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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!

Technorati Tags: conservatives, land value tax, localism, oxford, politics, tax shifting, taxation, tories

A few weeks ago this ten year old article by Fred E Folvary was brought to my attention. I thought I had blogged about it before, but in the light of what I said in 'Revolutionary Liberalism: 5 - The "Sovereign Individual"' the other day and the welter of stories of party funding corruption this week it's worth reprinting today I think:

Democracy Needs Reforming

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor, The Progress Report

Ever since the 1996 elections, we have had wave after wave of revelations about improper or suspicious political campaign finances. Campaign contributions from Asia, soliciting contributions from government offices, overnight stays at the White House, diversion of "soft" money to political parties -- all this money sloshing and influence peddling points to the corruption of government, whether it was strictly legal or not.

The finance reform bill now being considered may be blocked by Democratic opposition to the "paycheck protection act" that would bar unions from using dues for political contributions without the members' approval. Even if it passes, the problem will remain. We've had campaign finance reforms every few years, and 114 votes on the issue by the Senate during the last ten years, but nothing really changes.

The basic problem is the way we elect our representatives. Our system is mass democracy: a large mass of voters elect a Congressman or Senator, or the President. The voters' don't know the candidate personally, so the candidate relies on advertising in the media to project a favorable image. This costs money, and the special interests are happy to contribute the funds.

No matter what laws are passed, the special interests will find ways around them, because of the tremendous gains they can get. Government financing of campaigns only gives more power to the two major parties, reducing even further the opportunity for smaller political parties to challenge the system and come up with new ideas. The problem is the corrupt incentives built into the system. To solve the problem, the whole voting system has to be changed.

Since the key problem is mass democracy, the only remedy is to change it to small-group democracy. Have every election take place in a small group. That would eliminate the need for mass media, and therefore the need for mass campaign funds, and thus the opportunity for special interests to buy out the election. Also, wealthy candidates would no longer have such an advantage.

But if a Congressional district has several hundred thousand people, how can we elect the representatives with small groups? The solution is multi-level voting. Divide cities and counties into small neighborhood districts. Each district elects a council. Then the council members elect one of their members to a higher- level council made up of a dozen neighborhood districts. These then elect members to the next higher level, and this continues on up to the representatives to the city council, state legislatures and Congress. One of the rules is that a lower-level council may recall a representative at any time if they are not satisfied.

Now you the voter are electing someone from your neighborhood for the neighborhood council, somebody you might know or easily have access to. Instead of mass mailings and TV commercials, the candidates would hold neighborhood meetings. All the higher-level elections would also be personal, since only a dozen or so councils would elect representatives to the next higher level council. The President himself would be elected by Congress, and the House of Representatives would only have, say, some 60 members instead of 435. And let's cut the Senate to 50 members, while we're at it. We want smaller groups, right?

Somebody might object that he or she wants to be able to elect the President directly. But one vote out of tens of millions does not amount to much. One vote in a neighborhood election of about 200 voters does count for something, plus your voice will be heard, and those who want to be representatives don't need to raise money.

This bottom-up multi-level voting system would also profoundly change the incentives for taxation. Power would shift dramatically to the neighborhood councils. Decentralized voting would lead to decentralized government and decentralized taxation. With local funding that gets sent to higher-levels of government, income and sales taxes would not longer be practical. Taxation would shift to real estate, especially to land, which does not flee when taxed.

Small-group democracy would be a radical change, but if we want to eliminate special-interest influence and the corruption of government, campaign-finance laws alone won't do it, because of the incentives built into the system. Either we change the voting system, or we will continue to let the special interests have their way.