Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (480)

“You Georgists just hate landlords!” and “You Georgists are just envious of people with big back gardens!”

The latter is nonsense, we do have a big back garden by London standards, as do many other Georgists I know. Some are tenants, some are even landlords, that does not colour our opinion much.

As to landlords, would you say that the people at IBM who developed the word processor hated typists and type-setters? Are the people who design and build tractors envious of farm labourers? Did James Hargreaves invent the Spinning Jenny to spite people who span fabrics at home?

Nope, they just invented better ways of doing things that were to the overall benefit of humankind. With every step forward, there are people who lose out and have to find a different way of earning a living.

It’s the same with tax reform. Government spending which enhances land values (however indirectly) should be funded out of a user charge on the land values arising, and all the regressive and damaging taxes should be reduced as far as possible. If car manufacturers spends money on improving their cars, they get their money back by selling them for higher prices or selling more of them. If quality improves, the car repair workshops lose out. So what? That is to the overall benefit of humankind.

And yes, there will be people who have arbitraged or gained from our current unfair and stupid tax/land ownership system who will lose out, the same as the typists, typesetters, farm labourers and weavers did in the past. That’s not an argument for sticking with typewriters and type setting; we could argue against those and say we should have stuck with hand writing, but to preserve the jobs of monks, the hoi polloi shouldn’t be taught to read and write etc, the ultimate logic being we should have stayed living in caves and hunting animals with stones.