Land Value Tax

Just a brief post to recall that today, 29th April, is the hundredth anniversary of David Lloyd-George's 1909 "People's Budget". Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs you can now read the whole budget online.

He ended (the main section - in the "Balance Sheet" section) with these words which have stood for a century accusing his successors of all parties for not having solved the problems he set out on the road to do:

"This, Mr. Emmott [in the chair of the Ways and Means Committee to which the budget was addressed], is a War Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time when poverty and wretchedness and human degradation which always follow in its camp will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests."

[from "Balance Sheet": Budget 1909

From the financing of the newly created Old Age Pension and Disability insurance to the funding of the preparations for real war in the form of spending on Dreadnought battleships there was much for Lloyd-George to find in his budget. He didn't miss a trick, and more or less anything that could conceivably be taxed was, in many cases for the first time, taxed.

But for many of us it is for what ended up not being taxed that this budget is most remembered. The debate surrounding this budget, with speeches up and down the country by Lloyd-George himself and more notably perhaps Winston Churchill, must be one of the best documented in history, for it was a first attempt to implement some permanent form of Land Value Taxation. A tax shift that Churchill described as:

"the new attitude of the State towards wealth. Formerly the only question of the tax-gatherer was, "How much have you got?" We ask that question still, and there is a general feeling, recognised as just by all parties, that the rate of taxation should be greater for large incomes than for small. As to how much greater, parties are no doubt in dispute. But now a new question has arisen. We do not only ask to-day, "How much have you got?" we also ask, "How did you get it? Did you earn it by yourself, or has it just been left you by others? Was it gained by processes which are in themselves beneficial to the community in general, or was it gained by processes which have done no good to any one, but only harm? Was it gained by the enterprise and capacity necessary to found a business, or merely by squeezing and bleeding the owner and founder of the business? Was it gained by supplying the capital which industry needs, or by denying, except at an extortionate price, the land which industry requires? Was it derived from active reproductive processes, or merely by squatting on some piece of necessary land till enterprise and labour, and national interests and municipal interests, had to buy you out at fifty times the agricultural value? Was it gained from opening new minerals to the service of man, or by drawing a mining royalty from the toil and adventure of others? Was it gained by the curious process of using political influence to convert an annual licence into a practical freehold and thereby pocketing a monopoly value which properly belongs to the State—how did you get it?" That is the new question which has been postulated and which is vibrating in penetrating repetition through the land."

[From "The Spirit of the Budget", a speech given in Leicester in Sept 1909, recorded in Churchill's own memoirs "Liberalism and the Social Problem" and put online by Project Guttenberg.

When at last the Finance Bill of 1909 was rejected by the House of Lords (an action that led directly to two General Elections and the eventual imposition of curbs on the Upper House's power in the form of the Parliament Act 1911) Richard Cobden's comments in the Corn Laws debates in 1845 had come to its most extreme conclusion:

"For a period of one hundred fifty years after the [Norman] Conquest, the whole of the revenue of the country was derived from the land. During the next one hundred and fifty years it yielded nineteen-twentieths of the revenue. For the next century down to the reign of Richard III it was nine-tenths. During the next seventy years to the time of Mary it fell to about three-fourths. From this time to the end of the Commonwealth, land appeared to have yielded one half of the revenue. Down to the reign of Anne it was one-fourth. In the reign of George III it was one-sixth. For the first thirty years of his reign the land yielded one-seventh of the revenue. From 1793 to 1816 (during the period of the land tax), land contributed one-ninth, from which time to the present [1845] one-twenty-fifth only has been derived from the land. ...Thus, the land which anciently paid the whole of taxation paid now only a fraction. ...The people had fared better under the despotic monarchs than when the power of the state had fallen into the hands of a landed oligarchy who had first exempted themselves from taxation, and next claimed compensation for themselves by a corn law for their heavy and peculiar burdens."

Source: School of Co-operative Indivdualism, Quoted authors on the land question

The course of that "implacable war against poverty and squalidness" was set and as we know today, continues now and will continue until we learn to stop taxing production and honestly gained incomes and start instead to undermine the fundamental inequities of the economic system that traps so many in inescapable poverty, as people like Lloyd-George, Churchill, J S Mill, Henry George, and many of the individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century, like Benjamin Tucker knew only too well.

A century is long enough - real poverty reduction will never be achieved by redistributing the power of real economic growth but in eradicating these fundamental inequities that prevent people from bettering themselves. Alistair Darling, you have no hope of matching Lloyd-George. Learn from them, or give it up!

I am reminded by Henry Law's blog also that this month sees the 350th anniversary of the take-over the Diggers under Gerard Winstanley of various bits of land across several counties of the south of England and south Midlands.  Later in summer sees the anniversary of their arrest and removal.

I've blogged about the future of money and the possibility of virtualizing most of your monetary transactions before. With the current campaign against tax havens it's perhaps worth pointing this one out:

Online game gets banking licence Entropia has regularly mixed real and virtual finances. Online game Entropia Universe has been granted a licence to be a bank. Issued by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, the licence means the game can be more closely tied to the real world finances of players. [From BBC NEWS | Technology | Online game gets banking licence]

Now the article goes on to say that the Swedish banking authorities will be regulating the system, able to inspect accounts to ensure it's not being used for money laundering and so on. And that accounts in the online system will be covered by the same depositors' insurance as "real world" banks. But with the technology now quite well established there seems no reason why such systems could not run as virtual financial centres without any regulation at all.

