Lars Doucet is a game developer (creator of Defender’s Quest) and Georgist author whose book Land Is a Big Deal expands on his prize-winning review of Henry George’s 1879 classic Progress and Poverty. Georgism argues that land—meaning natural resources, locations, and other scarce, unproduced assets—plays a hidden but central role in driving inequality, and that the root cause of poverty amid progress is private capture of land rents. The core policy proposal is a land value tax (LVT): a tax on the unimproved value of land, excluding any buildings or improvements people add. This would replace taxes on productive activity like income, capital gains, and sales.
The Core Georgist Insight
Land is fundamentally different from labor and capital. People produce labor and capital; land pre-exists everyone. When someone owns land, they aren’t contributing something—they’re gatekeeping access to something everyone needs and charging for it. This is rent-seeking, not production.
The paradox of progress and poverty: Even as technology and productivity advance, inequality persists because the gains get absorbed into land rents. As areas become more productive (better jobs, schools, amenities), landowners capture that value through higher rents and property prices—not because they did anything, but because people must outbid each other to access those locations.
Ricardo’s Law of Rent: Land rents are determined by the difference between the productivity of a given parcel and the best available free alternative (the “margin of competition”). As frontiers close and good land gets privatized, landowners can charge more—up to the point of subsistence—because tenants have nowhere else to go. This is one-sided competition: landowners don’t compete with each other; tenants compete with each other.
Georgism is pro-worker AND pro-business—it opposes not capital or labor but land speculation and rent-seeking. It offers a third way beyond the capitalism-vs-socialism debate that has dominated the last century.
Virtual Housing Crises: Georgism in the Metaverse
Doucet’s path to Georgism came from observing repeated virtual housing crises in online games going back 30 years—in Ultima Online, Final Fantasy 14, and crypto games like Axie Infinity and The Sandbox. In these games, players could afford to build houses but couldn’t find land to place them on, creating black markets and speculation.
These crises reproduced real-world housing problems without anyone designing them to—they emerged naturally from first-mover advantages in scarce virtual land. This demonstrated that land speculation is a structural feature of scarcity, not a bug of any particular economic system.
This connects to broader “land-like assets” in digital economies: domain names (Vitalik Buterin has written on applying Georgism to ENS domains), app store positions, social media chart positions, and platform monopolies—all of which share the properties of scarcity, necessity for production, and locational value within a network.
Why Landowners Don’t Build to Maximum Productivity
Even without an LVT, one might expect landowners to develop their most valuable parcels. But several forces prevent this:
Land banking: If land appreciates at 10% annually, your marginal dollar is better spent acquiring more land than building on existing land. A teardown property can have negative building value—the land is cheaper with garbage on it.
Existing property taxes penalize building: Under current regimes, constructing improvements raises your tax burden, creating an incentive to keep lots vacant.
Speculative waiting: Owners hold land expecting future price increases, especially during population growth or decline, since land is a reliable store of value.
Domain name parallel: Doucet himself owns ~30 domain names out of speculative habit—a small-scale version of the same phenomenon. Every two-letter .com has been taken for over a decade.
The Frontier Is Closed
America has had two major frontier expansions: the physical westward frontier (closing in George’s era) and the automobile frontier (enabling suburban sprawl). Both temporarily masked land scarcity but eventually closed—meaning the value of proximity to cities got fully priced into land costs.
Technology doesn’t eliminate scarcity: Flying cars, teleporters, Zoom—each would provide a temporary frontier, but the first movers would capture the value, and the next generation would pay more in rent. Zoom already caused suburban home price increases as that “frontier” closed.
The urban agglomeration effect means what’s truly scarce isn’t raw land but specific locations—the dense networks of human relationships and economic activity that make cities valuable. These are non-fungible.
Addressing Key Critiques
“Tax opportunity cost / leisure instead”: Doucet rejects taxing unrealized opportunity costs (e.g., taxing a podcaster as if they were a software engineer). This requires subjective judgment, creates perverse incentives, and would need a massive bureaucracy. Georgism starts with taxing what nobody made—land and monopolies—before considering anything else.
“Speculation serves a useful price-discovery function” (Kaplan/Gautenhauer critique): Even if speculation has some discovery value, no one has shown that speculators need 100% of land rents to be incentivized. A high but incomplete LVT (e.g., 85%) would leave enough reward for discovery while capturing most rents for the public. Norway’s petroleum model subsidizes exploration but captures oil rents through severance taxes—empirically successful.
“Speculation dampens price volatility”: While this may be true for capital (which can be produced), land and non-renewable resources can’t be made more of. Empirically, land speculation has not produced cyclical stability—land values have risen monotonically alongside productivity, undergirding housing crises, inequality, and climate change.
“LVT would destroy the banking sector”: Most bank loans are secured by real estate. A sudden LVT could cause financial disruption, but the transition would necessarily be incremental—giving time to unwind investments. Doucet compares this to abolition: the Southern economy was built on slavery, and ending it was still right despite the disruption.
