I hear this statement from time to time, and almost always, it turns out to be a reference to the spending side of the budget.
But it is equally and -- perhaps more importantly -- true of the revenue side of the budget. To the extent that we -- as individuals, corporations, philanthropies, endowments, pension funds, family trusts, small businesses, whatever -- are obtaining our revenue from illegitimate sources, and keeping it (legally), we are stealing -- legally -- from what rightly belongs to everyone equally -- the commons. And that theft has huge effects on others -- individuals and systems.
It creates poverty for some and windfalls for others. We may consider ourselves to be winners if it appears to be working in our favor, but the larger effects cannot be good for society, for the common good, for the vast majority of our children and grandchildren (are our own really an exception??? How many of us are really able to make their prospects vastly different from the prospects of their contemporaries and their community?)
A budget is a moral document. Collecting revenue via taxes on wages, and failing to collect revenue via taxes on economic rent -- the return to land and natural resources and other things that result from the workings of nature and the commons -- is just plain wrong. Aside from that, it is unwise and imprudent.
We MUST shift from collecting our common revenue by taxing things which are rightly private property to collecting our common revenue from taxes -- heavy taxes! -- on things which are rightly common property. This may at first hearing sound like a relic from an agrarian past, but it is consistent with the values we profess to hold -- that all of us are created equal -- that "us" also includes "them" -- that the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights -- for all of us and, by extension, for the remainder of the humans on earth, too.
One of my favorite contemporary thinkers is fond of pointing out that it would be better to collect the rent -- the annual value of those things which are rightly common property -- and throw that money into the sea (!), than it would be to continue to leave it in private pockets! Ponder that one for a while. That's how important treating the commons as common property is to creating widely shared prosperity and economic justice. Yes, the revenue effects are huge -- they would allow us to reduce the perverse taxes we currently rely on -- but the social and justice effects of collecting the rent as common treasure are separate and far more important!
Sit with that for a while.
And you might appreciate Winston Churchill's thoughts on the topic (1909):
I hope you will understand that when I speak of the land monopolist I am dealing more with the process than with the individual landowner. I have no wish to hold any class up to public disapprobation. I do not think that the man who makes money by unearned increment in land is morally a worse man than anyone else who gathers his profit where he finds it in this hard world under the law and according to common usage. It is not the individual I attack, it is the system. It is not the man who is bad, it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the State which would be blameworthy were it not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice. We do not want to punish the landlord. We want to alter the law.
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