Campaign Flyer Promoting Joe Kopsick for Illinois State Assembly in 2022

 

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Author's Note (March 26th & April 20th, 2021):
     I no longer support home rule; I supported it due to a misunderstanding about how it worked.

     Towns should be independent on tax issues, but not so independent that elected officials can raise taxes without residents' approval.
     I believe that state caps on property taxes are acceptable as long as they limit the taxation of the value of improvements such as buildings, more than they limit the taxation of unimproved land value.

Designed on February 17th and 18th, 2021

Originally Published on February 18th, 2021

Author's Note Added on March 26th, 2021
and edited and expanded on April 20th, 2021

Second Image Edited on April 20th, 2021

E-Mails to Illinois State Legislators About Tax Revenue Sourcing and Land Value Taxation

     The State of Illinois currently suffers from a budget deficit, public debt, a pension crisis, and widespread disagreement about what to tax and how to solve the state's budget woes. I believe that Henry George, and his idea of Land Value Taxation, could do a lot to solve these problems.

     I wrote the two following e-mails on October 6^th, 2020, on the advice of the Lake County tax assessor, in order to communicate to my elected representatives what I think the solution should be. The first is addressed to a Democratic member of the Illinois State Assembly, and the second is addressed to a Republican member of the same body.

     The introductions, and names of the particular lawmakers, have been removed.

First E-Mail (to Democrats):

     My name is Joe Kopsick, I'm a 33-year-old voter from Waukegan. I'm also running for office.

     I was wondering if you've ever heard of Henry George or his idea of Land Value Taxation. George had a big influence on the Democratic Party in the 1880s, and almost became the mayor of New York City. I think George's ideas could do a lot to help Illinois's tax problems.

     Illinoisans are currently debating how to prevent property taxes from rising when property values rise, and how much to tax income. Instead of talking about how much to tax income, I believe we should be talking about whether to tax it at all.

     I also believe that we should pay less attention to the issue of whether "Is the tax funding something worthwhile", and more attention to "is it helpful, efficient, and ethical to tax this source of revenue in the first place?" If we keep taxing production, we will deplete our revenue base. But if we tax things we want to discourage, like destruction, then the need for government solutions to that destruction, will decrease, while the size of the budget decreases too. Government will enter the picture, solve the problem, and then go away; instead of sticking around forever to permanently administer programs that were originally intended only as temporary fixes.

     It's not that I think it's wrong to tax billionaires. It's that we should be taxing people for acquiring wealth through illicit or fraudulent purposes that take advantage of taxpayers; we shouldn't be taxing them solely for earning money, as if doing so were a crime. The people who pay the highest taxes, should be the people who acquired their wealth through destroying and wasting, or polluting, or selling things they didn't produce. People who produce and earn through their own hard work and effort, should either be taxed less than they are now, or else not at all. Or else they should be taxed solely in proportion to how much they owe the taxpayers for providing forms of assistance that helped them acquire their wealth.

     Capital gains taxes, and corporate income taxes, should of course be regarded as different from earned income that results from laboring in exchange for wages. But we must understand that imposing higher and higher taxes on income and property, will eventually have the effect of punishing or discouraging people from being more productive or increasing the value of their homes.

     This idea is called the Laffer Curve. Henry George's idea is basically just the Laffer Curve, but applied to land taxes and property taxes, instead of income taxes.

     Lawmakers must understand that most people don't like paying taxes; and for that reason, we should avoid taxing forms of voluntary exchange which we have no logical reason to discourage if we want people to prosper. I believe that earning income, and buying and selling, are harmless forms of productive economic activity, which should not be punished.

Second E-Mail (to Republicans):

     My name is Joe Kopsick, I'm a 33-year-old voter living in Waukegan. I'm also running for office.

     Are you familiar with the Laffer Curve (named for Reagan adviser Art Laffer)? It's the idea that if a person is taxed at too high a rate, they will eventually stop producing, in order to avoid taxes.

     I think the tax code should change, to reflect the fact that most people don't like taxes, and will try to avoid them. I think we should be taxing wasteful and destructive activities, in order to penalize them on purpose; instead of accidentally penalizing productivity, by confiscating people's money through income taxes, and by taxing sales.

     Earning money and buying and selling are are productive activities that harm nobody, and so in my opinion they should be completely untaxed, or at least taxed at a lower rate than they are now. [Raising expected revenues from other sources of revenue could easily replace the gaps in funding which would be caused by the elimination of income and sales taxes.]

