How Georgism Can Bridge Economic Divides on the 'New Right'
A small government, pro-youth vision that both Ahmari-ites and Hanania-ites could get behind.
Close followers of my work will have noticed I have advocated for a Land Value Tax (LVT) on numerous occasions.
One doesn’t hear one advocating for Georgism on the Dissident Right often, as it tends to be leftist and libertarian coded.
However, I think major elements of Georgist ideology are a perfect means to bridge the current divide which exists on the ‘Rightosphere’ (Third New Right and Dissident Right) between economic leftists and economic libertarians, in a way that is deeply in tune with the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It would allow free-market capitalism to work close to its ideal, whilst also facilitating a just economy that would cater to the needs of the working majority.
Georgism is not just a terminally online Polcompball ideology (though that is a surprisingly good resource that is often less biased than Wikipedia), it has been implemented to successful results. Based on the writings of economist Henry George, it was a founding principle of Sun Yat Sen’s ‘Tridemism’, and Taiwan continues to have a Land Value Tax which contributes to their revenue, as does Denmark. Singapore is also built on what are essentially Georgist principles, though with the state formally owning all land rather than just taxing it. Another example is Estonia, that has instituted Georgist economics more faithfully than perhaps anywhere else, though the rates are rather low.
Georgism is also not just the Land Value Tax. It is a comprehensive left-libertarian philosophy that believes that natural monopolies should be owned by all, yet a free-market should exist in areas which benefit from competition, all the while resisting the growth of big government and managerialism. Whilst a left-libertarian concept, Georgism would also be very compatible with a ‘Radical Centre-Right’, a label I am developing and will eventually do an article on.
I would recommend taking a look at the Substack ‘Progress and Poverty’, named after the famous book by Henry George, which operates almost as a think-tank for Georgist ideas. Of particular interest to Dissident Rightists would be
’s vision of the ‘Commonwealth City’, that essentially synthesises Curtis Yarvin’s Neocameralism into a Georgist framework (though, having spoken to him, he was unaware of Yarvin).I don’t expect this to be a perfect uniting vision. Ahmari and Hanania would object to this on different grounds. But I think that it may be able to gain followers of both of these men, even if not the men themselves.
The Case for a Land Value Tax
The tax systems in both Britain and the United States are extremely complicated. I pity Americans who have to file a tax return every single year. In Britain, even though PAYE spares most of us the agony (though, we also don’t notice taxes which allow them to be increased less visibly), we still have one of the most complicated tax systems in the world, that is around 21,000 pages long. The endless deductions, loopholes, and levies allow excessive lobbying from interest groups to get one specific tax they want removed or cut. Stuff like the ‘carried interest loophole’ and SALT deductions are egregious examples of this in the United States.
Tax is needed for society to function. I am not one to believe taxation is inherently theft, as it is the state that allows private property to exist in the first place. With a competent state that gains the trust of its citizens, taxation does not merely have to be a ‘necessary evil’, but can be a ‘positive good’.
However, taxes should be as low, as locally raised, efficient, and as little drag on growth as possible. They should also be simple; the Georgist movement in the early 20th century was called the ‘Single Tax Movement’, because it intended to replace all other forms of tax with just a LVT.
Taxing land does not disincentivise investment and economic growth like other taxes do, something Milton Friedman acknowledged. With other taxes, the amount of tax means tax money that cannot be spent on other products or services, thus dampening economic growth. But because land is a finite resource, the free market cannot generate more of it; therefore having a LVT incentivises it to be put to productive use, serving to increase economic growth.
Under a sufficiently high LVT, property speculation does not make any financial sense, as without tenants you would be paying the tax without any return. It also incentivises the development of high density, high rise buildings, as a strip of land will be taxed the same regardless of whether it’s a house or a skyscraper, and more tenants will be more rents to pool to cover the cost of the tax. This video by Britmonkey is a great introduction to those completely unfamiliar with Georgism:
A more in-depth argument is well made by Astral Codex Ten, who’s review of Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’ you should read.
