I was a rising senior in high school when Woodstock took place. A fellow waitress in the local deli in which I worked -- Max for Snacks, in King of Prussia, PA -- took off for Woodstock, and the rest of us dreamed of doing so.
We thought we could change the world. Many had a vision of a society in which all could prosper, all could succeed. We sang, we danced, we applauded, we protested. Gradually we worked our way up. We educated ourselves, we bought homes, we had children -- not always in that order -- and we became part of the establishment. We bent the establishment, a bit, perhaps, to our advantage.
But we didn't correct the problems, and arguably, we let them grow worse. We watched as the benefits of public investment -- local, muncipal, county, state, federal -- accrued not to all of us but to those who own our land and claim title to our natural resources. We permitted corporations and individuals to lay claim to our common resources, we who grew up hearing about Jed Clampett being somehow entitled to the oil revenue, to the exclusion of the rest of us.
We're so used to the way this aspect of the world was handed to us that few of us think to question it. And yet the privatization of the economic value of urban land and the privilege of collecting the revenue on non-renewable natural resources on which all of us are dependent together produce some of our most serious social, economic, environmental, poverty and justice problems. Most wars are fought over these two things.
And until we come to recognize this, all we can do is put bandaids on those problems -- locally, nationally and globally.
These two things are what someone wisely referred to as "Natural Public Revenue" sources. Yet we largely ignore them, and use taxes which set up perverse incentives -- and wonder why we can't seem to solve any of our biggest problems.
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