alt Hacker NewsWait do georgists describe any "finite natural resource" as "land"? Is clean drinking water "land"? Are radio frequencies "land"? Are domains "land"? (I mean domain names aren't "natural" but neither are IPv4 addresses????)
Weird-ass ideology
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The ideology is amazing.
The terminology is terrible.
But yes. When they say land they actually mean "natural resource".
The idea is that human-made resources should have their profits go to humans, but natural resources (most notably location value) do not belong to humans because humans did not make them, and also, the economic incentives normally associated with markets such as supply/demand management and price discovery don't apply because supply can't change.
Its extremely economically efficient and is endorsed by many economic thinkers on both the right and the left, as well as many social justice activists.
This is a decent recent video on the concept as it pertains to location value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suiU5b9tmoE
Georgists don't literally think that other scarce natural resources are actually land, but instead think that all scarce natural resources, if untaxed, lead to economic rents being extracted. Land/location ownership is probably the most damaging form of this, so it's the one that Henry George focused on, but the same basic principle applies to other natural resources.
This is why people refer to Norway's taxation of natural resource mining as "Georgist in principle" even though no land value tax is involved.
I (and I'm not original here) extrapolated that to other not-natural resources like IPv4 addresses, domain names, and so on that function much like a limited natural resource.
You even have cases of "land-banking" like nissan.com, although I don't believe Mr. Nissan ever intended to profit from owning the domain name; probably more akin to the main character of the movie Up.