"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.

If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it.

If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success.

Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.

I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.

The OP is saying, if you show up with a bill to fix one of these problems, in a scoped way — like, actual working text they can put to a vote, not a general ideal of what to do — and can explain exactly what you're trying to solve, you have a decent chance of them putting it on the floor.

Just in general saying "please fix professional licensing" isn't actionable, you aren't doing the work for them. You're asking them to turn a vague idea into law, when it wasn't their problem to start with.

I think the challenge is that when such things get to the floor, you find out that special interests kick in with ad campaigns or backroom deals.

I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.

Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.

Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.

It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.

Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of. This is a very different characteristic than scarcity, because many scarce things can be increased, and should be if they are needed.

Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.

The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.

The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.

How does one even put a direct financial value on clean water, clean air, lack of noise pollution, etc.?

These things have different values to different people. While most everyone wants them in some form, there is a huge spectrum between “it won’t kill me this month” and “living in pristine Mt. Fuji”.

Should private companies be allowed to pollute sparse remote areas with no population?

Does it have a financial value if nobody goes there?

Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.

The generalization I would use is that governments should tax any scarce resource based on the amount of revenue it should produce if used effectively, rather than the revenue a given consumer can actually produces. Whether that is land, radio spectrum, or clean air.

“Undesirable behavior” is overly broad to the point of being actively misleading, and gets you into sin taxes. smut or drugs are not the scarce resources anybody is talking about here.

There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.

Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.

You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.

I think land + income is better. It's what I have where I live, and I'd like to see the balance shifted more towards land.

We already have property tax + income tax, and property tax is land value + value of improvements. From TFA, the immediate proposal is just allowing the property tax to assess the land value and value of improvements at two different rates, with the rate on improvements decreasing to remove incentives against improvements.

I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh

Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.

I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.

If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.

It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.

Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.

Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.

If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.

The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.

I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.

We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.

The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.

I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.

think bridges being forcibly closed for causes

Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.

Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.

The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.

It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.

Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.

“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.

People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.

I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.

High density is more profitable for developers, they have no interest in supporting SFH zoning.

Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive

It’s usually them saying something more like “this will bring jobs”, “growth is inevitable” etc…

And by jobs what they mean is that they will import labor to build housing you can't afford in your neighbourhood.

A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.

Assuming a perfectly efficient market sure. But in reality an expensive house next door raise the price of the cheap house next door because home prices are heavily influenced by the amount banks will loan, and appraisals are heavily influenced by nearby property values.

Plus other reasons like people want to live in good school districts and higher income areas tend to have better schools.

But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.

But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.

I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?

Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?

Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?

And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?

Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable

I mean, I personally loathe the concept of HOAs so the government abolishing them sounds like a wonderful thing to me.

And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.

It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.

Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.

It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.

the movement against SFH zoning is not about destroying single family zoned neighborhoods, it’s about not forcing every lot to require a SFH. i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read, but SFH zoning itself is more of a taking. people who want to live in a single-family-only neighborhood should find a spot on the edge of town where development pressure is low, not weaponize land use regulations to make it illegal to build what the market wants near jobs and amenities.

and while an LVT doesn’t really care about zoning, depending on how close to a city center your SFH is, a well calibrated LVT might dramatically increase your overall tax burden even if you dropped all other taxes. SFH zoning is manufactured scarcity; LVT prices scarcity correctly, and there’s no upper bound on that value, especially since land taxes become divorced from income.

> i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read

I should have clarified that. I meant it in the context of Georgism. The concept of Georgism was manifestly against the government actually redistributing owned land; instead, landlords would divest themselves of the land if the only utility they got from it was rent. What Georgism says you're paying for when you pay LVT on the land you own is the exclusive right to private use of that land, which comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn't "own" (or essentially, lease) the right to live on it or build on it.

Georgism distinguished between ownership by individuals for productive use and ownership by either (a) individuals for rent-seeking or (b) governments as stewards.

You may be right about LVT pricing scarcity where I live winding up higher than my current tax basis, but even that would make sense since I have to earn a lot and therefore pay inordinate income tax to have the ability to live in a single family home near to a city center already. If where I lived were less important to me, under Georgism, I could simply move to the burbs. But there is a funny corrolary to that which Georgism seems to intuitively grasp and which is orthogonal to the argument between manufactured scarcity and progressive housing policies. (And maybe this is a gap in Georgism's argument):

I live in inner southeast Portland, Oregon. Along all our east-west avenues there are tons of Amazon boxes (what we call studio / one bedroom 4-6 story cheaply constructed wooden apartments with a patina of modern amenity). And tons of local businesses. Between the major arteries it's almost all single family homes. This makes it one of the last cities in America where you can live in a SFH within walking distance of everything, including downtown. Street parking is still free here, and a lot of people don't need a car at all. I live in an SFH within two blocks of apartments where the waiters and bartenders and shopkeepers live who work at the businesses on the avenues. It's truly mixed use. However, they've now rewritten the zoning law to allow tearing down houses as small as mine (1200 sqft) and replacing them with 4-plexes. The problem with the Amazon boxes is that they don't provide room for families. No one is building 3 bedroom apartments with a yard where you can raise your kids in the city. My Dad grew up in a shared row house in Baltimore. No one's building that.