“The Coase Theorem means initial allocation doesn’t matter”: Under Coase, peasants would simply rent land from aristocrats and use it more productively. But Ricardo’s Law means any improvement the peasant makes gets captured by the landlord through higher rent. This is exactly what happened in Ireland—tenants had no incentive to improve land because landlords captured all the gains.
“LVT is regressive—it shifts burden from upper-middle-class homeowners to tech billionaires”: Most urban land value is in commercial real estate (central business districts), not residential. The biggest gains from LVT come from taxing poorly used downtown parking lots and speculative commercial holdings—not middle-class homes. Better assessment technology would reveal this concentration.
“LVT enables government corruption in assessments”: Land value follows observable, verifiable rules (locational value, rental income). The solution is open-source models and open data: anyone should be able to look up assessments on a map, compare neighbors, and spot irregularities. This is far more transparent than income tax enforcement, which requires invasive auditing and is easily hidden offshore.
“Discovery of hidden resources (oil, minerals) won’t be reported under LVT”: Mineral rights are already separable from land rights in most of the US. The Norwegian model and England’s Treasure Act provide templates: reward discovery but capture the resource value for the public. The Spanish approach—claiming all sunken treasure for the crown—incentivizes people to never recover anything.
“LVT violates property rights and the rule of law”: The rule of law doesn’t mean the status quo can never change. America has banned and unbanned alcohol, violated countless treaties, and reformed asset classes repeatedly. George explicitly rejects seizing land (unlike Maoist reform); he advocates only changing tax rates. Transitional justice requires compensating those who bought in under the old rules, but the status quo itself is not sacred.
Revenue Potential and Policy Design
America has approximately $44 trillion in land value. A 100% LVT could raise roughly $4 trillion annually—enough to fund Social Security, Medicare + Medicaid, or defense entirely, with room for a modest citizen’s dividend (Georgism’s version of UBI).
Not all revenue needs to come from LVT: After LVT, the next taxes should target other rent-seeking—severance taxes on natural resources (as Norway does with oil), taxes on monopoly assets like radio spectrum, orbital slots, patents, and copyrights—before ever taxing income, capital, or sales.
The Atkin’s Conjecture (all taxes ultimately come from rent) suggests that reducing other taxes would increase land values, potentially making a single tax on land sufficient. Doucet is cautiously interested but wants more empirical evidence.
Political Feasibility
Start locally with revenue-neutral property tax reform: Exempt all buildings from property tax, collect the same dollar amount from land only. Most homeowners would see tax reductions; owners of vacant downtown lots would pay more. This is politically popular and can be done at the municipal level without federal legislation.
Cities currently considering split-rate property tax: Detroit, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and others. Texas is constitutionally blocked by a uniformity clause (land and buildings must be taxed at the same rate), but this may be interpretable.
Norway’s Georgist legacy: Norwegian Georgists designed the country’s early 20th-century hydropower taxation. The ruling Centre Party recently implemented a new severance tax on salmon farming aquaculture locations, explicitly citing Henry George.
Pitch it as property tax relief: “Your property taxes are too high? Let’s exempt your house and tax the vacant lot downtown instead.”
Georgism Beyond Physical Land
Land-like assets have three properties: scarce supply, necessary for production, and locational value within a network graph. This framework applies to:
Domain names (Vitalik Buterin’s analysis, with caveats about identity confusion)
App store positions and platform monopolies (Apple’s 30% fee as rent)
Social media chart positions (first-mover advantages that become rent-seeking)
Radio spectrum and orbital real estate
Patents and copyrights (Doucet’s undercooked but suggestive analysis: eternal copyright is rent-shifting; shorter terms would better serve the Georgist goal of not taxing production)
Space: The Outer Space Treaty currently prohibits national claims on celestial bodies—a de facto Georgist framework. Once permanent bases exist, the question of who collects interstellar rents will become urgent. Georgism would prevent the first entity to reach Mars from charging rent to everyone else.
Disney World question: When a single landowner is so large it internalizes all positive externalities (like Disney owning half of Orlando), it functions as a private city/government. Georgists acknowledge this changes the analysis—Disney is no longer a landowner but a city operator, raising governance questions rather than pure tax questions. The rents are still being collected; the question is who benefits.
The Fundamental Point
Rents will be collected one way or another. The question is whether private actors capture them (leading to underbuilding, speculation, and inequality) or the community captures them (leading to better incentives and shared prosperity). As Doucet puts it: “Someone is always collecting the rents. Georgism just says it should be the community.”
What Lars Is Doing Next
Defender’s Quest 2 is releasing in 2024 after a decade of development.
GeoLand Solutions (name likely to change) is a municipal mass appraisal startup that partners with local governments to modernize property tax assessment using the latest research, multiple regression, geographic weighted regression, and open-source/open-data methods. Funded by a round led by Sam Altman, the company aims to make land value measurement accurate, transparent, and practical—the essential infrastructure for implementing Georgism. The goal is to make Georgism not just a theory but a measurable, implementable policy.
