City Governments Could Make Revenue-Sourcing and Land Use More Efficient by Taxing Vacant Lots and Abandoned Properties

 

Table of Contents

Part I: Preface

Part II: Letter
1. Introduction to Georgism
2. Understanding Georgism
3. Land Value “Taxes” as User Fees
4. The Waukegan Budget
5. Implementing L.V.T. on a City-Wide Basis
6. Why Georgism?
7. “An Economic Miracle”

Part III: Post-Scripts

Content

Part I: Preface

     I wrote the following letter to Waukegan mayoral candidate Ann Taylor, in an e-mail, on April 2^nd, 2021.

     The letter outlines why – and how – I recommend that the City of Waukegan implement Henry George’s Land Value Taxation to solve the city’s budget issues.
     I provided Taylor with the three images at the end of this article, as appendices to my message.

     The Democratic primary for the 2021 Waukegan mayoral race takes place this coming Tuesday; on April 6th, 2021.

Part II: Letter

1. Introduction to Georgism

     I've been trying to bring the Green and Libertarian parties closer together, with the economic school of thought known as Georgism, named for Henry George. Libertarians would like it because it would simplify taxes and free production, while Greens would like it for its focus on maintaining land and environment in good quality.

     Basically Georgism would involve a tax on unimprovement of land; through what's called Land Value Taxation. This would involve getting rid of sales taxes, income taxes, [and] investment taxes (because they tax production). Taxing production, income, and sales, means we'll get less of those things, meaning less tax revenue will become depleted over time. This will make it necessary to find other revenue sources, preferably ones that don't deplete themselves.

     The current taxes on production (and harmless economic behaviors), would be replaced with taxes on waste and destruction. These taxes would primarily target the despoilation of land, speculation on land prices, and on land hoarding.

     Economist Art Laffer theorized, in his description of the "Laffer curve", that people will stop producing as much if you tax them at too high a rate. Laffer was correct that this principle applies to income and production, but we must go further, and apply the idea to the taxation of land as well.

     If you tax something, you get less of it. So if we tax income and sales, we will get less of those things, because people will avoid the behavior in order to avoid the tax. If we tax the waste and destruction of land, then people will stop wasting and destroying land, in order to reduce their tax burden.

     Land Value Taxation could be described as a tax, but it could also be described as a use fee, or as a fine. It could help to think of L.V.T. as a fine and a tax at the same time. L.V.T. could function as an intentionally punitive tax.

     This may result in self-depleting revenue streams from land taxation, but that will only happen if the new taxation scheme is successful at deterring unwanted behaviors. Furthermore, the revenue decreases will reflect the fact that government budgets can be responsibly reduced. Once stolen rents have been captured by the city, and redistributed to the community in a way that solves the city's problems, the need for government will decrease, and the need for more tax revenue will decrease along with it.

2. Understanding Georgism

     There are several ways to think about Georgism which helps us understand it. First are the slogans: "Tax land, not man", "Tax bads, not goods", and my own "Tax destruction, not production".

     Another is the idea that the tax on unimproved land value would function as a fee, paid by the renter of the land, as a user fee to compensate the community for the cost of protecting or insuring the property. Another is that the value of the unimproved land can be calculated by estimating either the cost to the community to protect it, or else the cost of restoring the land to its original natural state.

     Basically Land Value Taxation is a tax on unimproved land value, rather than on improvements. Improvements are things like additions we make to our houses, but more generally includes all houses, buildings, labor and capital, and mixing of labor and capital. All of which occurs on top of the land, out of which all natural and mineral resources, and land and water, come, to be mixed together and refined.

     When land is cheap, labor and capital become cheaper, and it becomes cheaper to mix labor and capital (which is the essence of all production). So when land is taxed in a way that is designed to minimize and punish waste and the pollution of the land, and businesses are taxes in a way that is designed to minimize pollution, we will have cheaper production with less harmful health effects associated.

     With less harmful health effects, medical costs will go down. Medical costs will have also gone down because taxes on doctors' and nurses' income will go down and be eliminated, and because sales taxes on medical goods will also be eliminated. Profits from sales of medicine should be taxed, however, if the seller is a monopoly, because that is not an ordinary sale.

