I stumbled across a quote, in someone's sigfile on a forum I hadn't previously been to. It expresses the effect of permitting the privatization of the economic value of land, and the socialization of our wages through income and wage taxes and taxes on what we produce. It is, perhaps, a bit stronger than how I'd express it, but I have to agree that Roy has it right:
We can make our system far more just by shifting our taxes onto land value, and off workers. The owners of fabulously valuable land are collecting from the rest of us value which they didn't create and we did. It does not come out of thin air; it comes out of someone's labor. Yours and mine, even if we've never set foot on that land or even passed within 10 miles of it. (Would it be any better somehow if it came out of someone else's labor, but NOT ours?)
Haha, that's my sig-line.
Posted by: Matt | June 03, 2009 at 12:58 PM