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Comment by ly3xqhl8g9 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how much of a downtrend, seems rather stable [1]. There are also 0 countries that implement Georgist policies and most of the countries in the world are directly neoliberal or neoliberal-bent, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia [2], and friends included.

Perhaps I am not correct, but what do you think will happen in a few years when we will have a 100 GB neural model able to drive any car in any environment, effectively obliterating 200+ million jobs worldwide? Fairly certain, if we keep the same policies and the same belief-system, homelessness will trend rather high.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...

[2] 2018, Abdullah Al-Beraidi, "The Trap of Neoliberalism for Gulf Cooperation Council Countries", https://online.ucpress.edu/caa/article-abstract/11/4/63/2579... PDF: https://caus.org.lb/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Trap-of-N...

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Ah, the Georgism fans. Thinking that every single problem in the world can be solved via a land value tax.

It is actually one of the few groups I've found that are worse than the socialist class reductionists, who think that every problem exists "because capitalism".

Yes, a land value tax can be a useful policy. But it simply has little relevance to the topic of people who are homeless because of mental issues.

And you bringing up georgism demonstrates a lack of engagement on the issue, and instead an attempt to shoe horn in your favorite ideology into any possible issue.

Conflating homelessness with mental issues is as much a lack of real engagement on the issue as your critique of the OP.

Homelessness is primarily a function of housing costs, so I'd suggest the land value tax is a lot more relevant than you think.

If it really is mostly housing costs, do you understand how easy of a problem that is to solve?

Just buy all the homeless people bus tickets to somewhere cheap in the middle of nowhere and pay the cheap rent for them there.

Problem solved. And easily solvable using the existing over inflated costs we pay now.

We, of course, don't do that, because it isn't going to solve the problem.

Or maybe it's because forcibly moving people to the middle of nowhere isn't something most people would consider acceptable.

Who said anything about forcible?

People could be paid to move or otherwise offered lots of benefits and best quality of life opportunities to do so. And paying people to move would be much cheaper than the amount of money we spend now on the problem to overpay for stuff in expensive cities.

The actual reason why we don't do this easy solution, is because home prices arent the sole cause of homelessness.

Simply doing the voluntary, cheap, and easy solution of giving people the voluntary choice to live in a much higher quality home in a low cost of living area simply wouldn't solve the issue.

"Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property)" [1]. From a Georgist standpoint today's land is data. Do you have $30 million or more to be considered an ultra-high-net-worth individual [2]? If yes, congratulations, we are indeed enemies. If not, don't kid yourself, you are just as much hoi polloi as a homeless person. Do you even own a factory or you just embody bonded consciousness as a hobby [3]?

I just can't wait for the full consequences of automated statistics-based decision-making to develop into realtime embedded robotics, giving rise to the $100 trillion company, evaporating hundreds of millions of jobs, burning down the world as it is, but at least silencing these squeaky, visionless voices: fiat lucrum, et pereat mundus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism#:~:text=Georgism%20is....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialecti...

Yes yes, you think that all the worlds problems are solved via a singular silver bullet solution.

That's what I just said.

But, the fact remains, that if you add a land value tax this doesn't do much to help the person who is homeless because of mental health issues.

I literally gave you a Wikipedia list of other concerns, "natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property)", the Georgist word land abstracts away, telling you the land of today is data, and the land of tomorrow will be neural models. Complex issues often have solutions in other places; houselessness will indeed not be solved by putting some people in some houses.

55% of homeless were not mentally ill in January 2015 in "the most extensive survey ever undertaken" [1]. Not having a singular worldview is one query away.

[1] https://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mental...

> houselessness will indeed not be solved by putting some people in some houses.

Thats my point though. That someone's buzzword ideology or singular solution isn't particularly relevant to this discussion, and that Georgists are the worst of the bunch.

Its actually the only group worse than the internet socialists who just blame "capitalism" for everything.

And georgism is actually worse in that it takes a single topic, that of "land" and just attempts to shoehorn that one concept into everything.

> the Georgist word land abstracts away

Oh thats exactly my point! They take one single word, from an ideology of that was outdated even 100 years ago, and pretend like it applies to every single problem.

What if, instead of that, not everything has to do with "land"? Maybe, different problems are solved by different things and we don't have to stress the definition of the word "land" to apply to literally every single problem.

But my point is "complex issues often have solutions in other places".

You just hate operator overloading, I understand. Hope you don't write much C++.

I do have a tendency to overload solutions, since there are so many problems. For instance, just to give you something more to kick, I believe all democratic issues would be solved by three changes in the electoral process:

(i) no political nominations, instead have a population-wide lottery, arbitrarily selecting 10 or so people as contenders [1]; (the principle behind: power should belong to those who do not want it)

(ii) to be able to vote "No", invalidating all the candidates, if majority vote, reducing the mandate duration, if not; (the principle behind: you are not free if you cannot say "No")

(iii) tie the mandate duration to the voter turnout: if only 60% vote, you get 60% of the duration of the mandate, not 100%. (the principle behind: politicians are better if they are changed often)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

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