     There are a lot of ways to explain Georgism, and lots of types of taxes may be discussed in the process. However, Land Value Taxation was formerly known as “the Single Tax on land”, so the fact that land despoilation and unimprovement can be taxed in many different ways, complicates things a little bit,

     Establishing a Georgist economy would likely involve taxing land blight, fining all major polluters, taxing land speculation, taxing land hoarders, taxing profits of monopoly companies, taxing slumlords, and taxing abandoned construction projects. Also, imposing Pigouvian taxes, which are taxes on unnecessary transaction costs (like ATM fees).

     These may all seem like very different types of taxes, but they're all taxes on what are, basically, different forms of theft, but more specifically theft of land value (or theft of some other form of value, through the use of the benefits offered by unnatural monopoly power).

3. Land Value “Taxes” as User Fees

     Georgism is not exactly a pollution tax, because Georgism wants to tax land despoilation, which is not just environmental degradation of the land, but any and all forms of damage and value degradation of the land. To be clear, allowing land to stay at the same level of quality, would not be taxed, nor would improving it; but allowing the land to decrease in quality would be punitively taxed.

     Land Value “Taxes” (or fees) would function as a user-fee-based system, allowing the community to transact with property owners (later, renters) on mutually beneficial terms. Nobody should get away with profiting at the community's expense.

     When land value is stolen from the community - and not reinvested into the community government and/or spent by the people in markets - then the cost of producing stays high. The cost of producing will stay artificially high, as long as we continue to tax environmentally harmless productive activities (such as income from labor, sales and purchase and consumption, and investment that doesn't come at public expense). We can replace those taxes, with fees and fines and liens against people who allow land to fall into disrepair, decline, and blight.

     Basically, I advocate keeping user fees and utilities taxes, and funding the government mostly through Land Value Taxation and user fees, because Land Value Taxation is a form of user fee. It is a fee, paid by the land renter (formerly owner) to the community, for protecting and insuring the given parcel of land.

4. The Waukegan Budget

     I looked at the preliminary 2021 budget for the City of Waukegan, and noticed some issues. First off, I think the figure at the end, giving $185,154,700 as the budget total, is about $14 million too high. I say this because I believe that the figures $6,077,000 (the property tax for the firefighters' pension fund) and $8,535,000 (the property tax for the police pension) are doubled.

     I was only able to account for $171,683,000 in that budget. I'd like to speak to whoever does the budgets, about that. Unless you know what that is about. I have the document I'm talking about, it's from the city's website.

     [Note: That document is available at the following link: http://www.waukeganil.gov/DocumentCenter/View/4459/Proposed-2020-2021-Budget. I was referring to pages 41 through 56 of that document.]

     Anyway, I assumed that the city budget is $171,683,000 in total, and will remain that way for the next four years, for simplicity's sake. Then I broke down all the sources of revenue, and ranked them by total amount. I split them into "OK taxes" (including use taxes and fees, government's secure sources of revenue from investments and interest, and other acceptable taxes) and "bad taxes" on productive, harmless, voluntary activities (as well as fees for services for which the government gets paid but arguably doesn't provide any real service).

     The green spreadsheet image shows a suggested set of budgets from now to 2025, to phase-in Land Value Taxation while replacing taxes on production.

[Click, and open in new tab or window, to see in full resolution.

Note:

Not all of the totals, for the years 2022 through 2024,

add up to $171,683,000 as was intended.

This chart should be consulted for illustration purposes only.]

[Click, and open in new tab or window, to see in full resolution.

Note: This chart is based on the green spreadsheet shown above.
It shows how Land Value Taxes would be phased-in
while taxes on productive behaviors would be phased-out.]

     I could easily re-adjust these projections based on future budgets, and in anticipation of future growth of government. But if this tax reform works, then growth of government might no longer be necessary to solve the city's problems.

     I wrote this article explaining how Georgism could help Lake County in particular. It would certainly lead to wiser, more efficient land use, at the very least. Altoona, Pennsylvania still has Land Value Taxation. It has also helped Singapore use land area efficiently.

     http://www.lclp.org/articles/geolibertarianism/

5. Implementing L.V.T. on a City-Wide Basis

     If I were running for mayor, I would announce that income, sales, and investment taxes are no more; that user fees, taxes on the unimproved value of land, and voluntary contributions should alone fund the government.

