Land Isn't Wealth
First of three posts sketching a civic system built on georgist economics. Part two: governance. Part three: resilience and transition.
What if the only tax you paid was rent on the land itself — and everything you earned, built, or sold was completely untaxed?
No income tax. No sales tax. No capital gains. Everything you make is yours. The only levy falls on what you didn’t make. That’s the pitch. Here’s how it works.
Henry George figured out the mechanism in the 1870s. Most economics still hasn’t caught up.
If you build a chair, it’s yours. Nobody has a legitimate claim to that chair. But if you fence off a quarter-section in Alberta — you didn’t make that land. You made the fence. The dirt was there before you showed up. It has some value on its own, but most of that comes from the road, the neighbours, the grain elevator, the town that grew around it. When your land appreciates because they paved the highway, you didn’t earn that increase. The whole community improved it, and you reaped some benefit. And if you build a fence and raise some beef, the community benefits from that too.
The policy move: tax the rental value of land. Only land. Not buildings, not income, not sales, not anything you actually produce. Just what people will pay to be there, ignoring whatever’s built on it. Call it LVT.
what this does to incentives
If you build a house, renovate a wreck, or add a shop — none of it increases your tax bill. The more you’ve built relative to the bare land value, the bigger the discount on your LVT — up to about half off. If you pioneer a neglected block, you get bonus discounts on top of that.
What it kills: speculation. Vacant lots in downtown Calgary that just sit there, worth more than the businesses across the street. Land banking, sprawl as an investment thesis — any strategy that bets on capturing appreciation that someone else created.
the commons principle
LVT isn’t really about dirt. It’s a general framework for anything scarce that nobody created through their own effort.
Radio spectrum — nobody made those frequencies. If you want exclusive use of bandwidth, that should cost you. Geostationary orbital slots are finite. So are fisheries. Aquifers. The atmosphere’s capacity to absorb CO₂.
Same mechanism each time. You recognize the commons nature, price the exclusive use, and capture the rent. No new regulatory apparatus needed. When we discover a new commons — and we keep discovering them — the framework extends without modification.
The constitutional principle would be: any scarce resource not created by individual effort is commons. Exclusive use requires compensation to the community.
ownership, unbundled
Traditional property law bundles everything into one deed — the land, the building, the right to exclude. What if you pulled the strands apart?
Three instruments.
Land titles are revenue rights, not dominion. You collect ground rent from the occupant, keep 15%, and remit the rest as LVT. They’re freely tradeable. But — and this matters — a title holder can’t evict someone who’s paying their rent. It’s not feudal lordship. More like preferred stock: you get dividends and governance votes, but no operational control. Without this protection, someone could buy the land under your house and hold your building hostage. That would destroy the entire market for improvements.
Improvements exist independently. You can own a building on land you don’t hold title to. You can sell it without touching the title. Two separate markets.
Revenue bonds are the interesting one. If you build a road, open a grocery store in a food desert, or install transit infrastructure — you earn a contractual share of the LVT increase you caused in surrounding parcels. Royalties for making a place better. Freely tradeable. A pure income stream.
This solves hard problems simultaneously. Infrastructure funding: build it and earn a perpetual cut of the value it creates. Service deserts: the grocer who opens where nobody else will captures a share of the uplift. And it works in reverse — if a factory moves in and tanks surrounding land values, the drop shows up directly in title holders’ revenue. The factory’s presence has a measurable cost, and the system makes it visible.
Here’s what it looks like in practice. Marta buys a house in Lethbridge. She’s actually making two separate transactions. She buys the building from the previous owner — that’s the improvement, and it works like buying a car. Separately, she takes on the land title, which obligates her to collect ground rent, keep 15%, and remit the rest as LVT.
She adds a garage. Her LVT doesn’t change — the land underneath is the same. The garage is hers, free and clear.
Then the city extends a bus route to her neighbourhood. Land values in the area tick up. A developer who anticipated the route had already purchased revenue bonds tied to nearby parcels. Now ground rents are higher, and the developer earns a contractual cut of the increase. Marta’s title is worth more too. The uplift gets distributed to whoever helped create it.
price discovery without assessors
The government never needs to assess values directly. Title holders compete. If you charge too much, occupants leave and you earn nothing while still owing LVT based on area averages. Charge too little and someone else buys your title and sets a higher rent. Market competition converges on truth.
Revenue bonds can be sold before the value exists. If you want to open a pharmacy where the neighbourhood needs one, you estimate the uplift, issue bonds, and sell them locally. If they sell out — that’s market validation. If they don’t — you’ve learned the project isn’t viable before burning capital.
The neighbourhood becomes its own venture fund.