     I believe that we should shift from a system based on taxing income and sales and the improvements we make to our homes, to a system based on taxing the non-improvement of land.

     Taxing unimproved land value at a higher rate than the rate at which we tax buildings, could even help solve the property tax problem. Property taxes would stop going up just because property values go up. This would also solve most of the gentrification problem.

     Several Pittsburgh suburbs tried this system for a while and had a lot of success with it (in decreasing unemployment, and decreasing the number of unoccupied properties that are just taking up space and have no economic activity happening on them).

     I think this idea could potentially get Democrats to understand how destructive the income tax is, and understand that they really are discouraging productivity and earnings. And once the Democrats understand that, bipartisan compromise with Republicans will be a more realistic prospect.

Conclusion of Both E-Mails:

     Does this make sense to you? Are you interested in learning more about Henry George and Land Value Taxation? If so, please e-mail me at jwkopsick@gmail.com, or call me at 608-417-9395.

     This is a personalized e-mail and not an automatically generated message; I am contacting you on behalf of myself, not on the behalf of any organization.

     Thanks for reading, I look forward to your response.

     Joseph W. Kopsick

     608-417-9395

     jwkopsick@gmail.com

     Waukegan, IL 60085

E-Mails Written on October 6th, 2020

Introduction Written on October 8th, 2020

Originally Published on October 8th, 2020

Georgist and Mutualist Economics Could Lower Health Costs by Eliminating Unnecessary Taxes

     I am running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois as a Mutualist.

     I am doing this for several reasons including: 1) Spread awareness of Mutualist and Georgist economics; 2) fix and simplify the tax code through lessons we can learn from those economic systems; 3) use those same lessons to improve the environment of the 10th District of Illinois, and its health, and its financial well-being, all at the same time.

     In regard to the question, "What should we tax?", Georgists favor taxes on the non-improvement of land, and they want to stop taxing improvements made to property. Mutualists, on the other hand, believe that if anything should be taxed, it should be negative externalities, and economic activities that cause them. These negative externalities - which are negative effects that two parties' agreements can have on unaware or non-consenting third parties - include coercive "agreements", one-sided deals, overtaxed transactions, and economic opportunities which may have been lost through being forced to purchase this or that good or service by government (or the monopolies it sponsors).

     Georgists and Mutualists may differ slightly in terms of which forms of taxes they favor, but they both agree that degradation of land, and making land unuseable for others, is a negative externality. Georgism and Mutualism are also remarkably similar systems, considering that they are both close to the economic center; both want to preserve a balance between community and property, and they are united in their opposition to monopolies and central government control. Additionally, they both care about people's freedom to make use of land in order to survive, with the minimum amount of resistance from government possible; and they want to make rent, interest, and profit unnecessary, in order to make land and consumer goods more affordable.

     This agreement is why I am promoting Georgism - and pro-market critiques of so-called "free-market libertarianism" - alongside Mutualism, as possible solutions to America's taxation and budget problems, environmental problems, and land tenure and housing and gentrification problems (among others).

     Georgists want to tax land, not labor and capital. And they want to tax land in order to avoid taxing labor and capital.

     If we were taxing land value - instead of income, sales, consumption, production, and trade - that would mean no taxation of health goods and services.

     By this, I mean that health workers and medical device producers would pay no taxes (except to the extent that they receive taxpayer assistance, benefit from monopoly privileges, and/or make land unusable for others).

     Just like all sales and consumption taxes, the medical device sales tax is unnecessary, because it unnecessarily adds to the total cost of medical devices, making each potential buyer (hospitals) decrease the number devices they were going to buy by that percentage (all other factors assumed to hold equal).
     Think about it: If medical devices were more affordable, and each hospital or doctor's office would have more of each medical device, then the likelihood that people would sue the clinic for malpractice for not having and using the latest medical technology to diagnose and treat their illness properly, would decline. Because medical devices would become that much more accessible to any given person might need one used on them.

     Unless there is an economic justification for taxing sales, and it's sustainable, we should not tax the sale of anything (except land). And if you tax land value, waste and destruction of land, monopolies, and use of common or taxpayer resources, and no taxation of health goods and services; then no taxation of anyone's earned income - doctor or not a doctor - will be necessary.

     If you pay no income taxes - and neither do your nurse, your doctor, and the people manufacturing the medical devices - then everyone's ability to afford medicine will increase. That's because unnecessary taxes that hinder productivity and earnings, will have been replaced with taxes that directly punish a significant cause of our health problems: land degradation and land hoarding. This will help further reduce health costs, by taxing the organizations that directly cause our health problems, making corporate polluters bear the financial burden of pollution instead of the patients themselves.