     I see that there is a “Vacant Registry Fund” in the proposed city budget. If I were running for mayor, I would advocate that the Vacant Registry Fund, and its ability to register vacant structures and impose fines upon the owner, be expanded. I would expand this fund into a fund for the registry of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and blighted lands” (or something shorter).

     In this registry, I would include all blighted and polluted lands, vacant lots, abandoned homes, incomplete structures, [and] halfway-done construction projects that are merely eyesores. Potentially, you could even include workplaces where virtually no useful economic activity is taking place, and slum apartments where landlords are doing virtually no maintenance work. All of these properties could be taxed justifiably under Georgism. Single-floor buildings, parking lots, and other wastes of area and economic potential, could be taxed as well.

     I would then announce that property taxes must be reformed, so as to begin taxing homes and economically active commercial properties at progressively lower and lower rates, while the actual owners of parcels of land are made into renters. Their taxes would be based on the quality of their land, rather than on their property value. Taxing land at a higher rate than buildings, is called split-rate taxation.

     If split-rate taxation, and the expansion of the Vacant Structure Register into a sort of “Vacant Structures and Lands Register”, turn out successful, then it's possible that the duties of this program could eventually be handed over to an independent, depoliticized, or quasi-governmental agency.

     I would recommend this, to protect it from profit motives and keep it a permanent program (to protect it from being changed by the fleeting opinion of narrow majorities). If administered as a non-for-profit cooperative corporation, the entity could be called a Community Land Trust (and community water and air trusts could exist as well).

     Such an entity could even operate on market principles, allowing the community to vote in online “artificial markets” to decide how much land parcels are worth. This idea is called Geo-Libertarianism.

6. Why Georgism?

     As long as property taxes remain in place, without reforming to Land Value Taxation, people will refrain from improving their property, for fear of higher taxes. Land Value Taxation would do wonders; in terms of simplify taxes, making taxes make sense again in order to restore people's trust in government, freeing people's entrepreneurial spirit, and allowing for the beautification of homes without worries about gentrification. It could also decentralize government, and potentially reduce antipathy between high-skilled and less skilled workers.

     Georgism would enable the community and the market to function as one and the same, by recouping – through redistribution - the costs of stolen unimproved land value which was stolen by speculators and land hoarders. This will bring about less government interference in the marketplaces for all goods besides land, which will in turn allow for the drastic simplification of taxes and work alike.

     Simplifying taxes - and eliminating the need for ordinary low-income working people (and everybody else who makes their money without profiting at public expense) to file income taxes - will help facilitate the balancing of government budgets, and help end public governments' financial crises.

     Solving those crises will help reduce the city's dependence on foreign governments for revenue, which usually carries with it a responsibility to implement certain policies which may not always be helpful, but are accepted begrudgingly in order to receive those funds. I would recommend replacing intergovernmental taxes, replacement taxes, and home rule taxes, with Land Value Taxation; because eliminating those taxes will help reduce the city's political and financial dependence on foreign governments. Becoming politically and financially less dependent upon the county and state, will help the City of Waukegan experiment more in regards to L.V.T..

7. “An Economic Miracle”

     Focusing on how to source revenue ethically and efficiently, would also help shift the focus, in budget balancing, from the “we need to tax X because we need to spend it on Y” model, to a model based on “spending money on Y may be necessary, but taxing X to fund Y is only acceptable if X and Y are related to each other, and if X is a harmful behavior that makes it seem necessary to spend money on Y in the first place".

     The closer we move towards a system where government can't tax or fine people unless they do something wrong (including harm the community's ability to make use of land and common resources), the closer government will come to honoring the principle enshrined in the Fifth Amendment and Thirteenth Amendment; i.e., that no private property shall be taken for public use without just compensation, and that no involuntary servitude (including rendering of income from labor) shall be required except in cases wherein someone has been convicted of a crime.

     If you help to implement these changes, people will say that what happened in Waukegan was an economic miracle. That's what they said about what 12 Pittsburgh suburbs did, when they experimented with LVT between the 1980s and 2000s. These towns' successes with LVT wasn't able to outlast the 2007-09 financial crisis, unfortunately; but they did see less land waste, less homelessness and unemployment, and more production, as a result.