Indeed, in researching software for my own mutual partnership banking project I even discovered that there is an open source "central bank" management system out there. I believe these development are inevitable. Governments that seek to prevent them will have to become extremely intrusive into their citizens' affairs. They had better get used to the idea and find different things to tax (like land, that you can't very easily "disappear" into the ether) or risk becoming ever closer to totalitarian.

Over at ConservativeHome there's a post about George Osborne's predicament over the Labour proposal for a 45% tax rate on incomes over £150,000 per year. Now, as we know when we did our work on the Lib Dem 50% tax rate it seems likely that such a move will collect very little and annoy many people whom the country needs for investment. And of course I don't like taxes at all and would abolish all but land rents in my empire, but this particular piece of criticism by Fraser Nelson due in tomorrow's News of the World attracted my attention:

> Fraser Nelson in the News of the World (not yet online) THE 45p TAX HIKE MAY RAISE "NOTHING" "Right now, the richest 1 per cent pay 23 per cent of all income tax collected. They pay their fair share – and the fair share of 22 other people. When the tax rate rises too much, the rich just bugger off. We saw this in the seventies. But as Tory peer told me: “Those too young to remember the seventies are destined to repeat its mistakes”. Yesterday George Osborne now said Brown’s proposed 45p tax on the rich is “difficult to avoid”. Difficult if you have no imagination. Experts say this proposed 45p tax will raise NOTHING. Because the super-rich will emigrate, or work less. Just like in the 70s." [From George Osborne hit by quadruple whammy]

It is frequently argued that the wealthy pay enough, and as in this piece that they pay the equivalent of many other people put together - more than their fair share. However, it is just plain wrong.

The top 1% by wealth in this country also own nearly 25% of the financial wealth in the country. While the very poorest tax payers (the bottom two fifths of the population that is) own no financial wealth at all yet still pay tax. So, whether we approve of taxation at any level at all, let's please once and for all get rid of this idea that the wealthy pay more than their fair share because of simplistic tax take ÷ number of taxpayers calculations.

Of course, as a Georgist, I would also say that of the financial wealth the richest do own, much of it directly takes money from the poorest, both in interest and rent, and should probably be more heavily taxed to drive them to invest in productive assets rather than zero-sum assets.

Welsh Lib Dem AM Mick Bates joins Don Foster in ignoring party policy over local business rates:

Bates calls for review of Small Business Rates Relief Scheme Montgomeryshire Welsh Liberal Democrat Assembly Member, Mick Bates has written to the First Minister to highlight the plight of small businesses in Wales and is calling for a review of the Small Business Rates Relief Scheme to help businesses survive through the recession. Mick said:“Small businesses are an integral part of the local economy and I am deeply concerned that many are being forced to close due to the high threshold for small business rate relief. [From Freedom Central: Bates calls for review of Small Business Rates Relief Scheme]

No Mick, all rates relief is a subsidy to landlords. If there's anyone you should be haranguing over business failures or near failures it is the landlords who think thaey can continue to rake in the same rent levels as last year when the property market has fallen out of their arses. Retail average property costs are now below levels last seen five years ago.. Landlords, as in 1909, are the only ones continuing to profit from this gloom. But it will be a short lived profit for if they see their tenants go to the wall they are unlikely to find other ones in a hurry and at some point in the closure of the high street there's a tipping point at which not only the empty plots are hard to shift but everyone else starts to want to leave.

It's an easy bandwagon to jump on. In theory at least government has more control over rates than rents (though in this case all local business rate relief has to be made up by other businesses in the collection area so you literally are robbing Peter to pay Paul) and so could do something. But when that something is the wrong something (further subsidy to landlords in this case), it is the wrong bandwagon to jump on.

If you have any control over rating policy in Wales then please, use it to promote our party policy would you!

Via Sharon Ball's blog I see that Don Foster has become a signatory on Peter Luff's Private Members' Bill:

Make Small Business Rate Relief automatic Bath MP Don Foster has become a signatory to a Parliamentary Bill that would see Small Business Rate Relief paid automatically to those businesses that qualify. [From Sharon Ball: Make Small Business Rate Relief automatic]

Oh dear! Given that it's a private member's bill and therefore unlikely to become law, do we really need to have our MPs supporting things that are directly contrary to party policy?

Yes, it sounds nice. I support the aims of supporting small and independent business where we can.

But rate relief is not a subsidy to business, it is a subsidy to landlords. It means that landlords can keep up higher rents because they know their tenants are not facing the whole of their usual property costs.

And not only that, but it is paid for directly by increasing the rates bill on only slightly larger businesses. Also, probably, often those local and independent traders we want to keep.

So, Don, do you know our policy on National Non-Domestic Rates? To replace it with Site Value Rating? A tax that, assuming these traders were paying the rent the market can bear, would be borne entirely by the landowners and that would encourage landowners furthermore to make more efficient use of their properties and, for example, build up the "living over the shop" market - something which brings 24/7 vitality and sustainability to suburban and small town shopping areas.

