Re your last paragraph: I admit I'm surprised by that. Still... Georgism calls for a tax only on the value of the land, not on the improvements. Of all that money in real estate, how much is in the improvements, and how much is in the raw land?

> This figure includes only high quality retail property, offices, industrial, hotels, residential, other commercial uses, and agricultural land

From this I gather that a large chunk of it is the improvements.

And, if real estate is the biggest category, why focus just on the land part of that, and ignore all the improvements on it?

This article is about a wealth tax. The arguments for Georgism are about something else - about social policy. It may even work as social policy, though I have at least some doubts. But as a wealth tax, it's not very effective. (If I were a rich person, I could buy a $100 million apartment in New York, and have the rest of my assets in stocks and gold and art, and my tax liability would be for my pro-rated fraction of the land that the high rise that held my apartment occupied. As a wealth tax, that's got far too many loopholes to be useful.)

(What's more important? IP. The value of Google, say, isn't in the land it owns. It's in the code, the database of web pages, and the google.com domain name.)

Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.

But we also need a national reckoning on ICE's excessive use of force, DOGE, using the DOJ to prosecute political opponents, the financial irresponsibility of the "Big Beautiful Bill", the attack on the Capitol, the rest of the attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 elections, the tariffs by executive order, the threats to Canada and Greenland...

The US has been remarkably stable for a nation that encompasses multiple ethno-cultural groups. It may not continue to be so, but historically it has been a counterexample.

The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.

Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)

The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?

You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?

"You cannot see the future. All we are given is the present."

"Of course. But if you look closely at the present, you can find loose bits of the future just laying around."

I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.

And because of all that, of course schooling has a meaning crisis. Oh, you tell me that an education is the way to get a better job? OK, boomer, why do I want that? Oh, that's how I get a "better life"? Why do I want that?

Tech workers have thought of themselves as the geniuses, the exceptions, not as part of the general labor pool. And they have been! They have received very high salaries, good benefits, sometimes stock options. There have been a lot of tech workers who have become millionaires - not 50%, but enough that it felt like they had a realistic chance to do so.

It's really hard to persuade people like that that they need a union. Unions are for people who can't take care of themselves, who need a union to protect them from big evil management. Tech workers don't see themselves that way.

Also, unions often have bureaucracy of their own. Tech people generally hate bureaucracy. Having the company's version is bad enough; adding a second one on top is a really hard sell.

So you have a really big headwind for trying to persuade your target members that they should want such a thing.

But you have an opening now, with AI and concerns for jobs. People may be more open to the idea than they historically have been. The problem is, the people that you need to get, the ones who are deciding to implement AI, are typically the ones who still think they're the special ones, the ones who will always have jobs, so they still won't see the need, not for themselves. You have an opening with some people, but I'm not sure it's enough for you to be able to make real change.

Whereas with gold, it isn't there in the rocks - not in the same amounts. No future chemical wizardry is going to make it extractable, because it isn't there to extract.

To make gold more abundant is going to take transmutation, which is a much bigger ask.

Now, if you want to say that the ancients didn't know that aluminum was there and gold wasn't, and therefore lucked out by picking the one that wasn't there, I would agree with that.

Deflation does far more damage than inflation. This is why the Federal Reserve fears deflation a lot more than deflation.