Public
Goods
As economists use the term, a public good is one whose
consumption is non-rival and non-exclusive. To be non-rival means that
consumption of
a good or service by some does not preclude its consumption by others.
To be non-exclusive means that non-payers cannot be prohibited from using
that
good or service. — Bill Batt (below)
Henry George: The Common Sense of Taxation (1881
article)
The more it is examined the more clearly it will be seen that there is no
valid reason why we should, in any case, attempt to tax all property. That
equality should be the rule and aim of taxation is true, and this for the
reason given in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created
equal. But equality does not require that all men should be taxed alike,
or that all things should be taxed alike. It merely requires that whatever
taxes are imposed shall be equally imposed upon the persons or things in
like conditions or situations; it merely requires that no citizen shall be
given an advantage, or put at a disadvantage, as compared with other citizens.
The true purposes of government are well stated in the preamble to the
Constitution of the United States, as they are in the Declaration of Independence.
To insure the general peace, to promote the general welfare, to secure to
each individual the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness — these are the proper ends of government, and are therefore
the ends which in every scheme of taxation should be kept in mind.
As to amount of taxation, there is no principle which imposes any arbitrary
limit. Heavy taxation is better for any community than light taxation, if the
increased revenue be used in doing by public agencies things which could not
be done, or could not be as well and economically done, by private agencies.
Taxes could be lightened in the city of New York by dispensing with street-lamps
and disbanding the police force. But would a reduction in taxation gained in
this way be for the benefit of the people of New York and make New York a more
desirable place to live in? Or if it should be found that heat and light could
be conducted through the streets at public expense and supplied to each house
at but a small fraction of the cost of supplying them by individual effort,
or that the city railroads could be run at public expense so as to give every
one transportation at very much less than it now costs the average resident,
the increased taxation necessary for these purposes would not be increased
burden, and in spite of the larger taxation required, New York would become
a more desirable place to live in. It is a mistake to condemn taxation as bad
merely because it is high; it is a mistake to impose by constitutional provision,
as in many of our States has been advocated, and in some of our States has
been done, any restriction upon the amount of taxation. A restriction upon
the incurring of public indebtedness is another matter. In nothing is the far-reaching
statesmanship of Jefferson more clearly shown than in his proposition that
all public obligations should be deemed void after a certain brief term — a
proposition which he grounds upon the self-evident truth that the earth belongs
in usufruct to the living, and that the dead have no control over it, and can
give no title to any part of it. But restriction upon public debts is a very
different thing from restriction upon the power of taxation, and reasons which
urge the one do not apply to the other. Nor is increased taxation necessarily
proof of governmental extravagance. Increase in taxation is in the order of
social development, for the reason that social development tends to the doing
of things collectively that in a ruder state are done individually, to the
giving to government of new functions and the imposing of new duties. Our public
schools and libraries and parks, our signal service and fish commissions and
agricultural bureaus and grasshopper investigations, are evidences of this. ...
The possession of wealth is the inducement to the exertion necessary to
the production and maintenance of wealth. Men do not work for the pleasure
of working, but to get the things their work will give them. And to tax the
things that are produced by exertion is to lessen the inducement to exertion.
But over and above the benefit to the possessor, which is the stimulating
motive to the production of wealth, there is a benefit to the community,
for no matter how selfish he may be, it is utterly impossible for any one
to entirely keep to himself the benefit of any desirable thing he may possess.
These diffused benefits when localized give value to land, and this may be
taxed without in any wise diminishing the incentive to production.
To illustrate: A man builds a fine house or large factory in a poorly improved
neighborhood. To tax this building and its adjuncts is to make him pay for
his enterprise and expenditure — to take from him part of his natural
reward. But the improvement thus made has given new beauty or life to the
neighborhood, making it a more desirable place than before for the erection
of other houses or factories, and additional value is given to land all about.
Now to tax improvements is not only to deprive of his proper reward the man
who has made the improvement, but it is to deter others from making similar
improvements. But, instead of taxing improvements, to tax these land values
is to leave the natural inducement to further improvement in full force,
and at the same time to keep down an obstacle to further improvement, which,
under the present system, improvement itself tends to raise. For the advance
of land values which follows improvement, and even the expectation of improvement,
makes further improvement more costly.
