If you spend some time reading this blog, you might come away thinking that I believe that land value taxation is a cure-all, a panacea. (See the "topic cloud" in the left sidebar.) But that isn't the case.
However, I have come around to the point of view that many of our most serious social, environmental, economic and justice problems are not going to be solved -- cannot be solved! -- without the enactment of land value taxation.
That sounds extreme, particularly to those who have never heard of LVT or who have read little about it.
So many of our most serious problems ultimately find their root in the privatization of the natural creation -- that which the classical economists called land, including things that the classical economists would have known nothing about, but would immediately recognize: electromagnetic spectrum, geosynchronous orbits, landing rights at LaGuardia (particularly at rush hour), etc..
Let me be more specific. It isn't the privatization of land, or oil resources, or minerals, or geosynchronous orbits, or water rights themselves that is the problem. Secure title is necessary and important. Rather, the problem is that the economic value of these common resources is currently treated as private treasure rather than as our common asset. But we need revenue for public purposes, so we then tax sales and wages and interest. But those who need land pay others for it (unless they inherited the rights to it) either in the form of rent or in the form of a lump sum, and then are burdened with the sorts of taxes which depress the economy and steal from them that which they produced (in addition to the significant costs of servicing the debt related to that lump sum payment).
Land, in all its forms, is not of human creation. We can't create more of it in response to an increase in demand. In particular, we can't create more land downtown, where it is served by awesomely important infrastructure that took decades and millions or billions to build. We can't create more water, or more frequencies on FM or AM radio. Yet we permit the privatization of the economic value of these and other like vital and fabulously valuable common assets.
Were we to shift our taxes off productive effort, off sales, off buildings, and onto all these things called "land value," we would be on our way to solving many of our environmental problems, our social problems, our economic problems, urban sprawl and its concommitants, and many of our justice problems. We'd have a more efficient economy, a more vibrant one, without the excess burden (deadweight loss) our current system creates. We'd have opportunity, jobs, a growing pie, and lose the boom-bust cycle which plagues us.
What's the old line? Something about insanity being continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results this time?
The name most associated with land value taxation is that of Henry George (b. 1839, Philadelphia; d. 1897, NYC), whose books included Progress & Poverty (1879) which detailed the relationship between the awesome advances in technological progress, in publicly-created infrastructure and in population which had occurred in the first 100 years of America's existence, and the increase in poverty. He saw the causal relationship, and he also saw how to remedy it, through a simple and wise tax reform. Another of George's books which I particularly appreciate is Social Problems (1883), a collection of essays. The first entry, entitled "The Increasing Importance of Social Questions," speaks to the need for our institutions to adapt to changing realities and to the increasing complexity of society.
My late grandparents were Georgists, and in their lifetime, I never bothered to read his work. I don't know that I'd even read my grandfather's fine An Introduction to Henry George, written in the mid 1950s, or my grandmother's short and humorous "My Introduction to Henry George," written about 1940. After they and my step-grandmother, who was also a Georgist (her first husband had taught an introductory course to my grandparents decades earlier!), were gone, I started going through their library and files, and happened onto pamphlets containing some of HG's speeches.
It was "Thou Shalt Not Steal" that first caught my attention. Then "The Crime of Poverty" and "Thy Kingdom Come." Despite the theological titles, there is nothing in them that would offend an agnostic or an atheist, and no logic or sentiments that rely on any particular religious belief.
Why do we have poverty even in "good times?" Why do we permit the despoilment of the environment? Why do all the things we do to try to minimize urban sprawl fail? Why do we permit some to capture windfalls, free lunches which do not come out of thin air, like manna from heaven, but rather out of the pockets and labor of others? Henry George answers these questions, and shows a simple remedy which will lead us in the direction of justice and liberty -- and a sustainable economy and environment for all.
People as diverse as Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Sun Yat-Sen, Leo Tolstoy, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Bill Buckley, Michael Kinsley have seen the justice and logic of George's analysis and solution. Consider looking to see if you see what they see.
My website, wealthandwant.com, whose title comes from the subtitle to Progress & Poverty, is inspired by my grandparents' commitment to these ideas, and by my hope that others will not be as slow to get to know these ideas as I was!
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