It’s not, though. The classical factors of production, whence we get the concept of “capital” as a factor of production, has land and capital as clearly separate:

Land or natural resource — naturally occurring goods like water, air, soil, minerals, flora, fauna and climate that are used in the creation of products. The payment given to a landowner is rent, loyalties, commission and goodwill.

Labor — human effort used in production which also includes technical and marketing expertise. The payment for someone else’s labor and all income received from one’s own labor is wages. Labor can also be classified as the physical and mental contribution of an employee to the production of the good(s).

Capital stock — human-made goods which are used in the production of other goods. These include machinery, tools, and buildings. They are of two types, fixed and working. Fixed are one time investments like machines, tools and working consists of liquid cash or money in hand and raw material.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production

And it’s an important distinction. The fact that land is not made and inherently finite makes it zero-sum. Meanwhile, the fact that capital such as education, tools, factories, infrastructure, etc. are man-made and not inherently finite makes them not zero-sum. This distinction has truly massive implications when it comes to economics and policymaking. It’s the whole reason LVT is so effective, so efficient, and so fair: it exploits the unique zero-sum nature of land.

I got a positive one for you

You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.

Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

Property taxes != Land value taxes

Further, it’s not a tax on capital; it’s a tax on land. It’s very explicitly designed to target land, as land has distinct economic properties that make it a prime target for taxation.

And yes, it does target speculative investments like those of Blackrock:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/54q68

They are taxed, but I think they could be taxed more and better. Specifically, we should implement a land value tax (LVT).

As for why LVT? In short, it’s just a really good tax. Progressive, widely regarded by economists as “the perfect tax”, incentivizes efficient use of land, discourages speculation and rent-seeking, economically efficient, and hard to evade. Plus, critically regarding landlords, land value taxes can’t be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

As for the difference between LVT and property taxes? This video explains well how property taxes enable land speculation and disincentivize housing development, and how replacing them with land value taxes would alleviate these issues.

Further, even places (such as the Australian Capital Territory) that have implemented quite milquetoast LVTs have seen positive impacts on housing affordability:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

Better than a wealth tax is a land value tax. Key properties are that it doesn’t cause capital flight (you can’t move land), it’s almost impossible to evade (you can’t hide land), it’s economically efficient (it literally doesn’t even harm the economy in the slightest to implement it), it can’t be passed on to tenants (both in economic theory and in observed practice), and it’s progressive.

Plus, it incentives denser, transit-oriented city development and disincentivizes wastage of prime real estate (which contributes to the housing crisis). All in all, a terrific policy that people aren’t talking nearly enough about imo.

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

They’ll ban you for acknowledging the existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

Edit: wording

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

deleted by creator

I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.

Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.

It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.

You speak a lot about “means of production” for someone who has not once uttered a single word of concrete, tangible solutions in this entire thread. I’m out here posting sources, data, policies, and actual solutions that would measurably improve people’s lives, while you’re here larping online, doubling down on your bigotry against sexual minorities, and doing zero praxis.

It’s a libertarian who had his land taken by agribusiness.

Certainly one of the takes of all time.

fursona

I’m no furry, but this is honestly very rude and condescending towards people with that kink. Not sure why you thought that bigoted, conjured-from-thin-air jab was necessary. Maybe don’t be a bigot towards sexual minorities online?

You know those words in that order are talking about slavery right? The ownership of labor in private hands?

Just because you say it confidently doesn’t make it true. Read a little bit about the factors of production. Here, private ownership of labor means the value of your own labor is yours, rather than taxed away (such as via income taxes) or otherwise expropriated by the state.

And yes, of course I’m skipping over a lot of nuance in the difference between communism and socialism, but this is the highest level distinction. Much like there’s a heck of a lot different between humans and E. coli, but the highest level distinction is that one belongs to the domain bacteria and one belongs to the domain eukarya.

You said yourself you support private capital.

And I also said I support social ownership of land and natural resource, either directly with government leases or indirectly via taxes, which is very much not a capitalist/libertarian viewpoint by any stretch of the imagination. Very convenient of you to leave out that half, isn’t it?

And considering Georgism diverges from capitalism at the highest level of categorization, well, let’s just say your pet theory that “georgism = capitalism” falls rather flat. To continue the biological analogy, it’d be like if you said the domain archaea is actually just a subset of bacteria based solely on the fact that you had pre-decided that you think bacteria and eukarya are the only two domains of life. Or if you said all fungi were actually plantae because you pre-decided that you think plantae and animalia are the only two kingdoms of eukarya.

Very bold opinion on the categorization of an entire economic ideology for someone who, far as I can tell, literally never heard of it until today.

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but one of the most basic ways to categorize economic ideologies is based on who owns what factors of production, i.e., who owns land (including natural resources), labor, and capital.

Broadly speaking, communists believe in social ownership of all three, socialists in social ownership of land and capital, and capitalists in private ownership of all three. Within this framework, Georgism falls squarely on the belief that land should be socially owned (either directly by the government and leased out kinda like Singapore does or indirectly via “full” taxes on land, negative externalities, severance, etc.), while labor and capital ought to be privately owned. Thus, it is equally incorrect to describe Georgism as either socialism or capitalism, as it is simply neither.

Unlike libertarians, neoliberals, and capitals, Georgists view monopolies and private ownership of land as basically satan. That’s a pretty dang big difference.

How would you feel if I attempted to reduce down the wild complexity of leftist ideologies – everyone from syndicalists to market socialists to distributists to demsocs to Marxists – into “lmao a bunch of Pol Pot supporters”? Pretty silly and reductive, isn’t it?

Lol what?

You keep on trying to put me into little ideological boxes so you don’t have to engage with a new-to-you economic ideology.

And for the record, libertarians are dumb af and almost uniformly oppose the Georgist vision of land. And carbon taxes. And severance taxes. And unions. Andl YIMBYism. And IP reform. And so many other Georgist ideas that neoliberals and libertarians typically hate.

It’s especially funny because libertarian types love to call us land commies. Clearly we can’t simultaneously be libertarians and land commies…