Peter Smith

A personal account, a BBC ambush that backfired, and the long unravelling of one of the most brazen policy frauds in modern British history Get me on Substack now:  Peter Smith Rewilding The science is now settled. It was settled, in truth, a long time ago. The tragedy is that it took four decades, a billion pounds of public money, and a quarter of a million dead badgers to force the establishment to admit what a growing number of independent scientists, and one very angry former biochemist with a BBC microphone, were saying all along. A Radio Studio, 2012 Let me take you back to 2012. The National Farmers Union was in full cry. Badger culls were being pushed hard. The political pressure on the government was intense, and the NFU’s lobbying machine was operating at full throttle, deploying its considerable resources to paint the badger as the villain of the bovine tuberculosis story. The Krebs report, the ISG final report, the great edifice of the Randomised Badger Culling ...

Why “Land Value Tax” is the wrong name for the most important idea in economics There is a problem hiding inside the most important reform proposal you’ve probably never fully understood. It’s not a complicated problem it’s actually a naming problem. But names shape thought, and this particular name has been quietly sabotaging the reform movement for over a century. The proposal is called Land Value Tax. And every single word in that phrase is, at some level, misleading. To paraphrase Voltaire's quip on the Holy Roman Empire: Its Not  land . Not  value . And — most importantly — not  tax . https://youtu.be/c01BIr-8HSw Why the words fail us Start with “land.” When most people hear that word, they picture fields. Pasture. The rural estates of the aristocracy. Something ancient and agricultural, distant from the realities of modern life in a terraced house in Swindon or a flat above a kebab shop in Hackney. But the proposal has almost nothing to do with dir...

How Land Value Tax and Natural Resource Rents Could Have Built the Most Prosperous Nation on Earth, and Why the Failure to Adopt Them Gave Us Putin Instead The inspiration for this essay stems from a meme shared by  R. Pettersson.  It addresses a subject I have explored extensively in conversations with my mentor, Fred Harrison   In the autumn of 1990, as the Soviet Union was entering its final convulsions, two economists flew to Moscow carrying an idea that was, in every meaningful sense, perfectly timed. Fred Harrison and Professor Mason Gaffney, both working in the tradition of Henry George, had been invited to advise the reformers around Mikhail Gorbachev on the shape of the new economic order that would replace Soviet central planning. They carried with them a proposal that was elegant in its simplicity and radical in its implications: instead of privatising Russia’s vast natural resources and land, the new Russian state should retain ownership of those assets in...