I've always wondered about that. I've been really into understanding Marxism as someone who believes in class consciousness and economic justice, and I remember an encounter with a guy I befriended playing Counter-Strike who literally called himself "Marxist Feminist." He loved our conversations about hedge funds, financial markets, and the concentration of economic power. Eventually we invited each other into our respective Discord servers, but he really didn't appreciate the "gamer language" in my friend's server, which struck me as an oddly bourgeois attitude for a Marxist. Then one day I casually mentioned that I thought one of my stocks might be unethical because platinum tends to surge during wars. He banned me from his Discord shortly afterward. I always found the irony amusing. Here we were discussing the structural contradictions of capitalism, but apparently acknowledging my own participation in those contradictions was a step too far. I've never understood how a philosophy rooted in materialism and class consciousness becomes an exercise in moral puritanism and policing other people's behaviour.

I think you're also overlooking the MMT component here, and treating government finances as though they operate like a household budget. A monetarily sovereign government doesn't need to collect taxes before it can spend, nor is paying down the national debt inherently a prerequisite for providing public benefits. The real constraints are inflation, productive capacity, and available resources. More importantly, a citizen's dividend isn't necessarily welfare or dependence on the state. It's the distribution of economic rents that rightfully belong to the commons. The state is collecting and distributing that value, not creating it. George explicitly entertained dividing surplus revenue per capita in his 1885 discussion with David Dudley Field. I'm not arguing he considered it a necessary component of the single tax, only that the concept was present in his thinking. I personally frame it as economic justice because I've thought through the mechanisms by which asset inflation squeezes households, and how LVT and a citizen's dividend could address them. Here in Canada, household credit-market debt exceeds $3.2 trillion, with nearly three-quarters tied up in residential mortgages. A tremendous amount of private debt is tied to inflated property values and the capitalization of economic rents. An LVT could put downward pressure on land valuations and speculative borrowing, while a citizen's dividend would give households additional income they could use to pay down existing debts. Together, they could facilitate gradual private-sector deleveraging, reducing debt-servicing pressures and potentially easing the inflationary pressures associated with housing. There's also a broader transmission mechanism here that I think gets overlooked. @JamesYoung has documented Federal Reserve research showing that house-price inflation systematically leads rent inflation by roughly 12–24 months, with correlations around 0.7–0.8. Steve Keen, discussing Young's research, summarized the relationship: "What drives wage changes is actually house prices." In other words, housing inflation isn't necessarily downstream of wage inflation. Housing costs can rise first, squeezing household purchasing power and creating pressure for subsequent wage adjustments, which may then feed into broader consumer prices. Inspired by that Post-Keynesian literature, I put together an empirical analysis of this mechanism in Canada a few months ago. My results found that housing-price inflation preceded shelter-cost inflation, and shelter inflation preceded wage growth, with statistically significant lead-lag relationships. The analysis doesn't establish structural causality, but the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that wages are responding to earlier housing and living-cost pressures rather than initiating them. samsteprojects.github.io/Can… This is why I see LVT and a citizen's dividend as complementary policies. LVT addresses the upstream capitalization of economic rents into land prices, while a dividend returns some of that socially generated value to households, potentially reducing private indebtedness and weakening the downstream transmission of housing inflation into rents, wages, and consumer prices. And I don't think eliminating economic rents automatically eliminates involuntary poverty. People still experience unemployment, disability, illness, and economic insecurity. Georgism can address a major structural source of inequality without necessarily eliminating every other cause. It's not simply redistribution to me. It's an intentional attempt to address the mechanisms producing asset inflation, excessive private indebtedness, and economic inequality in the first place. That's why I consider it economic justice.

I've been thinking about this a lot. Georgism seems like a good starting point. A huge share of private credit expansion in Anglosphere economies has been absorbed by housing and land, inflating asset prices rather than productive capacity. Tax land values, capture economic rents, and potentially extend that logic to AI/data rents, then return part of those rents as a social dividend. That could simultaneously reduce land speculation, de-financialize housing, and give households an income floor that isn't dependent on selling their labour. Then pair it with macroprudential policy aimed directly at private credit creation: restrain leverage during booms, prevent another property-credit spiral, and allow periods of private debt deleveraging without collapsing aggregate demand. The dividend matters here because it supports household balance sheets and consumption while debt is being reduced. So rather than UBI creating a politically powerless underclass, the goal would be to socialize part of the economic rent generated by land, technology and the commons, while structurally reducing household dependence on debt and wages in the first place. You kill two birds with one stone: curb private-debt accumulation and asset inflation, especially housing costs that eventually feed into wage demands and broader consumer prices. (I think this answers a handful of your thread. It maintains capitalism but removes part of the financialization machine that came about with neoliberalism.) Pt.2 in original thread.

Taxing land and predistributing economic rents is the logical and compassionate choice.

The capitalist machine — institutions, corporations, and government — making race, gender, and sexuality more important than a person's material conditions is recognition without redistribution. Reifying people through those identities while leaving their material conditions untouched functions as a barrier to class consciousness.

github.com/openai/codex/issu… github.com/openai/codex/issu… Awaiting the day this is fixed so I can resume developing while i'm at my pleb job @thsottiaux

Nancy Fraser was writing about the redistribution/recognition problem back in the 90s. Her later critique of “progressive neoliberalism” describes much of what bothers me about institutional DEI. You can make an institution more representative by race, gender or sexuality while leaving its underlying class hierarchy completely intact. In cases like elite academic hiring, the affirmative remedy is often being distributed among people who are already highly educated and economically privileged. That isn't redistribution. It's changing who gets admitted into the managerial/professional caste while preserving the caste itself. Recognition matters, but recognition without redistribution is remarkably compatible with neoliberalism. So as a Conservative MP @DeanAllisonMP , would you advocate for real redistributive measures targeted at socioeconomic disadvantage, or is your answer simply to tear DEI down? Because that would just be another remedy without redistribution: removing the recognition while leaving the underlying class hierarchy exactly where it was.

