View source for Quick Commentary on Alternatives to Property Taxes

Can anyone own the radio waves or the air? While we are accustomed to thinking of property as inclusive of land, consider that the 'land' may be defined as the natural resources, which not a single one of us labored to produce, save God if you are religious or spiritual, or Spinoza's god if not.

However, improvements upon the land most certainly involve labor and therefore should not be taxed any more than income or sales, IMO. 

Given recent murmurings from the left about guaranteed income and such, land value tax combined with some level of distribution should appeal to left and right, IMO. 

There are also many good examples such as in Singapore, etc. and it also, if provisioned well, can act as a natural conservation of the land (the natural resources). Objections over loss of home and farm can be dealt with via exemptions system as is common to most all taxation systems. Furthermore, Texas already has systems in place for land valuation assessment, as well as exemptions. So really no change would need to occur other than piloting the system in an area with a willing populace to test it out, and if successful expand from there. There are examples of areas which implemented the system and turned otherwise dying areas into beautiful 'gardens'. 

In the event that such notions sound like they originate from the liberal looney bin, consider the conservative words of one of the men who arguably fueled much of the dissent necessary for the American revolution to get started. Quoting from him as follows: 

“The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust…The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.”

“Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title deeds should issue.”

Thus, “Every proprietor, therefore of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea)... Each individual attaining the age of 21, should receive the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural in heritage, by the introduction of land property…and the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.”

Excerpts from Agrarian Justice selected by Tom Paine Friends Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002

Consider also: http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.htm

Consider also: http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/

Consider also: "It is evidently the same thing that has prevented all the scholastic economists, both those who preceded and those who have succeeded him, from giving any clear and consistent statement of the laws of distribution or the origin of property. This is a pre-assumption they cannot bring themselves to abandon – the pre-assumption that land must be included in the category of property and a place found in the laws of distribution for the income of landowners. Since natural law can take no cognizance of the ownership of land, they are driven in order to support this pre-assumption to treat distribution and property as matters of human institution only. " See here: http://www.landvaluetax.org/download-document/158-the-idea-of-property.html


I have attempted to document a rationale on this topic here, it wasn't until later that I learned all these smart people had already figured this topic out. See more thoughts here: [[The_Land_and_Labor]]

I know it was a long read -thanks for getting to this sentence. Have a good day.