     Economist Mason Gaffney says that Land Value Taxation could fully fund government by itself; as land constitutes approximately 1/3 of the economy.
     I'm not sure what level of Land Value Tax would be necessary here, however. More research, and experimentation, and consultation with the city's economic advisors, would be necessary, before determining that.
     In Australia, just a 6% tax on unimproved land value is recommended, to solve the country's budget problems, but that might not translate to the issues faced by a small American city such as Waukegan. 

     [Note: See the second post-script, at the end of this article, to read about why I recommend a 16% tax for Waukegan.]

     Here's a video about land use in Australia:

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL3n59wC8kk

     I can connect you to Georgist economists if you would like, I know a few through Facebook. One named Adam Jon Monroe lives in Chicago. He stresses that basic income and pollution taxes would not be part of a Georgist system, as Henry George supported a free market for everything except land (i.e., he supported free movement of labor and capital, and free markets and free trade for all things related to labor and capital).

     I'm at 608-417-9395 if you have any questions.

[Click, and open in new tab or window, to see in full resolution.
This image was not designed by the author of this blog.]

[Click, and open in new tab or window, to see in full resolution.
This image was designed by the author of this blog,
and previously appeared on this blog at the following address:
www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/11/georgist-economics-illustrated-with.html.]

[Click, and open in new tab or window, to see in full resolution.

This image was designed by the author of this blog,

and previously appeared at the following address:
www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2019/05/rent-profit-interest-and-usury.html]

Part III: Post-Scripts


First Post-Script, Written and Added on April 6th, 2021:

     In the above letter, I stated that I would like to end the city's sourcing of revenue from proceeds from rental income and capital leases, while phasing-in Land Value Taxation to replace it. I would like to amend that idea slightly; to the following.

     The following taxation powers, which the city currently has, should be combined: 1) the city's rent-charging and capital leasing powers; 2) its ability to impose liens; 3) its ability to charge taxes on hotels and motels; 4) its power to assess property taxes; and 5) its power to collect funds for a registry of vacant lots.

     The agency resulting from this union of tax powers could be named something like "the Land Tax Revenue Service" or "the Land Revenue Service". If it would be helpful, another agency could be created, to encapsulate all other sources of tax revenue.

     In order to bring the city's tax code in compliance with Land Value Taxation, the Land Revenue Service would then have to curtail the third and fourth powers mentioned above; by 3) restricting the levying of taxes on hotels and motels solely to unoccupied units which are in declining states of maintenance; and by 4) restricting the levying of property taxes to taxes on non-improvements rather than improvements.

      Such a "Land Revenue Service" - or L.R.S. - would eventually fund a Community Land Trust; a non-for-profit corporation that would manage land on behalf of the community. Once complete, a Community Air Trust and Community Water Trust could be created as well, to allow hydrogeographers and marine biologists and pollution experts (etc.) to find the specific agencies which are relevant to their particular interests regarding ecological preservation.

     But first, the L.R.S. would have to obtain databases of abandoned and vacant lots and buildings, and lands in declining state of economic and environmental value, in order to perform an adequate assessment regarding which lands can be taxed, and how much revenue can be gleaned from the taxation of despoiled and unimproved land value.

     Approximately $100 million in unimproved land value would be necessary to tax annually, in order to fund the Waukegan city government at its current spending levels. But Waukegan's approximately $1.9 billion G.D.P. - coupled with Georgist economist Mason Gaffney's observation that one-third of the G.D.P. is untaxed land rent - means that there is probably closer to $633 million in untaxed rent, generated each year, which could fund city services.

     In order for city governments to be streamlined, and their budgets made balanced and sustainable, the powers to tax property, hotels and motels, vacant lots, and rentals of government property, and the power to impose liens for non-payment of taxes, must all work together.

     They must work together so well that they become indistinguishable from one-another. They must be complemented, in sourcing the government's revenue, by fee-for-service models and utilities fees; again, until there is little discernable difference between the two, and it becomes clear that Land Value Taxation is a fee-for-service model.

     This must continue until government budgets are funded solely through different categories of Land Value Taxation, fee-for-service models, and voluntary contributions. This will allow participation in government services to occur on a maximally voluntary and free-market basis, allowing supply and demand to meet at a reasonable price, minimally affected by the economic activities of government.