See how unjust and short-sighted is this system. Here is a man who, gathering
what little capital he can, and taking his family, starts West to find a
place where he can make himself a home. He must travel long distances; for,
though he will pass plenty of land nobody is using, it is held at prices
too high for him. Finally he will go no further, and selects a place where,
since the creation of the world, the soil, so far as we know, has never felt
a plowshare. But here, too, in nine cases out of ten, he will find the speculator
has been ahead of him, for the speculator moves quicker, and has superior
means of information to the emigrant. Before he can put this land to the
use for which nature intended it, and to which it is for the general good
that it should be put, he must make terms with some man who in all probability
never saw the land, and never dreamed of using it, and who, it may be, resides
in some city, thousands of miles away. In order to get permission to use
this land, he must give up a large part of the little capital which is seed-wheat
to him, and perhaps in addition mortgage his future labor for years. Still
he goes to work: he works himself, and his wife works, and his children work — work
like horses, and live in the hardest and dreariest manner. Such a man deserves
encouragement, not discouragement; but on him taxation falls with peculiar
severity. Almost everything that he has to buy — groceries, clothing,
tools — is largely raised in price by a system of tariff taxation which
cannot add to the price of the grain or hogs or cattle that he has to sell.
And when the assessor comes around he is taxed on the improvements he has
made, although these improvements have added not only to the value of surrounding
land, but even to the value of land in distant commercial centers. Not merely
this, but, as a general rule, his land, irrespective of the improvements,
will be assessed at a higher rate than unimproved land around it, on the
ground that "productive property" ought to pay more than "unproductive
property" — a principle just the reverse of the correct one, for
the man who makes land productive adds to the general prosperity, while the
man who keeps land unproductive stands in the way of the general prosperity,
is but a dog-in-the-manger, who prevents others from using what he will not
use himself.
Or, take the case of the railroads. That railroads are a public benefit
no one will dispute. We want more railroads, and want them to reduce their
fares and freight. Why then should we tax them? for taxes upon railroads
deter from railroad building, and compel higher charges. Instead of taxing
the railroads, is it not clear that we should rather tax the increased value
which they give to land? To tax railroads is to check railroad building,
to reduce profits, and compel higher rates; to tax the value they give to
land is to increase railroad business and permit lower rates. The elevated
railroads, for instance, have opened to the overcrowded population of New
York the wide, vacant spaces of the upper part of the island. But this great
public benefit is neutralized by the rise in land values. Because these vacant
lots can be reached more cheaply and quickly, their owners demand more for
them, and so the public gain in one way is offset in another, while the roads
lose the business they would get were not building checked by the high prices
demanded for lots. The increase of land values, which the elevated roads
have caused, is not merely no advantage to them — it is an injury;
and it is clearly a public injury. The elevated railroads ought not to be
taxed. The more profit they make, with the better conscience can they be
asked to still further reduce fares. It is the increased land values which
they have created that ought to be taxed, for taxing them will give the public
the full benefit of cheap fares.
So with railroads everywhere. And so not alone with railroads, but with
all industrial enterprises. So long as we consider that community most prosperous
which increases most rapidly in wealth, so long is it the height of absurdity
for us to tax wealth in any of its beneficial forms. We should tax what we
want to repress, not what we want to encourage. We should tax that which
results from the general prosperity, not that which conduces to it. It is
the increase of population, the extension of cultivation, the manufacture
of goods, the building of houses and ships and railroads, the accumulation
of capital, and the growth of commerce that add to the value of land — not
the increase in the value of land that induces the increase of population
and increase of wealth. It is not that the land of Manhattan Island is now
worth hundreds of millions where, in the time of the early Dutch settlers,
it was only worth dollars, that there are on it now so many more people,
and so much more wealth. It is because of the increase of population and
the increase of wealth that the value of the land has so much increased.
Increase of land values tends of itself to repel population and prevent improvement.
And thus the taxation of land values, unlike taxation of other property,
does not tend to prevent the increase of wealth, but rather to stimulate
it. It is the taking of the golden egg, not the choking of the goose that
lays it.
Every consideration of policy and ethics squares with this conclusion.
The tax upon land values is the most economically perfect of all taxes. It
does not raise prices; it maybe collected at least cost, and with the utmost
ease and certainty; it leaves in full strength all the springs of production;
and, above all, it consorts with the truest equality and the highest justice.