     Once we can tax the right things, we can balance budgets, in order to stop borrowing and inflating. Then, the value of the money in everyone's pockets will steadily in increase, and medical costs will stabilize, flatten out, and then eventually begin to decrease. With taxes on productivity gone, investment in medicine will increase, but it will be sustainable, rather than oriented toward short term profit, because taxpayer funds will no longer subsidize medical R&D in a way that trains companies to be reliant on taxpayer handouts, and medical patents will be drastically shortened, instead of continuing to allow drug manufacturers to hold pharmaceutical patents for 14 or 17 or 18 years.

     Thus, the increase of the duration of patent, trademark, and copyright protection, since the establishment of the U.S. Patent Office, has caused patents to behave more like monopolies. Long-protected patents are monopolies that got out of control; they were originally intended to only confer a temporary monopoly. Patents are supposed to protect the property rights of real inventors, not confer a long monopoly privilege to a business long enough for it to become a corporate crony and a beneficiary of government largesse.

     Think of how few congressmen would be able to engage in "insider congressional trading" in medical device stocks, if they had zero ability to subsidize medical research or keep pharmaceutical and device patents absurdly long? With so much power to influence business, "insider trading", in this context, merely refers to the congressmen's abilities to trade stock, and then the same day, turn around and write legislation which sometimes literally provides for the spending of taxpayer funds on projects overseen by medical device and Big Pharma companies.
     The only reason some people don't see this as wrong, is because it is legal. But the same thing is true about subsidies for medical research and development! (Read the following article to learn more about that: http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/376574-pharmaceutical-corporations-need-to-stop-free-riding-on-publicly-funded).

     Why go in a socialist or free market direction with our health care system, when we can do both at the same time?
     We can do this by: 1) Shortening medical patents will allow generics to come onto the market sooner, leading to cheaper prices sooner; 2) Urging states to legalize interstate purchase of health insurance, while eliminating the employer provided health insurance tax credit, to make health insurance affordable and portable, while removing the unfair advantage that employed people have over unemployed people in obtaining coverage; and 3) Eliminating taxes on nonprofit and cooperative health providers, because they produce no profit which could be taxed.

     We can spread the word that direct primary care eliminates the health insurance middleman and allows people to avoid large bills by simply paying in a small amount of cash in person. The number of direct primary care providers should increase, the tax system should be restructured to leave them free to thrive, and they should be free to partner with any church or charity organization that wants to provide donations of physical cash to patients as they walk into the direct primary care provider's office (as long as the church or charity pays its land value taxes).

     Learn about Georgism, Land Value Taxation, environmental taxation, and Mutualism. The solution to the war in the streets between capitalists and socialists, is to teach them where their common ground lies, and that other economic systems exist besides the two that most of us know about.

     We should try some of those economic systems. We'll never know whether they'll work, unless and until we try them.




     To learn about where I got the idea that cheaper medical devices could lead to fewer malpractice lawsuits, watch Season 11, Episode 2, of the show King of the Hill, titled "SerPUNt" (in which Hank Hill becomes responsible for taking care of a snake and bringing it in to a veterinarian's office).

Written and Published on September 3rd, 2020
Edited and Expanded on September 4th, 2020

Proposal of a Geo-Painean-Friedmanite Caucus of the Libertarian Party

            The following four paragraphs contain the description of a political study group which I created and administer on Facebook in November 2016, entitled “Basic Income & Tax Reform”.:

            Basic Income & Tax Reform (formerly Give Me My Money) is a study group promoting radical tax reform alongside cash payments to the poor.

This is a group to bring together proponents of:
(1) Land Value Taxation and Split-Rate Taxation,

(2) the Negative Income Tax,

(3) the FairTax,

(4) Citizens' and Residents' Dividends,

(5) Sovereign Wealth Funds and Permanent Funds,

(6) Universal / Unconditional Basic Income Guarantees,

(7) extensions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and

(8) expansions of ordinary people's tax deductions for expenses of care.

We believe that serious discussion of taxation reform, environmental policy reform, and welfare reform must take into consideration the need to take an integrated and comprehensive approach to these three issues. Reforms which must take place alongside our proposals include reforms to property rights, natural resource extraction, homesteading, and the budget.

We look forward to building coalitions with libertarian-leaning and progressive Democrats, moderate and libertarian-leaning Republicans, third parties and independents, Georgists, anarchist and direct action groups, and others.

