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Equity for the Landless

 

Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets of the Incentive Taxation Philosophy

Applications Abroad as Well as at Home
As important as our ideas are for the justice and efficiency of the American economy, their application is even more important in less developed countries, where often 80% of the land is held by 3% of the population. To give all the citizens of these countries chances to make something of their lives, it is extremely important to equalize access to land, not by redividing the land (which inevitably winds up putting land into the hands of people who cannot use it well) but by requiring any one who uses land to pay according to the unimproved value of the land that he or she uses. To bring this message to the world, we must first apply it to ourselves. ...  Read the whole article



George's land tax promotes equity toward the landless in at least four ways.
  • One, it relieves them of taxes, to the extent that landowners pay more;
  • Two, it makes jobs by removing all tax penalties from hiring workers, and also because the land tax, a fixed charge, spurs landowners to use land to earn cash to pay the taxes;
  • Three, while jobs are generating new money incomes, new production supplies more goods and services. Those give substance to the money incomes, precluding inflation such as poisoned the springs of Keynesian "fiscal stimulus";
  • Four, it offers the landless new chances to acquire land themselves, as old owners release surplus lands to the market.  Read the whole article

 

Robert Ingersoll: A Lay Sermon

No man should be allowed to own any land that he does not use. Everybody knows that — I do not care whether he has thousands or millions. I have owned a great deal of land, but I know just as well as I know I am living that I should not be allowed to have it unless I use it. And why? Don't you know that if people could bottle the air, they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is. Now, the land belongs to the children of Nature. Nature invites into this world every babe that is born. And what would you think of me, for instance, tonight, if I had invited you here — nobody had charged you anything, but you had been invited — and when you got here you had found one man pretending to occupy a hundred seats, another fifty, and another seventy-five, and thereupon you were compelled to stand up — what would you think of the invitation? It seems to me that every child of Nature is entitled to his share of the land, and that he should not be compelled to beg the privilege to work the soil, of a babe that happened to be born before him. And why do I say this? Because it is not to our interest to have a few landlords and millions of tenants. ... read the whole sermon


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