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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Pre-George Henry George is only the most famous of
those who have advocated these ideas. He was certainly not the
first. Interestingly, he arrived at his ideas quite
independently. The process by which he got there is described in Progress & Poverty. H.G. Brown: Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty: 10. Effect of Remedy Upon Wealth Production (in the unabridged P&P: Part IX — Effects of the Remedy: Chapter 1 — Of the effect upon the production of wealth)
Jeff Smith: Sharing Natural Rents to Sustain Human Society To get rich, or more likely to
stay rich, some of us can develop
land, especially sprawling shopping centers, and extract resources,
especially oil. While sprawl and oil depletion are not necessary,
they are more profitable than a car-free functionally integrated
city. Under the current rules of doing business, waste returns more
than efficiency. We let a few privatize rent -- ground rent and
resource rent -- although rent is a social surplus. As if rent were
not profit enough, winners of rent have also won further state favors
-- tax breaks, liability limits, subsidies, and a host of others
designed to impel growth (20 major ones follow herein).
If we are to sustain our selves, our civilization, and our eco-system, we must make some hard choices about property. What we decide to do with rent, whether we let it reward our exploiting or our attaining eco-librium, matters. Imagine society waking up to the public nature of rent. Then it would collect and share its surplus that manifests as the market value of sites, resources, the spectrum, and government-granted privileges. Then we could forego taxing labor and capital. On such a level playing field, this freed market would favor efficiency - the compact city - not waste - the mall and automobile. Proposals to share rent have
surfaced before - in antiquity by
Moses in the West and Mencius in the East. In the
modern era, the idea appears in a century cycle:
William Ogilvie: An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1782) and D. C. MacDonald's Preface to that essay, found in the 1891 edition of Birthright in Land by George Morton |
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Wealth
and Want
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www.wealthandwant.com
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... because democracy
alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can
prosper
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