Bryan Caplan co-authored a paper critiquing Georgism in 2012. From the blog post explaining the critique,
My co-author Zachary Gochenour and I have a new working paper arguing that the Single Tax suffers from a much more fundamental flaw. Namely: A tax on the unimproved value of land distorts the incentive to search for new land and better uses of existing land. If we actually imposed a 100% tax on the unimproved value of land, any incentive to search would disappear. This is no trivial problem: Imagine the long-run effect on the world’s oil supply if companies stopped looking for new sources of oil.
I can explain our argument with a simple example. Clever Georgists propose a regime where property owners self-assess the value of their property, subject to the constraint that owners must sell their property to anyone who offers that self-assessed value. Now suppose you own a vacant lot with oil underneath; the present value of the oil minus the cost of extraction equals $1M. How will you self-assess? As long as the value of your land is public information, you cannot safely self-assess at anything less than its full value of $1M. So you self-assess at $1M, pay the Georgist tax (say 99%), and pump the oil anyway, right?
There’s just one problem: While the Georgist tax has no effect on the incentive to pump discovered oil, it has a devastating effect on the incentive to discover oil in the first place. Suppose you could find a $1M well by spending $900k on exploration. With a 99% Georgist tax, your expected profits are negative $890k. (.01*$1M-$900k=-$890k)
You might think that this is merely a problem for a handful of industries. But that’s probably false. All firms engage in search, whether or not they explicitly account for it. Take a real estate developer. One of his main functions is to find valuable new ways to use existing land. “This would be a great place for a new housing development.” “This would be a perfect location for a Chinese restaurant.” And so on.
Bryan Caplan co-authored a paper critiquing Georgism in 2012. From the blog post explaining the critique,
Thanks, this is very interesting!