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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Taxi
Medallions
Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets of the Incentive Taxation Philosophy When the principle that the value of government-assigned opportunities should be received by the public treasury is violated, the result is "privilege," which from its Latin roots means "private law," that is, law that permits one person to do what others are not permitted to do. Thus what we stand for is an end to privilege. Numerous examples of privilege are incorporated in our institutions.
This list of examples of
privilege, which is by no means
exhaustive, contains some privileges, such as acreage allotments and
import quotas, that would be best reformed by eliminating
restrictions and permitting all to do what now only some may do. For
other privileges, such as broadcast licenses and land titles, great
productivity results from the social understanding that a specified
individual will have the use of a given resource. For these
privileges, the best reform is the introduction of the requirement
that any person who is assigned such an opportunity must pay to the
public treasury an annual fee equal to what the opportunity would be
worth to someone else. ... Read
the whole article Priority
#1. Safeguarding the property tax
Priority #2: Enforce Good Laws
Priority
#3. De-Balkanize Tax Enclaves
Priority
#4. What Tax to Fight First?
Priority #5: Make Landowners Pay Their Taxes Another soft target is the Manhattan taxi license, or "medallion." For some reason this has long been a favorite object lesson among economists, even as they shut their eyes to grosser sources of rent. It may be because cabbies are rude and visible and lower class, but whatever the reasons these writers have shown their consciousness of the rent aspect of medallions, and raised the consciousness of others. The reason for pursuing soft targets is not for the money they may yield, but for principle. Once the principle is understood and established, wider applications should follow. In economic principle, fishing quotas and taxi medallions are just like conventional land titles: privileged control over limited natural resources. If it makes sense to socialize the rent from quotas and medallions, why not land titles too? Read the whole article
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