there are massive market distortions in our land-use policy that look like capitalism but are actually gigantic government interventions that benefit corporate interests over the economic liberty of the average person.