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Praguetory — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:43:15 +0000

Thanks for the tips, Jock. I have a pretty limited list of objectives for Conference (which did not include LVT) but I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction. I'll let you know.

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Jock Coats — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:08:26 +0000

The wealthy are always more mobile. We lose 60,000 pensioners every year to Spain and you can bet they're not the ones dependent on their council house to do so!

As to whether to promote LVT at conference - two people are worth trying to hook up with:

David Curry supports Site Value Rating (especially in the face of the possibility of Supplementary Planning Gain" proposed by Barker and Brown last year).

Mark Wadsworth who authored much of the Bow Group tax commission proposal is keen to develop land based property tax it seems.

Also, the IEA have produced some stuff by a chap called Fred Harrison in the last year about transport and LVT, and Steve Norris is on the platform tonight at a Labour fringe meeting (see my blog post of today)."

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Praguetory — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 16:24:07 +0000

Cheers Jock. The man's reaction is knee-jerk. It is hardly convincing that he has looked into it. Your comment re rich people moving to poor areas was a powerful one that I hadn't considered before.

I'm going to my first conference. I believe that espousing LVT would probably be a quick way to make enemies. Oh well.

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Gareth Doutch — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:30:52 +0000

Thanks for sharing it anyway, Jock.

"Kaiser" Keith's courteous correspondence

Jock — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:19:00 +0000

Remember I sent that email to Keith Mitchell, leader of Oxfordshire County Council, after his characterization of Land Value Tax as some kind of nasty left wing tax that was designed to blight our beautiful countryside. I was slightly hesitant about publishing his reply and my response as I was hoping for a rather more adult correspondence, but since such has not appeared, to hell with it.

For your delectation, his first response:

Thanks for your e-mail, Jock. I understand I was featured on the Politics Programme today but have not yet had a chance to see it. Despite that, I will retain my Thatcherite credentials and wish to distance myself from left wing confiscatory and levelling down policies of the Brown/Ming axis in general and Land Value Tax in particular. I am for Low taxes; real choice; value for money whether applied at the local level or the national level.. I regard the replacement of Blair by Brown as an important step in the process of returning to a Conservative government and the redemption of our country from the awful damage that your Party has done to our country over the last nine years.

As ever

Keith
Leader of the Council
County Hall, Oxford
Oxfordshire: Low taxes; real choice; value for money

Anyway, believing that such an obviously brilliant man, and an accountant to boot, could not have made the mistake of confusing what the tax base should be with what the tax take should be I responded:

Keith,

I realise you are incredibly busy and Sundays are probably the one day you don't want to fill up with such things but...

1. You must be mistaking me for someone else - my party has not been in power for nine years!

2. I particularly chose a quote from the blessed Margaret's favourite economist. However little you like taxes, and you may be surprised that I share that view, Milton Friedman believes that land value tax is the "least bad" sort of thing to tax, though he would not go as far as Henry George would in advocating the full taxation of all economic rent on land (which many Georgists suggest should be distributed as a sort of a "citizens dividend" to which everyone would be entitled in place of the plethora of benefits that we currently have and help trap people in dependency).

3. You may believe you can create a low tax regime through "value for money" policies. However I would suggest that a national LVT, REPLACING all other taxes on incomes, transactions, inheritances, capital gains, profits, sales and so on, is the only viable way of achieving significant reductions in the size of the state as it would significantly reduce the need for transfer payments to support economically less well performing areas as they would become attractive for businesses and individuals seeking low tax environments in which to maximise their profits which they then can use to buoy up those previously underperforming regional economies. Given that such transfers amount to what, half of the tax burden, we should stop piddling around looking for a few billion cuts here and there and start looking at the possibilities of saving hundreds of billions.

4. Unlike the peonage of income taxes, LVT is essentially voluntary in the sense that if you don't like paying the amount demanded of you because you live in a hotspot, you move to somewhere suitable with low land values and hence lower taxes. When the millionaires start moving into Greater Leys to save on tax, watch the need to spend lots of social support money on such an area fall dramatically, for example.

5. The likes of your constituents would be amongst the biggest gainers.

Can Adam Smith and Milton Friedman be *that* wrong in your view? How could the blessed Margaret have been taken in by proponents of such nasty left wing ideas?

But it all goes to prove that dangerous leftie Leo Tolstoy's truism on Land Value Tax: "People do not argue with the teachings of [Henry] George, they simply do not know it."

Sincerely,

Jock Coats - Secretary, Lib Dems ALTER!
(Action for Land-value Taxation and Economic Reform)
www: http://www.libdemsalter.org.uk - http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/

Still my hope for a mature discussion of his knee jerk reaction knew no bounds and I waited expectantly until this morning:

Now why did I think you were a lefty Labour Councillor when you were actually a lefty Liberal Councillor? Sorry for the confusion.

As ever
Keith
Leader of the Council
leader@oxfordshire.gov.uk
County Hall, Oxford
Oxfordshire: Low taxes; real choice; value for money

I dunno - you offer a Tory what you believe has the potential to halve the tax burden and all they can muster is a cheap political jibe. Is it any wonder even I am getting jaded by political partisanship. This man is nominally in charge of hundreds of millions of our money. He's bright, he's clever. I was once considering setting up a political party entitled the "Cooperative Commonwealth of Oxfordshire" which members of other parties could sign up to a manifesto to put the interests Oxfordshire before the party label they are elected under. Clearly people like Keith could not ever live with such co-operation.

Still - it proves the point - condemned by the "right" as a dangerous trot and by everyone else as a neo-lib nutter. LVT - you can't win!

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Jock's Place - "Kaiser" Keith's courteous correspondence - Comments

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"Kaiser" Keith's courteous correspondence