The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.
“We continue to privatize the essence of our humanity. Those of us who claim to own land and therefore claim the rents that are produced in our societies are actually enacting the role of slavery. We are appropriating other people’s humanity.”
Part I of Fred Harrison's latest work. Humans became a hugely successful species because we generated rent and shared it. But now the rent is being appropriated and misused by a minority impoverishing the majority and destroying nature.
Location Value Covenants are a proposal for collecting annual rental values without the pain, routing around the roadblocks, avoiding economic seismic events and of course in a politically achievable way.
The Systemic Fiscal Reform Group believes that any cure to the economic malaise must include development of an alternative to the private bank mortgage. From an economic perspective, the mortgage has three serious defects :
* repayments are linked to interest rates rather than market value
In preparation for future challenges like COVID-19, we should take steps to address the root causes of low societal resilience. An important such step is a move to Land Value Taxation. This financial modification would turn the tax structure into a policy tool to boost community resilience without additional taxation or micromanaging legislation.
Every citizen has a right to a Basic Income, a right to their share of the surplus wealth produced by their local economy.
But Basic Income plans should be funded out of unearned income, NOT earned income. People with jobs should NOT be taxed to pay for people without jobs.
About 30% of the GDP in every jurisdiction is economic rent, variously called the economic surplus, super profits, royalties, capital gains, unearned income, monopoly profits, or profits without a corresponding cost of production.
These days most Davos types get rich through stock option buy backs and then avoid taxes through offshore tax havens, shell companies, equity swaps, shell trust funds and real estate borrowing. To reduce the obscene wealth gap plus boost the economy, governments should finance programs by collecting unearned income (economic rent) in lieu of taxing jobs.
Renegade Economists Show 572 Subscribe to the weekly podcast.
Frank de Jong talks about the fading political currency of policy makers and their inability to meet the demands of inequality alongside rampant right-wing influence. How can a pre-emptive economic system be enabled to deal with issues at source? Taxation is not just to raise revenue, but to improve economic outcomes.