The last thing we want to be doing, perhaps especially in this centenary year of Lloyd-George's land taxing People's Budget, is to be supporting ideas that, whatever their good intentions, go against the principles of both L-G's purpose in proposing land taxes and our current policy.

If, on the off chance, this bill does make past its Second Reading - which is possible because it's the sort of unthinking "stimulus" that might get support from lots of MPs worried about how to support their local small businesses - I hope our Lib Dems will take the opportunity to amend it to reflect better our much superior policy.

A while back, when the Competition Commission demanded that Ferrovial sell off its other London airports because it had been decided that it posed a monopoly problem, I suggested that a "Land Value Tax" in the form of landing slot auctions would more effectively break up its monopoly, or rather render it impotent.

Well the same solution offers itself as a response to the third runway problem. Whilst I appreciate the arguments made by Willie Walsh on Question Time the other week about Heathrow being an essential international hub airport we have to remember that his company has a pretty well undeclared interest in the form of billions of pounds worth of subsidized landing slots, the most valuable of which are, of course, at Heathrow, under so called "grandfather rights".

I just cannot believe that all our regional airports are operating at optimum capacity - that people are not traveling halfway across the country to take flights from Heathrow or the other London airports that could just as easily be taking off from regional airports closer to home. Auctioning landing slots, a policy approved at South Central regional conference last year, would create an economic incentive for airlines to use any spare slots at those regional airports before we have to decide whether to increase capacity at Heathrow.

It would also of course capture a revenue source for the public purse arising from the use of our airspace that currently disappears onto airlines' balance sheets. And be good for regional economies.

I’ve long been wanting to try and address an issue which appears to be a fairly significant point of conflict between various people who would otherwise all call themselves libertarians. A post by our good Devil and the comments that follow it provide a good opportunity. Some there and elsewhere in libertarian groups would even suggest that those of us who subscribe to the opinion that land values are somehow not legitimate private property cannot really be libertarians at all. On the contrary, some would say even that we are crypto-communists for wanting to rob people of the yields from their landed property.

Yet it seems to have been a matter of controversy throughout the history of anarchist and libertarian thought, and both sides even invoke John Locke as the supreme expositor of property rights in support of our arguments.

But let’s start from where we generally speaking agree. We all, I think, would agree that monopoly is inimical to the free markets we would want to see. I suspect we would all subscribe to the idea that we are entitled to self-ownership, and that to a very great extent, self-ownership means the right to own the fruits of our own labour. And I think most of us would subscribe to what Herbert Spencer described as “the fullest liberty to do as [we] will compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other [person].”

I feel most of us also acknowledge that there are some problems in the historical distribution and acquisition of land and recognize that much vested interest has been created through violence or state intervention - either forcibly taking land off others as in many of the enclosures or through grant of title over others’ claims by the state favouring individuals or great families.

But that’s about where agreement ends insofar as land is concerned. It seems that most libertarians view land as a free market in which people are free to participate or not to the extent they wish - to own, to rent, whatever suits them at their time of life or financial circumstances. To use the fruits of their labour to buy up more than they can use for their own needs as an investment and charge others to use it if it has such a value. And that anything that impedes that is theft just as taking away your chattels or other property would be. In fact, I think they also feel that since, as they see it, we are inexorably moving away from dependence on land (most of us no longer have to till the soil for sustenance) the importance of land itself is diminishing and it becomes an ever more free market.

So, before getting into discussion of possible remedies, I want to set out why I think there needs to be remedies to the “land question” as many of us would call it. I believe that property in land breaches the three main tenets of libertarianism I mentioned above: it is monopolistic and therefore not a free market; it exacts a toll on the fruits of others’ labour; and as a result it denies people Spencer’s “fullest liberty…”.

First, some definitions, because I think people get quite confused about just what we mean by “land”. “Land” in the economic sense is not just the earth, the ground we walk on, the soil we till. It is the third factor of production; everything in the material universe not originally created by the application of labour and capital; resources in their “natural state”.

But more than just that, when we are talking about “the ground we walk on” we are really talking about its “location” as much as its extent. A million acres in the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica may, for all we know, have no material value whatever. The few acres of Chelsea Barracks was worth £970 million last year. Similarly, we may yet have no use, and therefore put no value on, one part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but have many competing businesses dependent on technologies that use another particular, finite, location on the spectrum. So we usually mean “land in a particular location”.

Land as monopoly. When Winston Churchill made his “speeches by the yard” on the land question in gathering popular support for Lloyd-George’s land taxing 1909 “People’s Budget” there were of course very much fewer people who owned their own homes than do nowadays. But he was also expressing the views of some anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker, Leo Tolstoy and Proudhon, as well as Liberals such as Spencer and later Henry George, that the land monopoly was one of the greatest barriers to free markets.

Many today feel that land, especially in the form of property in housing, is much less of a monopoly if at all. After all, in a world where nearly 70% of households live in the home they own, how can it be the monopoly problem of grasping landlordism that it was at the turn of the 20^th century? But the problem of land monopoly has not gone away. In fact, because it is less obvious I would suggest it is more insidious. Every location is in effect a monopoly of its own. A monopoly of the various circumstances, services, links and other infrastructure that make it unique. If you have the only house for sale in a particular school catchment area, the only house within a reasonable distance of a transport link that will allow people to get to the nearest good employment opportunities, or any number of other factors, you have a monopoly.

