Comment - Land Value Tax Campaign

Think of the economy as a car

Written on 26 April 2011. Posted in Taxation.

This comment turned up recently in response to the blog Tax Haven Explosion (below) on the website of Tax Justice Network. TJN is running a campaign against tax avoidance, in particular against tax havens. Now the obvious solution is to switch as much taxation as possible onto property charges, preferably on the rental value of land. That puts a stop on the whole thing at the outset. Any other approach...

How the land of England got enclosed

Written on 18 April 2011. Posted in History.

The hedges and walls characteristic of the English landscape are taken for granted but they are mostly of quite recent origin. Perhaps hedges and walls on the ground give rise to hedges and walls in the mind. Or perhaps it is the other way round. Before enclosure, the landscape would have looked something like that in the picture. How the situation came about is described here. The article, in the...

Tax haven explosion

Written on 16 April 2011. Posted in Tax Justice Network.

A video on the website of Tax Justice Network, from Democracy Now, goes into lots of detail about the damage done by tax havens, pointing out that both Britain and the UK are themselves important players in this game. The only thing is that the speakers fail to draw the most obvious of conclusions – that there must be something wrong with the tax systems themselves if they leave all these...

Spare a thought for the poor landowner

Written on 14 April 2011. Posted in Home-Owner-Ism.

[Photograph by John Digney] The correspondence in the FT has been continuing, with a letter from a landowner in a National Park who claimed that his estate was costing him money. A response from Carol Wilcox was published – she suggested, in irony, that perhaps we ought to pay landowners and put a few estates up for auction to see if they really were worth less than nothing. I thought we already...

Renting one’s kicking skills

Written on 2 April 2011. Posted in History.

In an article in the FT last Wednesday, economist John Kay corrected the widespread misconception that the Law of Rent was discovered by David Ricardo, noting that the phenomenon was first noted by a Scottish gentleman farmer and scholar, James Anderson, 50 years earlier. John Kay then went on, as many economists do, to extend the term “economic rent” to the rent of talent, referring...

Revealing find at London School of Economics

Written on 31 March 2011. Posted in History.

On March 8th the Times published a letter from Lord Kalms saying that around 1991 he offered the London School of Economics a grant to set up a Chair of Business Ethics. The faculty rejected the offer as it saw no correlation between ethics and economics. By pure chance a Latvian cleaner at the LSE found what we take as a draft or copy of the rejection letter behind a cupboard. Although we cannot...

Fudging the principles

Written on 29 March 2011. Posted in Taxation.

We have now had a chance to study and think about the report produced by the Parliamentary Treasury Committee, following its inquiry at the beginning of the year made under the title “Principles of Tax Policy”. As we reported earlier, the case for land value taxation was presented by a large minority of the submissions and could hardly be ignored. The report stated that “the...

Not the Property Ladder again

Written on 26 March 2011. Posted in Home-Owner-Ism.

Oh no! Not the Property Ladder again! You would have thought that the property ladder was the last thing George Osborne would mention in his budget speech on Wednesday. But no – despite the untold damage and misery the property boom has caused throughout the world, the property ladder is to be dusted down and given a lick of paint to encourage ‘first time buyers’ to climb onto...

Woodland grab – the Great British Land Heist continues

Written on 24 March 2011. Posted in General.

Peter Smith of the Wildwood Trust writes, “The recent political turmoil provoked by the Government proposal to sell the nation’s woodland was a travesty of public policy. Unfortunately even though the Government has now ‘U turned,’ the sad fact is it will continue to sell off public woodland, but just at a slower pace. The historical trend of the loss of public land will...

Treasury Committee Report on principles of taxation

Written on 15 March 2011. Posted in Taxation.

The Treasury Committee into the principles of taxation has now published its report. In accordance with our usual practice, we will not be commenting in detail until we have had an opportunity to study it carefully and consider its implications. However, at first glance it appears to offer a good overview of tax principles, which we broadly accept. There are, however, in relation to those principles,...

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