     If successful, and if Land Value Taxation becomes so popular that support for it becomes nearly universal, then Land Value Taxation will be on its way to becoming a fully voluntary tax. It's not fully avoidable, though; but it's a tax that you can easily avoid, as long as you don't waste, hoard, or destroy public or common resources or socially created value that you yourself did not create.

     Does that sound like a fair deal?

Second Post-Script, Written and Added on April 8th, 2021

     Given Waukegan's 88,000-person population and its $21,500 income per capita, I assume that Waukegan's G.D.P. (gross domestic product) is approximately $1.9 billion per year.

     Georgist economist Mason Gaffney estimates that one-third of the G.D.P. is tied up in untaxed rent on unimproved land. If that is true about Waukegan, then I would estimate that there is about one-third of $1.9 trillion in untaxed land rents in Waukegan, which comes out to $633,333,333.33.

     The target amount which I provided for the Land Value Tax, in the fourth year of my budget proposal, was $102,500,000.00. That number is 16.1842% of $633 million (the value of land rent which is available to be taxed).

     This is why I would recommend that unimproved land value should be taxed at 16.1842% of its value, during the fourth and final year in the process of gradually replacing approximately 60% of government revenues with Land Value Taxes.

     I would recommend that, during the first four years, unimproved land be taxed at 4.04605% of its value; and then 8.0921% the following year; then 12.13185% the third year; and finally 16.1842%, where it should remain until the city decides that its overall budget should decrease.

     

E-Mail to Ann Taylor written on April 2nd, 2021

This article was first published to this blog
on April 3rd, 2021

Post-Scripts Written and Added on April 6th and 8th, 2021

Table of contents edited on April 8th, 2021

 

What is Geolibertarianism? (Abbreviated)

What is Geolibertarianism?

Written on January 25^th, 2017

      The Libertarian Party needs a tax policy.

      Given that Gary Johnson failed to convince certain media figures that the FairTax is the best tax plan out there, and failed to convince the American people to vote for him, it's time for the L.P. to think about its tax policy, and the principles behind it.

     Don't get me wrong; there's nothing wrong with the FairTax, Johnson simply wasn't given enough opportunities to defend it. The FairTax – which would aim to replace personal income taxes – is a proposed 23% sales tax on all goods sold nationally, in order to fund the federal government. On first inspection, the plan appears to achieve every goal of good libertarian tax philosophy.

      Despite the concerns of CNN's Chris Cuomo that the FairTax is regressive - and the concerns of John Oliver that the plan is just another social welfare program – Johnson continued defending the FairTax.

      He argued that it was revenue-neutral. He also argued that the FairTax is not regressive; because it would compensate people – in advance, to the tune of several thousand dollars annually – for those national sales taxes which they would pay on ordinary consumer goods and services. This payout – which John Oliver described as just another social welfare program – is called the FairTax “prebate”.

      The FairTax succeeds at putting into practice most of the goals of libertarian principles on taxes. And what are those principles, exactly? We want to simplify the tax code, for a start. We want make tax burdens more equal by flattening tax rates, and run government services on fee-for-service models. But we also don't want to burden low-income people who have difficulty affording taxes, because we recognize that more government involvement has made their lives more difficult in that respect.

      Lastly, we want a tax code that doesn't inhibit productive behavior. We share the concerns of former Reagan economic adviser Art Laffer, whose “Laffer curve” explained the mathematical ramifications of the observation that taxes often have the effect of punishing or deterring the behaviors which they tax. If we agree that taxes do punish, then they should punish intentionally.

      More to the point; what the FairTax lacks is an idea of how to fully apply the idea that all taxes just might punish and deter the behaviors they tax. That's where the Single Tax comes in.

      Now commonly known as Land Value Taxation, the Single Tax is the philosophy of 19th-century American economist Henry George. Students of George's philosophy – called Georgists, or geoists – have adopted slogans such as “tax land, not man”, and “tax bads, not goods”.

      This means that Georgists want government to be funded entirely through the collection of rents on the non-improvement of landed property. In a Georgist system, local governments would levy fees against wasteful “uses” of landed property, while “community land trusts” would be charged with preserving and allocating land.

      I know what you're thinking, and you're right; your property taxes are high enough already. But under Georgism, you would incur no tax liabilities from making productive use of your land (as long as you don't render the land unusable). You would be free to make sustainable improvements that increase your property value, without paying increased property taxes.