By and large we can only have one occupier occupying any particular plot - okay, we can build upwards and fit more people on the same plot, but that itself is exploiting the monopoly power of that plot.

Some will say that a monopoly is not necessarily the worst thing that could befall us, after all, if someone owns all the shares in a company that too is a monopoly - you just invest in another one. If someone is the only doctor in the community they have a monopoly, but someone could start another surgery. But we all have to live somewhere. So far as I am aware, pace Patri Friedman’s “seasteading” project, we have yet to find a way of living that does not involve some contact with land - even boats have to moor somewhere once in a while.

So land is a monopoly quite unlike being the only person able to own and admire that genuine unique Picasso. Yes, others may want it, but it does not alter their ability to live by not having it.

Incidentally, it is this monopolistic quality of locations that means it is so easy to bid them up into a bubble, such as we’ve seen recently. All that needs to happen, in our debt-based money system is that the banks have got to be prepared to lend to someone more than the next bidder for the one desirable location in the area. Yes, this can encourage others to cash in and create more opportunities in an area but we remain in a quasi-monopolistic system. Those of us, which includes most libertarians I suspect and certainly all Austrians, who regard the fiat and debt-based money system as the root of all problems should be extremely worried about this monopolistic ability to talk up the price of any individual location - it is, or has been these past few years, the prime factor in enabling the creation of mountains of debt-based money.

Land exacting an unjust toll on others’ labour. If you happen not to be able to borrow enough to get you a home in the optimum location for your work, or your kids’ school, or near enough for relatives to look after the kids when you go out to work or a whole host of other reasons, you may find a place further away, but more of your labour is going to be spent circumventing those more optimal locations.

Or if you have a business, a shop say, and cannot manage to pay the rent for the optimal “pitch” where most people will pass your shop display and be tempted in, you’re still likely to have to employ the same minimal number of employees to get the work done as someone in the higher rent location, but your takings will be lower. If you look at the structure of retail rents in the UK for example you will find that landlords try and capture this difference explicitly - they try and charge a premium based on ever more complex formula for guessing what a business can make in that location.

This illustrates David Ricardo’s so called “Law of Rent” in which he discovered that rent will rise at any particular location to capture the difference between productivity at the lowest priced location relative to the one in question. The huge land values usually found nearest the most lucrative business districts of communities and cities arise directly because people who cannot afford to occupy them have to work harder to avoid those locations.

In its simplest form this is best seen just by having to spend a fortune on your season ticket, an hour on the train to work and so on. Churchill again used to tell a story about the tolls of London Bridge and the landlords of Southwark. Most people in Southwark worked in the City of London as relatively low paid workers. It was the cheapest area they could get within reasonable travel distance of work, their means of sustenance. The parish elders responsible for enacting the poor law support in the parish of Southwark noticed that though most of the community were gainfully employed over the river, they still had to hand out a lot of dole to give them an acceptable quality of life.

London Bridge at the time had a toll, and so the parish petitioned to have the toll removed so that the workers would at least have to spend less getting to and from work. They succeeded in their aim. For a while the dole required fell, but then they noticed it rose again nearly to the former levels. What had happened? The landlords of Southwark had also noted that the workers would have a few extra pennies in their pockets and put up their rents to capture it.

With developments in transport methods and so on of course it is easier nowadays to get further to work and so on, so the gradient if you like at which landlords closer to the centre of things can cash in on others’ inability to rent their locations is lower, but it exists all the same. At some point, on the outer fringes of any settlement, there will always be those locations which are only just “marginally productive’ in which the residents can only just get to work or their other needs and maintain a reasonable standard of living. Ricardo’s Law of Rent says that inside those locations rent will rise to capture the bulk of the difference between the costs of those living further out and those living closer to the centres of economic activity.

Land impinging on others’ “like freedom”. Both of these previous factors combined clearly affect those excluded from the better locations freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labour. This is where Locke comes in. Robert Nozick coined the phrase most often quoted here - the idea of the “Lockean Proviso”.

Locke had said, in his Second Treatise, that it was legitimate to appropriate as much land as one wanted, so long as one left enough, of similar quality, amenity and so on, for everyone else. He also said that we own the earth “in common” with everyone else (note - common, does not mean “collective”). If we are to have self-ownership everyone born (who has to make do with this our only planet on which to eke out a life) must have a common birthright to claim a place to do so. You cannot own the fruits of your labour if someone is always taking some of them off you just to have a place to sleep at night.

That may have been easy in the New World, where there seemed as if there were vast, perhaps unlimited, tracts of currently unoccupied land just there for the taking. But in a more sophisticated economy, one not based solely on one’s agrarian abilities (and let’s face it we all benefit from that agglomeration of humanity into bigger, more specialised, settlements), more and more people will want to settle in the same area both to contribute to and benefit from the economic activity that human civilization affords. At that point, when Locke’s Proviso is breached, and there cannot be “enough and as good left over for everyone else”, land starts to have the two qualities already mentioned - of a monopolistic, zero-sum, market and of exacting a toll on others labour. At that point it begins to have a rental value. The rental value reflects the extent to which Locke’s Proviso has in fact been breached - the higher the rent the more people could make “as good” use of a particular location and the fewer “as good” locations are available.

