Lars Doucet digs into a problem that shows up in expensive cities, sprawling suburbs, and even countries Americans often point to as models: land. Monopoly, he argues, became frustrating by design because it captured something real about how land markets work. The episode connects that lesson to housing costs, land value tax, Henry George, Norway, Texas, sprawl, and the uncomfortable question every city eventually faces: who gets the value created by a place?
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. My guest this week is Lars Doucet, and my guess is that you would say that differently than I just said it, Lars. He's the president of data and research at the Center for Land Economics. I just found out that we are distant cousins. No, I'm just kidding. But Lars is part Norwegian. He's actually in Norway right now, and I am part Norwegian myself, so he's been explaining to me how I pronounce my family's names. Lars, welcome to the Strong Towns podcast.
Glad to be here.
Oh, yeah, you were just going to explain to me who you are, because your background is a little bit non-traditional to be chatting about land value taxation. Although I will say, at the top, most of the people that I talk to who are in land value tax advocacy, to some degree or another are a little bit strange, so that's a thread we can follow up on. But talk to me about who's Lars Doucet, and would you say it, Doucet? Is that how you would say your last name?
It depends on whether the person with that last name has given up yet or not. So, in Louisiana, it's pronounced differently. My mom's side is Norwegian, and she's an immigrant. My dad's side is Cajun French, from Louisiana, and so it's pronounced Doucet because it's French. Okay, it's the masculine version. The feminine version is E-T-T-E, and that's Doucette. Then anyone who leaves Louisiana with the masculine version eventually gives up and just starts pronouncing it Doucet, but it's technically pronounced Doucet, not that I care, but what's your mother's maiden name, then?
Aadland.
I love it.
Yeah, it gets pronounced in America as Harberg. If you've heard Harberg, Harberger, or Harbinger, that's the same root Scandinavian name.
Okay, my mom will listen to this podcast. How would you say her cousin's name, Nygaard, in actual Norwegian?
If you see a double A, that is an indicator that it's actually a special character in Norwegian that they don't have in English, which is an A with little circle over it. I call it a-low because it's an A with a halo. It's pronounced 'or.' That's actually its name in Norwegian.
So Nygaard would be Nygaard, and gaard means farm, or it can be a general reference to a plot of land, so Nygaard means new farm, and there's actually a Nygaard kirke and a Nygaard church, right over there, where I'm staying, and there's a bunch of people with the last name Nygaard buried there, so there's probably not the only place in Norway that has that place name, but it could be relatives from here in Bergen, so that'd be interesting.
Fascinating, you are in Norway right now, we are going to talk. I wanted to chat with you, because well, there's a lot of reasons. First of all, every place that I go, people say you need to talk to Lars, you need to talk to Lars, have Lars on the podcast. I said, yeah.
Then I got your book, Land Is a Big Deal, and I have to say, internally when we put together the podcast, I write a guest list, here's the people I'd like to have on the podcast, and I put next to them low, medium, or high in terms of prep time, and I kind of ask for a little bit of heads up if someone's going to be in that medium or high category.
I had you in the medium category, and I did not know until last night at 9 o'clock that I was going to be talking to you this morning, 12 hours later, usually I will tell my audience if I'm going to interview someone, I've read their book, I have not read your book, and so I feel bad because I wondered, do we cancel this, do we not cancel it, do I try to reschedule? We've been trying to make this happen for, I feel like, 12 months, so we're just going to do it, and then we'll do a follow-up later, after I've read your book. Does that sound fair?
Yeah. Well, I mean, you've given presentations land value tax before. I seem to be familiar with most of it. The book is designed to be basically a complete introduction to a total newbie, and just real broad overview. It includes, a modernized book review of the historical seminal text, Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. So, basically, you can get the same information with less 19th century repeating the same concept six times, and then just objections to the concept of a land value tax from a modern perspective, and the best answers to those. that's basically what the book is about.
It's a collection of a couple of essays that went viral a couple years ago that I wrote, and so that's basically what the book is. I think you should be familiar enough, just from your background, Strong Towns, and what you already know about LVT, and your collaboration with Joe Minicozzi, to be pretty fluent on this already. So the questions that naturally arise to you are going to be great ones to answer.
Well, I have a lot of questions for you, so I always hate when I listen to a podcast and they spend the first 15 minutes not talking about the thing that I got on to talk about, but I feel like when I want to talk to somebody, I have all these ancillary questions. I do feel like there's a good starting point here of who are you, and how did you get into this? Because there is a certain part of the land value tax discussion that I think winds up to be an academic theoretical kind of exercise, and the reality is I do think this stuff is pretty accessible to people and should be.
So, why should people not be scared of this? I asked that by way of tell us your background, so that people feel that this is an accessible thing.
Yeah, so my background is actually kind of my work background is kind of strange. How I wound up where I am now is as a policy analyst. I used to be a video game developer of all things, and my daughter is desperately disappointed now when she can't introduce her dad as a video game developer, but instead as someone who works in property taxes.
Yeah, downgrade from a kid standpoint, but to be
Fair, when I used to work in video games and tell kids they would be like, Minecraft, I'd say, no, and they would say, what good are you, There are a couple of origins into this land value tax field that happened for me. The one I like to tell a lot is that, as a video game developer, I discovered video games are kind of a terrible career, it's like trying to be a musician, there's an endless parade of 20-year-old dudes, more talent and less self-respect than you.
Know if this, but I was there in my 20s.
Yeah, what it's like.
Yeah, I looked around and I thought, I'm not willing to do what you do and for what you'll do it for. So, yeah, this is not; this is a dead end for me.
Yeah, you just have to be the best in the world to hope for the bottom rungs of a middle-class lifestyle, and then a couple superstars will get lucky, but being a superstar is necessary, but not sufficient. But so, what I transitioned kind of halfway through my independent video games career, because I own my own company, I made independent video games, I started just like consulting and doing contract work on other people's projects, and it was this weird thing that happened as games started getting more complex.
They started hiring economists because they would have online virtual economies, and as a consultant, I would study these kind of cases, and what was really crazy is I discovered this absolutely bizarre trend of virtual housing crises, and this was a trend that did not just happen emergently on its own in one online multiplayer game, but it has happened multiple times going back 30 years, maybe to the very origin of online games, and it was: How is it in made-up worlds with made-up rules with made-up money, where nothing needs to even be scarce, we somehow re-achieved the same, pathologies of the real-world economy, that seemed like the most insane thing to me.
