Land value tax (LVT) has been high on the political agenda for most of the past two centuries; in the three decades up to World War I it was backed by a widespread popular movement. Thus, in the broader perspective, its eclipse since about 1950 is exceptional. The flurry of fresh interest in recent years is due, amongst other things, to the
realisation that tax systems have hit the limit to what they can raise, whilst expectations of government continue growing and attempts to cut large welfare bills consistently fail.
LVT in its classic form is a tax on the annual rental value of all land, ignoring buildings and other developments, the valuation being on the assumption that the land is at its optimum use. It would not be additional to existing taxes but a partial or complete replacement for them. Proponents argue that it is a precondition for the solution of a wide range of apparently intractable economic ills. Opponents usually come up with objections
which are criticisms of what is not actually being proposed.
The vision of Economics with Justice is that a well-run economy can provide prosperity for all. There does not have to be a situation where a few get rich whilst most stay poor. There do not have to be violent cycles of boom and bust.
By taking recent examples of good practice and examining why they were effective,Peter Bowman, Head of Economics, explores how an economy can be developed and directed to work for the common good.
We live in interesting but uncertain times. In the economy a sense of instabilitycontinues to pervade. The crash of 2008 has not been followed by any fundamental reforms or substantial change and we still live in its shadow. A heavy burden of indebtedness, probably worse in the private sector than in the public sector and the pervasiveness of the doctrine of austerity has made recovery slow and painful. Meanwhile there is a growing suspicion that conventional economics is not the best voice to listen to find out how to make the world a better place. A growing number of economics students are demanding reform of their university curriculum. They are saying that it should at least be widened to include views other than just the orthodox one and there should be a more critical approach so that the basic assumptions and models should be carefully examined rather than just being passively accepted and applied.
Having a parent at home to take care of the family is a choice most families feel they can’t make.
The purpose of this booklet is to shed light on the economic conditions bearing down on families to better understand the pressures they are under and the choices available to them.
We have seen an increasing rise in the numbers of mothers returning to the workplace when their children are very young. Not such a long time ago 70% families had a mother at home, now only 28% do and that figure is falling fast. Crucially more stay at home mothers have gone back to employment in the past two years than in the previous 15 years combined.
I am not saying that mothers should not go out to work or that mothers at home should be regarded as better but I am questioning whether this is really what all these mothers want and whether they have a choice in the matter.
Today the market is seen as the pivotal point around which our economic system moves, and the starting point for the study of economics. The laws of the market – the laws of supply and demand – are said to direct economic activity, and, so it is said, if the market is allowed to operate in an open, free and self-regulating manner, the prosperity of all will increase.
Today the market includes not just what is produced, but also the factors of production and the producers. There are markets for claims on production, markets for future production, and markets for ideas. There is almost nothing that cannot be bought and sold.[1] It is almost impossible to imagine a world without markets.
But this was not always the case. Our Anglo-Saxon forebears, after settling in England, were self sufficient, without markets, money or specialisation. This is the story of the genesis of trade, specialisation and the use of money in Anglo-Saxon England.
There are a great many faults in the UK tax system, but in this paper three authors look at just a few from different angles.
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1. VALUE ADDED TAX, THE STEALTHIEST OF STEALTH TAXES. By Duncan Pickard. The author is a working farmer, who has had a good deal to do with VAT in practice.
In 1954 France was the first country in Europe to introduce a national VAT. France persuaded Germany and then other “common market” countries to adopt VAT.
When any country wanted to join the EEC, which became the EU, it had to have VAT. It was introduced in the UK in 1973.
VAT is the most harmful to economic activity of all the harmful taxes. It is the largest of the indirect taxes and affects poor people much more than the rich. The poorest fifth pay 31% of their take- home pay in indirect taxes, the richest fifth pay 13%.
A few days after I accepted the invitation to give this talk, I looked at the poster advertising the event and I was struck by the realisation that the title was absurdly ambitious and, since then, the absurdity of the ambition has increased day by day. So if you were anticipating a comprehensive history I am afraid I am going to disappoint you. This history will be very selective. I am going to concentrate on the period of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th because that covers the time when public revenue without taxation had widespread public support in both Britain and America and its prospects of being introduced looked most promising.
I shall use as my text for today’s talk a statement from the gospel of John Maynard Keynes. Right at the end of his great work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes rewards all those who have managed to get thus far with this observation;
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interest is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval’’.
The Danes’ might and power that suppressed the people,
the Decline that made Equality and Common Welfare possible; and
the Democracy and happyland neither of which are perfect – yet.
Today’s REMARKABLY EVEN DISTRIBUTION of wealth in Denmark is due to centuries of fatal defeats and fall from great might and power:
This article is meant to turn the readers’ attention to the fact that the down-turn made equality and welfare possible to Danes in general who inhabited and today inhabit the remaining part of Denmark.
The Anglo-Saxons, whose invasion of Britain began in AD 449, 1 regarded everything they seized by conquest as their common property, to be distributed as each new district was secured. ‘Property’ included the former inhabitants (the weala), 2 all their moveable possessions, their livestock, and their agricultural land.
The invaders shunned the towns and cities, settling in small villages usually composed of less than twenty households (hiwiscs). The village community granted each household an entirely private area around their house (a haga), usually bounded by a hedge, to be used as a kitchen garden, to rear chickens, to store crops and to keep tools and equipment. The head of each household was absolute master of this land, with rights at law ranging from the capture and execution of trespassers to the discipline of the household, including slaves.
IU Conference July 2013 – Peter Bowman – School of Economic Science
In March 2013 I took the high speed train from Beijing to Shanghai for the first time. It is a five hour journey with a steady speed of three hundred kilometres per hour. I was eager to get out of the city and see what the Chinese countryside was like. The scene was fascinating. For the whole journey almost all the land I saw was in use, much of it under cultivation and most of that in rectangular patches silver . The cultivation lay right against the built up areas which were considerable. In fact there was nothing I would have called countryside. Later that month I took another train journey, this time from London Paddington to Devon. I was struck by the contrast. Travelling west through the England once you are out of London there seem to be great expanses of green, very pretty but not very much appearing to be happening. The relationship of the Chinese people with the land was noticeably different to that of the English and I suspected that went back a long way.
A short while later I stumbled across a published copy of the doctoral thesis of Han Liang Huang, published in 1918 which traced back the story of Chinese land tenure from the beginning of its history. At first glance it looked like it would provide a useful source of information to help understand the Chinese relationship with the land but his underlying thesis was also arresting. Essentially it was thPandora Sale is: over its long history the principle source of government revenue has come directly from the land. What follows here is to quite a large extent a summary Han Liang’s findings/ By coincidence the same thesis was also referred to by Alanna Harzog in her recent presentation to the World Bank’s Land and Poverty Conference on “Socializing land rent, untaxing production”.
China is single most extensive and enduring civilization in the world. Its language, in spoken and written form, has been largely unchanged for some four thousand years. Its early history fades into mythology. Back in 2967 BC Huang-Ti (diHuang) brought the feudal provinces under his control, made them acknowledge him as emperor and received tributes which were in the form of levies derived from the land.
The Xia dynasty was in 2150 BC by Yu the Great. There had been a great flood and Yu was the administrator responsible for bringing the water under control. After the inundation arable land was in short supply. At that time the tradition was that the land belonged to the people at large (not to individuals, nor feudal chiefs not even the emperor). Individuals were allotted a plot of land, fifty mows (probably about ten acres) the traditional measure of area at the age of twenty and then gave it back when they reached sixty. There was a tribute system called Kung fa. For the central province of Zhi Zhou one tenth of the produce of the land was given to the emperor. In the other eight provinces the same fraction went to the feudal lord.
The Economic Philosophy of Georgism, and Decreasing the Gap Between Rich and Poor
Today, the gap between the rich and poor is wider than it has ever been, and while there are certainly a number of causes of inequality in general, it is hard to ignore the role that how we distribute, ’own’ and view the simple dirt under our feet has a large role to play in this problem. The problem itself of course, is not necessarily anything new by any means. There has always been a division between wealthier and poorer elements of society for as long as history has been recorded. However, as new ideas and moral guidelines were introduced by the British Empiricists, John Locke in particular, new modes of thought began to form, and ways in which society could be made a fairer place for all, while perhaps a pipe dream, were actively pursued. Henry George, a economic philosopher of the late 19th Century, was one such thinker, and proposed a system that he believed would make for a much fairer way of approaching, and taxing, land in general.