Of course, not all land should be taxed, and the value of a piece of land would depend on the planning permission and zoning. There may need to be different LVT rates for natural resources (higher), and farmland (lower), and nature reserves should be free of it entirely.
However, the LVT works best when there are as few deductions as possible. Estonia’s model, with very few exceptions (only for nature reserves) and valuations carried out by the Estonian Land Board (though intermittently, something that can be improved upon), with its classification of land into ‘classes’ and various subtypes by which to accurately calculate and tax value, is a model to follow.
YIMBYism
As the ‘Progress and Poverty’ Substack highlights, Georgism and YIMBYism go hand in hand. YIMBYism, by loosening planning restrictions and upzoning, ensures housing can be built. Georgism disincentivises speculation and actively encourages the development of high density housing, ensuring affordable prices.
Pierre Poilievre of the Conservative Party of Canada stands out as the only right-wing politician in the Anglosphere who has been able to get youth majority support, and he has done this by laser-focusing on the bread and butter issues, chiefly the cost of housing, and proposing YIMBY solutions.
Rapidly increasing supply should solve the problem of extortionate high prices somewhat. Japan has managed to have cheap property by having easy planning permission, and so has Dubai. The 1950s suburban ‘American Dream’ was possible because there was mass housing construction. We’re simply not building enough houses.
But many on the left criticise Poilievre’s plan by saying there’s no guarantee the houses will be affordable. What’s stopping these new houses being speculative assets rather than homes? Places like Ireland come to mind, where a property boom has led to gentrification and pricing out, the supply and demand mechanisms not working to reduce prices.
This is where a LVT comes in. Not only does it disincentivise speculation, but a LVT actively ‘encourages’ more development of dwellings, unlike other taxes that have negative externalities.
An oversupply of housing is a good thing. If many homes are built, there are only so many that can be for the rich. Eventually, dwellings not able to be rented out at a high price will reduce their price, and the market will focus on a lower-income demographic. This is how all markets work, the wealthy market is catered to first, and then when the demand from that market dries up (as long as there’s no speculation), more affordable housing is then built.
In my Blade Runner article, I hypothesised that the alternate Los Angeles had a LVT to incentivise mass housing construction, in my argument that the movie is biased by stylised lighting and times of the day, and the future it posits is better than the one we got.
Why Sales Taxes are Bad
Most libertarians consider sales taxes the least bad form of tax. The argument is that it is a tax on consumption rather than saving or investment, so does not slow down economic growth.
However, I oppose this argument. Sales taxes are regressive, more complex than other forms of taxes, and can be avoided by black markets. Oregon did not have a sales tax until it legalised cannabis (the tax was only for that specific product.) By putting a tax on legal cannabis, it did nothing to stop illegal sale of the drug, and in fact encouraged it.
Sales taxes make the ‘grey economy’ a ‘black economy’. My view is that semi-secretive industries should be treated the exact same way as open and public industries, to create a very clear line between what is within and outside the law. The doctrine of ‘formalism’ is that there should be only as many laws as the state, and society, is prepared to enforce. Sales taxes encourage a shadow economy and so are a bad idea.
The ‘FairTax’ proposal advocated by many libertarians also has a heavy redistribution element to mitigate its regressive effects, which is an expansion of the size of the government which they claim to oppose. The tax is complicated and would be hard to collect and administer, causing more bureaucracy.
Red States like Florida should replace their sales taxes with a LVT, which would be simpler to administer as well as having the aforementioned positive externalities. It would also ensure they retain their competitiveness and relatively low housing costs.
Modified ‘Estonia Model’
Estonia’s tax system, in addition to having the LVT, is one of the best and simplest in the world. They also have a marginal flat income tax (flat income tax above personal allowance), designed by Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka, and a corporation tax which has total deductions for investments and savings and only taxing profits at the moment of distribution to shareholders.
