Peter Smith

My blog post about BREXIT was picked up and rewritten for a global audience in the Georgist Journal - a great honour for my good self. http://www.georgistjournal.org/2016/12/12/brexit-why-land-value-tax-can-stop-fascists-save-the-planet/ The Georgist Journal has a wealth of articles which I recommend anyone to read it If you are after a much deeper investigation into the issues surrounding Brexit and an explanation of how Land Rent Capture is the solution then read the excellent book by Fred Harrison: Beyond Brexit: The Blueprint: You can get it on amazon here:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Brexit-Blueprint-Fred-Harrison/dp/0995635102 and do visit Fred's excellent website www.sharetherents.org   where he published an excellent article ' Brexit and the Last Great Injustice '

A friend sent me some choice quotes from St. Ambrose of Milan (AD 339-397), who could have wrote these yesterday and not in the 4th century.  A man who understood the natural world and that the fundamental causes of poverty and evil all stem from the private ownership and exploitation of the gifts of nature. This got me thinking, while I was just reviewing my pension today, the main reason I will live in penury in my old age is rent, not just rent of a house or the high cost of a mortgage but all the rents on all the things we have in life in a million complex ways that pervade our society. To get around this many old people cling on to property they do not need, and vehemently oppose the one fundamental solution to poverty and environment damage..... taxes on land. Thus we make the situation worse for all and the future, from our greed and fear today. Poverty and environmental destruction today both stem from the private wealth to be generated from forcing rent onto to the...

It is one of my big ambitions to return red squirrels to all of the UK; non-native North American grey squirrels, introduced at the whim of some aristocratic thinking they look cute to his grounds,  have edged out our native red squirrels to near extinction in England. But it has been noted by many naturalists that red squirrels are present in the same place pine martens exist. Pine martens were wiped out in England by gamekeepers to keep them from their shooting estates, allowing our landowning elite to shoot that other alien invader, the pheasant, bred in their millions still today. It is rare for reds, pine martens and grey squirrels to co-exist, in fact the return of Pine Martens to central Ireland has spelt doom for the invasive greys and a leap in red squirrel numbers this has been coined the 'Sheehy Effect' after Wildwood's good friend Dr Emma Sheehy who has done so much of the Pine Marten Surveys that have confirmed this hypothesis.  In fact Dr Emma Sheehy is work...

What’s killing our wildlife, is a question that occupies my mind a lot & getting to the bottom of the issue and addressing it is my lifes work. So it is my mission to understand why many people do not critically assess this and put the policies in place that address wildlife loss as efficiently as possible. In my career I have two issues with fellow conservationists and ‘greens’who have been getting it wrong for so long: Following the herd and not addressing the real needs, chiefly not addressing the issues of inefficient land use as the primary driver of biodiversity loss Focusing on ineffective solutions that are counterproductive to biodiversity conservation, chief of which is subsides to landowners and not on fundamental solutions such as a Land Value Tax and taxes on environmental degradation. One approach, to put some real numbers on the relative importance on the things that are killing our wildlife, is to look at all the threatened (and near threatened) wildlife...

"Something vital was missing from the campaigns to alert the world to the way our natural habitats were being wrecked." Conservationists must relaunch their vision to target the financial drivers of ecological destruction: So says Fred Harrison, the economist who predicted the financial collapse of 2008 in his blog commenting on the chapter I wrote in the new book 'Rent Unmasked' Read his blog about it here: Saving Nature: the Missing Link   http://www.sharetherents.org/saving-nature-missing-link/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, yesterday committed the UK government to providing subsidies for farmers worth £2.3 billion a year until 2020 and most of the press has hailed it as vital to the UK economy but is it? Phillip Hammond, the enemy of real British farmers - the friend of landowners  The first thing to understand is where does all these subsidies go, whether its direct payments to farmers or in manipulating global food prices. The net effect of these subsidies is that they are capitalised into higher agricultural land prices and higher rents. "In many ways, nature conservation has become just another method of rent extraction by landowners who are trying to hide the fact that modern farmers’ fields are essentially deserts, devoid of wildlife, and the taxpayer must pay ‘rent’ if we want wild animals to occupy ‘their land’."  Peter Smith Rent & high land values are unique in that it stifles our farming efficiency and robs the productive capacity of our...

I have had my first contribution to a book published, co-authored with 12 leading Professors from around the world, the book focuses on economic solutions to social and environmental problems.  The book comprises of essays in honour of Professor Mason Gaffney, who has for years researched and published the most insightful work in to the economic concepts that can solve our social and environmental problems. Professor Gaffney is a personal hero of mine I am am deeply honored to be chosen by the Schalkenbach Foundation to honor Mason in this way.  “An inveterate optimist [who] makes an excellent case that, by applying the Henry George principle, we can reduce inequality, and raise ample public revenues to be directed at any one of a multitude of society’s ills”. Joseph Stiglitz (University Professor at Columbia University, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics)   Mason Gaffney Describing how to solve the water crisis in California: ...