You’re misunderstanding many of my points. Market concentration is one aspect of how Capitalism functions, and is why it can’t last forever and is bound to be replaced by planning or by barbarism. Land ownership is a part of that process as well. However, the negative consequences of these facts are minimized in areas like Scandinavia through Imperialism.

I follow the logic here. So the inequalities that would have happened in Scandinavia is outsourced to countries with less worker rights and thus lower pay, and you evaluate the inequality of the whole economic ecosystem including these outsourcing countries. I always thought of it as a natural progression - that when these countries grow, the rights of their workers will grow too, which will reverse the trend or move the outsourcing to a new country until there are none left. It doesn’t negate your argument however, and aside from institutions that reinforce these inequalities like the IMF, isn’t outsourced labor also creating some positives for these countries in terms of growth and raising people out of poverty? How would these workers have faired without the outsourced labor?

I am not engaging mostly with the stats you bring up because they are one-sided and really serve to apologize for Capitalism and Imperialism, by focusing on land ownership alone when it’s a giant and interconnected system. I’m skeptical that the impact is as big as you say it is, but even if we accept them all as true, you’re still only analyzing one factor and thus miss the true problems at play. Marx elaborates as such in this letter discussing Henry George.

Again I’m not bringing up the stats to argue that only land is important. I feel like I’ve stressed this in almost every comment, but you keep saying that I’m only looking at land - that is the position of some Georgists maybe, but as I said, I’m not a Georgist. Unfortunately when you do a PhD, you have to make a focus, and the focus of mine is land rent. It does not mean that I remain shut off to other theories and ideologies. As I said, I do believe in the existence of exploitation rents and monopoly rents. Even Adam Smith believed in taxing land and stopping monopolies. I bring up land ownership, because it seems vastly underrated in comparison to how much it contributes to inequality, recessions, urban sprawl, stagnated growth, and housing unaffordability. The numbers I show, should be quite convincing to most people that land makes up the majority of the rise in inequality, and I would love to see empirical arguments as to why this is not the case. Without it, I cannot change my current judgment of its importance, which seems to be increasing exponentially as an increasing population is competing for the same scarce land - which again is NOT to say that market power and exploitation isn’t important and doesn’t deserve debate and reform.

The role of land. My point is that a Land Value Tax will not solve the problems of Capitalism. It can certainly play a role in a larger transition to Socialism, but it alone will simply pave the way for new avenues of exploitation, as has happened every time a “progressive Capitalism” has been enacted.

Again, I never stated that an LVT will solve the problems of capitalism. I said in many comments that I believe exploitation rents and monopoly rents should also be solved. I have spend time eloborating on the problems of rising market power in the west. I have said I believe in state owned natural monopolies and that we should have stronger antitrust laws, better institutions preventing companies from owning modes of communication, making bought elections illegal, making political ownership of stocks illegal. I understand that you don’t believe these things are sufficient, but that is different from saying that I only focus on land, which I don not.

Capital, and its role. Land is one aspect of Capital, just as financial Capital and Industrial Capital are.

You are stating this as if it’s a fact, but these are normative arguments that the classical economists disagreed with. And a main reason land was consolidated with capital in the neoclassical economic school was because of some simplifying assumptions when they attempted to make economics more mathematical.

You taking specific aim at Land ownership, and not at the system of private ownership as a whole, is why you have an incomplete view.

Again, focusing on land ownership, does not mean I ignore everything else, and isn’t any view incomplete - and who decides which view is complete? George was mistaken in not thinking at all about monopoly rents. Also, are you saying that all private ownership is a problem?

We agree already that Land needs to be tackled, and you agree that markets centralize and thus are better to have those monopolies folded into the public sector, but what happens after that? How do we get there in the first place? We keep folding into the public sector and abolish classes, and we get to there in the first place through revolution. We don’t sieze for the sake of seizing, but because it becomes an economic necessity as production increases in complexity. It has never genuinely been possible for any working class to gain power by asking for it, ever. Only revolution has worked.

I’m not dismissing revolution as unnecessary. But the historical record of revolutionary transitions is complex, and there’s no clear blueprint. There are revolutions that have advanced human flourishing, and there are those that have produced new forms of domination. The welfare state in much of Europe was built incrementally through democratic politics, trade union pressure, and policy innovation—not revolution. Civil rights movements in the US achieved a lot of changes in law, education, voting, and labor rights through organizing, protest, and legal pressure, not regime overthrow. The Iranian revolution replaced a secular authoritarian monarchy with a theocratic regime. Even revolutionary regimes often reproduce the same dynamics of rent-seeking and monopolization under different banners, which is why institutional design matters after revolution. My work doesn’t reject revolutionary change, but it asks what institutions are necessary before and after revolution to prevent new monopolies from forming. I don’t present a land value tax as panaceas, but it can help lay groundwork for a big part of the problem.

You do focus, but you over-focus, which is why you miss the key points. This is why there aren’t really any Georgists anymore, the right-Georgists become Social Democrats or Neoliberals, and the Left-Georgists become Marxists. Georgism occupies a niche underdeveloped in economics, which explains its scarcity. The largest economy by Purchasing Power Parity is run by Marxists, while Georgists don’t run anywhere.

The history of Georgism is complex. The neoclassical school were only able to argue that land was capital through assumptions that simplified the analysis for mathematical conceptualizations that ignored economic rent, and John Bates Clark, who initiated the marginalist revolution, was paid large sums of money to take down Henry George. He did it by making assumptions about land that would make it equal to capital, ignoring it’s differences. And as I said, Henry George was wrong in ignoring monopoly rents. Ryan-Collins and co-authors in “rethinking the economics of land and housing” argue that it was one of the main reasons Marx had more succes than Henry George; he had a too narrow focus. I’m not taking his position.

I also don’t know what you mean by “ethical problems” with respect to Marxism. Marxism, if anything, is more ethical as it aims to abolish class society as a whole, rather than apologize for a large part of it and focus on one aspect.

This is true from a consequentialist ethics point of view, but not from a deontological ethics point of view. A system grounded only in consequentialist ethics risks justifying coercive or unjust means if they are believed to serve long-term egalitarian ends which can override individual autonomy. On the other hand, a purely deontological view of property rights can enforce structural inequalities by treating existing distributions as fair, however unfair these might be. I believe that a fair and resilient economy should balance the need for redistributive justice while respecting individual freedoms and rule of law. This means recognizing the moral legitimacy of correcting advantages—such as unearned economic rents, monopoly rents, exploitation rents or inherited wealth—while also preserving basic rights, procedural fairness, and pluralism. I think the balance is found democratically, which is why I believe so strongly in improving the institutions that strengthen democracy. I might have my own opinions on this balance, and it all depends on the trade-offs in different situations.

I don’t think I’m being rude. I do disagree with your analysis quite sternly because I think you quite nearly get it. You fall just short, and it’s frustrating, if I’m being honest. If that manifests in rudeness on my part I apologize.

I guess it’s not a rudeness I’m observing. I think what I interpreted as rude was the absolutism in your replies. The main problems I have with your replies is first that you are making my arguments into strawmen, and second that you are evaluating the truth of my arguments not out of a scientific point of view, but out of whether it aligns with what you believe. I believe you have done a great deal of research, but I’m getting the feelings from your replies that Marxism is more important to you than truth. If you are arguing that Marx is the one and only truth, then it is not much different from religion. I’m trying to synthesize findings, not defend an ideology.