Estonia represents ‘neoliberalism done properly’, as a consistent government plan. It isn’t like the US, where neoliberalism and small government is done when it benefits corporations but not when it benefits the everyman, in Estonia the neoliberalism is a consistent, holistic system
However, it is not without flaws. The LVT, whilst very impressive with its calculation, is way too low. There are still too many deductions for the income tax, with the state taking upon itself which ‘savings’ are worthy of deduction and which are not. There is also a non-domicile rule that is more geared towards ‘business friendly-ness’ rather than minimising bureaucracy.
Additionally, it relies a large amount on sales taxes, which I just explained my opposition to. They also have a system of mandatory employer contributions, which is more bureaucratic than simply having sectoral bargaining and allowing workers to contribute to pension and health funds themselves, something Hall and Rabushka proposed.
A better way to do income taxes would be to make the corporate tax and income tax a single tax. Individuals would have total deductions for money saved in an ISA or group-savings of any kind, or money invested, and would not take into account numbers of children.
I believe that the Right should advocate for the abolition of all taxes saving two, one would be an LVT, the second would be a marginal flat income tax, the same rate for individuals and corporations, with total deductions for savings and investment, like the one I proposed.
Carbon prices were necessary throughout the 90s and 00s where low-carbon energy production was not economically viable on its own, but are no longer necessary due to the low price of renewables, and cause a large amount of extra bureaucracy. On harmful chemicals, blanket bans are usually better at making enforcement simpler, though the state should only ban what it is prepared to enforce.
Intellectual Property and Formalism
Copyright infringement has been a core part of the internet since its inception. From music sharing by Napster in the early 2000s to YouTube’s revolutionization of the music industry later on in that decade, law-breaking has been done on such a scale that it has the music industry more-a-less surrendered.
But other industries, like movies, still try to crack down on online piracy. This is despite the fact that piracy is easily accessible and essentially uncontrollable.
This is another example of a law existing that the state does not have the means or the will to enforce, which cheapens respect for the state. Laws should as close as possible reflect, and in fact be less strict than, the social mores. The internet has meant that old models of intellectual property are outdated and unenforceable.
When it comes to patents, the exploit of medical patents through thicketing and evergreening to artificially extend them is utterly evil, bleeding the average American dry. However, Richard Hanania makes a good point that ‘anti-trust’ and ‘anti-monopoly’ carries the risk of empowering the state. The EU Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts seemed great ideas on the surface, but they were used to expand Woke surveillance of speech and further entrench social media platform’s role as servants of governments.
The best solution is to do what Henry George advocated; abolish intellectual property. This is something that even Elon Musk, the greatest inventor of our age, has been supportive of. This is most commonly associated with Pirate Parties, but their ideas of copyright reform are not new.
How would people’s ideas be funded? Through donations. It would be a moral standard to pay for intellectual property. Yes, it could easily be circumvented through online piracy, but shoplifting is also quite easy to do. What’s important is that there are the social mores for a ‘high trust society’. It should be taboo to make money off of other people’s creations.
This would still be a capitalist society, but businesses would take it upon themselves to maintain their edge as opposed to bogging down the courts. Inventors and artists would be patronised, and money given in-kind, something that is already de-facto the situation. People could buy Substack subscriptions and distribute them for free, but people aren’t inclined to do that because they respect the writer as an individual and respect their need to support themselves.
Paying for art and writing should be like tipping waiters, just something that you do. Whilst this may appear to discourage innovation, patent and copyright, whilst useful in the 19th century, in today’s world are both unenforceable in many cases, and hold back technological progress and living standards (particularly when it comes to medicine) when they are enforced.
Private competition would still be essential as scaling production is probably more important than having a theoretical knowledge of how to. But taking away this state-imposed means of giving oneself an advantage in the market would be anti-monopoly without expanding bureaucracy.