      Despite the “Single Tax” label, there are numerous types of activities which would be taxed in a Georgist system. These include but are not limited to: hoarding, abuse, misuse, disuse, blight, pollution, and unsustainable development of land; as well as the extraction of natural resources without compensating the community.

      The Georgist system would levy taxes with the intent of deterring and punishing the undesirable behavior (the “bad”); while avoiding taxing man's productive economic behaviors; like engaging in labor, and buying and selling “goods”.

      The advantage that Georgism has over the FairTax is that Georgism taxes waste, while the FairTax taxes consumption. This is problematic because consumption is not always wasteful. Conspicious consumption (that is, excessive consumption), on the other hand, resembles waste. But to tax only the waste of land, while refraining from taxing purchases, could help avoid the risk that the FairTax could deter the purchase of ordinary goods.

      Truth be told, as long as prices and the value of the dollar were to remain stable, the FairTax's prebate would probably remove that disincentive to make purchases. But nonetheless, the Georgist plan to tax waste, in all its forms, achieves the goals of libertarian tax philosophy even more thoroughly than the FairTax does.

A geo-libertarian tax policy would most likely be funded through 1) voluntary donations, 2) user fees), and 3) taxes on the non-improvement of land.

      Henry George's philosophy was praised by the late former Reagan economic adviser Milton Friedman; as “the least harmful tax” ever proposed. For the last fifty years, Nobel Prize winner Friedman – as well as his son David, and grandson Patri – has been an important influence on conservative and libertarian thought.

In 1968, Friedman defended the Negative Income Tax (N.I.T.) against William F. Buckley's questioning. The N.I.T. was not devised by Friedman, but it was supported by Sargent Shriver and Daniel Moynihan, and considered by presidents Johnson and Nixon.

      The Negative Income Tax would be paid for through a flat tax on those above a certain income level, with a “negative tax rate” being applied to people below that income level. This imposition of a negative tax rate would result in a cash payment, which Friedman explained could be equal to (as an example) 50% of the difference between the low-income person's annual earnings, and the income level that establishes who will pay taxes and who will receive payment.

      One intention of the N.I.T. is to phase-out requirements that a person must give up benefits as soon as they become employed; these requirements create what some call “the poverty trap in the welfare system”. Another intention of the plan is to pay low-income citizens their own money back.

      Such a plan could be argued to provide reparative compensation (that is, reparations) to the impoverished; as an redress of grievances; grievances against the federal government such as growing beyond its appropriate scope of power, putting taxpayer money in the hands of cronies and lobbyists, and creating artificial scarcity of land through the hoarding of land into federal ownership.

      A libertarian implementation of the N.I.T. would most likely involve shrinking government involvement in health and education, while returning the moneys that fund health and education to the taxpayers, so that they may more easily be able to afford buying health and education goods and services on the open market, just as they would with ordinary consumer goods.

      Now the similarities between the FairTax and the Negative Income Tax are becoming apparent.

      Both plans impose a tax upon a productive economic behavior which is not related to land; the FairTax taxes sales, while the N.I.T. Taxes income. Both plans would be levied in the hope that they would make at least one other way of sourcing government revenue obsolete. Additionally, each plan would be administered concurrently with reductions in the size and scope of government; returning money to the taxpayer, in a way that is effectively progressive, even if some describe them as flat.

      Aside from the FairTax, the Negative Income Tax, and the Georgist plan, the ideas of Thomas Paine should be considered. At the Libertarian Party's 1998 convention, a group of libertarian Georgists called the Thomas Paine Caucus hosted a booth, hoping to get their land platform into the party's platform.

      The caucus was unsuccessful; and although some caucus members did become L.P. members, the caucus did not become part of the party. As a result, in the last twenty years, the party has perhaps paid less attention to Paine than it should. However, that does not stop today's geo-libertarians from calling for the party to consider Paine's ideas on welfare, in addition to George's and Friedman's.

      In Common Sense, Paine articulated what could be described as a geo-libertarian proposal for a citizens' dividend program. He essentially argued that, since government must deprive individuals of full private property rights (in order to maintain basic zoning and land-title systems), government should be obligated to compensate all adults in the country with a certain guaranteed income; an income equal to the value of the vast set of landed property rights which they would otherwise fully possess.