In one of these cases, what happened was, so I'd always known about the land value tax, I'd read about it in college, and forgot about it, but I was reading this case about this spaceship game, it's very famous in video game lore, it's called EVE Online, it's this Icelandic space opera game, people put their whole lives into this, they will run actual in-game corporations, which own giant fleets of spaceships that go to war with other people, like Civil War reenactors who get really into it. This
This is the online version of that. Okay.
Online version of that. Okay
Yeah. But for, futuristic space opera made by Icelandic people. so, what is it with Scandinavians of video games? Anyway, what happened is, when this game first came out, they had a recession. They had a recession, because basically what was happening is that there were only basically like a couple of nodes throughout the galaxy that would allow you to produce a spaceship. It was called a spaceship factory, but it might as well have been like a fixed part of the universe, because you couldn't make any more of them.
So it functioned exactly like land, like you had to own this little spaceship place to build spaceships, so there weren't enough spaceships to play the giant spaceship game, and they hired an economist who was like, yeah, you've got a, you've got a holdout problem here, because you've got this asset that can't be produced that everybody needs, and so what's happening is people are squatting on this asset and basically charging economic rent without actually doing anything productive themselves, and so what you need to do to unstick your economy here is just apply a high holding tax to these spaceship production nodes, or choose to not make them scarce in the first place, but because you've chosen to make them scarce, you need to charge a high holding tax, so someone will either make a bunch of spaceships or sell it to someone who will, and they did.
They got their economy unstuck, and spaceships started, getting turned out, and people went back to blowing each other up, and it was fun. This guy, his name was Ramin Chakrazade, he went on to become a pretty famous video game economist. He wrote this big write-up of it several years later, and I'm reading through it, and I am my eyes are bulging out of my head, and I am Ramin, did you reinvent Henry George's land value tax from first principles, and he said, 'Who's Henry George? What's a land value tax?"
No way, no way, really. Okay, no. this
Is not the first time this has happened in real or virtual life. what's crazy is, there's this whole tradition of like real-world phenomena playing out in video games.
I don't want to like draw too much evidence from that, but it's just like interesting, like there was a plague in World of Warcraft that played out much like a real world pandemic, where like a little like curse a boss could put on you, like was supposed to reset when you left the dungeon, but it like escaped on someone's dog, and the dog infected like the entire population of the game, and so people were like shunning the lepers and like even killing them, like shooting them with arrows. Epidemiologists like wrote a whole research paper on it, was like published in like actual research stuff.
So, I have studied stuff other than video games, to be clear, but this was my kind of first introduction to this. what was really crazy is, you remember the crypto boom, where everyone went insane for about a year and a half
Yeah. Oh, yeah, monkey pictures for
Millions of dollars
Exactly. Yep.
So, a bunch of people made a bunch of games based off of crypto speculation, and they all had land-themed economies that were basically built almost entirely like Ponzi schemes, and I was working for a consultancy at the time, and I basically wrote this kind of landmark paper that called the top of the whole thing, that was like basically because what was happening is that people were basically sharecropping tenants in the Philippines, essentially people in the Philippines would rent your assets and play the game for you, and then you would take most of their earnings, and I drew this little graph of like unlike the real world, where you can't log off and you can't opt out of it.
You can opt out of having to play this online game, and the point where everyone will basically like log off of the universe, with which we have hotlines to prevent you from doing that in real life, but in this video game is when the Filipino, when the average earnings go below the average Filipino minimum wage, and I wrote that paper, and then that happened like that day, and then it proceeded to crash, and so, my origin story is from video games, it was really weird, but the skills it gave me was just I'm a good programmer, right, or I like to think I am, and so I went from there to writing this series of articles for a book review contest, and that was the first basic section of what became Land Is a Big Deal, and it was just a book review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty.
Henry George is the economist who didn't invent the land value tax, it actually goes back centuries, arguably millennia, but he popularized it, he's kind of the Henry Ford of land value tax, Adam Smith recommended it, Ricardo, things like that, and I just wrote a book review of this, and it became very popular, and then people demanded, more, we want to know more, they had all these objections, what about this, what about this, what about this, and I was I don't know, so then they had me write three follow-up responses to all the best objections, and that basically became the book. Then this whole ordeal just wound up taking over my life.
Somewhere along the way, there was a deep personal tragedy in my life, and after that, I was kind of weighing between, working for a startup and keeping in video games, I kind of left video games behind after that, and then I left the startup shortly after, and then through a complicated series of events, I basically put my life back together, and I work for this nonprofit, doing advocacy full time, That is my weird and convoluted origin story of how I became a land value tax guy.
I love it. You're autodidactic. You find the topic and dig in.
That's where I started. So, I guess we can dig into some questions.
I do think that it would be helpful, because I'm sure there are people who, like the economist who wrote the explanation for the spaceship video game, have not heard of Henry George? You mentioned him a little bit as the Henry Ford of maybe land value taxation. Why is he important? What should people know about a land value tax?
Well, the first thing you should know about a land value tax is you can be a fan of land value tax without necessarily being a fan of Henry George, although it is important to understand the historical concept. The movement is kind of named after the man Georgism, which tends to, which is actually not an unfortunate name, because George means earth worker, means land worker, and Georgism is all about land, but it's sometimes called geoism as well, to distance a little bit from one particular 19th century dude
Has he been canceled or anything like my kids always ask me that, is he canceled? no.
So the one kind of big thing with his reputation, like he was actually early on a lot of things that would actually make him fit very in very well in modern times. He was early to women's suffrage, he was early to rights for African Americans, he was early to all kinds of economic inequality issues.
His big thing is that he was arguably like racist against Chinese immigrants, and that was like the one thing I know a lot of Chinese people who actually are big fans of him now, ironically, but one of them was in fact Sun Yat-sen, who is looked to as kind of the father of modern China, both the PRC and Taiwan, they sure, but I mean, you can generally say that, aside from the kind of, anti-Chinese immigrant thing, that was about it. He wasn't trying to minimize that
Wasn't he?
Yes, the thing to understand about him is that he basically kind of was the American labor movement, I mean, that might be a little overstating it, but it is hard to grasp how popular this guy was at the end of the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century, the attendance at his funeral was equivalent to 10% of the population of New York City. It was bigger than Lincoln, it was bigger than Abraham Lincoln's. His book sold millions of copies. It's often said it sold more copies than the Bible. Nobody has any actual records, but it's probably true. He was really at that time.
