Middle East
Jeff Smith: How Sharing Earth Brought Peace
Since forever, humans have claimed and counter-claimed every square inch of this planet. Occasionally, these disputes have ended peacefully. What has worked in other times and places might work again in the Mideast. Delivering a double dividend, what settled land disputes also developed moribund economies and revived developed ones. Among others, New York, now aiming to rebuild, has used this policy before. Because it's growing popular among environmentalists, greens could lead the US to geonomics.
Bloodless Resolutions
On a distant ridge at dawn, a Palestinian might gaze across the desert at the hills where his fathers before him had grazed sheep, where now sprout Israeli settlements. Many American suburbanites, too, cannot go home anymore, to childhood’s field or woods or marsh, now filled or clear-cut or leveled and covered by monotonous boxy structures. An Australian aborigine knows a similar scene of displacement and an effective means of redress. ...
Mideast implementation
These cases involved different classes, not different cultures. Yet with a new twist the rent rebate that worked within society may work between societies. The Koran urges landlords to not gouge tenants but to consider land a trust. In Israel, admonished to not own land forever, since the land is Mine (Leviticus), the National Trust leases all the land to the occupants. These strictures could lead to geonomics.
Israel and Palestine would establish a steward to collect land dues and disburse rent dividends a la Alaska's oil dividend. Since land is more valuable in Israel than in Palestine, Jews would pay in more than Arabs, yet everyone would get back the same. And since Israelis prosper, they drive up land values; having Jews as co-owners developing land, raising its value, fattening everyone's Citizens Dividend Arabs might accept that. Profit does make for strange bedfellows. Two archrivals, China and Taiwan, recently agreed to explore for oil together.
Mideast Development
While sharing rent may soothe hurt feelings, collecting it stimulates development. As a World Bank report acknowledged, all the Asian Tigers first had land reform before becoming Tigers. Land taxes impel owners to put their land to its best use, which requires employment and construction. As workers exchange wages for goods, they generate more output for everyone.
Using geonomics, people have turned some of the poorest lands into the richest economies. Hong Kong is a barren rock owned by the public. The city collects enough site-rent to keep taxes on effort way down. Thus prices are low and investment and income high, moving FORTUNE magazine to name Hong Kong the world's best city for business. In a different culture, Mexicali (Mexico) replaced the property tax with a land tax and bettered itself.
If Palestine does forgo taxes, it'd become a tax haven, attracting money from wealthier neighbors without incurring debt. As Palestine sustains development, it could sell bonds at a lower rate. When Palestinian bonds are selling on Wall Street, overlapping self-interest will wither the appeal of terrorist rhetoric.