Housing prices are falling at the margin, but that doesn't mean affordability is returning. The underlying land value remains structurally elevated. Unless land rents are actually compressed, through much more supply, taxation of land value, or a major credit/deleveraging event, cheaper transactions won't undo decades of land-price inflation.

I think people are putting too much weight on Bitcoin's four-year cycle and not enough on the macro environment underneath it. Bitcoin is, first and foremost, a high-beta liquidity asset. It performs exceptionally well when money is cheap, credit is expanding, leverage is available, and investors are willing to move further out on the risk curve. The reverse is also true. If the world economy is moving toward recession while global financial conditions tighten, you can't simply draw a line from a 2026 bottom to another enormous bull run because previous Bitcoin cycles happened to rhyme. The important question is: where does the liquidity for that bull market come from? Right now the risk is that we get some combination of higher funding costs, tighter credit, deleveraging, a yen carry-trade unwind, and an energy shock feeding inflation. That's particularly ugly because it can create a stagflationary environment where growth weakens but central banks are constrained from immediately flooding markets with liquidity. The sequence could look something like: Oil/inflation shock → higher yields → tighter financial conditions → carry trades unwind → leverage comes out of the system → credit growth slows → risk assets get repriced. Bitcoin tends to amplify those moves. A recession could eventually create the conditions for the next Bitcoin bull market, but the recession itself isn't bullish. The bullish part comes later, when inflation breaks, central banks can ease, yields fall, credit conditions loosen, and the global liquidity cycle turns upward again. Bitcoin would probably anticipate that turn before the real economy does. So I'm not saying a $55K–$60K Bitcoin bottom is impossible. It's completely plausible. I'm saying "2026 was the bottom in the previous pattern, therefore this is the next super-cycle bottom" isn't a macro thesis. Show me the liquidity inflection. Until then, a global deleveraging event could take Bitcoin considerably lower than a four-year-cycle chart suggests.

It's a combination of things. One is that modern neoclassical economics largely treats land as a form of capital, whereas Georgism comes out of the classical tradition that treats land and economic rent as fundamentally distinct from productive capital. So the framework itself sits somewhat outside the economic orthodoxy that informs modern policy. Then there's the political economy of it. In Canada, and in a lot of other countries, we've built enormous parts of the economy around protecting the FIRE sector. Rising land and housing values support mortgage lending, bank balance sheets, household wealth, construction, real estate activity, and ultimately measured GDP. Housing and other real assets are also deeply embedded in institutional and retirement portfolios. Once you've structured the financial system around continually appreciating asset values, deliberately taxing away land rents or allowing land prices to fall becomes politically very difficult. That's part of why Georgism is such a strange middle ground politically. It doesn't require abolishing markets or private property, but it attacks one of the most politically protected forms of private wealth: the capitalization of economic rent into land prices.

This is why many of the strongest UBI proposals pair it with taxes on economic rents. If you fund a social dividend by capturing land rents, monopoly rents, resource rents, and other unearned income, the policy goes much further than simply handing people cash. It starts stripping away the rent extraction that creates and sustains oligarchic wealth in the first place. Capture economic rent at the source, distribute it broadly, and UBI becomes a form of predistribution: the value created collectively flows back to the public instead of being privately captured by landlords, monopolists, and resource owners.

IT’S NOT JUST A WAGE PROBLEM. THE CEILING THAT KEEPS RISING IS ECONOMIC RENT. WHEN WAGES GO UP BUT LAND VALUES, RENTS, MORTGAGES, AND MONOPOLY PRICES RISE FASTER, WORKERS DON’T GET AHEAD. THE EXTRA INCOME GETS CAPTURED UPSTREAM. BY LANDLORDS. BY BANKS. BY MONOPOLIES. BY OWNERS OF SCARCE ASSETS. YOU CAN KEEP RAISING WAGES FOREVER. IF YOU DON’T TAX ECONOMIC RENTS AND STOP REWARDING THE OWNERSHIP OF LAND OVER PRODUCTIVE WORK, THE CEILING JUST KEEPS MOVING UP. THAT’S THE GEORGIST PROBLEM.

A wealth tax is a politically convenient affirmative remedy. It taxes the distributional outcome without changing the structures that generate concentrated wealth in the first place. A transformative remedy would target economic rents at their source: land rents, resource rents, monopoly rents, and other forms of unearned scarcity income. Tax the rent-generating structure, not merely the fortunes it produces.

Hi Sam, I'm Sam. Building more housing can depress prices at the margin, especially in the short run. But that isn't the end of the story. The infrastructure, amenities, and accessibility built around new density can then capitalize into the underlying land value. Vancouver is a good example. It has added substantial density and housing, but improvements in transit, infrastructure, and access make particular locations more valuable. In a geographically constrained metro, those gains are increasingly captured in land prices. So yes, supply matters. But if you ignore land-value capitalization, you're only analyzing half of the housing market.