Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high

Georgism argues that we should tax the unimproved value of land and other monopoly-like assets rather than income, sales, or buildings, because no one produced land itself. This discourages rent-seeking while leaving productive activity—work, construction, and capital investment—untaxed and more attractive.

As cities grow more productive and attractive, those gains are capitalized into higher land prices and rents rather than shared broadly, a dynamic explained by Ricardo’s Law of Rent. Over time, more of workers’ and entrepreneurs’ output flows to landowners, pushing housing costs up and younger or poorer people out of thriving regions.

Doucet notes that MMOs and metaverse projects like Ultima Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and crypto “land” games have independently recreated real-world housing crises, with limited plots and intense speculation. This parallel strongly suggests that the mechanism is structural: artificially scarce, gatekept “locations” inevitably become rent-extraction machines.

Rather than an overnight revolution, Doucet advocates converting existing property taxes into a split-rate system that taxes land at a higher rate and buildings at a lower (eventually zero) rate, while keeping total revenue constant. This immediately reduces the tax penalty for building and densification and shifts the burden toward underused prime sites like downtown parking lots.

A major practical objection to LVT is how to separate land value from building value fairly. Doucet’s startup aims to apply modern statistical methods, frequent reassessments, open data, and transparent models so cities can accurately value land, reduce current assessment inequities, and make any land-focused tax politically and ethically defensible.