Keep in mind, this is pre-Marx, so nowadays, like the kind of worker movement post-Marx, I mean, Marx was alive, but Marx was not nearly as kind of hadn't taken over the workers' movement, the labor movement, and even the word socialism was very poorly defined back then, was kind of up for grabs. Post Russian Revolution, it's all about Marx. Before the Russian Revolution, particularly in America, it's all about George, and we can discuss, what happened to the movement historically. Why did it kind of go from being just this absolute household name to being something like quite obscure today, it did leave its marks deep in American society in ways that aren't always appreciated.
The early Georgists had a huge part. I say there's like a big sedimentary layer in the New York skyline that was built during the tenure of Georgist-influenced administration, where they implemented some LVT-like effects in the New York skyline, and that's the single decade during that decade when they were in power, is the single greatest time of building in New York.
Things like the concept of referendum came from them, and then also the biggest modern touch point is the modern game of Monopoly is a direct descendant from the work of a previous game called The Landlord's Game by Elizabeth Magie, who, which was it, was when you play Monopoly and one person winds up with all the real estate and everyone else winds up broke and fighting and angry and wanting to pitch a revolutionary fit, that is the point of the game, it is a piece of what we call in video game design. Now, there's a school called Procedural Rhetoric, where you make a game that's making kind of an argument, it's kind of this avant-garde thing.
Elizabeth Magie is kind of seen as the progenitor of this entire thing 100 years before it even had a name, when she designed the Landlord's Game, which later became rebranded as Monopoly by someone else, but yeah, so that's who Henry George was.
The fact that when we play it, everybody gets ticked off and wants to flip the board over, that's the purpose.
That's the purpose. It had two rule sets originally, one in which basically, through kind of just random chance and a little bit of skill, but mostly just runaway positive feedback is the game designer term, where, the rich get richer, you get more victory points, and the more victory points you get, the easier it is to get more victory points. In good modern game design, for board games, it's like you try to not have very strong positive feedback, and so she intentionally designed it that way, because it was supposed to teach you a lesson about how real-life real estate markets work.
How basically someone is able to kind of corner everything, and then basically extract wealth out of everyone else, and that eventually has to end in ruin. It came with a second rule set, where it's often considered like less fun, because, basically it becomes a cooperative game, sort of, where the game gets much more equal, like you're not trying to like knife each other in the back, and it's really kind of more like game of life, where you're all trying to like race to better yourselves the best, and like, but it's much more fun to just destroy each other, it's just not that much fun in real life
Yeah, just to keep the game going, right
Yeah, and so it's really fun that whenever it's really interesting that whenever anyone, almost nobody plays Monopoly by the official rules, they always like try to take the edge off with like money on free parking, or like creating like kind of like loose like UBIs, where the little redistributive effects to kind of like take the edge off of what is otherwise a very kind of cut set of rules that swiftly results in most players becoming bankrupt.
Yeah, what is Henry George's key insight on land? I feel like we've been dancing around it, but maybe we should just say
Yeah, the key insight is that land is not capital. The key insight is that land is different, and this means something. If you crack open an economics textbook, a modern economics textbook. There's a chance that when you go to the section called the factors of production, there's a chance that it might give lip service to the third factor of production as land. land, labor, and capital are the three factors of production in classical economics.
In neoclassical economics, even if they list land, and sometimes they throw in entrepreneurship as this kind of fuzzy fourth one, but really it's land, labor, and capital, the three things that combine to do anything in the economy, and the thing is land is very different from labor and capital in that it's not expandable, like labor, the more people, like I can choose to work harder today, or I can choose to slack off, or the human population can grow, it can shrink. There can be more available labor today versus tomorrow, like that can change in relation to price signals, How much labor chooses to work or becomes available, like people move from one place to another.
Capital is the stored up value of labor, we usually think of capital as money, but really, what it is like this pen is capital in a sense. This laptop I'm communicating to you with is capital in a sense, It is previous labor that has been stored up and crystallized, so that I can do things more efficiently today. So, that instead of having to send every letter of this podcast over to you by carrier pigeon, I can then send it to you in real time through modern telecommunications. Land is also required to do anything.
You cannot eat, sleep, work, or even poop without access to a location on earth to do that thing. here's the kicker: if you do any of those things I just said in land you are not authorized to access, very bad things will happen to you, up to and including you being executed and killed, Certainly arrested, like you can get arrested just for sleeping on a park bench in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of day, or at all, right. in this sense, when we say that land is interesting because it has certain features that capital in general does not, but my point is that even if neoclassical economics, which is the modern paradigm, and socialism, by the way, which is neoclassical economics' enemy, both socialism and modern-day capitalism, even if they give lip service to land as being one of the factors of production.
Pragmatically, they treat it as if it's just a special kind of capital. They always talk about labor and capital, and like even those two movements being our two vocabulary words, like each of them is the avatar of one of those. Capitalism is the avatar of capital, and socialism is the avatar of labor.
You could call them capitalism and laborism, and well, in this sense, like Georgism is Landism, but not in the sense of, we're here for the landlords, we're here for pointing out that Land Is a Big Deal, and land, and also land-like assets, which we'll get to in a second, because this includes things like natural resources and radio spectrum, and other monopolizable things, land-like assets, and land itself have a couple of unique features. They're scarce, they're necessary for production, and they obtain value from their location, and this is what makes them very different from, a hammer or an hour of work or anything like that. We can make more hammers.
Hammers can respond to price signals, when there is a large price signal, when things are expensive. Normally, the reason capitalism is supposed to be good is because that price signal is a signal to producers to go make more of that thing until the price comes down, and that's how we have abundance. But that doesn't work with land, because there's no land fairy, there's no land factory, and because everyone needs land, it's not a video game, you can't log off, you can't, I mean, like we said, we, you can, but we have hotlines to prevent that
You can't opt out of needing it, you need it to do anything, because you have to be somewhere to do anything, and increasingly, you have to pay for the privilege of doing anything anywhere. Ultimately, George's insight is we are for a land value tax, but the thing you need to realize is like you are already paying a land value tax, you are paying a private land value tax for the privilege of existing anywhere on earth, we just want to turn that private land value tax into a public one, so that all of us can share in the benefits from the fact that we are all excluded from land that we don't explicitly own.
We think that dividend, that recurring land rent, should be captured and used for public purposes, because it doesn't represent the labor, or the savings, or the investment, or the entrepreneurship of anyone, it represents something that all of us built together, because that's the point of land obtaining value from its location.
