Kaiser Keith on Land Value Tax again

Back in September I wrote about seeing our glorious Oxfordshire leader, "Kaiser" Keith Mitchell, on the southern region section of the Politics Show attacking Land Value Tax.

He was on again today, talking about one of his pet subjects - car travel and road transport. He made a wonderful case for Land Value Tax. He pointed out that once upon a time the M40 stopped at Oxford, and from then on it was a network of slow country roads. And then they extended the motorway and you can now zip right through to Birmingham and that "it has brought prosperity to the northern Oxfordshire towns like Banbury and Bicester".

Now, what did those towns do for that prosperity? What did they pay towards the motorway? Nada. Nothing. Zip. If truth be told many in the area probably baulked at the thought of a motorway coming through their corner of England's rolling green land and ruining their property values. They may even have actively campaigned against it for a while.

Could it be, one wonders, that Keith is indulging in a bit of thinly disguised rent seeking, unwilling to acknowledge that his constituents near one of those newly prosperous towns, have gained that prosperity for no input on their part?

If you want to fund transport infrastructure fairly, whether that be planes, trains or automobiles, the clear answer is to capture some of the gain in prosperity experienced by the areas, the new markets if you will, opened up by that new infrastructure. Land Value Tax. It's simple and it's fair.

Read about it at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a crazy loony left think tank, or so I imagine Kaiser Keith would think.