The ‘Commonwealth City’
Joel Anderson had an excellent idea of the ‘Commonwealth City’. This is a synthesis between Georgism and Yarvinite Patchwork/Neocameralism, even though Anderson did not know of Yarvin or really this sphere at all. I’m not sure about his social views, but I welcome him to engage in this intellectual space.
The Commonwealth City is the idea that a city should be corporation, with people buying a piece of the city’s land as a ‘share’. He proposed this be a newly built city, as it would allow Georgism to be implemented from scratch rather than having the strong opposition from landowners which has historically stopped it from happening. Whilst I do not give up on trying to pass the tax politically, this is also an interesting idea. In Britain, these ‘Commonwealth Cities’ could be built in the North as part of a ‘Levelling Up’ agenda.
Like property taxes, land value taxes have the flaw of pricing people out of areas if the value increases too much. Therefore, under an ordinary Georgist model, there would be an inclination towards not wanting revaluations or making the percentage lower and lower, meaning it’s utility as a ward against speculation is reduced. There would be less enthusiasm about doing anything that might increase the value of the land, which would damper economic growth.
A way to guard against this is to have landowners buy ‘shares’ in the city, which will mean that as the land values increase, the value of their shares and the dividends those shares pay out are increased, which is exactly what Joel suggested.
Georgism has been keen on the ‘citizens dividend’ idea since the beginning. All this talk that Universal Basic Income (UBI) will solve all our problems is a bit silly, and I’m generally opposed to UBI. An equal citizens dividend idea wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem of landowners being opposed to land increasing in value, because people would still have to pay more in increased land values than they receive from the dividend.
But if land purchasers buy the percentage of the land value they will be taxed on, also in shares, something that should be encouraged or even required to raise revenue for the initial stages, there would be an inbuilt desire to improve the value of the city. Share ownership would mostly be limited to landowners in the city, however the CEO would have a fixed percentage of the entirety of shares, above what they own in land, to give an incentive for them to improve the city’s value.
This would incentivise beautiful housing and urban planning in a holistic way. Unlike cities like London which has been blighted by eyesores, developers would be interested in the value of the whole city and not just their plot, that they ‘rent’ from the city, which in turn ‘rents’ it from the local council. What is likely to emerge is an urban planning of ‘beautiful high density’, like the skyline of Dubai or New York, as skyscrapers are incentivised to maximise efficient usage of land.
A LVT is based only on the unimproved value of the entirety of the plot, what lies beneath it and what lies around it. If a city was built from scratch after the land was tendered, and the whole city, as private land, was taxed a LVT by the local authority, it would be the same amount if a thriving city was built on it than if it was just grass, depending on the surrounding areas, incentivising a property boom of affordable housing.
This model may be applied to existing cities as well, though it would probably be first piloted in specific neighbourhoods of large cities like London or Birmingham. The land should be ‘leased’ rather than owned by this private company, and there should be restrictions on how many shares one landowner can buy to prevent one owner dominating the community and its governance.
Whilst some people may object to ‘corporate ownership of public property’, my theories of the state mean that there would not be that much functional difference between public governance and corporate governance. There would be some differences in public governance, like representation for taxpayers (who would simply be ‘customers’ under a corporate government), and citizens initiatives, but the figure of the ‘Warden/Mayor in each local authority, which I discussed in my article on the problems of representative democracy, would be fairly similar to a CEO.
This particular kind of corporate governance would not be plagued by parasitic consultancy and market fragmentation. Like Elon Musk’s various companies like SpaceX and Tesla, the corporation managing a city would be highly ‘vertically integrated’. Services that the city provided would be akin to publicly owned services, various economic activities akin to state-owned enterprises. The corporate city would operate similarly to Singapore, combining a single planned vision with a entrepreneurial, innovative spirit.
Coalition Building
If an anti-Woke movement is to be successful, it must build a broad coalition. Most people do not care about the issues that we passionately care about, focusing predominantly on bread and butter issues. We must package our cultural programme, which is of varying popularity, with a laser focus on material needs of people: what City Journal called a ‘Conservative Popularism’.
