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RSS LVTfan

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1 point

The value of land and natural resources. Doing this would not take from anyone something he had created, but merely recycle for community purposes value created by the community.

I'd avoid taxing that which individuals or corporations create -- goods and services, houses and other buildings, wages. Taxing these things is both unjust and unwise; taxing them destroys jobs, destroys incentives, burdens the economy.

Taxing things in scarce or finite supply actually brings the selling price down, making them affordable to those who will use them, rather than held out of use by speculators who are hoping for or expecting a price rise.

3 points

First of all, capitalism and socialism are not forms of government. They relate to how economies are organized, and what is privatized (untaxed) and what is socialized (taxed, treated as common treasure).

Actually, my position would be a third way, between socialism as most of us think of it and the sort of capitalism we in the US are used to.

I'd like to refer you to an article which makes the case better than I can. It is online at wealthandwant dot com (among other places) and is called "Henry George and the Reconstruction of Capitalism."

Briefly, I think things which nature (or, if you will, God) provides, and things which are created by the community together rightly belong to the community. This would include non-renewable natural resources, particularly those in short supply, and it includes the value of urban land, which can be awesomely valuable. Individuals and organizations and corporations can't create these things, and so ought not to be able to privatize their economic value. Those who require them ought to compensate the rest of us for what we take.

But once we've compensated our fellows for what we've "enclosed" or privatized (via an annual payment of land rent, or royalties, or a lease payment on a particularly slice of electromagnetic spectrum), we ought to be able to privatize that which we create using it. I'd pay rent to the commons equal to the annual value of the land I wanted as mine, be it a postage stamp lot in the city, or a grand spread in the middle of nowhere, or on the value of, say, 880AM within a 200 mile radius of NYC. As long as I didn't harm my neighbors, I'd have rights to those bits of the commons, and if I made a success of that radio frequency, it would be mine to keep. Mind you, I couldn't turn around and sell the rights to 880AM to someone else at a higher price (except for the duration of my lease on that frequency slice), but I could sell my transmitter and studios and the possibilities of my office and on-air staff staying. On my urban postage stamp, I could place a cottage or a skyscraper, but my rent to the commons would be what the market says that land is worth. If I could afford that rent while keeping just a cottage for myself on the land, fine. If it made sense to build a skyscraper on it, I'd be entitled to keep the portion of the rent which related to the building itself and the services I provided my tenants, while passing along the portion attributed to the locational value.

And 100 years ago, this was known as The Single Tax. The powers that be didn't like it much, but it is still a fine idea. (In fact, the board game Monopoly is based on The Landlord's Game, which was developed to teach the ideas behind The Single Tax.

Supporting Evidence: Wealth and Want (www.wealthandwant.com)
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