So that “rent” is not something the current owner “earns”, except by the purest luck of being there before anyone else, so much as something that all the other potential owners of that monopolistic location create; what they have to pay to avoid the previously occupied location.

I’ve already gone on too long in this piece to be able to go into the possible remedies to this situation. All I wanted to show in this though is the problems land in particular as a type of property creates. Problems which all are inimical to the principles of markets and freedoms that libertarians are supposed to stand for.

If the monopoly factor were not of itself enough to make a libertarian think twice about treating land, location, as a species of property worthy of different treatment from other chattels and goods, the fact that it gets its value not by any of the labour the first appropriator expends on it but because of the costs others expend having to avoid it, and the consequent limits on the freedoms of others to do as they please and enjoy the full fruits of their own labour ought to convince them.

As I said in a comment on the Devil’s blog earlier, some libertarians feel that you can’t be a good libertarian if you believe the land market needs some type of reform, I have to say that I find it difficult to see how one could be a good libertarian without acknowledging that land needs some kind of reform because the effects private ownership of rental value of locations are so opposed to the basic free market and self-ownership tenets of our philosophy.

No doubt I will return some time to try to convince you about the best remedies to these problems.

The End is Nigh Originally uploaded by Martin~

Or, why I am really a "geo-mutualist" and why I think you should be too!

The revolution has begun. In fact it's been building for at least twenty years. When history looks back it will not probably be able to identify a particular date, but it could do worse than choose Christmas Day 1990, the day a humble academic computing geek communicated with his server in something nobody had really heard of called "hyper text". Finally there was something useful to do with the "internet" that would eventually draw in users from well outside of the ivory towers and military research facilities that developed it. Users in every corner of the world; users of every age and race; users of every background.

And what will history say about this revolution? Will it be seen as a great leap in human freedoms, capable of finally fulfilling Cobden's vision that "peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less"? Or perhaps that it heralded an era of unprecedented interference in our lives by governments?

Actually, I think it is a one way bet; that eventually it will be a revolution in human freedoms, in co-operation and in innovation. Such are the players in this brave new world; hackers working to bust the Great Firewall of China and liberate a fifth of the world's population for example; Kenyans being the first to be able to make payments quickly and simply by mobile phone; privacy technologists working to keep us one level of information security ahead of the law; game players investing ever more realistic virtual worlds; their individuality and very lack of co-ordination in many cases makes it inevitable.

What politicians can do, however, is either to make the transition long and painful, or to smooth its passage for the "good of mankind" so to speak. We can choose to stick by the state and try and keep it working just as its citizens are less and less tied to it, which will inevitably lead to more and more monitoring and restrictions; or we can choose to look at how to build alternative civic institutions and mechanisms to fulfill our needs in an era when the state has much less power to intervene at least without the force that is endemic in state action becoming more and more obvious to the point of rebellion against it.

So what is the great weapon of mass destruction that is going to bring low the state as we know it? Why, tax, of course. I'll let you into a little secret: in order to function a state needs to be able to tax: in order to tax it needs to have the ability to track transactions or peoples' wealth and changes therein. And from the taxpayer's point of view, there is every incentive to try to minimize their tax liability. Up until now, or very recently, it has been only the global super-rich who have had the means and sufficient incentive to take advantage of loopholes and allowances that enable them to choose the lowest tax jurisdiction in which to crystalize out their tax liability.

But thanks to the global and interpersonal nature of this most recent communications revolution we are on the cusp of mechanisms being easily available to the big majority of people that will enable us to minimize our "financial footsteps". When most of us only ever relate to the majority of our money through pixels on a screen or numbers on a bank statement - a small minority of trade now relies on real metal or crinkly coloured paper currency - what does it matter what those pixels are called; pounds, dollars, euro, yen? What about a completely new, essentially fictitious currency perhaps, like the "Linden Dollars" of "Second Life"?

Add e-Bay and Tesco to Second Life for example and one could imagine a world in which most of your financial transactions are conducted entirely in cyberspace, in virtual worlds that know no territorial boundaries or tax regimes (or at least that could be relocated into a sympathetic tax jurisdiction quickly if necessary), but with delivery of goods and services in the physical world. That's not to say giants like Tesco and e-Bay would necessarily be best, or would necessarily even survive the upheaval.

Those widespread international (and local) interpersonal (and business-to-business) mechanisms for sophisticated modern-day barter are now within reach and threaten the very raison d'etre of many of our longest standing institutions - banking and currency, transnational corporations built in an era when intermediaries were necessary to trade with far off lands, and ultimately the basis on which the state is founded - its monopoly of taxation. At the same time we can form non-geographic communities of genuinely voluntary co-operation in which we can build trust relationships, quasi-legal ways of dealing with disputes and so on that make trade possible with people a few short years ago we would have never had a hope of even communicating with.

So, which side are you going to be on - freedom and co-operation or ever more intrusion, regulation and restriction? And how long have we got?

