Hallelujah!

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Hallelujah!

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You didn't have me down as some happy clappy evangelical did you? No, you'd be quite right. So this is just a little celebration of "Tax Freedom Day".

"Hallelujah" was the cry of the Hebrews' slaves when, in the year of the Jubilee, those who had had to sell themselves into servitude or give away their lands to keep themselves afloat were freed and their lands returned to the common wealth for redistribution.

Of course "Tax Freedom Day" is a bit of nonsense. It helps perhaps to see just how much we have taken from us but in reality, if we make a little more in the second half of the year, they'll take a little more all the same. And what the Adam Smith Institute, who organize this little wheeze, won't tell you is that their eponymous hero himself was one of ours, a supporter of Land Value Tax.

Taxes on our labour make us peons to the state. How wrong James Thomson was!

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Comments

Submitted by Tom Papworth (not verified) on June 1, 2007 - 14:27.

Funnily enough, "Wheeze" was exactly the phrase I used .

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on June 1, 2007 - 14:56.

>>Taxes on our labour make us peons to the state<< And taxes on the land we occupy don't? If we don't want society to be a war of all against all, we have to have some common services. They have to be paid for. If you have the option whether or not to pay for them, how do you deal with free riders, or conversely, those who can't afford the option?

Submitted by Jock on June 1, 2007 - 21:40.

And taxes on the land we occupy don't?

No, I don't think they do actually. The relationship is quite different. With taxes on labour and capital, we make, the state takes, we make more, the state takes more. And none of this even begins to think about the economic disincentives involved.

With land taxes, the relationship is more like a leaseholder of the common wealth. Such an arrangement is a market arrangement. I don't have to take a particular lease. If I don't like the cost of it I can go elsewhere. When one occupies land, any specie of economic land that is, one excludes everyone else from it, and the state protects your right to exclude people from it. But it is finite, the location is a monopoly, guaranteed by the state who protects your right to occupy it. The land value is the value of that monopoly, and so the tax is compensation to the rest of the community for holding that monopoly.

It's also perhaps worth noting that Henry George felt that the state's budget should be absolutely limited to what it could raise in such a "Single Tax" and that because trade would be freer and more equitable there would be less need for massive state protection for underperforming areas and so on.

I think it's quite sad that the alternative to a war of all against all need necessarily be coercive government thinking it knows best.

Submitted by Jock on June 2, 2007 - 15:54.

LVT is "just" a transfer of an obligation everyone presently pays, to the vendor of a property if you are a buyer or to the landlord if you are a tenant, to the community chest instead, on the basis that it is the community that actually creates those values.