Georgism is one of the few economic programmes that can unite various ideological strands. A Ron Paul-style libertarian can be persuaded by its abolition of other taxes and rolling back of the frontiers of the state, the techno-optimist can be persuaded by it’s YIMBY orientation, and the economic leftist can be persuaded by its appeal to the general welfare.
The young are the future, and at the moment in the Anglosphere (minus Canada) they are Woke. But Canada shows this does not need to be the case, with a majority of young Canadians supporting Poilievre, despite almost a decade of insidious Woke indoctrination under Trudeau, because he appeals to their material grievances.
The Right should not be ‘conservative’, but radical. It should provide an optimistic vision which can excite the young and the well-educated, that appeals to their material needs and, through focusing on their material needs, gain alignment towards our cultural values.
The left has done this well in Britain and the United States. The left had answers to the economic grievances of millennials, even if they were misguided ones. Whilst not being the sole cause of youth cultural leftism, packaging cultural leftism with a programme geared towards their material interests made those ideas more attractive.
Georgism can do this. It is a way the Right can give convincing solutions to economic problems, and attract elite human capital. Young people face major issues with the cost of living, which is something Georgist economics can rectify, as well as getting them to have more respect for small government solutions.
Georgism would be easiest to implement at the state level, with the repeal of all state income taxes and sales taxes and replacement with a LVT, something that would be very feasible, as state revenue in Red States often comes from a single source, like sales tax in Florida.
Replacing its sales tax with a LVT would further enhance Florida’s reputation as the new ‘Vanilla America’, having taken that mantle from California, making property cheaper than it already is, and further enhancing the competitive edge that Red States have over Blue States.
Conclusion
I hope throughout this essay I have made a convincing case for Georgism. It is a movement that transcends the political spectrum, and if adopted by the Third New Right, could build inroads amongst more educated, elite-human-capital groups we so desperately need, as Walt Bismarck has highlighted. It would compliment a general economically libertarian view, and make such a view far more attractive to ordinary people, connecting the policy of a LVT to reducing the cost of housing and simplifying government.
It would likely face opposition from the elderly base that constitutes the voting bloc of most right-wing parties in the Anglosphere, who have their properties and don’t want to pay taxes whilst in retirement. However, the Right cannot continue to rely on these elderly voters, as they will naturally pass away. The young are the most important demographic to get on side, not just for short term electoral calculus, but because they are the group that will shape the future. The Woke-orientation of Gen Z in the Anglosphere is a tragic catastrophe, but cannot become a self-fulfilling prophecy and may be able to be shifted, like it has done in Canada, by connecting to their real needs.
For the up and coming Gen Alpha, who have known nothing but Wokeness, a focus on gaining independence and freedom, that they have been so sorely lacking growing up, and which low house prices could facilitate, may give the Right a counter-cultural appeal. Whilst the failed promise of Gen Z with the anti-SJW movement gives reason to despair, Continental Europe and Canada show its possible to get young people to embrace the Right. Let’s give it a go!
Good spitballing and like the direction of the idea.
Part of the reason for the current tax structure is that revenue has to match expenses. Let us imagine an empty piece of exurban real estate, the kind they are plopping down developments left and right on. The “land” has a value of almost nothing. Now a lot of people are living there. How are their local schools going to be funded? How will the other services they incur going to be paid for?
If you say that you are going to increase the value of the land to raise more tax revenue to pay for the expenses the people brought with them, how is that all that different then taxing improvements? The way a municipality deals with that now is that the value of the improvements provide additional property tax revenue to pay for the services of the people living in those new houses.
If I build a high rise don’t I now have to provide government services to all of those people. How do I fund schools for 1,000 kids from the high rise with the same tax revenue I would get from a few SFH build on the same land but only requiring me to provide education for a few children.
