From the BBC: Russia’s foreign ministry has condemned the EU’s call for Europe-based airlines to avoid Belarusian airspace, calling it completely irresponsible. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting after Russia had denied entry to two airlines that planned to avoid Belarus, said passenger safety was at risk… Belarus will lose out on millions of dollars a year in over-flight...

From The Daily Telegraph (£): Japanese-owned NCP, which operates across 500 sites and employs more than 1,100 people, has written to landlords asking them to write off tens of millions of pounds as it scrambles to strike a deal with landlords by April. “Without a fundamental shift in NCP’s commercial arrangements with landlords, there can be no certainty that NCP will be able to survive,” the operator...

President Trump is stepping in to the dispute over EU proposals for digital taxes. That raises important questions. What do the US tech giants owe to foreign governments that they do not already pay through existing taxes? How exactly do these obligations and liabilities arise?

One argument put forward against LVT is that ‘land’ (in the physical sense) is ‘not so important any more in a modern economy’. The proponent then mentions something like intellectual property rights (copyrights, patents etc), points at a few companies who make large amounts of money from them (Facebook etc) and says that is what we should be taxing. Clearly, in overall...

An ill-informed article in The Guardian draws attention to the “riches” held by Oxbridge colleges – £21 billion, according the report, “Guardian study reveals how wealth of nearly 70 colleges is held in estates, endowments and artworks“. The mischief and disinformation is the aggregation of estates, buildings and artworks under the title of “assets”. The...

A new 3000 word article available as a download discusses LVT in fuller detail, beginnning with an explanation of how land value arises and what it actually is (and is not). One of its aims is to dispel the growing misconception that LVT is a wealth tax based on the selling prices of land. LVT is not a wealth tax and it is a charge on the its rental value, which is an actual or imputed revenue stream....

Not so. The value of your land arises because the state protects land titles by the rule of law the state defends the realm a state of civil order exists in which the community respects property rights and the taxpayer pays for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure which keeps your land in a usable condition. Since much of this infrastructure is out of sight and out of mind, it is...

EAST COAST FLOODS 60TH ANNIVERSARY Older people will remember the East Coast floods which occurred at the end of January 1953, devastating coastal areas all the way from Lincolnshire to Kent, as well as parts of the Netherlands and Belgium. The upper picture shows the centre of Felixtowe, Suffolk. The cause was a combination of high spring tides and a storm, resulting in a surge tide in the North...

Google makes a lot of money. The company is often cited by those who purport to be fighting against injustice in taxation, as an example of an outfit that would get off scot-free by relocating its head office to some remote place – such as an island off the coast of Greenland. The so-called Tax Justice Network (TJN) likes to wheel out this argument as a reason why LVT is not the way forward...

A Paper given to the Henry George Foundation March 2012 In Chapter VI of The Science of Political Economy, entitled ‘Cause of Confusion as to Property’, Henry George asks why John Stuart Mill was so confused about the basis of property. He replies that: “It is evidently the same thing that has prevented all the scholastic economists, both those who preceded and those who have succeeded...