Hello! What are good socialist critiques of georgism?
Let’s assume for the sake of argument georgism involves:
-shifting to only taxing inelastic supply items like the unimproved value of land and other simular things like co2eq and radio bands at whatever rate you prefer.
-No taxes on elastic supply items like income, sales, value added, property improvements, estate taxes, etc.
-no seizing the means of production nor outlawing trade
-tax revenue being used for whatever you prefer
Hello! What are good socialist critiques of georgism?
Economist Michael Hudson often makes arguments for taxation of real estate, but not necessarily as a singular tax. https://michael-hudson.com/category/real-estate-and-georgism/
-no seizing the means of production nor outlawing trade
Unless your proposal is something that the owners of the means of production want, it’s not going to happen. Why? Because the owners rule the state. The Epstein class rules the state[1]. The state’s job is to impose the will of the Epstein class upon the working class, if necessary through the state’s monopoly on violence. Changing this power dynamic requires changing who owns the means of production.
-tax revenue being used for whatever you prefer
Money is used for whatever the ruling class prefers, and right now that’s not the working class.
Note that I said that money is used, not tax revenue. That’s because, while regional taxes can pay for things, at the federal level they don’t actually pay for anything[2]. Michael Hudson again: The Use and Abuse of MMT.
All these “socialists” since Colins have this much in common that they leave wage labour and therefore capitalist production in existence and try to bamboozle themselves or the world into believing that if ground rent were transformed into a state tax all the evils of capitalist production would disappear of themselves. The whole thing is therefore simply an attempt, decked out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_06_20.htm
