What part of Georgism is Anarcho-capitalism ? It is merely a way to reason about land and taxation.
For a country with near-zero historic buildings, the US has some of the most suffocating housing regulations. Making the regulations easier to navigate does not make it anarcho-capitalism.
The US housing crisis is an urban problem. Take California for example. Prop 13 handles land-taxation, which lets you pay pennies on prime real eastate. The Bay-area is the world's tech capital and has the world's most expensive real-estate. Yet you'd struggle to see an 5-floor+ building outside of a small pocket in down-town SF & SJ. Nimbys have practically outlawed any building by exploiting environmental regulations. The troubles associated with the new Apple Campus and the SJ downtown transit extension are recent examples among many.
In the above examples, housing of those who have it, is being protected by the laws as if it is a need. However, it explicitly prices-out those without housing through the same means. The individuals who protect their housing, do so to protect an investment. To me, taking away the ability of NIMBYs to project power outside their own walls limits exclusionary regulation. And standardizing taxation by land value generates the kind of fair-market pressure that keeps supply coming.
Now yes, it fully embraces housings as an investment, and it will inevtiably comes with it's fair share of problems. But first, investments come with well-understood regulations to avoid abuse (cartelization, hoarding). And second, I can't imagine how it would be anywhere close to how bad things are now.
If you have a better solution, then I'm all ears. But, at least don't be condescending if you aren't willing to engage.
> What part of Georgism is Anarcho-capitalism ? It is merely a way to reason about land and taxation.
Sure, but that's not what you espoused. You mentioned it as the best opinionated middle ground, but ultimately concluded, too much regulation was bad--Georgism involves far more regulation than we currently have. Note that Georgism isn't just about land.
> Making the regulations easier to navigate does not make it anarcho-capitalism.
Sure, but "making regulations easier to navigate" is quite a bit different from listing every current regulation you can think of and saying they are the cause of our current problems.
Even if we charitably assume you're genuinely proposing Georgism as the end goal, that's a complicated ideology to implement. What are the steps to get there? It seems like your only concrete solution is to get rid of the too-much-regulation examples you mentioned--the few weak protections we have--and vaguely "implement Georgism". Whether you intend it as such or not, that's a motte-and-bailey fallacy: the end result of this plan is simply to get rid of regulation and then fail to implement Georgism.
I don't share your optimism that land value tax cannot simply be passed on to renters. Closing that massive loophole involves implementing the rest of Georgism, which I'm not convinced you know exists since you've failed to mention it entirely. And ultimately, I am not convinced that loophole is possible to close.
And then there's the separate problem of accurately valuing land in order to tax it.
> The US housing crisis is an urban problem.
No, it's not. Homeless flock to urban areas because it's easier to survive without a home in an urban area, and small-town/suburban cops have a lot more ability to just imprison all the homeless they encounter under some pretext. But a lack of affordable housing in suburban and rural areas is absolutely a cause of homelessness just as much as a lack of housing in urban areas is. If anything, the lack of employment opportunities in suburban/rural areas creates more housing insecurity.
> In the above examples, housing of those who have it, is being protected by the laws as if it is a need.
Is it? I don't think so, and you conveniently talked around zoning laws which are more obviously treating housing as an investment and not a basic need.
These laws presuppose that housing as an investment is a reasonable thing. I suppose that assumption doesn't mutually exclude housing as a basic need, but the laws you mention completely lack the sorts of protections with real effect that regulate investors in other basic needs. If your water company or electric company fail to provide service, they get fined--who gets fined for failing to provide housing? When food supplies became insecure, we subsidized farming at a level that creates a permanent excess of food: who are we subsidizing to create a permanent excess of housing?
> If you have a better solution, then I'm all ears.
Well, housing is a basic need. You keep dropping phrasing like "if housing is a basic need" or "as if it is a basic need", but the statement "Housing is a basic human need" surely is not under debate? So maybe we treat things the way they are. There's no need for an "opinionated middle ground"--there are not two sides to this coin: housing is a basic need. I do not care about investors in housing: people withholding people's basic needs to collect rent are a blight and should be treated as such.
No one should be able to own houses they do not live in. I have no objection to simply giving landlords a year to sell off their rental properties, but realistically this sort of regulation is hard enough to pass without cutting the oligarchy out of their pound of flesh, so some sort of compromise that reimburses landlords somewhat is a reasonable compromise if we can solve homelessness permanently.
The crux is that people can agree that "housing is a basic need" without agreeing that "no one should be able to own houses they do not live in".
Even the most well-intentioned attempts to implement this will probably be more harm than good. There will always be enough loopholes to create many of the same problems while the added restrictions can introduce other problems of their own.