I feel like my arrival at land value tax, and I've written this, I think, in every book I've written, is that this is a, it's the worst form of taxation, except for all the rest, I mean, let me, let me throw this idea by you, because this was really central to my first book, Strong Towns.
I argued that the pre-Great Depression City was a very kind of highly stable place, and it was stable in a sense, a byproduct of that was a handful of wealthy people owned land in the prime locations, and had an incentive in my framework to make sure that was stable, and a lot of people were in a sense like shut out from that would have been the downside of the traditional city after World War II, and I've not seen anyone else make this argument, so I'm bringing it up to you as a way to kind of, I think, further the discussion, but I'd love your take on it.
Highways running through the middle of the city, highways bisecting neighborhoods and making land out on the edge more accessible. It didn't create new land, in a sense, like it didn't, God didn't like expand the size of the earth, and now we have a greater circumference, and more surface land area, but what it did do is it created more land that was accessible and usable
And that actually broke the stability of the traditional city, in a sense, it cratered land values in the middle of the city, while bumping land values on the edge up, a little bit, but for the people who were there, a substantial amount, it did, in a sense, in a city sense, create new land. Am I wrong?
So, no, no. You're absolutely right. this is actually a big part of my thesis. So, there's a chapter in the book that talks about Ricardo's lover, and I'm not going to bore you to death with it here, but the thing is, there is a scarce amount of acres on earth, but practically speaking, it might as well be an infinite plane. We are not running out of desert land in Nevada anytime soon, right
Right, is
Scarce is valuable land, and what makes land valuable, location, location, and not because, like Manhattan in the Stone Age was not particularly valuable to human beings, I mean, valuable to some human beings, but not nearly as valuable as it is today. Why? Because there's a lot more human beings there. There's a lot more labor, there's a lot more capital, there's a lot more just stuff there. simply being in Manhattan gives you just easy access to all of these things, and that is so incredibly valuable. so also it's really interesting. You, there's so much we can talk about the automobile frontier, because the automobile frontier is also why Georgism went to sleep for 100 years.
It is what kind of devastated the modern city. It is what ended the Georgist movement, because it just Otto von Bismarck had this famous phrase where he said, God has a special provision for children, drunks, and the United States of America. where it was just like you're just like the luckiest people on the planet, somehow.
Yeah, and yeah, America has had not one, but two frontiers, and this is at the heart of understanding the paradox of what it means to be an American. as someone from Texas, like the idea, like as someone who is both legitimately a Texan and a Norwegian, I'm a dual citizen, but I was born in Texas, and in Texas we very much have this frontier mindset, and so does the rest of the world about us.
That's where the Norwegians have this very, totally Texas, I think I mentioned before the podcast, yeah, and so they think of America as this, frontier, right, and Americans think of us as this, as having this frontier line, saying, 'Go west, build your own thing, be your own man, get your own land.
That's why everyone hates property taxes, But the thing is, that only happens, like having an open frontier is a very rare historical phenomenon, but America, for its entire history, has been able to take it for granted, and right when it was closing, right when the first one closed, and the door shut, and all of the old descent and foment and revolution that had been plaguing Europe forever, because all the land was owned, that's when we invented the automobile, and we got frontier number two, and so America is a frontier nation.
America is a nation with a frontier mentality that has now lost its frontier, and we lost it in about 2006 because that was when we started to really reach the natural extents of sprawl, and so America basically kicked its so at the end of the 19th century, like you said, it was like it was stable in a way. I mean, if you go back to that time, the economics were that there was a very real risk of a communist, like red communist revolution in America. However, you're right about something. The rich people at the time did have a civic mentality tied to where they were from, that is no longer true.
Now they are just, yeah, they're just
Distant, And my argument on stability was looking at through the lens of a city, as you're absolutely right, and you're absolutely, if we want this city to endure over time, in a sense, and I say in the book, this is not like a good thing, I'm not arguing that this is a good thing, but part of the trade off of stability is, you can think of it as like old money, You, okay?
I was in Italy, I spent six weeks in Italy a couple decades ago, and it was my like first immersion there. you do get like I'm in an old city in Italy, and it's all it's owned by families that have literally like owned this building for centuries or owned this area for centuries, and you can say, well, I love their building pattern, and I love their development pattern, and wow, these buildings are fantastic, and this is really like a great place, and even through wars and decline and state instability, this place is endured. Yes, that's all true. The downside of that is it is not dynamic, It loses you.
Would you just call the frontier mentality, like, they don't have that in an Italian city in southern Italy, Right.
The other thing that's important to understand is the title of the book, Progress and Poverty is getting at a paradox, which is we want, like people say, we want to have an owner's mindset, not a renter's mindset, because the renters, why should I clean this dump up?
I don't own it, I'm not going to get those benefits, whereas an owner is like, we make everyone owners, they have this incentive, but there's kind of this paradox here, the paradox of Progress and Poverty is like, as we get material progress, George was noting that poverty seemed actually wrapped up in material progress, and the reason for that is that it is absolutely true that you do want people to own things, and that you do want people to own what they produce, but when you allow that for land, what often happens is that you have people who don't even necessarily live in an area will be able to extract the production that is created by the people who are building that place, and so, our instincts are like half right.
It's like we do want this owner's mentality, but, and, going back to the 19th century, what was interesting is that we were at least building up places, and they were good in the beginning, when the frontier was still open, it was good when you could homestead, and, I mean, assuming you weren't being the native, being kicked off your land to make room for the settlers
Yep, or the Chinese immigrant coming over to do the extra labor that no one wanted to do, climb down, and build that sewer line, yeah
And you were excluded from all of the, kinds of
Right, you were, you were kind of treated as a second-class citizen, or if you were a recent freedman who still didn't feel that free, all these, all these kind of things, or you're a woman, or etc, etc, but the point is, even if you were an enfranchised white male citizen, at some point the party stopped, at some point the doors locked, and at some point you come to the Monopoly board, and everything's taken
Bought up, and St. Charles Place is bought up, and all the all the utilities are bought up, and now, where do you, where do you get your start
So the thing is, it's not that we ran out of land in the Nevada desert, it's that the problem is that all the places that are productive, like basically, the problem becomes like you. We see this now, and so there's a reason that they're calling our time period the second Gilded Age, and this is also why Georgism is coming back all of a sudden. It wasn't because I wrote a bunch of articles. If I had written those articles 10 years earlier, I don't think anyone would have cared. It's because the material conditions we're experiencing now are reproducing the material conditions of the time, which is specifically the closing of the second American frontier.
