Don't you wonder why jobs are taxed, but many people get rich by collecting unearned income, which is taxed little or not at all?
There are two income streams:
āearned incomeā from jobs, investments, and businesses, and
āunearned incomeā primarily from monopoly ownership of land or resources.
Economists call unearned income āeconomic rentā, defined as income not subject to competition, or revenue without a corresponding cost of production.
The Total Resource Rents of Australia report finds the complete removal of income, company and sales tax is possible by replacement with a tax on monopolies such as water trading, cyber squatting, taxi licenses and land.
āEconomists have for hundreds of years pointed to a more efficient system by harnessing the naturally rising value of scarce resources as the tax base. Few reports have calculated if this is actually possibleā said report author Karl Fitzgerald.
- Press Release: http://www.prosper.org.au/2013/12/03/harnessing-monopoly-to-finance-govā¦
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX5gzRnUfSw Francis K. Peddle, J.D., Ph.D., is currently Vice-President -- Academic Affairs at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy. He is a barrister and solicitor and has been a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada for over twenty years.
Prominent people living today and throughout history endorse financing government by collecting economic rent in lieu of taxing jobs, businesses, sales.
by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor, 4 February 2013
Geoism is the social philosophy and theory of absolute human equality, with the belief that each person is properly and fully a self-owner and an equal owner of the surplus from nature and from communities.
Human equality is the proposition that all human beings have an equal moral worth, because there is in human nature no inherent master/slave or superior/inferior relationship. Geoism takes equality to its complete logical conclusion.
A 30-minute interview where Earthsharing Canada's Frank de Jong argues that governments should finance programs like health care, education by collecting economic rent in lieu of taxing jobs, businesses and consumption.
Linked is a 30-minute interview where I argue why governments should finance programs like health care, education by collecting economic rent in lieu of taxing jobs, businesses and consumption.
Today's Toronto Star front page features a dejected senior citizen struggling to pay her rising municipal taxes. Purchased decades ago, mortgage long paid off, her house, in a groovy part of downtown, is now worth upwards of $700,000, having doubled in price in the last 10 years alone.
Written as a hard luck story, this "unfortunate" fixed-income senior can barely make ends meet, mortified of being forced to sell her long-time home.
The Generalized Henry George Principle:
One of the general principles of taxation is that one should tax factors that are inelastic in supply, since there are no adverse supply side effects. Land does not disappear when it is taxed. Henry George, a great progressive of the late nineteenth century, argued, partly on this basis, for a land tax. It is ironic that rather than following this dictum, the United States has been doing just the opposite through its preferential treatment of capital gains.
Allowing rent to mostly accrue to land owners (as in Canada and other democracies) has the same negative effect as not collecting it all, as in the former USSR.
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Michael Hudson writes:
The former Soviet Russia and other [communist] economies had NO payment of rent. But they had land. Because Russia did not collect the rent for land it led to inefficiency. Bureaucrats let the "best" flats in a city to Communist Party members in return for favours.