For, to take for the common purposes of the community that value which results
from the growth of the community, and to free industry and enterprise and
thrift from burden and restraint, is to leave to each that which he fairly
earns, and to assert the first and most comprehensive of equal rights — the
equal right of all to the land on which, and from which, all must live.
Thus it is that the scheme of taxation which conduces to the greatest production
is also that which conduces to the fairest distribution, and that in the
proper adjustment of taxation lies not merely the possibility of enormously
increasing the general wealth, but the solution of these pressing social
and political problems which spring from unnatural inequality in the distribution
of wealth.
"There is," says M. de Laveleye, in concluding that work in which
he shows that the first perceptions of mankind have everywhere recognized
a most vital distinction between property in land and property which results
from labor, — "there is in human affairs one system which is the
best; it is not that system which always exists, otherwise why should we
desire to change it; but it is that system which should exist for the greatest
good of humanity. God knows it, and wills it; man's duty it is to discover
and establish it." ... read the whole article
Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets
of the
Incentive Taxation Philosophy
Creating a More
Productive Economy
The ideas we espouse are attractive not only for their
embodiment
of principles of justice, but also because they can be expected to
lead to a more productive economy.
Economists agree that the
imposition of taxes generally retards an
economy. The reason for this is that with almost all taxes, it is
possible for a tax payer to reduce total tax collections by doing
less of whatever is taxed--work less, spend less, save less, etc.
This means that taxes generate an incentive to be less
productive.
With fees for the use of
government-assigned opportunities, on the
other hand, the only thing that a person can do to reduce the amount
of money that he or she pays is to use fewer of these opportunities.
But then the opportunities can be used by someone else, who will pay
the fees, and total public revenue will be unchanged. There is no
possibility reducing total government revenue by being less
productive. Thus these fees can be collected without dragging down
the economy in the way that existing taxes do.
Our ideas
provide for the natural financing of any worthwhile
public expenditure that makes a particular area more attractive or
productive -- parks, freeways, subways, sewer systems, etc. These
public expenditures raise the rental value of land in their vicinity,
and thereby raise the fees that can be collected for using the land.
If the activity is worthwhile, the increase in rental values will be
sufficient to pay for the activity.
Another way in which our ideas
promote a more efficient economy is
by eliminating the opportunity grow rich by having government promote
one's own interest at the expense of others. Such distortions of the
political process can occur either by persuading a government agency
to spend money in a way that raises the value of land that one owns
while others foot the bill, or by persuading a government agency to
prohibit others from doing what one is permitted to do. In both kinds
of cases, the person who promotes his or her own interest has no
reason to take account of the costs that are thereby imposed on
others, and typically these costs to others are greater than the
self-seeking benefits. This makes the economy less productive.
Furthermore, the very possibility
of growing rich by manipulating
government action draws talented people into the effort to manipulate
government decisions, when they could be employed doing something
useful.... Read the whole article
Nic Tideman: Improving
Efficiency and Preventing
Exploitation in Taxing and Spending Decisions
For
truly national public goods, other ideas must be explored. One
of the major national public goods is defense. In a perfectly just
world, everyone would be so respectful of the rights of others, and
everyone would feel so safe that no defense spending would be
desired. In a less perfect world, many people, but not all, want
public defense expenditures. How can they be provided justly?
Some financing of defense expenditures
can be provided by a
Pigouvian tax on the externality of accumulating capital, which makes
a nation a more attractive target of aggression. If the U.S. requires
a greater defense budget than Canada, which is larger in area, it is
because the greater value of the assets in the U.S. makes the U.S. a
more attractive target of aggression. Thus anyone who owns capital
might reasonably be charged for the increase in the defense budget
that is needed to make other citizens as safe as they would be if
that one person's capital were not adding to the attractiveness of
nation as a target. It would be interesting to know how much of the
defense budget could be covered by such charges. I propose a
self-assessed tax of, perhaps, 1% per year on the value of all assets
and contractual rights, to pay the costs of defense. The owner
assesses the value and pays a corresponding tax, and if anyone wants
to buy the asset at the assessed value, it is sold. There could
be a
personal exemption of perhaps $50,000 per year, and an exemption for
personal papers. There could be a local add-on to pay the costs of
local police and courts.
