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BirdieNZ • today at 6:26 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

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.


Replies

mort96 • today at 10:34 AM

Money is a scarce resource and should therefore be taxed.

You could say that it's intentionally kept scarce, and that is somewhat true, but currency is kept scarce because it only functions if it's scarce. Currency without scarcity ceases to be currency.