John Locke

Yes, I'm still meant to be on internet silence, but Linux and various bits of software have me stumped for a while until I get some help from the mailing lists, so I thought I'd cast my mind over the implications of the court case this week that resulted in a jury deciding that it was okay to commit a crime in order to prevent what the perpetrators believed would be a greater harm in the future. The case in point was that they had committed (and admitted) criminal damage by climbing a chimney at a Kent power station with the intent of scrawling graffiti on it in protest at its pollution record and plans to expand the facility, which, their oh so clever advocate declared would cause more and more widespread damage to people and property through the global warming it would contribute to.

Now, some of the more unthinking environmentalists might see this as a great victory. A court recognized that global warming was such an imminent threat to life and property that it was justifiable to commit brazen thuggery leading to criminal damage on anything that allegedly contributed to that global warming. Yay!?

Nay! I have two problems with this.

First is the acceptance, apparently by both judge and jury (and so, you may think, all "reasonable people"), not just that anthropogenic climate change is a fact but also such a grave threat that it justifies individuals taking the law into their own hands. To my mind this is still a matter in the political arena. Not only are there still, and perhaps growing, voices of dissent on the very premise of the debate; that mankind is responsible for such a change that it is a threat to the planet's very future. But also about what to do about it and when. A power station after all merely supplies a demand. Is the power generator guilty or the consumer making those demands? It is more dangerous to disrupt existing dwindling supplies before we have worked out how to replace them with cleaner affordable technologies? If the threat from global warming is real, so presumably is the threat of harm through disrupted power supplies.

Second is how this operates as a precedent in other, possibly more serious cases - although I heard someone saying that this decision will not be treated as forming a precedent, I'm not clear how that can be prevented. It is okay to murder an abortionist in order to stop the immediate harm to others he or she will cause? That threat, after all, is far more immediate and traceable to an individual than the effects of a single coal power station amongst all the coal fired power stations and other "climate vandals". We're starting to get not only into the realms of Philip K Dick's pre-crime but vigilante prevention of what individuals claim may be a pre-crime. This is hardly the basis for the rule of law.

Oh, you can say that no court is going to acquit a murderer because they thought they were preventing a bigger crime, but actually we already do. The "reasonable force" defense can be used to justify a death in the process of preventing an immediate threat to others' life. This decision seems to extend the boundaries of "immediate threat" let alone accurate identification of the person causing that immediate threat.  One could, and many do, fight abortion on the basis that the most immediate threat t future generations of humanity is eradicating them before they are born.  If we're going to adopt a principle (and I do) that we have a responsibility of stewardship not to harm future generations' survival on the planet then it would be legitimate for others to argue more forcefully that we have a responsibility to see those future generations actually survive as far as birth!

Anyway, two odd sounding sources provide what I believe are better alternative "precedents" to work from. First, there is a Catholic maxim that it is not legitimate to cause one moral bad, or an act that could foreseeably lead to morally bad consequences in order to prevent another, even near certain, specific bad. It is used mostly about abortion again. It is used to argue that it is not even permissible to abort a new life in order to prevent the death of the mother - often in the circumstances of an ectopic pregnancy for example.

Of course the world's aggressors, including the US and UK, routinely ignore this. They argue that foreseeable "collateral damage" is permissable to remove a dictator, for example. It is not. Terrorising and killing the people of Bagdad in "Shock and Awe", even as "collateral", was morally repugnant, notwithstanding our general agreement that the regime they were trying to punish or remove was also morally repugnant. The results of ignoring of this basic principle are there for us all to see - there can be little doubt now that more people in Iraq have suffered for longer under the oversight of the western occupying forces than it is likely would have happened at the hands of the previous repugnant regime. At least there could have been alternatives that held less potential for further suffering.

But on the environment, the libertarians' respect for the rule of law provides a better alternative to various bearded crusties climbing a chimney and committing vigilante criminal damage. Locke's proviso can be used, for example, to tackle pollution. If you, a power generator or anyone else - a pig farm even, pollute the atmosphere we both have to share, we have the right to legal remedy. Just as much as if you came along and started digging a hole in my prize rose border. Indeed this ought to work better than any political "solution". Protectionism is a political strategy, and even Green politicians will forcibly protect their favourite, in this case, power generation mechanism against legitimate complaint of harm. If planning permission were truly privatised, those affected most would almost certainly do better out of it than they will once the government has removed most of their rights in order to force their political idea of strategic energy infrastructure through.

