Fred Foldvary wrote:
> In which case you yourself are 80% Georgist, because if taxes there be not,
> then landowners will bear the major cost of infrastructure now paid for by
> the taxation of labor and capital. That will deflate their land value, now
> puffed up by the capitalization of neighborhood benefits they don't pay for.
You are overlooking so much.
1. Property taxes bring value down just as services bring value up.
2. A lot of tax money is spent on activities that do nothing for
property values. Is is hard to see why Social Security or Medicare
would raise property value much. Perhaps they increase immigration by a
slight amount, that's about it.
3. A lot of the external effects in real estate markets are voluntarily
produced by your fellow land-owners. Every time one of my neighbors
improves his landscaping, that raises my property value, but government
has nothing to do with it.
> The rent would be collected by the private providers, but such rent-based
> public finance is Georgist nonetheless. This is how condominiums, homeowner
> associations, hotels, and other real-estate complexes operate today, so this
> is not just hypothetical.
>
> > I suspect that there are very
> > few (if any) true "public goods," that cannot be "internalized" and paid
> > for entirely by those who use them.
>
> Agreed. Everything, including government itself, can be privatized or
> voluntarized. A purely privatized world would be much closer to Georgism
> than today's world. Indeed, the most feasible reform towards Georgism is the
> privatization of civic governance. Presumably you do not disagree with the
> central aim of Georgism, free trade.
>
> Fred Foldvary
>
> =====
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he felt that no one
would have understood what he wanted to say, and besides it was not
necessary that anyone but himself should understand it."
Leo Tolstoy, *The Cossacks*
