I accidentally discovered the Georgist argument in 2003 and it saddens me how far away our national dialogue is from its precepts.

We have a major political party now proposing to untax investment income completely, shifting the burden entirely to wage and consumption spending (same thing for the most part).

I also despair at what passes for the left just arguing that we need to inflate everything to get back to prosperity. If inflation just raises rents and land values, half this country will fall further behind the 5% who own most of everything.

I can count around $1.5T/yr of ground rent flowing from the lower quintiles to the 5%, yet nobody else can see this and how this flow is a large part of the rent-capture that enables the top 5% to collect 33% of the national income.

I came across a McLuhan saying that explains this — “I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish”. (I believe the Chinese have a similar saying.) We are so immersed in — and our financial lives are so shaped by — ground rents that we don’t really understand how dominant they can be.

I lived in Tokyo in the 1990s and the amount of rent everyone was paying, and the sky-high land values — were part of my formative experiences. Speaking of which, it is my hope that Japan’s falling population will remove the driving force of the land-value treadmill they put theirselves on for much of the last century, and if things go as wrong as I fear here going back to Japan at least might work better.

Either that or the high-tax Nordic countries. They are such interesting real-world demonstrations of your ATCOR argument.