> I'm now much more in favor of a Georgist-style land value tax, where wealth taxes on natural monopolies like land are the only form of taxation.

Why only natural monopolies? Why should Google, say, be taxed on the value of the land under their buildings, but not on the value of the google.com domain name?

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nostrademons 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Simply put, because we want to incentivize people to build things that have not been built before, and by nature these are always monopolies when they get started. While with natural monopolies, no person built them, they were taken from nature, and so we don't want to incentivize people to profit simply from plundering what as there before. There's also a justice argument: most people are okay with people owning and profiting from work that they themselves did, but not okay with people profiting from taking control of the commons.

The idea of a "natural" monopoly is also fairly broadly applied in modern Georgism. Things like the natural resources, the electromagnetic spectrum, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions are included, for example, in addition to land. There's a good argument for things like utility rights of way. Some proponents (more radical than I) also favor including IP in it, which actually would cover the google.com domain name.

I'd prefer some other mechanism (outside the scope of Georgism) to handle cases where "You built a monopoly through your own efforts to deliver a superior product, but now you've moved on and the current managers are mismanaging this resource to the detriment of society, but since it's a private monopoly there are no ways the get them to stop doing it." This is a really common problem in the economy today, and I'd like to find a way to manage it that preserves the incentive to invent new things while also removing the ability to prevent others from inventing new things.

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AnimalMuppet 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Good answer. It's all about incentives. I'm not sure I totally agree, but it's a reasonable answer.

To answer your problem in the last paragraph, we should recognize that the world is moving much faster now, and so 20 years for a patent in tech is ridiculously long. Even more ridiculous is 95-year-long copyrights. Those should revert to 14 years like they originally were.

That doesn't let you do something specifically for a mismanaged company, but I'm not sure there's much you can do under anything like our current legal system.

Also, it doesn't do anything about domain names, but those aren't exactly IP, are they? IP is patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Domain names can be related to a trademark, but they aren't exactly the same.

	▲	kiba an hour ago \| parent [-]
		When examining patent and copyright system, it is instructive to examine the history of these systems in question. You say that 20 years is too long, and that five years is more reasonable in today's environment. But you haven't exactly examined the abuse of patents in historical example. For example, James Watt was just one of many inventors who worked on the steam engine, and he was himself stymied by at least one patent he couldn't use until its expiration. His competitors similarly just wait for his patents to expire before they could release their own inventions. That suggests to me that patents have bad incentive early on.