Georgism was the answer to the closing of the first, and America got dang lucky that they came up with a way to kick the can down the road. It did come at enormous cost.
There is enormous cost to sprawl, but it is absolutely true that sprawl, as you did it, didn't create new land, but it kind of did economically, in the sense that it made new land more valuable, and in the book I talk about this, of like things that can make land more valuable, like technology, right, so when, assume we could, there's land on the moon, it's worthless, But someone invents a rocket that can reliably get us there in some way to, let us breathe reliably and keep our bones from dissolving. It will become valuable,.
But until that technology is developed, land on the moon is valueless, as is land on every other planet we can't currently access, as is Antarctica, for that matter, as is the Sahara Desert, yeah, the bottom of the ocean.
The bottom of the ocean. No one has planted that yet and tried to speculate on land there, because how would you survive, right
Right. so the point is that, so yeah, so the whole, the whole point of this whole line of thinking is that the automobile frontier really did open up this bounty, it did at great cost. We know the cost of sprawl, you have chronicled that masterfully in all your strong towns work, but America was like, yeah, I'll take that deal. then America, having done that for its entire history, assumes that there will be a third frontier somewhere. A lot of people thought this would be the work from home frontier.
I will tell you, as someone who follows real estate prices, there was a third frontier in work from home, and it opened and closed in about, like a month, like post-COVID, just the inner city cities, like the commercial property values, went down, and then everywhere else in the world went up, every suburb with good Wi-Fi went up, and went up a lot, and that's what a frontier is.
It is a place where it is productive land that has not yet been priced in, because once it's priced in, it's okay, well, now I can pay my landlord more money for that's exactly equal to the raise I get for moving here, like I can get the better job and I hand it right to my landlord, which is why you have these like crazy situations now in the big American superstar cities, where they can't afford to pay all their service workers. If you want to pay for daycare, you have to pay like a full professional salary just for daycare.
So that's even the point of having two spouses work, and the reason, and it's not like that's going to your daycare provider, that's going to their landlord, and they're commuting in three hours from out of the city
Right, yeah. This is the, this is a spike that we saw in cities like Austin during the pandemic, where it just went, and then yeah, I'm with you. It there is the idea of it being a second frontier, and then like this third blip is interesting, because I feel like part of what, part of what the pre-Great Depression development pattern offered was the idea, and I'm walking a fine line here, because in some places you would call them, and I say this in the book, I'm not pretending that this doesn't exist, but in some places you would call them slums out on the edge of the city.
As the city was growing, the places that were least accessible were in many ways like startup land, like I could, I could get, I could get going out here pretty cheap, and if the city continued to grow and expand, my land would become more valuable.
I would, in a sense, be more accessible than, the next person out on the edge, and so my neighborhood would evolve and adapt and change that new frontier of suburbanization, cut that off at its knees, there was no, in a sense, evolution of a place anymore, there was just the next land, the next land, the next land, the next land, and my take on it was been, you got as far out as the economics could take us, the cost of congestion added on to the cost of maintenance added on to just makes that that model no longer work, I called it a Ponzi scheme, right.
There's no, there's no new entrants enough to rob to pay for keeping the rest of the system running. We haven't really talked about what a land value tax does, but I'm wondering, if Henry George looked at where we're at today. If he would come up with the same prescription, okay, you bought yourself 100 years of doing things differently. Now you're back to where we started. Here's my question: I'm just going to dust off the book, and it's the same prescription, people
I think. If he had been teleported to 1950 in the middle of post-war expansion, it might have given him some pause. I mean, I think he was a pretty true believer, even then, but like, it might have given him some pause, say, "Oh, was I wrong?" But transport him to now, I think he would come up with exactly the same ideas. In fact, he had what you can basically call a prophecy, and let me see if I can remember it. I think I have it memorized. Where he says, because at the time he was a man of San Francisco and New York, he lived in both in various times.
He ran for mayor of New York at one point, beat some random guy no one's heard of, called Teddy Roosevelt, and got came in, but came in second, and then he ran again and died four days before the election, but.
Yeah, but so, but he was a newspaperman in San Francisco for a while, and San Francisco, at the time, was a boom town, it was a frontier town, it was a place of opportunity, It was not a place that was locked in, New York was, so he had this both, East Coast, West Coast synthesis, and he has this famous prophecy, basically, where he says, where he noticed that there was very much progress in New York, but also the highest poverty he'd ever seen right alongside it, but he didn't really see that in San Francisco, but like people weren't super rich there either, like nobody was rich in San Francisco, but nobody was poor, and so he said if there is yet less poverty and deprivation in San Francisco than in New York, is that not because San Francisco is still behind in all that both cities are striving for?
For who can doubt that when San Francisco arrives at the point where New York now is, that there will also be barefoot and ragged children on her streets? That's today. That's today. If you've ever been to San Francisco, tell me that's not today
That's fascinating, because it does it. I think the argument that would have been made about San Francisco at the time if you transported like modern thought and discussion back then would be that, well, San Francisco is the more dynamic place. I mean, this was the argument that Texans would make today, hey, we're the more dynamic place, lower taxes, more land, more building, we're pro economic growth, and they're just, a bunch of liberals larded up their regulations, worried about the wrong thing.
I've always thought that Texas was just California 25 years behind schedule, That just like it's it's the California development model, just a generation late, you reach the same destination, That's a fascinating insight, that yeah.
This is a new thing. Okay, let's go back to some kin, some long lost kindred, some other Franco-Norwegians in a little place called Normandy. It's 1066. We're going to go grab ourselves some prime land in this place called England. Hey, who cares about the native population? Whatever. it's this open frontier, and it's great, and all our descendants, everyone can be a little lord. You get a dukedom, you get a dukedom, what I mean. It's going to be great, a couple hundred years later, if you look to this day
But one of the greatest predictors of how well off you are in England is if you have a Norman surname
Like this is a thing where it's like people are like, well, I should just have absolute ownership of land forever, I should pay no holding cost on it, I should have perfect tax privileges.
