Not real capitalism: Capitalism as it exists and is practiced in the physical, material world

Real capitalism: An idealized abstraction of capitalism that only ever existed on paper

Makes sense

Big Yud is super into Georgism which is enough to instantly make me suspicious of it

The only that matters is land ownership. If you design the perfect redistributive land tax, it doesn’t matter what economic system you have. You will solve society.

The Land Value Tax, their central position, is actually a really good idea. But they think it’s a cure-all.

tl;dr Yes.

The main thing Georgists believe is that no one has a special right to natural resources (NB: Georgists use “land” to mean “natural resources,” a holdover from classical economics), and so the state should fund itself, primarily if not fully, by charging a fee for their use. This gives a “principled” justification for taxation, and economically speaking it’s generally considered a good tax policy. There’s no real reason to argue against it, although they get carried away on just how good of a policy it is, like it’s going to solve every problem in the world and should be prioritized above all else.

The two big problems with Georgists are that that they don’t have any clear, explicit strategy for how to get their big idea implemented, and that they don’t have a clear understanding of class dynamics.

Historically, Henry George seemed to conclude, almost as an afterthought to his economic arguments, that some kind of alliance could be formed between the workers and the bourgeoisie, against the landowners. He saw the bourgeoisie and landowners as separate classes, which may have had some degree of truth in the 1800’s with the new money industrialists and the old money aristocrats. And to a certain degree at that time, the bourgeoisie could be considered a “progressive” force compared to the aristocrats. But George took that too far at the time, and these days it’s just completely archaic. Whether someone is a landowner or bourgeoisie or both is just a question of where they choose to invest, hell, if they have someone manage it they might not even know. And that class is completely opposed to asserting collective control over any part of the market, no matter how much you assure them that you only want the land.

Modern Georgists don’t necessarily agree with that but still don’t have any clear coherent strategy, beyond just trying to win in the marketplace of ideas. What I’ve seen is like, forming a nonpartisan think tank to make the case to mayor’s offices. There are some community land trusts that claim to be based on Georgist ideas that tend to wind up pretty bougie which I guess might be the goal? But it’s like, obviously you can’t really build a mass movement around nuanced tax policy rather than things that people understand and experience, like healthcare.