Which gets to the heart of the matter, which is that a major reason that this city and this area are so desirable is precisely because those SFHs exist between all the major streets. The spending value (and social value) of the essentially middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center is widely overlooked by people campaigning to eliminate SFH zoning; but without those people, you end up with neighborhoods where everyone is under 30 and relatively transient, without much money to spend in the local economy or any deep ties to the place. The apartments decay, and most of the work reasons for living there disappear.

Eliminating SFH zoning is an opinionated, political form of slow redistribution that preferences a certain age group and a certain socioenconomic position over others. It reduces actual diversity, and produces monocultural places like Seattle and Santa Monica where only the very rich can raise a family in town, and everyone else is a young renter.

And here's the kicker where Georgism may be right: In the end, eliminating SFH zoning only redistributes property from individuals and families (like me) to corporate landlords.

i appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it’s rooted in a desire to maintain some element of diversity.

i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.

if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.

also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.

I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".

So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.

Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.

Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.

What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).

LVT is assessed on land value. Your 13 rural acres aren't insanely valuable and would not be assessed a million dollars a year under a Georgian model.

Ok, that makes sense to me then. I thought I was going to be taxed for unused land.

The idea here is that unused land in a city should be highly taxed, but unused land in rural areas should not.

The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.

TFA literally shows how it is better for homeowners

Eh... After finishing the article, did I miss the section where the author discuss if Georgism actually works?

Did it actually increase the amount of housing? Reduce wealth disparity? Got enough taxes so cities can make commutes better?

Yes, you did. Re-read the end of section III, around the part with the final two color coded images.

There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:

Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.

But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.

Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.

Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?

All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.

Georgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.

Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.

Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.

What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?

This is the argument again Georgism I have the hardest time countering.

Yes, it works. It makes childless gloomy cities that are now also going bankrupt (see: Austin, TX).

Because why would you move into a shoebox-sized apartment that costs as much as a single-family home and doesn't have any grocery stores nearby (see: Manhattan)?

But don't despair! Your unit 31E will be allowed an individualized door knob and a space for a whimsical 4x5 inch placard.

Austin does not have a land value tax.

Austin is the main example of consequences of densification.

You are attacking a strawman of your own invention, since LVTs have nothing whatsoever to do with Austin.

You are confusing property taxes with land value taxes

A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.

When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.

It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.

It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.

Serendipity, I guess.

This place has always had a soft spot for Scott Alexander, and in turn he loves to talk about Big Systemic Fixes.

It never ends.

This piece was not written by Scott Alexander.

I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.

Georgism has been mentioned many, many times in the 15 years you've been on HN. How could you not know about it?

One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase masquerading as innovative tax policy. It would be great if cities were to reduce the spend by a 30% while they are at it.

At the very least, it would be great if politicians implemented it as tax neutral and as originally designed: the ONLY tax, and including renters. Some jurisdictions are doing it that way.

It’s unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve. Market value changes for every asset, not just land, and unearned wealth creation is common. Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?

I will probably believe it more when the proponents act on their recommendations, say, if Lars sells his house and sends the 50% appreciation he says in his blog he didn’t earn, as a gift to the Federal Government so that Trump can hire a few more ICE agents.

My concern is also aligned with Orwell in Notes on Nationalism: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

It's deeply weird how little interest there seems to be the inquiry of why Georgism failed in the past despite being an enormously popular political movement. It was tried. And abandoned. Investigating that history would yield a lot more compelling information than musing about the hypotheticals of what would happen if it was implemented now.

its unclear to me how you could pay for the massive tax burden of a modern state with a single tax. while i agree in theory that taxation of land is the most "fair" type of tax, it does not seem possible that eg. the federal US government could obtain $7,000,000,000,000 from a %5 tax rate on land, without making it completely unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home.

if you were to couple Georgism with a massive reduction in state spending i would be more on board i think.

It's already unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home in much of the country. Only if you worked and then moved to a cheaper place.

Also, I don't think it precludes a sales tax or tariffs, etc.

i think it generally does preclude other taxes, although i'm sure there are people who consider themselves georgists who would also want to see other forms of taxation.

but yes, home ownership is becoming increasingly unaffordable for a number of reasons, including increasing government spending...