Some of these technologies fall into the category of "overestimated penetration at 2 years, underestimated at 10 years." I think the state will be lucky if it has another decade of relatively easily collected taxes based on productivity, sales and incomes. If people want the state to be able to function beyond that, without increasingly authoritarian intrusion into our economic lives, we need to be looking now at how to make it pay its way through user fees for any value for money services we want it to provide. And as soon as it does of course it must also open itself to competition - else it's a monopoly again whose only rationale is to use its discretionary power to rip off the very people who both fund and use its services.

Unsurprisingly any of the various forms of land value tax will do to start with and would be especially beneficial implemented soon, near the bottom of the crash in land values currently underway. The present situation in financial markets offers an ideal opportunity for new means of trading without the sort of money so invidiously inflated and deflated by the banking cartels. Again, these alternatives could operate either on a local scale or in an international, or non-geographic trading community. Land has the singular benefit of being immoveable. You can't virtualize land as easily as you can income - for we all still need to have a base somewhere.

There's another major reason for helping this process away from the power of and dependency on nation states rather than fighting it - the state is expensive. The sort of redistributive measures required to ensure that everyone gets a fair crack at opportunity - the level playing field - are getting more and more expensive. Our interventions into the affordable housing market for example, in the form of subsidy, will continue to rise when land values rise, subsidizing the already-haves in the name of assisting the have-nots. Far better to try to ensure the fairest of level playing fields for all than trying to play uphill on a steepening playing field.

So, when you find me criticizing the state and its acolytes, it's less about what has gone on in times past - I would say times of missed opportunity for sure - but more on how we will be able to live in future, a future I think is pretty inevitable, in which the very idea of a state with the power to tax fairly will be severely compromised. The elephant in the room needs to be dealt with, and dealt with soon. Will it be freedom, or more desperate attempts to maintain the ailing state structures? You choose!

To Reading this morning for South Central Regional Conference at the wonderful, if somewhat seriously cramped, Oakwood Centre in Woodley. The first, opening, speaker was Sandra Gidley, MP for Romsey. The "Romsey Redhead" herself. She seemed to devote most of her speech to having a go at the Lib Dem parliamentary press operation for watering down anything any MP want to press release so it says nothing at all preferably by the sound of it, but certainly nothing "spikey".

Now, as a defence against charges that our MPs are invisible, even to us, that's one thing, but frankly I don't want to hear that sort of excuse even if it is correct. If it is correct then we should be getting new press officers perhaps. Or not constraining them as much. But it is none of our, South Central ordinary members', business. The Parliamentary Party has to sort this out, not us.

But then she said something that somewhat let the side down - that we should "stop banging on about Site Value Rating and Constitutional Reform" and speak about things that matter to real people. Huh? When last did you ever see a parliamentary party press release about PR, less still LVT/SVR?

I very much suspect that the last press release on SVR was one of Herbert Asquith's.

And frankly, since it is, though I say so myself, the single most important step towards economic and social freedom we could take, perhaps we should be talking about it in press releases. At least it would differentiate us from the anodyne bull turds coming from the red-blue parties.

But to suggest that we do too much of that and too little responding to other issues is just fantasy Sandra.

Over at Lib Dem Voice they've printed a biographical piece from the Directory of Liberal Thought about Henry George, the leading proponent of the "single tax" in the nineteenth century that many of us know nowadays as "Land Value Tax" or "Site Value Rating". Several of the correspondents in the discussion following the article felt that they had never really understood, or had explained clearly and convincingly, what LVT is and why it is such a good thing. So I'll give it a go, though many have tried before me, and no doubt many of them more intelligibly.

Land.

Forget what you might think you know about land. In economic terms land refers to the third factor of production. If "labour" is the work that goes into something, "capital" the wealth invested or expended in producing more wealth then "land", in economic terms, is everything else - "the entire material universe not produced by the application of capital and labour." So yes, it includes the land underneath our feet, but it also includes the air, the electromagnetic spectrum, the cosmos, the mineral wealth of the planet, all in their natural states, natural fertility, self-seeded trees and plants, water and fish and non-domestic animals and so on.

Now, billions that we humans number, for most purposes most of these types of land are either unlimited or of indefinite supply. Some types we don't absolutely need to survive. Others we do need to survive. Others are fixed or limited in supply. As far as I am aware, we are pretty well attached to this planet. Every single human born so far has only had the resources of this one planet to sustain them. And since we need it to survive, then we must all, every one of us, have an equal claim on its natural bounties.

In early human society, hunter gatherer family units or tribes would simply range over as big a territory as necessary to meet their nutritional needs. For some, in fertile temperate parts of the world, this may have been a small area.  For others, in less fertile territory, it might be a large area of rough foraging. But of course this sort of isolation, subsistence living, is not very conducive to human development. Through trade we grow, both as individuals and as communities. And as soon as we come together to trade certain locations become more important as places where people meet and we can no longer justly grab as much space as we want without excluding others. It is at this point that land begins to have...

Value.