It's like that's great, and in 50 to 100 years it is a recipe for revolution, because like you look at Europe, you look at Asia, and all this stuff, like after World War II, all these Asian tigers that, took over, and how these like huge economic booms, like Taiwan and South Korea, and places like that, they all had Japan, they all had really aggressive land reform, often at the often, because, MacArthur just stuck a bayonet in everyone's face, it's yeah, Japanese noble, nope, you go live in the city, here's some money, and we're just redistributing all the land to the peasants, and of course the problem with land reform is like you like redistribute the land every 100 years in either a peaceful or a bloody jubilee, I mean it like comes back together 100 years later and you just wind up exactly where you started, At some point like as much as annoyed as people are listening to me, you will just wind up in the same place, no matter what.
You can get lucky, like America, and get two frontiers in a row, and then have that be like your entire country's history, so you forget that's not normal, but eventually you wind up in the same place every country ever does, and then you have to have the hard conversation about how to share the land, and so, okay, Norwegian, recent Norwegian immigrant lineage to distant Norwegian immigrant lineage, the second Norwegian son gets on a boat and tries to take someone else's land or be admitted to someone else's land is like the oldest story in the book, we've been exporting Norwegians from Norway forever, because this place is like a giant rock.
It's beautiful now, but like much less arable land in Sweden and Denmark. what's interesting is, in America, from my American side, I've always noticed that American liberals, really fetishize the Scandinavian countries.
Do what problem the beautiful Nordic model has not solved.
Tell me
Housing.
There is a wicked housing crisis in Oslo. we have the same housing crisis that everyone else does. Healthcare, it's fine. we've got the sovereign wealth fund, it's I don't have a strong opinion on it. It's high tax, I think, maybe we could have some lower taxes on incomes and higher taxes on land, but, I mean, it's a fine place to live if you like butter and fish, but like, whatever you think of, the documentaries of, Norwegian summer camp prison, and all the things we're, super progressive on. We have the same housing crisis everybody does, and this is something that I think people don't realize. It's not just an American phenomenon, it's a worldwide phenomenon.
Ireland has a housing crisis,. South Korea has a housing crisis, like everyone has this problem, and it is the universal paradox of Progress and Poverty, and it's because we don't have a good way to share the land.
You are pushing me to think about this in a slightly different way, because I arrived at land value tax through a strong towns analysis, and I'll tell you the question that I was trying to answer. The question that I was trying to answer is, as we build more and more suburbia, I was seeing so many properties where the utilities in the road, the literal pipes, the road, sidewalk, all the stuff we were providing to these properties cost more than what the property would sell for
In other words, we were not adding, actually adding value to the property, somehow we were devaluing the property through the land development process
Like eating up a big subsidy that can't keep itself going, is basically, yeah
And I look at neighborhoods here in my hometown, there's a corner lot just up the road that sold for $15,000 last year, I looked at that, it's got $60,000 of utilities to it, like it's a negative $45,000 land value, like how does this, how does this actually make any sense? to me, the answer from a supply demand standpoint was that we were just oversupplied with land, which is an insane when you say that to people, they think you're insane because they often key on, Manhattan and San Francisco, where there's, there's not that. But I just got back from Omaha last week,. I travel around all over the country.
I feel like the vast majority of the country has far too much developed land than they actually have capacity to utilize, we've bankrupted ourselves, and so my question was like, instead of creating a next round of speculators, I'll buy this land, I'll hold on to this, which is, which is what I see happening all over the country, a land value tax would create incentive alignment, where, in a sense, you could build, if you, if you develop that land, if you did something with it, you wouldn't be punished for that improvement, correct? But if you let the land sit raw and idle, you're going to pay a more premium price
Right. It's interesting that you came at it from this different perspective, because, completely
Different perspective. Yeah. Well
I'll give, I'll give you an example. I'm from Texas, which is sprawlsville, suburban sprawlsville. It's like strong towns analysis, applies directly,. Yeah
Then I have, some culture shock whenever I come back to Norway, and I am you mean I can just get on a bus and go anywhere, and the bus is clean, and it's safe, and it comes every two minutes, and like I can get on the bus and transfer to a train, and like I see like a bunch of like eight year old girls get on with their little backpacks, and like go hang out at a friend's house, and like, and it all just like works completely
Normal
Yeah, and it's not just because Norway is super high-trust, it's that once upon a time we were Vikings, and it was much lower trust place, so it's not because we're magic genetics or anything, but like at the same time, even though, I think if you were to come to Bergen, you would give Bergen, if it was in America, you would give it like Strongest Town award.
Sure, yeah
Or Oslo,. But if Oz, you give Oslo like Strongest Town award, but Oslo would also have a housing crisis, and it, because it has, because the land problem manifests in so many different ways,. It manifests when cities are growing and when they're falling apart, when they are well built and when they're poorly built, when they, when, like in the 19th century, like a lot of people, like the YIMBY movement today, which has, a pretty friendly detente with strong towns by now, I would say, some big points of disagreement, but like back, we're pushing
On the same. Problem, that's for sure
Right, but, so, and I consider myself, in addition to being a George, just a YIMBY and a strong counselor, I'm just, yeah, I'm just friends with everybody, but, the MB argument is like, we just need to upzone, we just need to upzone and solve our problems. it's well, we have a proof text of this, we had this horrible housing crisis in the 19th century, right, like if zoning is the panacea to housing crises, and like just the deprivations of them, then what was going on in the 19th century?
We only invented Euclidean zoning like around 1920 before it proliferated everywhere, And so, it is true here in Norway that like development is like restricted and stuff, but that I mean, that's not the only reason that housing prices are high, is because we've effectively made, there was this kind of conservative-led, and I consider myself conservative in certain ways, but there was this conservative-led movement that if we make everyone a homeowner, instead of just having a couple of big 19th century landlords, like we used to, if everyone just gets their little piece of the pie and everyone becomes a little homeowner, it's going to make it's going to solve everything.
Yeah, the
Problem with that is that creates a world for everyone's home prices to go up forever, means someone has to always be excluded, In order to be getting rent, by definition, have losers
By definition. If prices are going to go up, there's an imbalance of supply and demand, right. There's there's more demand than there is supply, that's how prices go up. Yeah, and
There has to be someone actually willing to pay that money, Right, that has to keep going on forever, and it obviously can't. Anyway, that's a whole tangent.
Can it, or can it not? I feel like we've made this transition into financialization, where the set goal of our economy is to allow people to pay more for the same house, right?
Can make the number go up as high as we want, but whether that's what I mean, the same amount of value is another question.
Amen. Yeah, you're, we're on the same page.
Yeah, indeed. Yeah. So I mean, where do you want to go from here? Do you want to talk on, I can talk theory all day, but you want to talk more on the pragmatics, or I feel like time we have today.
