Last Saturday, 2/6, the mid-Atlantic region received an amount of snow that exceeded what it normally gets in an entire winter. By Sunday afternoon, major highways had a single lane well-plowed and a second one barely passable. We had delayed our planned trip from Connecticut (where we're used to snow and our towns budget for snow removal) to southern Delaware (where snow is much less common) from Friday. We arrived to find our destination had about 15" of snow and plowdrifts blocking the driveway. We were grateful to have a very short driveway. Having read a few local blogs, we'd packed 2 snow shovels, an ice hacker (MUTT = multi-use tough tool), some salt and a long pole for getting snow off trees, as well as boots and parkas. Some young men cruising the neighborhood looking for work had one snow shovel, and they borrowed one of ours and moved enough snow to get our cars off the street. We knew from the local blogs that shovels had sold out well before the snow started. Had we thought more deeply, we'd have bought 5 or 10 at our CT grocery store to offer to neighbors. I also wished we'd brought a Wovel with us; it would have had a great workout.
The next day, I went to see if anyone was in need of some shoveling help. One neighbor's car was sitting on top of compacted snow, and the MUTT turned out to be just what we needed to break up that hardened snow. The MUTT was also very helpful when I needed to hack through the plowdrifts, which had hardened. Without it, I would have been much less productive; my shoulders would hurt more, and I would have gotten less done.
While there are many pickup trucks and tradesmen's SUV's in the area, almost none have snow plows here; snow of a quantity that would require it is so infrequent as to make it uneconomical. Within a couple of days, though, some "bobcats" started to appear; I don't know how far away they came from.
A second storm arrived Wednesday, bringing more snow. We'd mostly cleared our driveway after the first storm, and getting the second cleaned out was easier. State and local snow plow drivers were very kind and avoided socking us with a plow drift, once we'd opened our driveway the first time.
I titled this post "land, labor and capital." Why? Well, here are some of the thoughts that occupied me while I shoveled and hacked.
- the young men who came looking for work on Sunday could not earn a living unless they had some land to work on -- in this case, ours.
- their single snow shovel -- capital -- made them far more productive than they would have been with no tools at all. But their lack of a second shovel made them far less productive than they could otherwise be. Even if they'd had funds to buy a second shovel, shovels were simply not available.
- having the right (specialized) tools for the job -- the MUTT, or a truck-mounted plow -- plus the skills to use them well makes a big difference in how much one can do with 10 minutes or 2 hours of labor.
I listened to a radio program coming out of nearby Washington, DC, which was largely shut down by the nearly unprecedented snows (there was no mail delivery from Saturday to Thursday; the federal government was pretty much shut down), and there was some discussion about whether towns and cities ought to spend taxpayer funds keeping inventory of plows to handle snows much heavier than what typically occurred, or whether perhaps there should be incentives for private individuals to own and maintain truck-mountable snow plows. Did it make sense to tax everyone, say, $50 more per year to pay for better snow-management equipment if it would save $100 worth of productivity per person?
I no longer remember what I heard on the radio, and what parts of this were my own musings. But it did pass through my mind that such things as snow removal ought to be financed not through taxes on people's wages or interest income, or on their purchases, but rather should be paid for by taxes on land value. People are willing to pay more to live where better services are provided, where more consistent utilities are provided.
Taxing the poor people of Washington, D.C., many of whom are tenants, $50 each, and taxing the wealthy homeowners in Georgetown $50 each is not nearly as fair as taxing people in proportion to the value of the land they own. Georgetown homeowners ought to be paying a lot more each than the owners of subdivided brownstones in less expensive neighborhoods. And the tenants of those subdivided brownstones are paying significant rents to their landlords; their share of the costs of providing local services should come out of the payments their landlords receive, which are a function largely of their location in Washington, D.C., not luxurious landlord-provided amenities within those homes.
The tenants are already paying 30% or more of their income for housing, which seems to me to be a form of sharecropping; their landlords share in their labor. For that matter, those of us who are paying mortgages are sharing our wages with a mortgage lender, who in turn paid off the seller of the property we're bought. It is highly unlikely that more than half of the purchase price was for the improvements to the land (unless it is a brand new house in a fringy area); most of the purchase price -- and the mortgage payment -- are payments for land value. And the seller didn't create that value, so it seems perverse and odd to me that he is the one who reaps what the community has sown. Our structure permits him to privatize this public investment.
The remedy, of course, is rather simple: shift our taxes OFF labor, OFF sales, OFF buildings ... and ONTO land value. Many supposedly intractable problems will start to evaporate when we do that. And we can do it very gradually if we choose, or expeditiously if we see fit.
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