That is not an ad hominem statement. It is an opinion about how overblown the idea is and why George is famous for it. Some property tax is probably a good idea. Does this dude deserve credit for the idea? No. Is he right in asserting that all poverty results from a lack of access to land? No. Will property tax make the economy go brrr? No. The idea of choosing the uses of land by taxing the hell out of random entities just because you think have the money to pay for it is tantamount to communism. I'm not about to read a whole book on the supposed revolutionary merits of property tax, thank you very much.
Oh yeah, now that I got to this comment of yours… it’s very evident you haven’t read it by your (honestly, I don’t say this just to be insulting) downright cartoonish misunderstanding of its contents.
Even more impressive, it’s obvious you haven’t even read a decent critique or summary of it.
You should consider it! There’s a reason for its stature :)
I disagree. I listened to an hour long, glowing summary of it and read about it on Wikipedia. It is just not convincing to me. The only thing cartoonish is how hard people praise it, considering we already have property taxes much like George wanted, which are often quite high and don't add to the economy. Property taxes like that are very close to communism, especially if you take it to an extreme. The higher the taxes, the less you actually own anything.
I have also had the displeasure of arguing with someone who thinks Henry George had the right idea. The dude was literally defending the communist Chinese "property" model which is just a 70 year lease from the government.
Calling my view extreme is like saying that an atheist is religious. Just because I don't accept this idea and all the ensuing conclusions, does not make my views extreme or unreasonable, much less "cartoonish"...
Sorry, I didn’t mean cartoonish in the sense of extreme (quite the opposite), I meant it in the sense of not understanding what you’re talking about.
You’ve stuffed an impressive number of misunderstandings into these few comments, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you unwind them except to say you should read the book.
Well, perhaps the people glorifying this book are the ones who have misunderstood it. They certainly did not convey anything about it to me besides what I have said and criticized here. I don't feel the need to read it one way or another. If the main idea is simply that property tax can be good, I already think that. If the main idea is that property tax is likely to fix poverty and inequality (as I have been led to believe), nothing in it can possibly convince me of that. On a similar note, I don't think that reading a Bible will make me doubt the theory of evolution, or the laws of physics. And you can't convince me that the Bible is not contrary to those principles, because I know better than that.
That’s not the main idea. In fact it’s the opposite of the main idea. You do not understand what you’re arguing against, and it’s not a subtle misunderstanding either. You are wrong on the very core of the idea.
So, again, if I misunderstand the ideas and nature of the book, it is because fans of the book do not understand it either. I think we are disagreeing about definitions. I looked at a wiki page about Georgism and I am even more convinced that this is the case and it is being co-opted by communist/socialist influencers. Anyway, it does not matter. This whole thread is going nowhere.
No, it's because you misunderstand what you've heard and you are demonstrably impervious to doubting and therefore improving your own understanding.
The "disagreement about definitions" is the substance of the disagreement. You do not understand the terms that are being used, therefore you do not understand the argument being made.
You say up above that all taxes are just taxes, so a conversation with you about tax policy is bound to roughly a first grade level because you've chosen not to learn what words mean.
As a bystander, I am baffled. You are clearly misunderstanding the core ideas of the book, yet adamant that you wouldn’t learn anything from reading it. Your reduction of the ideas to communism is juvenile. In fact, the alternative tax system proposed would keep value produced from labor in the private hands of the laborer — in essence the exact opposite of communism. Taxation can take many forms, and the details matter quite a lot. Until you open your mind to realize this, even if you still disagreed with the proposals, I think you’ll continue failing to understand why Progress and Poverty is globally one of the most widely distributed political economy books in history.
