# Georgism **The model:** Georgism holds that the economic value of *land* — meaning location and natural resources, distinct from the buildings and improvements on it — is created by the surrounding community and nature rather than by the landowner, and that this unearned "land rent" is the proper and ideal source of public revenue. Its signature proposal is the **land value tax** (LVT): tax the underlying land value heavily, tax productive activity (labor, buildings, capital) lightly or not at all. Henry George's 1879 *Progress and Poverty* — one of the best-selling economics books in history — made the case that land monopoly, not capital or labor, is the root of poverty amid plenty. ## Core mechanisms The theoretical elegance that keeps Georgism alive is the LVT's near-unique efficiency: because the supply of land is fixed, a tax on its value cannot reduce the amount of land or be shifted onto tenants (the landlord already charges the maximum the market bears), so unlike almost every other tax it creates no deadweight loss — economists across the spectrum, from Milton Friedman ("the least bad tax") to progressives, concede this. George's causal story: as an economy grows, the gains flow disproportionately to landowners as rising rents and land prices, so workers and capital run ever harder to stand still while landholders capture the surplus by doing nothing. The remedy — capture that rent for the public — would simultaneously fund government, curb speculation, and free production from taxation. The "single tax" version proposed replacing *all* other taxes with the LVT. ## Right-wing relevance Georgism's importance for the vault is that it *scrambles the usual coalitions*. It is aggressively pro-market (abolish taxes on work and investment) and simultaneously radical about socializing land rent, making it claimable by libertarians and egalitarians alike. Its recent revival runs partly through the tech right and YIMBY housing movement — Silicon Valley figures rediscovering George, framing the housing crisis as a land-speculation and zoning problem rather than a construction-cost one, and floating LVT as a market-friendly fix. This makes it a useful diagnostic: when a tech-adjacent figure proposes land value taxes, the vault can locate the move in this specific, cross-cutting tradition rather than the standard left-right grid. It also connects to critiques of rentier capitalism and [[Rent-Seeking]] that appear across the political spectrum. ## Critiques and successors Practical objections dominate: assessing pure land value (separating it from improvements) is administratively hard, transition would impose large one-time losses on current landowners (a politically fatal constituency), and in a modern economy land is a smaller share of wealth than in George's agrarian era, limiting how much revenue the single tax could raise. Critics also note it doesn't address non-land forms of rent and monopoly. Geolibertarianism and modern LVT advocacy (partial land taxes, split-rate property taxes in some cities) are its living descendants. ## See also - [[Rent-Seeking]] — the rent-extraction Georgism targets - YIMBY — the housing movement invoking land value tax - [[Classical Economics]] — the Ricardian rent theory George built on - [[Universal Basic Income]] — a "citizen's dividend" from land rent is a Georgist cousin - [[Neoclassical Economics]] — which absorbed and then marginalized land as a factor