Equity
for the Landless
Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets of the
Incentive Taxation Philosophy
Applications
Abroad as Well as at Home
As important as our ideas are for the justice and efficiency of
the American economy, their application is even more important in
less developed countries, where often 80% of the land is held by 3%
of the population. To give all the citizens of these countries
chances to make something of their lives, it is extremely important
to equalize access to land, not by redividing the land (which
inevitably winds up putting land into the hands of people who cannot
use it well) but by requiring any one who uses land to pay according
to the unimproved value of the land that he or she uses. To bring
this message to the world, we must first apply it to ourselves.
... Read the whole article
George's land tax promotes
equity toward the landless in at least
four ways.
- One, it relieves them of taxes, to the extent that
landowners pay more;
- Two, it makes jobs by removing all tax penalties from
hiring workers, and also because the land tax, a fixed charge, spurs
landowners to use land to earn cash to pay the taxes;
- Three, while jobs are generating new money incomes, new
production supplies more goods and services. Those give substance to
the money incomes, precluding inflation such as poisoned the springs of
Keynesian "fiscal stimulus";
- Four, it offers the landless new chances to acquire land
themselves, as old owners release surplus lands to the market.
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article
Robert Ingersoll: A Lay Sermon
No man should be allowed to own any land that he does not use. Everybody
knows that — I do not care whether he has thousands or millions. I
have owned a great deal of land, but I know just as well as I know I am living
that I should not be allowed to have it unless I use it. And why? Don't
you know that if people could bottle the air, they would? Don't you know
that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know
that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if
they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how
it is. Now, the land belongs to the children of Nature. Nature invites
into this world every babe that is born. And what would you think of
me, for instance, tonight, if I had invited you here — nobody had charged
you anything, but you had been invited — and when you got here you
had found one man pretending to occupy a hundred seats, another fifty, and
another seventy-five, and thereupon you were compelled to stand up — what
would you think of the invitation? It seems to me that every child
of Nature is entitled to his share of the land, and that he should not be
compelled
to beg the privilege to work the soil, of a babe that happened to be born
before him. And why do I say this? Because it is not to our interest to have
a few landlords and millions of tenants. ... read
the whole sermon
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