Jock's Place - Comments

clarifications

Tim Carpenter — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:32:57 +0100

Thanks, Jock, for your full reply, but I do need to clarify things here.

I am not against LVT as a concept to tax and in the policy we at the Libertarian Party do say we would want to do it IF IT CAN WORK. That proviso has not yet been met by a long way, and btw, it is inaccurate of Paul Lockett (in the comments) to suggest there is any inconsistency here - we want a practical plan, and I criticise what I see as IMpractical plans.

1. When I say who defines the value of your land, you say "why does anyone need to decide", yet immediately go on to talk about collecting the tax! Someone DOES decide the taxable value and that affects the actual value. Can you not see that?

2. As you should know, we aim to eradicate income tax., so the comparison does not hold. The problem comes when some local area under the influence of whomsoever, adjusts taxation on land they wish to gain access to because a new development is coming. So, building a road, whack up the value of land next to it. Farmer has no CAPITAL to develop it, so has to sell it for a knock-down price because he HAS to sell to meet the tax bill. If this does not concentrate land into a few hands, I do no know what would. This is just one example of the potential risks.

3. Living costs - if you have CBI as described you would still keep the most expensive parts of the Welfare bureaucracy - the entire means-testing apparatus. Housing benefit would probably remain in all but name.

4. Income. You need to clarify here - are you saying that COMPANIES have 40% more or that wage earners do? Be under no illusions, if you have CBI, income tax will be enormous. I worked out once that if we went for CBI with no other tax changes but a cull of QANGOs, income tax would need to be about 64% flat from the very first penny (IT is currently £140bln, 7k x 50m = £350bln pa). A HUGE disincentive to working especially at the lower end. Result: black economy, unproductive citizens, more companies shutting down and a growth in imports (and do not say "cheap imports make us richer" because that only holds if we are simultaneously exporting a greater amount of higher value exports).

5. Movement to low tax areas: A company will consider workforce supply as a prime consideration, not just rental costs. If that were not the case, expensive London would be empty. People pay top dollar for London rents because of a massive pool of labour - they can gain access to many cheap or more chance of snaring the best. To think LVT would make a company move out to a depressed area? Those places are already cheap. Why doesn't it happen now? Limited skilled labour pool. As you say the Government does it now and did it in the past (remember the Hillman Imp?) and it creates quasi-soviets. If LVT has an influence, it might IMHO move a few companies, deter some from even setting up where they need to and the rest of the companies will be bled paying higher rates just to keep near the labour pool they require. In the case of London, the move will be to New York or Hong Kong and we all lose out.

6. Mutualism: your previous reply was not an answer and neither does this answer, m'fraid. It is not a case of being employee or mutual but mutual or owner here. CBI, I agree, will allow people to consider taking the risk in a new venture, but I cannot see where changes are put forward that would encourage more mutualism, or should I say remove the discouragement to mutualism (that is very important distinction - no favouritism!). BTW, if only the Co-op did not fund the Labour Party, I'd seriously consider changing my bank account to them. I use Nationwide, though.

7. I think you need to rewind a little here and explain why the State thinks it has the right to charge 100% land tax! That to me is "tax is theft" in its pure form. It is Nationalisation or even Communism. The State as landlord? Go to China and see the misery and abuse the lack of freehold creates. I can see that you have no idea what will happen with 100% land tax in terms of ownership or even the banking industry - this is a core part of my concern with LVT schemes.

Funny you mention Second life. Do you remember the recent banking crisis therein? This is a problem if you are not careful about banking, though the mistake SL had was allowing Lindens to be used. What I want is for all those Social Creditors to go on to SL and try and make their ideas work.

Private competing currencies might well be a good thing, but eventually the State would collect taxes measured in one currency or basket thereof (which in effect becomes a currency!), regardless of how the other currencies floated around it purely from a perspective of budgetary planning. I would not be surprised if VISA and MASTERCARD were quick to create their own - they have the operational systems to create a currency without even printing a single note or minting a single coin and to match the exchange rate transaction by transaction.

btw I am no "anarcho-captialist". I am not a "geo-libertarian" either.

p.s. your page has a script that my browser asks me to kill due to risk of resource hogging.

reply

Tax Jobs — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:42:11 +0100

Hmmm..interesting.

reply

Tax Jobs — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:41:00 +0100

Hmmm..interesting.

I have a feeling that

Jock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:47:13 +0100

I have a feeling that things changed quite a lot in the early days of the website. I've not heard from them either since probably their membership system got really going. I heard once, from Parick, saying tah tthey were closing down the public forums and revoking any internal forum memberships they had given to people who hd not joined, including me - end of June maybe?

But they did give me private forum access when I explained much the same as it sounds you did. Maybe I made more of the possibility of my joining them.

Tcoh.

Alix — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:34:59 +0100

Well, at least the Libertarian Party give you the time of day. I signed up to their alleged mailing list when their website was about a week old, with a chirpy message saying how interested I was in the Libertarian/Lib Dem overlaps, and have heard bugger all since. [/grumble]

I wasn't actually going to

Jock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:25:07 +0100

I wasn't actually going to mention that. I had read it and suggested that we were pretty well there practicality wise. Inching closer to a full register, building more and more data all the time with which to estimate values. A colleague has written a book, "Location Matters ", about one way of implementing some LVT. I know there is great disagreement between types of libertarians about whether "goe-libertarianism" and "mutualism" are really libertarian at all and that land tax is a crime against private property. And as you say, they'd hardly be a libertarian party if they were not allowed to disagree with each other!