Yes, we all need power, but left to ourselves we would probably not choose to have a nuclear reactor at the bottom of our garden. But, as they say, everyone has their price. If, collectively, my neighbourhood decided that the compensation on offer was enough when weighed against the costs of electricity or the convenience of not having a long transmission route or any potential danger they'd accept that nuclear reactor. If nobody accepts any price for nuclear, they have to weigh that decision against the potential alternatives. If nobody wants a giant power station, then we perhaps have to accept that we will have to help our neighbours fund micro-generation.

Anyone who has read more than one post of my blog will realize that I am a passionate supporter of Land Value Tax. In other forums, when the subject comes up, people sometimes feel, and say, that I pursue the issue too zealously. Even those that support some LVT are sometimes embarrassed at the "hard core Georgists" like myself shrilly calling for more. I know plenty who regard the claims from some of us as to the myriad benefits Land Value Tax could bring as just plain rubbish - "nothing could be that good and not have been tried".

None more so than when housing policy is to the fore, as it ought to have been, floods permitting, these past couple of weeks. No sooner was the Housing Green Paper published to great fanfare than it seemed for all the coverage that half our existing housing stock was plunged knee deep in water and all the discussion about housing was about building in flood plains or not rather than the rather more pressing issue of ensuring everyone has a decent place to call their own in the first place.

So, read on if you want to try to understand just why it is that "hard core Georgists" like myself so fundamentally believe that not only is Land Value Tax the only permanent solution to the broken market that is housing, but also why it forms such a core part of any human being's fundamental right to an opportunity to achieve personal freedom and the root of many equity and economic justice issues. I hope you'll understand at least that we are not talking about just a different way of raising tax but a radical shift in how we think about tax itself and more importantly an alternative view of our relationship to the planet's resources and each other.

Land: our common birthright

The headline of Polly Toynbee's article on the green paper from Tuesday 24th July, "Everyone is entitled to a stake in the nation's soil and bricks", showed promise that at least one of the chaterati was going to describe this basic principle. Though she failed convincingly to explain the entitlement the headline proclaimed or how one might achieve such an entitlement the sentiment embodied in that headline gets close to the core rationale for Land Value Taxers.

Every human being ever born is ultimately utterly dependent on the bounty of our common planet's natural resources to survive. Consequently every human being ever born has to have a common entitlement to a share of that bounty if they are ever to achieve self-ownership. If you are always dependent on another for a place to rest your bones, that other has a coercive relationship over you, you are dependent on them for how much of the fruits of your labours you are able to keep.

It's an easy thing to say and in an agrarian, low population, subsistence economy a relatively easy thing to envisage - everyone simply spreads out until they've got enough land each of a quality sufficient to keep themselves alive by their own labours on that land, growing food for subsistence and no more. Indeed, John Locke, proto-liberal to some of us, said that since it was mankind's calling to be steward and master of his planet, you have the right to take as much as you can keep and make good use of with one important proviso - that you always leave as much left over, and of as good quality, to be divvied up amongst everyone else.

But such an economy isn't conducive to human development as a whole. In order the better to put nature's bounty to use for everybody's benefit we specialize, in specializing we come together in markets, communities, cities, and our relationship with land changes, though our dependence on it does not diminish. Johann Heinrich von Thunen described and then David Ricardo explained how human interactions and communities create rental value in land - those locations closer to where more people want to circulate, live, conduct commercial or social activities rise in value simply by virtue of where they are.

In fact, the rental value of a location in land is the financial expression of by how much that location breaches Locke's Proviso mentioned above - that you can take and own as much as you like, so long as you leave enough for everyone else, of as good quality, for everyone else who needs to be in that location to share. Collecting that value and pre-distributing it to all the people that together create that value - via a Land Value Tax (others have described it as the "Community Collection of Rent" perhaps more descriptively) and a Citizen's Dividend - is giving each person the financial value of their birthright to a piece of land.

Now, there are lots of objections to such a scheme, frequently voiced by those who do already own, or by those who don't think this could produce significant amounts of revenue. I shall try and anticipate and respond to some of those objections in following articles. But I hope at least that you get the picture as to why some of us believe LVT is more important than just another taxation method. The sharing of the land value we all collaborate in creating is a fundamental right to an equitable share of our common inheritance in a complex world where it just isn't practical for us to spread out and have an equal share of actual land each.

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