An even greater share of the federal budget is used for various
programs that provide help for people with special needs--welfare,
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, disaster
assistance, etc. Some of these programs (social security, Medicare,
and unemployment compensation) are funded in part by payments by
prospective beneficiaries. But all incorporate substantial elements
of deliberate redistribution. ...
Read the whole article
Fred Foldvary: Geo-Rent:
A Plea to Public Economists
Public goods are usually defined
as both nonrival and nonexcludable.
The public finance literature often alleges “market failure” for goods
such as streets, sewers, parks, security, and fire fighting. Once a
collective good is provided, it is not practical or desirable to
exclude persons. For example, even if one agrees that people can be
excluded from a city park, it would not be desirable to have walls and
gates to keep out the free riders.
The “free rider” doctrine, however, tends to treat public goods
as
though they have no location in space and time. Somewhere, out in the
ether, there is a public good and some users who cannot be made to pay
for benefits. But the benefits of most real-world public goods fall
within an ambit that is territorial. Accordingly, those benefits become
capitalized into the market price of land within that ambit. Those
using the civic services are included by proximity; it is costly for
far-away users to visit a neighborhood park. Residents, businesses, and
customers willingly pay more because they benefit from the territorial
goods. Most users therefore do make payments that are proportional to
such amenities, since they must pay to use land. But the payments are
made to the landowner. The market-failure doctrine for public
goods is
turned on its head: Users do tend to pay in an indirect sense, and
government policy creates the free riding of the landowners, at the
expense of the extraneous taxpayers. Rather than correcting any
deficiency of markets, policy is iatrogenic, that is, illness caused by
the doctor. Streets, parks, and security suffer from free riding
because the doctor made it that way. This insight is rarely found in
mainstream sources. Read the entire article
Nic Tideman: A Bill of
Economic Rights and Obligations
Communities are allowed to have
whatever taxes and regulations
their citizens choose. Anyone who is dissatisfied can live elsewhere.
While communities would be permitted to tax wages and interest if
they wished, they would find it attractive to do so only if their
citizens were content with such sharing. The primary source of
financing for communities would be the rental value of land and other
natural opportunities. Because the provision of a worthwhile local
public good generally raises rent by enough to pay for the good,
communities would generally be able to finance themselves with only a
fraction of the rent of land. The rest of rent could provide as
a
basic income for all.
Support for those who are unable to provide for themselves would
come from this basic income, from the generosity of the fellow
citizens of their community, and from insurance that their parents
might reasonable be expected to provide for them in a world in which
all parents received justice themselves. ...
While the bill of economic rights
and obligations does not address
the issue explicitly, it should be understood that people have a
right to redress for past injustice, no matter how far back in the
past. If some persons have inferior starting positions because they
are the descendants of slaves who, because of that status, were
unable to provide what others provided to their children, then there
should be a levy on the property of the descendants of slave-owners
to rectify that injustice.
In fulfilling its obligation to
ensure that future generations had
opportunities at least as great as those of the present generation,
people would want to take account of:
1. The amount of land per
capita, adjusted for the quality of land;
2. The level of technology that will be available;
3. The education and any initial wealth that is provided to all
children;
4. The level of public infrastructure;
5. The level of public debt;
6. Environmental quality;
7. The price of depletable natural resources.
Decreases in some items could be
offset by increases in others. If
people wanted to have more children than could be provided with
opportunities equal to those of the present generation, Congress and
state legislatures would have an obligation to tax those who wanted
to have children, so that people would have fewer children, and so
that all children could be provided with an initial endowment upon
attaining maturity, to compensate for reductions in other items on
the list. Read the entire article
Peter Barnes: Capitalism
3.0 — Chapter 6: Trusteeship of Creation (pages 79-100)
A Second Set of Books
Mental models begin with assumptions. Most economists today assume there
are only two kinds of property, private (that is, corporate or individual)
and state. There are no shared assets, no inter- or intragenerational obligations,
and no nonhumans other than those we eat.
Yet as we’ve seen, many things are missing here. The most obvious
omission is the great economy of nature within which the human enterprise
operates. We’re borrowing prodigiously from that economy, but not recording
the loans. Equally absent are future generations, from whom we’re borrowing
just as wantonly and surreptitiously. In a proper bookkeeping system, every
loan shows up on two balance sheets, the borrower’s and the lender’s.