Some people cannot afford to buy, and some would not buy even if they could, preferring flexibility or a different kind of market exposure. For them to have a place to rent, someone else -- be that a company, family, or individual -- has to own a place they don't live in so they can rent it out. There will always be a need for this, you can't just ban it.
Aside: Don't tell me you want state-built housing projects. People seem to forget that the USA already tried that. Even in Russia and China virtually anyone who can afford to move to private housing does and never looks back.
Australia's state housing projects may have kept some people off the streets but have not prevented runaway housing prices for everyone else. One could argue they took up valuable land that could have helped with the supply side.
It's not "anarcho-capitalist" to recognize that many laws and regulations have had paradoxical effects once implemented. Even the most die-hard planned economy maximalist has to acknowledge that the plan can function differently in practice to how it was imagined by the committee. History is full of examples of well-intentioned plans functioning far worse for both the collective and the individual.
...and crashing housing prices drastically would solve this.
> and some would not buy even if they could, preferring flexibility or a different kind of market exposure.
A lack of flexibility in home ownership means a lack of liquidity in the market. A more liquid market is the solution here, not rent.
Paying rent is not market exposure. It's explicitly excluding renters from any market appreciation. No one chooses to rent so they can "gain exposure" to monetary loss. This is an absurd argument.
> Aside: Don't tell me you want state-built housing projects. People seem to forget that the USA already tried that.
People who hate government housing love to point to urban projects built in primarily black neighborhoods before the civil rights movement, and conveniently forget that postwar housing programs built much nicer housing in primarily white neighborhoods. I grew up in one such house.
> Even in Russia and China virtually anyone who can afford to move to private housing does and never looks back.
Imagine seeing people who would otherwise be homeless become stable enough to move into nicer private homes and seeing that as a failure of public housing.
My guy, people are sleeping on cardboard outside in 10 degree weather here. Grow a sense of perspective. Yes, I also support improving quality of housing, but if your criticism is that my solution doesn't result in perfect housing, I'll point out that your opposition to all real solutions doesn't result in housing.
> Australia's state housing projects may have kept some people off the streets but have not prevented runaway housing prices for everyone else.
Sorry, what was that first part?
Australia's state housing projects couldn't meet the demands of investor greed, because corporate greed is limitless. It should be unsurprising that as long as investment is allowed in housing, housing can't be cheap.
> It's not "anarcho-capitalist" to recognize that many laws and regulations have had paradoxical effects once implemented.
True. It becomes anarcho-capitalist when you see the complexity of regulation and use it as an excuse to oppose any and all regulation.
> History is full of examples of well-intentioned plans functioning far worse for both the collective and the individual.
History is also full of examples of well-intentioned plans functioning quite well. You like working no more than 40 hours a week? You like that your boss can't lock you in your office and let you burn to death if the place catches fire? You like that your food has to be inspected for foodborne illness?
Many of the regulations we have were written in blood and there are many people still suffering because regulations have not yet been written. Your free market ideology brought us sweatshops, cars that explode when rear-ended, paychecks paid in company store credit, black lung disease, prison slavery, Chromium-related cancer clusters, opiods, microplastics, kitchen grease fires--the list is endless, and in every one of these cases people knew what they were doing was harmful, did it anyway, and walked away with the profits of, in some of these cases, literal murder, because people like you are too blinded by ideology to prioritize human lives over freedom of the market and regulate before untrustworthy corporations cause harms that they obviously will.
What part of Georgism is Anarcho-capitalism ? It is merely a way to reason about land and taxation.
For a country with near-zero historic buildings, the US has some of the most suffocating housing regulations. Making the regulations easier to navigate does not make it anarcho-capitalism.
The US housing crisis is an urban problem. Take California for example. Prop 13 handles land-taxation, which lets you pay pennies on prime real eastate. The Bay-area is the world's tech capital and has the world's most expensive real-estate. Yet you'd struggle to see an 5-floor+ building outside of a small pocket in down-town SF & SJ. Nimbys have practically outlawed any building by exploiting environmental regulations. The troubles associated with the new Apple Campus and the SJ downtown transit extension are recent examples among many.
In the above examples, housing of those who have it, is being protected by the laws as if it is a need. However, it explicitly prices-out those without housing through the same means. The individuals who protect their housing, do so to protect an investment. To me, taking away the ability of NIMBYs to project power outside their own walls limits exclusionary regulation. And standardizing taxation by land value generates the kind of fair-market pressure that keeps supply coming.
Now yes, it fully embraces housings as an investment, and it will inevtiably comes with it's fair share of problems. But first, investments come with well-understood regulations to avoid abuse (cartelization, hoarding). And second, I can't imagine how it would be anywhere close to how bad things are now.
If you have a better solution, then I'm all ears. But, at least don't be condescending if you aren't willing to engage.