This website is designed around looking at America, but virtually everything on it is also relevant in third world countries as well. And sometimes it is easier to see it when one's own country is not the subject.

Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets of the Incentive Taxation Philosophy

Lindy Davies: Land and Justice

It’s all about treating the land as an “asset.”

In "developing countries" it leads to a terrible vicious circle: peasants lose their land to one of two groups: either, first, to land-baron cronies of corrupt regimes — who hold land idle for the specific reason of not allowing peasants to use it, thus making sure they have no place to go, and are willing to work for subsistence wages — or, second, to multinational corporations, who run huge plantations to grow crops for export. The foreign exchange thus gained goes for debt service, which allows the ruling regime to keep playing by the IMF's rules, and stay in power. Meanwhile, the peasants gravitate to the cities, seeking nonexistent jobs, and end up in shantytowns that lack clean water and sewers.

We're told that two billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Now, certainly there is lots of poverty in the world — but that statistic troubles me. Two dollars a day? Consider your own basic needs, and ask yourself how far two bucks will go toward satisfying them. Nobody can survive on two dollars a day. Why haven't those two billion people just keeled over by now?

This sort of paradox led the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen to the studies described in his book Development as Freedom. Sen contends that the true measure of economic welfare — and therefore of development in any meaningful sense — can't be a matter of GDP and other conventional measures of "growth." Any true measure of economic welfare must have to do with the degree to which each person can set and achieve his or her own economic goals.

Economic freedom for the world’s poorest people is unquestionably all about the land. Let's say a peasant family has a goat and a garden, and, working carefully, can grow enough to feed itself. Occasionally a good harvest will yield some surplus which can be sold — there wouldn't be much of that, but let's say it brought in an average of two dollars a day. With thrift, enough for school clothes, maybe even books.

Now, let's imagine that the family lost their land — perhaps an injury or some other disaster made it impossible to keep farming it — and they had to go to the city, where they managed to find a combination of odd jobs, yielding them an income of $10 per day. Now, they had to somehow buy their food and every other necessity out of that ten dollars, and they had to live in a miserable shack, with open sewage running in unpaved streets — yet in terms of development numbers, their income had increased by $500%.

In which case did the family have more freedom? Which scenario is more conducive to development?

We were talking about the tendency for landowners to use land as an investment — a sensible thing to do — not to use it now if they don't need to, but to think in terms of enjoying its increase in value over time. We even identified that as the key to the problem of poverty. But — good heavens, what can we do about that? Isn't that just how the economy works? Isn't the private ownership of land a basic part of a modern economy? How can we do without such an important institution?

Or in other words — won't the poor always be with us?

Not necessarily. It has been plain, since very earliest days of civil society, that the private ownership of land leads to exploitation and great extremes of wealth and poverty. And, since the time of the Book of Leviticus, we have had a pretty good idea of what to do about it. In that book were recorded the words "The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is Mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." ... read the whole speech

Alanna Hartzok

Mason Gaffney: The Taxable Surplus of Land: Measuring, Guarding and Gathering It

Not only can you have both common land and free markets, you can't have one without the other. They go together, like love and marriage. You need market prices to help identify land's taxable surplus, which is the net product of land after deducting the human costs of using it. At the same time, you must support government from land revenues to have a truly free market, because otherwise you will raise taxes from production, trade, and capital formation, interfering with free markets. If you learn this second point, and act on it, you will have a much freer market than any of the OECD nations that now presume to instruct you, and that are campaigning vigorously to make all nations in the world "harmonize" their taxes to conform with their own abysmal systems.

• polluting air and water,
• wasting water,
• cutting timber whose value is less than the cost of logging, or
• populating remote regions whose costs exceed the benefits derived.