A second issue: How do we determine the value of “land”?
Within many cities the land under the middle class is worth a lot and the land under the poor is worth little. But it’s the same land, sometimes blocks apart! Are we going to tax the shit out of the ghetto land? Will building a safe and profitable neighborhood just increase your taxes? I suppose we already have this problem with the current system, but property taxes have to assess base on market value. Trying to tease out how much of that value was land versus improvements is trickier.
Anyway, let’s say we solve all those problems. It seems to me that the general thrust is that you want to raise taxes on SFH dwellers and lower them on apartment dwellers. Generally, this is going to be a transfer from right to left and from families to non-families. That’s a hard sell without some kind of offsetting value prop.
A very lucid overview of Land Value Tax. You've sold me on it for something to include in an idealistic utopia.
However, there's likely multiple, practical reasons the places it has come the closest to being implemented are Taiwan, Denmark (which I've never visited so won't comment on), Estonia and Singapore.
Taiwan's major cultural fault lines are between the Chinese Nationalist Mainlanders that fled to the island in the 1940s, the longer established Hokkien speakers (ie "Taiwanese speakers"), a small minority of Hakka speakers concentrated in a few towns, and a tiny minority of Austronesian aborigines. The island was largely developed during the Japanese occupation. Debates over de jure Taiwanese independence vs closer ties with the PRC don't really impact living situations and zoning.
Outside two major cities and a few outlying areas, Estonia is an culturally homogeneous and well functioning society. Their main social problem is trying to integrate the (largely working class and low skilled) Russians that moved to the country during the Soviet Union. In Tallinn, the capital, Russians by and large live in their own neighborhoods, so are spatially segregated. Narva, on the border, is 95% ethnic Russian. The country is far less corrupt than fellow Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania, and escaped experiencing a brain drain during EU accession. In short, if you can exclude or somehow otherwise go around the Russian remnant as a variable, almost any technocratic "improve government" idea could be tried there and bound to succeed, especially thinks to the well educated population. The high sales tax is thanks to EU regulations requiring a VAT.
Singapore is a top down incredibly socially engineered society. Government policy is based around homogenizing the disparate Chinese population into speaking Mandarin and English, who originally spoke different Chinese languages (the "dialects" from, say, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Wuhan would be as different as Spanish, French, and Romanian -- all Latin based languages but not mutually intelligible), while also keeping down the Muslim Malay population. The reason they have their very strict no gum chewing, no jaywalking etc laws is to help prevent racial animus from building up... their main fear has always been the far more populous Indonesia and Malaysia invading to protect ethnic Malays from the local Chinese (especially with race riots in the 1960s). They prevent ethnic enclaves from forming with public housing while also encouraging the middle class to have more children by making larger apartments easily available to them, while throwing up impediments to more disfavored elements of the population from getting access to the same.
Now to put on my US hat... Our entire environment is based on intentional "postcode lotteries" (in the UK, government policy ostensibly tries to even out public funding with taxes highly centralized, at least in England proper). LVT would blow up this intentionally constructed spatial segregation based on housing size, neighbor income, school districts and other public services, and traffic. Even in California, no matter how to the left the state has drifted, zoning and property tax reform has largely been off limits. California started to really go off the rails when all of the easily developed land sprawling outwards from Los Angeles and San Francisco was filled in. Then you had millions of middle class people fleeing the state, to be replaced by either the rich or poor. Boomers squatting on large houses in prime school districts doesn't help either.
To be fair, LVT might be more easy to do in Florida, as they have large county wide school districts, but again you'd be messing with a critical mass of the populations' property values and quality of life. To make LVT work in the US, you'd need serious education reform. Vouchers, academic selection (streaming) at multiple stages... You'd also need strict, Singaporean level prosecution of quality of life crimes from noise to littering to parking cars on the front lawn and public transport reform to compensate for the increased traffic caused by density. You essentially need a high trust society to make it all viable.