The value of "land" is its "rent". Just as the cost of "labour" is "wages" and the cost of "capital" is "interest". When natural resources (land) are in infinite supply, so that anyone who wants to use some of it can just take it and there will still be plenty for everyone else, it has no rental value. But as soon as humans get together in clusters, the further we move away from being a agricultural based economy and as our survival is based more on our ability to sell our specialist labour for enough to sustain us those locations where we form our clusters begin to attract rent, because many people are in the scramble to be in the best location for their market.

A landowner might be able to make more efficient use of his location and fit more people onto a particular piece of land, or they might invest in creating a work of art for the discerning occupier who will pay a premium for quality. But the landowner, as a landowner, does not have to lift a finger to contribute to any change in the rental value of that location.

And when we buy our homes, what we are doing is rolling up all the location rent for a number of years and handing it over, together with the capital value of the buildings at that location, to the previous landowner, and usually borrowing to do so. This is a key concept in LVT - we are already paying this rent either monthly when we actually rent, or up front when we buy (but inflated often by the cost of borrowing to afford it). It is this "rent" value that Land Value Tax seeks to...

Tax.

To me, this is a big misnomer, and causes a deal of confusion about LVT even amongst "Land Value Taxers". The Georgist purist like me intends really for the community to share the rent for the locations that are made valuable by that whole community equally with everyone in that community. Shared equally because, remember, we have that equal right of access to the land as our birthright as creatures tied to it for the very stuff of life, and because we all help to create that overall rent value. We more commonly think of a "tax" as an imposition used to fund government spending. The community sharing of rent is really a way of each and every one of us paying everyone else who has just as much right to make as good use of our location as we do for the inconvenience of having to avoid it because we have exclusive rights to it.

The community in question is the area within which land has rental value - technically speaking "within the margin of production". In some cases that may still be just a single town or city - the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona, for example might well tail off to zero in rental value at the end of the irrigation system pipes. In others, it could be an entire country - for example it could be argued that we are such a small country that London creates some rental value almost everywhere in the country.

The effect of this rent sharing is that those in that geographical community, however big it is, whose productivity - ability to earn - means they can only afford to live in the cheapest locations with the lowest rents will get more, perhaps much more, than they pay out in location rent. Those whose ability to earn enables them to commandeer the best locations will be paying into the community rent fund much more than they get out. And the net effect of all that is that we create an automatic, self-adjusting safety net which, if you have nothing else coming in, should enable you to eke out a basic living on the most marginal, cheapest locations.

Of course many of you reading this actually do believe that government is sometimes the best body to deliver "essential" "public" "services" and will recoil from the idea of giving people a basic income for fear it becomes an invitation to idleness. That's fine. For you, the Land Value Tax would be a way of financing those public services. I will tend to try to persuade you to take that one further step and believe that giving people their money to spend for themselves will lead to better and more efficient services in most circumstances.

The single tax.

Now this is the other side of the equation. Nobody who is serious about LVT's benefits wants to add to the current tax bill. LVT must replace other taxes if it is to achieve its most important benefits - of freeing up labour and capital to invest and work in productive wealth creation. And so Henry George called it the "Single Tax" and his adherents were called "Single Taxers". Henry George reasoned that virtually all other forms of taxation constituted tariffs, and therefore barriers to wealth creating free trade. All except tax on land in the generic economic sense affect the resources that can be applied to productive enterprise - labour, capital and, in the end, consumer spending.

And remember, the best thing about all this is that most of us, that is everyone who is still paying a mortgage or anyone who rents anyway from a landlord, are already paying this "single tax" in the form of location rent to our landlord or previous landowner, who have done nothing as landowners to earn that bit of the rent. So reductions in any of these other taxes, such as employers National Insurance, Income Taxes, VAT and capital taxes, feed straight through into more money in our pockets. And not only that, but all the disincentives to work and creating employment created by our complex income tax system and the problems associated with benefits withdrawal rates and tax credits and so on, will be removed.

Nor must you believe that the "Single Tax" only refers to a tax on the rental value of one type of land. There are other finite natural resources that we can rightly claim belong equally to all of us but which attract an economic rental value because they are scarce amongst a given community of users. One can argue for a "Land Value Tax" on the exclusive right to transmit on particular frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Or to fly through our airspace at a particular time and place. You could even describe some mechanisms for taxing polluters as a specialized "Land Value Tax" - though it may not be the best way to deal with such issues.

Common Objections:

"We've already been taxed on the money we bought our home with"

Actually, you've been taxed on what you have paid your rent with - whether you actually rented, or bought from the previous owner by paying over several years' rent up front. Any rise(or fall) in your property's rental value by the time you come to sell it on is mostly accounted for by changes in the location rent, to which you have not actually contributed, as a landowner anyway.

But think of it in a post-LVT world - you'll have paid substantially less for your home, you'll have borrowed substantially less to do so, and you will not be paying all those unproductive taxes on income and capital anyway.

We have plenty of "double taxation" in our current system anyway. I pay tax on my income, but then when I go out and spend my post-tax income on most most goods and services I will pay VAT at another 17.5% and possibly duties. And this is an ongoing double taxation - at least with LVT we're only talking about this effect being felt once - at the implementation date and then not again because all the other taxes will have been ended.

"Land rich, income poor - the "poor widow bogey""

As long ago as 1909 Winston Churchill used to be taunted by the Tories with what he called the "poor widow bogey" - the supposedly unbeatable argument that LVT would be wrong because people who happen to have seen the rental value of their location rise will have to pay more in location rent without necessarily having more income with which to do so.

