It employs people, and it's really not that expensive, and the impact is demonstrably enormous.
Tangent but David Harvey says "wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism". A better way is to do a few things differently so those people are better empowered to make more money for themselves. This can be achieved by promoting worker control and ownership in the economy, so that when the economy does well so do regular people. There is no need for heavy handed manipulation to achieve this - we currently have plenty of laws subsidizing and promoting non worker-owned businesses. A little support for learning about, starting, and maintaining worker owned businesses would go a long way to ensuring that regular people don't end up poor in the first place.
And then when we think of where to spend our tax dollars we can all agree that spending on planting trees is a great use of funds.
This is a pretty interesting take.
From a Capitalist perspective, people know what they want - and the market is "efficient" when you let people do what they want. There's nothing more efficient than giving people money.
From a Socialist perspective - I guess this is obviously wrong? If an economy free of government interventions worked, you wouldn't need Socialism in the first place? So it's better to let the government make investments on your behalf?
I'm not sure I follow your terminology.
Unregulated markets are not, in theory or practice, efficient and do not work out to be free markets; they are controlled by the few for their purposes. Government can regulate markets to provide free markets, reducing barriers to entry and requiring competition; they also can provide safety and public good by preventing harm to the public by fraud or injury. Another way to think of it is that power (over the market) is conserved; the question is, who has it, a few participants acting in their interests or the people acting in theirs? A well-regulated market is better and freer for almost all participants than an unregulated one.
Regulation is not socialism; socialism is the collective or government ownership of economic assets. For example, the US government regulates GM, Ford, etc., but does not own them.
Capitalism is ownership of economic assets by private entities, called capitalists.
Legal rights/entitlements are essentially a form of non-fungible wealth that resists the common pattern - being turned into an "asset class", centralized, and packaged up into recurring rent streams collected from wider society. It remains an open question whether the overall trend would be so strongly towards centralization without the continual government handouts powering the financial industry (witness all the whinging about interest rates existing again). But unless that dynamic is actually reformed then non-fungible guarantees seem like a necessary backstop for maintaining distributed power throughout society.
Agreed, to recycle a comment [0] in the same vein:
> On Monday, capital-C-Capitalism is celebrated as being the most efficient and economist-approved system (i.e. the bestest) when--if--there is somehow perfect price/deal information available to all actors.
> On Tuesday, no-True-Capitalism is lauded as immune to cartels and collusion, because any actor will quickly undercut the others with secret prices and deals and hidden identities and wash-trading.
> On Wednesday, Virtuous Capitalism needs no oversight because nasty behavior will be seen and detected by consumers who will vote with their wallets.
> On Thursday, Property-Respecting Capitalism refuses to infringe on the owners' essential freedom... to construct impenetrable webs of shifting corporate ownership to obfuscate all controlling relationships.
There’s a reason the law that GP states, that all public investment is eventually baked into rents, is called the Henry George Theorem.
There’s no way around this, but with LVT at least society captures the returns on its investments instead of private landowners, which can then be reinvested e.g. in nicer public housing or public transit that allows a larger geographic area to participate in city life.
If you make everywhere nice, then you don't need to pay a premium to live somewhere nice.
Maybe you have to pay a miniscule amount more in property taxes.
You could just stop running trash & sewer service and let the city turn to garbage if you want lower rents. I don't think that's what people want. They want somewhere nice to live.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
On a city level, if - say - Chicagoland invested in all of its neighborhoods being beautiful instead of mainly just the wealthy areas near the lake - then you might have more people than expected migrate to the area and drive up rents everywhere, slightly.
But I'm skeptical...
As much as people like a nice neighborhood, you pick where you live (your metro) mostly based on jobs and your life - not trees.
You pick your individual neighborhood that metro based on a ton of factors. Trees could definitely influence that.
If trees are everywhere in that matro, then it's a non-factor.