Libertarian Party Policy

Paul Lockett — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:16:28 +0100

Obviously, a member of a political party doesn't have to agree with every policy of that party, but I find it a bit odd that the Head of Policy at the Libertarian Party would go out of his way to criticise LVT when the Housing and Planning policy statement in their manifesto tacitly supports it with the statement:

"Until a practical Land Value Taxation system can be devised, forms of zoning (such as Green Belts) will still be needed."

On-communications

Jock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:35:47 +0100

Very interesting, thanks Anon. Nobody here seems to know anything about them! But Wireless Oxford is rather hoping not to have to build out a system ourselves, so a supplier aiming at a different part of the market could be a very welcome partner. I will be in touch with them!

WiMAX

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:20:43 +0100

On-communications currenltly supply a WiMAX service in the Oxford area. Check out their website.

Tim - thanks for those

Jock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:36:59 +0100

Tim - thanks for those comments. I think that deserves another post, so will maybe have to reply more fully when I get home this evening if that's okay!

Richard - I kind of agree that the position we are currently in is not the place to start "living off the financial assets" partly because even if they were sound they are not well enough distributed. I think what I am saying in this post is that we need to rebuild that as you say.

LPUK

Richard Allan — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:14:43 +0100

"Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change?"

Yes. The others will never listen to you until you show them you're ready to "throw your vote away" in order to hurt them!

Very nice, but...

Richard Allan — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:11:15 +0100

I agree with almost all of this, but:

"It is not just their approach to benefits that is backwards in vision, but the whole assumption that "full employment" is the thing we should be aiming for. Such a policy actually highlights even more starkly the difference between being independently wealthy on the one hand and having to work for the basics of life on the other. In an era in which more and more of our tasks can be automated or even exported we should be aiming more to live off the financial assets that past productivity has created."

I would say that trying to "live off the financial assets..." is part of the problem, for now. The gov't is busy liquidating all of the nation's assets to pay for current consumption, and they won't last forever! I would say that realising people need to start working for money again instead of borrowing from the past/mortgaging the future is more the issue. Of course, once people are working and producing again we'll want them to save as much as possible so that

1) Capital stock will increase, allowing people to produce the same amount with less labour and therefore take more leisure time (possibly - I gather the jury's still out on this, economically)
2) Stock of "financial capital" will increase; ie. by exporting goods to other countries we can import more from them later and allow them to do the work for us.

Of course this is predicated on the re-allocation of ground rents from landlords to the community as you attest.

Land snatching... land land land...see "Snatch".

Tim Carpenter — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:31:42 +0100

LVT can seem fine and dandy at the first off, but over time who decides the future value of your land? It is fraught with risks, opportunities for corruption and chaos. If you think compulsory purchase was bad...

If CBI is only half what is needed to live on, then surely we will still need welfare. Removing the minimum wage is fine but be under no illusion, the CBI will be factored into that wage (or lack of). It will be no solution to poverty AFAICT and your assertion that it would eradicate x y or x is not explained. I think parish provision is an interesting one, but frankly, look at places like S Wales and you will find that parishes will have little or no wealth creation so no money to spend on their army of dependants - central funding will be needed in precisely the places where people say it causes problems of unconditionality - for once the parish is spending other peoples' money the problems are right back with you again.

As another person has mentioned, the mutualist company can occur NOW. What is to change here? The fact that it does not happen now should either make you ask what stops it legally/financially or regulatory OR that it is actually a factor of how humans are socially, in that it takes certain individuals the gumption to kick start a company (and that is NEVER to be underetimated) and once they do so, why would they then let a whole load of strangers take just as much out of it as he/she does?

Monetary reform and changes to fiat issuance will not happen by itself. The problem is coming up with something to replace it that actually works. I have seen many attempts and none appear to work or are just a cover operation for hatstand ideas like "social credit".

Backed by - well nothing

Jock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:56:41 +0100

Backed by - well nothing fixed necessarily. I am of course aware of moves towards hard currency in several parts of the world - the Qatari gold dinar for example. But in practice, currency is just a token of trust which at the moment happens usually to be "backed" by governments. But it's not really, it's really backed by the trust of its users.

In a globally interconnected trading world, I could see the large scale equivalent of, say, eBay where people built up very public credit scores based on trading feedback and so on. That in itselg may be all the trust that's needed.

Thanks for that info IanPJ -

Jock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:54:13 +0100

Thanks for that info IanPJ - one of my current "good causes" is trying to get a group going to develop a social enterprise operated city-wide wirless system for Oxford and we are really now looking at WiMAX so I had only gleaned from WiMAX Forum and places like that that Freedom4 had the whole lot - good to know I might have two people to play off agains each other for spectrum renting! Though I remain a bit pissed off that I have to buy it from somewhere else since it's "already ours" in my opinion!