First, again, think of it in a post-LVT world - you will have borrowed substantially less to acquire the various places you will have lived in your life and you will be paying, if you are efficient in your use of land at least, less in tax in the form of location rent. You will have more to save and invest in productive assets other than housing. If you choose to save for your retirement an amount that allows you to continue paying your location rent till you drop, fair play to you. But the evidence is in fact that there is a huge unmet demand for people downsizing nearing retirement (indeed it is mostly the best off pensioners who are able to do this at present). LVT, because it makes the market in land and locations much more reactive to community change, will more than likely encourage this need to be met.

But in the implementation there is some evidence that a very small proportion of pensioners would indeed face larger bills than they have at the moment. For those Land Value Taxers who would prefer to implement LVT slowly, increasing the rate of the tax over a long period of time, their answer would be to allow such people to roll up their tax bill until they do eventually sell up and move or for their estate to pay. I, preferring the big bang approach, would simply compensate people for the lost land value in bonds which they can use to pay their tax into the future.

"Confiscating the value of our biggest asset"

It is true that implementing the full rent sharing I outline above will wipe out the capitalized rent values that one is accustomed to seeing as part of the "sale price". And it is also true that this will hurt those most recently on the ladder and having just borrowed to pay for that up-front location rent.

But the home you live in is not really "wealth" in the conventional sense. Until you are at the stage of downsizing or selling up completely, the value of your home really only matters in respect of its relationship to the price of your next one. For most of us, for most of our lives, our shelter is a cost of living - either in rent or mortgage payments. And if we have slashed the cost of buying by removing the land value, then we have also slashed the cost of your next home in similar proportion.

Again though, in transition from one system to another, with my big bang approach, those who lose out can be compensated with bonds with which, for example, they could pay off any outstanding mortgage over the new land-free market value. If you take the slower incremental implementation mechanism, again, the loss will be less all at once; indeed you could structure implementation such that it effectively only capture future rises in rental values.

"Impossible to value"

This is the "experts' objection" that it will be too cumbersome to invent a system that values the rent for each plot of land every year. And more than that, that it will be arbitrary. But we know from evidence in on the ground pilot studies that we only actually have to value about one in ten plots that share common characteristics in the form of access to services and infrastructure say. It's also not really too different from the current system of self-assessed income taxes. A game is played out every year with taxpayers trying to minimize their liability and the HMRC trying to catch people out hiding some of their income. And here there is no market to help.

The average mortgage lasts eight years. That means that somewhere around 12.5% of our owner occupied housing is valued every year just to get a mortgage valuation. More in recent years where people have been encouraged to chop and change their mortgage even though they are not moving home.

And then there's the rental market. There will always remain benefits to renting for some in the population - short term workers and so on. So there will remain a rental market. This presents yet more, and really very accurate, evidence on which to base valuations- more accurate once you take away the capital gains aspect of land ownership as landlords will only be investing in a rental stream.

And ultimately the market will still highlight areas where the assessed location rents are higher or lower than investors think they should be. If buyers think the current rents are too high, they are going to offer a discount on the capital value of the buildings themselves and if assessed rents are adjudged too low by the market, buyers will offer a premium over the building values in order to get the more desirable location at a lower location rent until the location rent is adjusted the next year.

And finally, let's not pretend that this is new - we had Schedule A imputed rent on our homes on our tax returns until 1963.

"Concreting over surburbia"

There is often concern that when Land Value Taxers talk about our system leading to more efficient land use we mean that every available inch of land will be developed. There is no reason to think this in reality. It will first bring into use completely unused land - that mouldering old factory that's been sitting empty and becoming more and more of an eyesore for a decade for example.

But there's no reason why Land Value Tax would not be subject to a similar planning regime as now. It would change - because a community decision that they would prefer housing to a factory on a particular site for example will lead to that factory being redeveloped a deal sooner than it might today, because its owners are going to be seeing their location rents rise to the point that running a factory there would be inefficient compared with developing it for housing, say.

Personally I would also like to see many planning controls repealed anyway and have most (ie small scale) developments make their peace privately with its neighbours through mediation rather than state control.

Overall though, there is little evidence that people would suddenly settle for a squashed apartment instead of a suburban semi with garden and garage just because of LVT. It will encourage people to consider whether their continuing use of a particular location is cost effective for them and it will make the market more efficient and so there is likely to be more rebuilding, but that doesn't need to be at the expense of amenity.

In conclusion

So, there then was my now not so concise explanation of Land Value Tax and some brief responses to some of its most common objections. It is quite important to get across just how land gains its value though. That helps to explain why some of us see LVT as such a just and equitable way of doing things. If we had Star Trek style free instant transportation systems, land would again be worthless but while it take time (which is money opportunity lost) and money itself to get from A to B the land in between A and B is absorbing some of your hard earned income (and that of everyone else who has to pass it by every day) for doing precisely nothing.

Land values are effectively a tax on all production and one we already pay anyway. Getting rid of all those other taxes on production and capturing for the community the rental values of land will create such a different more equitable economic playing field on which we all continue to ply our various trades.