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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.

Technorati Tags: property tax, geo-libertarianism, land value tax, liberty, Locke's Proviso, John Locke

I read this...

Blair says sorry to Cameron over terror plans:

Tory leader's anger as the phone tap initiative he outlined in private is adopted by Brown.

...and thought, hang on, where have I heard that before? Oh yes, I know, a more or less constant stream of Lib Dem press releases and ministerial statements on the various terrorism measures that have gone through parliament over the last few years.

Here's one going back to October 2003, specifically about the use of phone tap evidence:

IF USED CORRECTLY PHONE-TAPS CAN LEAD TO MORE TERROR CONVICTIONS - KEETCH
14 October 2003

Responding to reports that MI6 and GCHQ are mounting a last-ditch defence against Whitehall proposals to end the traditional British ban on phone-tap evidence being used in court, Paul Keetch MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Defence Secretary, said:

"If used correctly, phone-tap evidence could lead to more convictions of terrorists and organised criminals.

"Many suspected terrorists are not brought to trial because of insufficient public evidence. Equally, suspects who are wrongly accused should be able to test the intelligence which brought them to court.

"In the campaign against terrorism, intelligence is one of the only weapons we have. Prosecutors should be able to use it to full effect."

I'm pretty sure I've heard our folk talk about questioning after charge too, which I see David David claims as his idea in the same article, but I can't be bothered to prove it. If the Tory leader is reduced to claiming credit for something the Lib Dems have been pressing for for at least three and a half years now, I don't see that his Home Office shadow crony is any more credible.

Dave, if you're going to complain about plagiarism, you ought to check out that you didn't nick the idea in the first place.

Apparently Gordon Brown's plan to micromanage British sport for the next four years is hitting trouble...

...but I can't see what all the fuss is about personally. After all, the British Lions combined rugby team does not jeopardise the competitiveness of the various home nations' independent rugby international teams does it?

Mind you, if they do keep on tinkering with the sporting bodies themselves don't they stand a chance under IOC rules of getting the entire team GB banned from the next Olympics. Wouldn't that be somewhat embarrassing. On the other hand, if they ban us now, perhaps we can stop spending all that money on a hole in the ground in East London... :-)

You didn't have me down as some happy clappy evangelical did you? No, you'd be quite right. So this is just a little celebration of "Tax Freedom Day".

"Hallelujah" was the cry of the Hebrews' slaves when, in the year of the Jubilee, those who had had to sell themselves into servitude or give away their lands to keep themselves afloat were freed and their lands returned to the common wealth for redistribution.

Of course "Tax Freedom Day" is a bit of nonsense. It helps perhaps to see just how much we have taken from us but in reality, if we make a little more in the second half of the year, they'll take a little more all the same. And what the Adam Smith Institute, who organize this little wheeze, won't tell you is that their eponymous hero himself was one of ours, a supporter of Land Value Tax.

Taxes on our labour make us peons to the state. How wrong James Thomson was!