Basic Income & Tax Reform desires to help lift the poor out of poverty (and remove poverty traps in the welfare system) while creating an economic environment more conducive to investment and savings (whether domestic or international) through less government intervention, not more; with redistributive taxation and involuntary taxation used only as last resorts. The types of tax proposals which we deem most necessary and proper, as well as urgent, are proposals which provide tax relief to the poor, while refraining from hindering productive behavior.

Proposals in include 1) extensions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (E.I.T.C.); 2) repeals of non-luxury sales taxes; 3) curbing inflation – through balancing the budget and paying off the debt – in order to lower what effectively amounts to the taxation of savings, which discourages savings; 4) expansions of homesteading tax credits so as to allow credits to apply to apartments, and tiny houses (alongside homesteading reform); and 5) permissive tax deductions for expenses from child care, elder care, and health care and insurance.

After those first five short-term proposals are achieved, our medium-term goals include 6) Cut-Cap-and-Balance measures; 7) reverting to zero-based budgeting; 8) passing across-the-board tax cuts; and 9) supporting measures which make taxes flatter. Our long-term goals are 10) formally repealing the 16^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; 11) passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution); and 12) reforming the structure and philosophy of taxation into one that embraces geo-libertarian principles.

We would like to see all taxes imposed by the most local level of government possible (without sacrificing efficiency), and we desire that government be funded wholly through taxation proposals permissible under the umbrella of Land Value Taxation / the “Single” Tax (including carbon taxes), in addition to receipts from user fees, and revenues collected through voluntary contributions.

In the event that Georgist and geo-libertarian tax proposals were to fail, Basic Income & Tax Reform regards neither the FairTax nor the Negative Income Tax (N.I.T.) preferable to the other. This is because there are several things at issue; namely, that of progressive vs. regressive taxation, as well as problems associated with precisely which types of behavior are being taxed and which are not.

In one sense, the Negative Income Tax is preferable to the FairTax, because the N.I.T. is more progressive than the FairTax is. The FairTax has a reputation of being regressive, and in one sense it is, because it penalizes the purchases of ordinary people. On the other hand, the FairTax comes with a “prebate” that compensates people for the expenses they incur in paying those sales taxes (up to a certain point). But the prebate aside, the Negative Income Tax is a flat tax which has a reputation of being effectively progressive; this is because the poor would receive money overall instead of paying taxes. This is why the N.I.T. has been described as a flat tax which is effectively progressive; the poor would “pay” a “negative tax rate”; i.e., receive money.

On the other hand, the FairTax is preferable to the N.I.T. – especially as far as Georgists are concerned, and to some extent as far as many conservatives are concerned – because the FairTax penalizes consumption and the purchase of luxury and ordinary goods, while the Negative Income Tax penalizes the earning of income. Since some conspicuous consumption is wasteful, this means waste is more similar to consumption than it is to productive labor and the earning of income. Hence, the FairTax is less detrimental to productive behavior than is the Negative Income Tax.

Basic Income & Tax Reform is interested in ascertaining the beneficial aspects of, and principles behind, each of these two tax proposals (the FairTax and the Negative Income Tax) into a new philosophy of taxation.

As a way to avoid taxing either sales or income – and lessons from the FairTax and the Negative Income Tax having not yet being ascertained for the purposes of improving the rest of Basic Income & Tax Reform’s platform – taxation proposals permissible under the principles of Land Value Taxation (L.V.T.) should be the only taxes levied which are involuntary. Of course, convincing others that these taxes are appropriate, and winning elections, is how L.V.T. becomes voluntary.

The environmental objective of enacting Georgist taxation to its fullest extent, involves establishing Community Land Trusts (C.L.T.s), Community Water Trusts (C.W.T.s), and, if governments please, Community Air Trusts (C.A.T.s). These agencies could choose to unite these three functions into a single office; perhaps an “Office of Taxation, Environment, and Welfare” (O.T.E.W.).

Municipal and county governments would be encouraged to offer fewer services and shrink spending and taxes, while at the same time establishing these agencies. Additionally, unincorporated communities – and autonomous, independent, unincorporated local voluntary associations – would be encouraged to refrain from applying for recognition as official incorporated municipalities, and instead to build these agencies as the act establishing their legitimacy.

Communities would be encouraged – either that, or required, as a condition of participation in a coordinated effort across communities to build the same agencies and implement similar-enough policies – to set up Sovereign Wealth Funds. The concept of Sovereign Wealth Funds, Permanent Funds, Citizens’ Dividends, Residents’ Dividends, the Universal or Unconditional Basic Income Guarantee, the prebate from the FairTax, and the bonus given through the Negative Income Tax’s “payment of a negative tax rate”, all amount in the same thing: cash payments to people; either to all of the people, or only to those earning below a certain level of income (often set as the poverty rate).

