Peter Smith

Who Was Henry George? by Agnes George de Mille A hundred years ago a young unknown printer in San Francisco wrote a book he called Progress and Poverty . He wrote after his daily working hours, in the only leisure open to him for writing. He had no real training in political economy. Indeed he had stopped schooling in the seventh grade in his native Philadelphia, and shipped before the mast as a cabin boy, making a complete voyage around the world. Three years later, he was halfway through a second voyage as able seaman when he left the ship in San Francisco and went to work as a journeyman printer. After that he took whatever honest job came to hand. All he knew of economics were the basic rules of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other economists, and the new philosophies of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, much of which he gleaned from reading in public libraries and from his own painstakingly amassed library. Marx was yet to be translated into English. This portrait by Harr...

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 assoc...

I am auguring that the best subsidy for extensive farming and stop the horrendous condition of feedlot farming would be to stop taxation on wages and put it on the value of land. Also tax inputs like energy and oil at a rate that reflects their environmental damage. This would rebalance the economic issues in modern farming practices and allow extensive farmers to compete on a level playing field against the foodlot farms. A land value tax relief would be given to those in ELS and other Agri environment schemes Our present taxation system rewards those who favour capital investment in machines and high level of chemicals and energy while it punishes those farming systems that use a lot of labour as labour is taxed disproportionally. A farmer could buy a new machine that he can offset his own taxation against and Vat. He does not pay the environmental costs on the fuel he uses or the chemicals. So when he makes an investment decision he rationally would favour machinery and chemica...

For those of en economic mind it is madness to give grants to buy land, as it only puts up the price of land. Therefore any aid is doomed to fail in any serious objective.   In my many years with the Wildlife Trust I saw this repeatedly, especially when the Heritage Lottery fund gave Land purchase grants. The irony is that people at the lowest income levels are buying lottery tickets to increase the wealth of the very richest in society, through the use of Heritage Lottery funds to purchase 'nature reserves'.   Land as a finite commodity and its price is directly linked to the sum total of money in the economy. Money is created by borrowing (sounds mad but is true). Therefore as the money supply has increased enormously so has land values.   The money supply will decrease as we enter the recession proper over the next 5 years and thus land values will go down. This has been a cyclic process and has gone on for hundreds, if not, thousands of years   This is why a tax ...

A Quote from Henry George - follow him on facebook  http://www.facebook.com/henry.george1 This quote encapsulates the most important concept for all humans to learn if we are to have prosperity progress and sustainability. "The underminer of civilization is not the existence of rent; civilization's enemy is the existence and growth of *speculative* and *monopoly* rent. It is speculative and monopoly rent that the heavy annual single tax on land values will annihilate. The growth of *ordinary*, non-speculative, non-monopoly rent is natural and beneficent and an indicator of social health, development and cooperation, but it's *private retention* is unjust, creates vast unearned fortunes, and, *worse*, generates land speculation (the systemic underuse and nonuse of valuable land in anticipation of higher future rents and land values), land hoarding and land monopoly, which together *drive down wages to the subsistence level* regardless of population size or so...

Ghost Towns: Fred Harrison describes how the reckless activities of property developers and banks have left Ireland and Spain in a state of economic collapse with growing poverty and no hope of recovery. Fred goes on to say That the solution to this problem is to stop taxing people wages and start taxing land and natural resources.