We've got about 10 minutes left. I do want to get to kind of.. I know that there's been a shift in momentum. I want to get to that, but I do think, I mean, the thing that we haven't done yet, that we've just maybe kind of assume that people are following along with us, is actually talk about what a land value tax is, and how it works
And how it works, because there is, Joe's work, Minicozzi's work at Urban Three, they've really looked at how messed up assessors are, and assessment processes are, they're horrible, they shouldn't be. I mean, we have Compute Zillow, is this magic company that can actually just look at data and kind of tell you what your house is worth, and it's pretty close. I don't understand why assessors with like vastly better data couldn't do the same, but they don't. Can you talk about land value tax, what it is, and how it would actually, in an ideal sense, function in an American city today.
Okay, so a land value tax is just basically a special kind of property tax, Most people know what a property tax is. It's an ad valorem tax on the value of your house, annual tax, it's on percent.
A land value tax is just a property tax without a tax on the buildings, so you would subtract, the depreciated value of your structure, there's various ways to do that are all in the handbooks, and then you would just tax a recurring value on just the value of the site in San Francisco, like it's pretty easy to give examples of this, because, you can find literally multi million dollar empty lots, like multi million dollar tiny little townhome lots right next to a built-up time home, and like the townhome will add just like a couple $100,000 of value to an otherwise like million dollar, multi million dollar lot, and so you can like really like I've done the calculation, and like if you were to plate the whole thing in several layers of gold, like that would be worth as much or less than the site value
So like dirt, literally, like more expensive than gold, so that's all a land value tax is, and what it does is that it reflects that, the value of the building is the value of labor and capital, it is the value of the things we want more of, and the things that, there's no reason, I don't think, for instance, like the government should run grocery stores, those are pretty low-margin places, what I mean.
I think price signals are working pretty well there, but like the land is not something anyone produces, except for like the whole community is producing that value, and so I think that value should be taxed and given back to the community in terms of assessments and questions like that. I will, I will partially agree with you there. I think there are plenty of places I won't, I won't universally, because I know some assessors who are pretty good, but I do think, but I do hear your pain with assessments, and anyone can point out, like some assessments they've found that are like crazy and like off the wall.
Part of this is actually, there's a weird shell game that goes on. Local government that I actually have quite a bone to pick with, which is that assessors are underfunded in many cases, under trained right now, like a huge bulk of them are all retiring, so there's actually a good opportunity here for us to get a lot of new blood into this
And a lot of places they're elected, which does very strange things, to yeah, you'll get
People who hate the property tax system run to undermine it, and that's unfortunate. yeah, the other, the other thing is, I know some good elected assessors, but the other thing about it is that there's this weird shell game where basically the elected official will blame the local assessor for high property taxes, even though it's the local official who sets the tax rate, so the assessor is supposed to be a neutral fact finder, and there are objective tests you can deploy that will tell you if your local assessor is doing a good job or not. one of my missions is to actually just flood the zone with open-source software.
I wrote and produced the largest open-source AVM, which stands for Automated Valuation Model. This is what you said, like Zillow. Zillow has this. Why can't everyone has this? I agree.
Well, because Zillow won't give it away, but I will. so I created a state of the art automated valuation model, but the joke is that they're only as good as the data they have. Some jurisdictions are getting really good at just creating open data,. I do think that, and one of my buddies, Paul Bedansett, wrote, did a survey.
It's probably more like a decade old, but it's still probably fairly representative, that a lot of jurisdictions still aren't necessarily even using regression to do their stuff, and that's just like a factor of just, I won't necessarily cast any dispersions, but just the fact that it's not a glamorous profession, and it's often one that everyone's eager to cut its funding and its training, what I mean, like no one says there's no Richard Scarry animal that's like municipal property tax assessor, like they call it the accidental profession, people fall into it, and so I've become obsessed with mass appraisal lately, and so my pitch is like, let's use this as an opportunity now that everyone's retiring, let's kind of make it a glamorous job.
I want to see strong counts people go become municipal property tax assessment staff, and like really take pride in their work and do a good job. It's challenging because you're often the most hated civil servant in town, including by the elected official who knows what he's doing, because he can show
Them. Yeah
And then, and then blame you, but I think, I will, kind of plus one your kind of pain with assessors, because I have definitely seen it. I've called it out myself in various jurisdictions, but, also see it as, the way we can make the place better is if more of us engage with the field, more of us go into it and just keep putting stuff on maps, like whether they throw something at you. Yeah, go for it.
I feel like what we ask assessors to do now is almost impossible, in the sense that, I have my house and my neighbor has their house, and the assessor is not going inside and seeing what's being done, they've got like rough things to work with, they can look at what sales are and kind of try to extrapolate out, but I tell you what, you could do, you could look at my lot and my neighbor's lot, see they're the exact same size on the exact same street, have the exact same amount of land, and say these are the equivalent things, the land here is easy to price, it's everything else that is impossible to do.
40% of property tax protests. This came - this is anecdote from, I think, one of my assessor friends in Florida. He said 40% of protests are not because of accuracy, so much, but because of side-by-side discrepancies. Yeah, right. also, right now, the property tax creates not only a disincentive to build, because it taxes the building. It creates a incentive to hide information, because if you improve your property, you don't want the assessor to know why. he said, "Oh, you've got new condition, well, you get to pay more taxes, you built an addition, well, now you've got more square footage, you pay more taxes. what I mean?
You built a pool, like you got to hide that from the satellites, because they'll know, and you'll, you'll, you'll pay more. So, what you really want to do instead is, if you go to a land value tax, it's well, if I have construction receipts, I want the assessor to be the first to know, because I want my discount. what I mean? I want him to know how wonderful my house is. Yeah, I want him to know what it's worth down to the penny. I want him to have my insurance receipts. I want him to have, how much I paid for the new roof.
I want him to have everything he needs to perfectly exempt my house from, from taxation. so I think it would flip some of our adversarial things right now and kind of align, stuff. What's really crazy, also, there's weird anecdotes where, assessment in the first half of the 20th century used to be way less adversarial, used to be communal, back in places that did land value tax experiments had this crazy system, and this was the standard way land was valued in America for like 50 years, Cleveland in a bunch of different places, including like Chicago and even New York and Houston.