The Sovereign Wealth Fund (or whatever name it has, given that so many names apply to such similar ideas) would be funded and backed by the chief export or exports of the community and / or region. It would also be funded by receipts and revenues originating from the imposition and collection of user fees, voluntary contributions, and taxes admissible under an extended Land Value Taxation system.

O.T.E.W.s (or their components, working independently of one-another) would be free to choose whether to establish currencies backed by the value of natural resources, and / or by the fees imposed for the privilege of extracting said natural resources, and / or backed by export sales. Such currencies could originate in local, state, or regional government; or they could be outgrowths of electronic currencies, or other types of alternative currencies.

O.T.E.W.s would operate as not-for-profit (or non-profit) consumer-cooperatives. They could be either quasi-governmental, non-governmental, or entities which are non-incorporated altogether. Any purchasing by these entities should be performed as a consumer-cooperative purchasing society.

These agencies would be free to become corporations, but not through official recognition by government. They would be independent corporations – really, consumer credit unions – which would sell stock. The value of the stock would rest upon the degree of success of each of those agencies in preserving its respective sphere of the environment (that is; land, water, and air).

The value of the optional natural resource –backed currencies would derive from both the degree of success of O.T.E.W. agencies in preserving the environment, and also from chief export sales, as well as general faith and credit in the government; and in the solvency of its taxation, banking, and financial systems.

Basic Income & Tax Reform feels that the above set of policies is the platform most likely to unite members of the Libertarian Party with members of the Green Party; through creating a convergence upon geo-libertarianism as a philosophy that lies between the two. We encourage Greens and progressives to come towards the positions of the Libertarian Party.

We additionally encourage Libertarian Party members, ideological libertarians, and libertarian-leaning conservatives, to embrace Georgism, or at least to support Thomas Paine’s basic income proposal, which in my opinion is compatible with Henry George’s ideas. In Paine’s proposal, a citizen’s dividend would give a basic income for all adult citizens, as a form of compensation for government takings from the full bundle of freedoms and rights which come with private landed property ownership in full allodial title (rights such as freedom from taxation of that land, the freedom to deny even government agents access to the property, and the freedom to explore one’s own property for natural resources without compensating the community).

The author of this article, himself, feels that the best avenue and vehicle for embodiment and presentation of this platform, would be as a Thomas Paine Caucus; revived from its late-1990s form as a voluntary association comprised of libertarian Georgists, but as a caucus of the Libertarian Party. The caucus should make sure to bring followers of Henry George and Milton Friedman into the mix; so I propose a Geo-Painean-Friedmanite Caucus of the Libertarian Party of the United States; to consider radical tax reform and cash payouts, in addition to increasing tax deductions and low-income tax credits.

In light of what the Constitution has to say about the environment (which is nothing), and welfare (which is that government spending should benefit everybody), it is important to consider at what level these reforms are to be implemented.

It seems appropriate to recommend (and highlight) that this system works best as a decentralized or diffused federation of communities – or as multiple, geographically overlapping confederations – rather than as a centralized system or a polycentric system. Polycentric agencies may be helpful to prevent disproportionate favoritism of productive firms based in urban areas; but political power paradigms that are as diffused as possible are what are generally desirable. Encouraging jurisdictions to expand and overlap would help maximize this diffusion of power.

But if a centralized or oligocentric government ought to exist in any form; it should primarily be in the businesses of 1) allocating land in a macroscopic way; 2) ensuring mutuality of exchanges and transactions; and 3) registering individuals’ political membership. These functions reflect the main functions of legitimate governance as regarded by the schools of 1) Georgism; 2) Mutualism; and 3) Panarchism.
It might additionally prove appropriate for a centralized government to guarantee certain basic civil rights and civil liberties; such as equal protections under the law, like the right to defend oneself in court, and the equal right to sue.
However, it could very well turn out that those are simply the last functions of government which would dissolve, while a Geo-Mutualist Panarchist system emerges out of the unentangling last vestiges of a constitutional republic. And that goes whether it's a minarchistic one that's decided to embrace true liberty, or whether it's a corrupt democratic republic that ceases functioning or collapses (in any given imaginable scenario).

Written between Mid-November and December 5^th, 2016

Edited on January 19th and 29th, 2017, and December 1st, 2018

The Georgist View of the Factors of Production, Illustrated with Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots