England needs a land reform debate

Sue, A great article demonstrating the one aspect of the crazy economic system we live under.

I have made a deep study into land reform in the UK  and after looking for many solutions I discovered that there is a very simple solution that would really work. It has been promoted by all of the world’s leading economists, yet that solution has been systematically side-lined, as those that benefit from that economic status quo are the people who affect politics and political discourse, and so have blocked its wider discussion and implementation.

As I have mentioned a number of times the only real land reform that is needed is a system whereby the government collects the ‘rents’ of land and natural resources (and abolishes  all other taxes such as Income, NIC,  VAT etch).

The untaxed monopolisation of land means we will always be in this situation no matter what other remedies are tried. Lobbyist and vested interests have achieved the complete abolishment on all taxes associated with holding land, indeed there are many tax advantage to land ownership. The laws of land and its taxation has been groomed for centuries to harvest the wealth of all hard working people in this country so it can be received, with little tax, by landowners, monopolistic companies and investors in our banking system.

Any land reform that does not take out the unearned income from landownership will mean the attempted land reform will soon revert back to the system of monopolistic rent extraction that we have at the moment.  This is down to how rents work (Ricardo’s Law) and how the market will always take increases in productivity into land values and rents.

The smallholder or farmer who pays rent will always be in relative poverty as no matter how hard they work or whatever subsidy there receive. It will, over time, end up capitalised in the value of the land and charged as rent, by the landlord.

I would urge everyone to read Progress and Poverty (modern Version) you can get a free PDF or audio book from this website http://www.hgchicago.org/ It sets out the problems and solutions in a coherent way and shows how all attempts at land reform are doomed to fail unless economic rents are captured and shared amongst all.

It is the greatest book ever written in my humble opinion and strips away all frippery about economics and gets to the root cause of inefficiency and poverty that is pre-determined in our political and legal system.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beaver, Rewilding & Land Value Tax have the answer to the UK's Flooding Problem.

Image
Interesting the solution to the problems of flooding is the same for many of the problems facing Britain in the economic, housing and environmental crisis: Tax land values. This is because marginal farmland which is only farmed because of enormous taxpayer subsidies, and produces little food, will come out of production and can revert to flood plain and naturally water absorbing wild land - saving us from the flooding My press release on these issues of flooding: Beaver & Rewilding have the answer to the UK's Flooding Problem. _____________________________________________ Peter Smith, Wildwood Trust Chief Executive said: “It took the death of school children in a catastrophic flood event to shock the Dutch authorities to really tackle flooding on the Rhine; one of their answers was to stop farming on flood plain and to create a giant natural wetland, managed by wild horses, to prevent this tragedy from happening again.” _______________________________________________ ...
Read more

Zen and the Art of Land Value Tax

Image
  Or why the green movement has trouble accepting the one policy that will guarantee their objectives.   Land Value Tax (LVT) in its full theory is very complicated and to understand it properly requires a lot of thought and to mechanistically work out how it is fundamental to the protection of nature & natural assets. I myself have been attacked at conferences by well-meaning greens who’s hostility and almost zeal at condemning LVT leaves me depressed and confused as to their thinking. Why such people should have such anger, denial and almost  willful  need not to educate themselves of the economics of environmental destruction needs further investigation.  My best answer for this came from the similarities to the title theme of Robert M. Pirsig's bestselling book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ exploring the ‘Metaphysics of Quality’. Even though LVT is official Green Party Policy, explaining LVT to the leaders of the gree...
Read more

How do we stop the Insect Apocalypse?

Image
There have been a number of articles this week on the insect apocalypse, with some studies showing an 80% drop in insect numbers since the late 90s. These come from the car windshield splatter effect. We now see so few bugs splattered across our windscreen when many of us over 40 in childhood saw  our car windscreen splattered with insects, and every stop our parents had to wipe hundreds of squashed bugs from our windscreens during the summer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects More detailed studies in Germany have identified a 75% decline in flying insect numbers over a 26 year period. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 As regular readers of this blog will know, I am far more interested in practical solutions to ecological problems than in the endless, often misleading debates presented in mainstream media. One of my pet hates is the way these “futile dilemm...
Read more