One entity’s liability is another entity’s asset. But this isn’t
true in contemporary economics. When the human economy grows, assets on corporate
and individual balance sheets go up, but nowhere is there a debit. In fact,
there aren’t any accounts that could be debited. There’s only
good growth on one side of the ledger, and on the other, a void in which
illth and debt accumulate, uncounted and unnoticed.
In recent years, economists have added a few bits to this stripped-down
model. For example, they now recognize public goods and ecosystem services
as contributors of economic value. Public goods are services like national
defense, education, and flood control, which benefit everyone but can’t
easily be sold at a profit. Because markets don’t adequately supply
them, governments step in and do so. Economists sometimes debate whether
the value of these public goods exceeds the “burden” they impose
on taxpayers, but they don’t see the expenditures as adding value to
any account, or to any asset owned by anyone.
Similarly, many economists now recognize ecosystem services as valuable
inputs to the economy. However, the ecosystems that produce these services
have no owners or balance sheets. They’re just there, floating in space,
with no connection to humans. What I’m suggesting is that economists
treat them as if they were common property held in trust. This simple supposition
would not only put ecosystems on the books, enabling us to track them better;
it would also pave the way to real-world property rights that actually protect
those ecosystems. ... read
the whole chapter
Mason Gaffney: Megabucks
for Negabucks: Solving the Water
Crisis
There’s more than one way to
skin a cat. When Henry George
wrote “We must make land common property” it was in a place
and at a time when most land in sight had been privatized only
recently, using crude methods. “Force and fraud” were not
dim memories in 1879, but a living presence. So George’s phrase
did not strike people then as being any more shocking than it is
today to remind them that the public domain, with its pasturelands,
waters, rights of way, the air, radio spectrum, fish, mineral riches
and timber, belongs to us all in common. Today, to replicate
George’s impact, we would do well to train our sights on the
public domain that is currently being privatized.... Read the whole article
Bill Batt: The Nexus
of Transportation, Economic Rent, and Land Use
Correcting
Distortions by Pricing:
Increasing the Recovery of Transportation Service Costs
With respect to charges upon transportation services and
externalities,
there are several components to a proper pricing design.(25) The
first step to proper pricing is to identify the proportion of
transportation services that ought rightly to be seen as private goods
as opposed to public goods.(26)
Although this is a daunting task, the frequent figure used is 80
percent - 20 percent proportion.
- The public good proportion of road use
reflects the amount of reliance by services provided by the government
and associated agencies like mail service, national defense, public
safety (ambulance, police and fire departments), and so on.
- The private
use of the roads constitutes the overwhelming amount of its use. This
means that as a rule 80 percent of the highway use charges should be
paid by individual drivers, directly or indirectly.
It is easy to
distinguish five elements of transportation service cost: capital
investment, maintenance costs, regulation costs, environmental
externalities and congestion costs. Each of these calls for a different
treatment with respect to revenue design.
26. As economists use the term,
a public good is one whose consumption
is non-rival and non-exclusive. To be non-rival means that consumption
of a good or service by some does not preclude its consumption by
others. To be non-exclusive means that non-payers cannot be prohibited
from using that good or service. One economics textbook offers the
following alternative definition: "A public good is a commodity or
service whose benefits are not depleted by an additional user and for
which it is generally difficult or impossible to exclude people from
its benefits, even if they are unwilling to pay for them. In contrast,
a private good is characterized by both excludability and
depletability." William J. Baumol and Alan S. Blinder, Economics:
Principles and Policy, Third Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1985), p.543. National defense, clean air, and mosquito
control are usually offered as cases of services that come as close to
being "pure" public goods as the real world offers. A private good, in
contrast, is one which has the attributes of being both rival and
exclusive. That is, its consumption by one party depletes its
availability to others, and consumers can be required to pay in order
to obtain it. A hamburger can be considered a private good insofar as
it cannot be eaten by two persons at the same time. For a good to be
exclusive means that those who do not pay can be barred from its
consumption: the metering of electric, gas, cable, and phone lines is
done to prevent non-payers from tapping in. Radio and television are
non-exclusive, and therefore are paid for not by consumer listeners but
through advertising. Highways have elements of both public and private
good, and the demand for each should ideally determine how much each
sector should pay. See also Musgrave, pp. 6-ff. ... read
the whole article
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