They would just gather everyone in a big town hall room and just be like, okay, what's the value of all the land in this town? Let's go street by street and let's argue about it until we all agree, because we're doing this as a community, says all our land, let's extract all that local knowledge. It sounds absolutely insane, it's completely out of line with all the modern standards and rules, but it provably worked for 50 years and it's kind of great. Yeah
Yeah, if you're, if your goal is to generate a consensus. I had this thing years ago when I was working as an engineer, where we were going to go in and fix a street and do some things that, and my argument was, are going to make your property more valuable, like this is this is the city making an investment in this street, and the end result would be the tax base would go up, and I was shocked, because everybody showed up to the meeting and said we don't want our tax values to go up.
Yeah, we don't want you, we don't want you to add value to our property, we don't want you to make our place better, more valuable, because then we'll have to pay more taxes, and I thought that is the most perverse set of disincentives I've, I've ever experienced.
Yeah, it's weird,. it all depends,. you see people like talking out of both sides of their mouth, when they go and they want to get like a big mortgage loan, they want their assessment to be as high as possible, and then when they want it for tax purposes, they want it to be worth nothing, and there's all kinds of little techniques they use for this, like attaching deed restrictions, so that the parcel can only be sold for particular use, so it can't be valued at highest and best use, has to be valued at, the exact thing, it's I call it the lemonade stand on Times Square effect, or theory, when Walmart does this, so that's pretty pervasive, we could go on for hours on this subject, but I'm thinking, yeah, establishing open-source software and getting better at data collection and fixing the incentives can go a long way, and I'm actively engaging with a lot of assessors, I go to their conferences, and I think there's a lot of uptake, especially from the younger crowd, so I'm kind of optimistic we can kind of flip this
Let me ask you this as a last question, and recognizing that we should do this again, because we've just barely cracked my list of things I want to talk about. For years, I have seen land value tax advocates talk about, this one obscure state legislator likes our stuff, and is going to bring a bill forward, and then, it never gets a hearing in a committee, and never gets moved ahead. Cities generally can't just do this themselves, this does take state legislation to change to at least allow cities this option. I have been getting the vibe from you in recent, in recent times, that there's actually more serious uptake of this.
What would be the prognosis right now on North America, US cities being able to enact a land value tax if they chose to do so?
Yeah, so like traditionally, like in the 20-first century, it was mostly just Pennsylvania that had the authority to do this, and so a lot of it is, I like to take at least a little bit of credit with this at the CLE, because we've been like trying to, I'll give you a lot of
Credit, yeah, man, but
But a lot of it's been pre-existing, and a lot of it has been changing material conditions, a lot of people coming around to the same idea at the same time, and there's a lot of existing activists and groups that we work with that deserve just as much credit, if not more, but what we found seems to work is you have this chicken or the egg problem, where you need an enabling law or a state constitutional amendment in some cases from your state to even allow, because of Dillon's Rule, which prevents cities from doing anything that their states don't explicitly allow them to do, and so like what we do is that we get someone, an elected official that has some priority that they care about.
Common one is blighted properties, vacant lots, that's a good entry point. then we find a local person from there to go talk to them, and just like be their friend, and like start doing their homework for them.
This is the key: do officials homework for them, and then, and then just like, be helpful, be useful, don't come in with like an agenda or anything, don't hide your agenda, but don't like be normal, right, don't start like talking about this niche thing they don't care about yet, connect to their priorities, just be useful to them, and then when there's a national opportunity, be like, hey, you hate all these blighted lots, let's think and talk about our tax policy. Here's some maps. Look at these incentives we're creating. then that elected officials like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Why don't we do this? you're like, why don't we do this?
Well, because we need enablement. they said, well, what, I know some people in the state senate, and let's get them on the horn. so we have followed this exact playbook now, and the first time we did it was in Kentucky with a local activist, and we just recently recorded what we call LVT Landscape Live. We're going to post that next week, and so you can go through the whole transcript, he'll explain everything you did, but we've also had other groups go through that whole thing without our direct involvement. It always starts bottom up, it's the city or the town first, the.
Then they go and they get they connected to the state because if you ask for enablement laws to pass without someone asking for it, like the legislatures are going to be like why that's exactly what I've
Seen, yeah
And so if you've gone
Theoretical exercise, but like why are you making me take this vote, there's no upside
It's very Strong Towns, it's very like, identify the smallest change you can make and do it now. so we go, we like, instead of me going to some town I'm not from, I try to, I won't even say recruit someone from the town, because it's mostly what you mean, it's mostly inbound that we're getting someone from their own local town will find me and be like, I want to do this. Teach me how. so one of my lessons is like we can learn in one year, 10 years of experience, if we have 10 people sharing their experience. so I just, I just collect these people now.
When they come to me, I get them to talk to each other, I get them to share their experience. We throw spaghetti at the wall, and we started to find things that start that seem to be unsticking. at this point, a lot of them are doing it themselves without us, and we put tools out there. they say, "Oh, I don't know how to make a map." I say, "I know how to make a map, and I know how to make it easy and use my tools, steal them, go, they're free. Then they make the little map, they make the little PowerPoint presentation, they talk to their state legislatures. We do like a bunch of experiments.
Okay, that didn't work. That didn't work. This really seems to work. This works with Republicans, this works with Democrats. and so we start to figure things out. so, what I like to say is, the loop is shots on goal, pay attention, learn, and that's basically it.
If people want to get a hold of you, if they want, if they want to start this process in their place, they've got blighted land, they've got undeveloped land, they've got vacant lots in the downtown, they've got slum lords, they want to get things moving. Where do we reach you, Lars
Landeconomics. org or progressinpoverty. substack. com Those are my two places, and we've got a really good Progress and Poverty article called Enacting Land Value Return in Your Hometown, which is a whole playbook guide that is distilled from what our activists have figured out, and it's based on what succeeded in Kentucky, and getting an enabling law passed.
Lars Doucet, I've given up, so I'm saying Doucet. Say it in French.
Doucet. It's like dulce, like sweet.
Oh, it's beautiful. I have so much respect for people who can speak multiple languages. I just never... my mind doesn't work that way, and I've never been able to do it. So what is the secret?
Norwegian language, Donald Duck comics.
I'm not kidding. I always thought the secret was having parents who spoke multiple languages, but
Yeah, no. Well, it's that too, but seriously, nuclear-grade language learning material as a kid, that's how I learned to read.
We will get together someday and play some video games and chat land value tax. Until then, Lars, have a good trip in Norway, and everybody else, thanks for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.
Thanks, Chuck.
Thank you.
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