      Of course, without access to land and natural resources, it is practically impossible for most people to be productive. As a result, competition for resources, trade, and currency, are all more prevalent than they would be if individuals sustained themselves. Poverty and dependence go hand-in-hand; this is what libertarians, conservatives, and Georgists all want to address.

      That's why we should consider what people like Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, and Henry George have taught us about taxes and welfare; as well what libertarians leaning to the left (such as Charles Murray) have to say on the matters. Murray (of the American Enterprise Institute) has been criticized for supporting a basic income proposal.

      Some of the more conservative members of the Libertarian Party might criticize basic income (and similar proposals like citizens' dividends and sovereign wealth funds) as proposals that advocate redistribution. But given our belief that most taxation resembles theft, and the fact that the First Amendment recognizes the natural right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, Libertarians shouldn't rule-out all proposals that would put cash directly in the hands of the people.

      That's because any one of these proposals could result in payouts that are parts of a long-overdue civil settlement between the people and their government. We the People have no duty to forgive the federal government for the self-defeating, unjustly punitive tax policies which it has administered since the Founding; we should instead hold it responsible. Government and its cronies should be found guilty of legitimized unconstitutional mass-scale theft of wealth and property rights; and the rewards should go to every resident under federal jurisdiction.

      Many L.P. members and Georgists would probably agree that the federal government should pay compensatory damages to its victims (We the People). We might argue about how much we can trust the states on land issues, and about whether people should have a choice between receiving land and money. But what is clear is that, if all “social welfare programs” keep people in poverty, then none of the reforms mentioned herein are social welfare programs.

      That's why we should continue to consider sales tax prebates, negative income tax payouts, basic income proposals, the citizens' dividend, and the sovereign wealth fund. We should also keep our minds open to new ways to put into full practice all of our principles on taxes. We must craft a tax policy that is fair and equal; that affords as much freedom to the taxpayer as possible; and that holds government (and its largest land-hoarding and polluting beneficiaries) responsible for funding government.

      We must levy fines that punish civil and criminal wrongdoing, not fees and taxes that deter people from working, trading, and engaging in productive activities that harm nobody. To do the opposite is to continue to grow government; to enrich cronies; to make land more expensive; and to keep the poor in poverty. It is to continue down the same path that has given innumerable unsustainable budget deals and irrational forms of taxation.

      That's why the Libertarian Party should not shy away from making tentative alliances with those slightly to the party's left, nor should the L.P. shy away from the party of free land and free money.



See other articles on this blog about Geolibertarianism here:
http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/what-is-geolibertarianism.html 
http://www.lclp.org/articles/geolibertarianism/

What is Geolibertarianism? (Expanded)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Gary Johnson and the FairTax

2. Libertarian Tax Principles

3. Georgist Tax Principles

4. The Basics of Georgism

5. Georgism, Advanced

6. The Geo-Libertarian Synthesis

7. Georgism as Libertarian

8. Thomas Paine's Citizens' Dividend

9. Taxation and Social Welfare

10. The Geo-Painean-Friedmanite Synthesis

11. Conclusion: Social Welfare Programs

Content

1. Introduction: Gary Johnson and the FairTax

      The Libertarian Party needs a tax policy.

      In 2016, the party's presidential nominee Gary Johnson advocated the FairTax. Under this proposal, the federal tax on individual income would be replaced by a nationwide value-added tax on consumption; a 23% tax (paid by the customer) on all goods sold nationwide, functioning the same way that state and local sales taxes do.

      Since about half of federal revenues derive from taxes on individual income, it's possible that if the sales tax rate could be doubled (to 46%), capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and gift taxes, and maybe other types of taxes as well, could become unnecessary, in addition to personal income taxes (of course, few libertarians - and few followers of Henry George's Single Tax philosophy - would support prohibiting voluntary donations to government paid from charges on earned income, sales, capital gains, etc.).

      During the 2016 campaign, on Chris Cuomo's CNN show, Gary Johnson answered concerns that the FairTax proposal is regressive (despite the plan's “prebate” which would compensate consumers for their purchases). Additionally, John Oliver criticized Johnson for declining to go into enough detail about whether the FairTax's “prebate” is a welfare program.

      It seems that the public and the media are not quite ready for the FairTax. Judging by Johnson's disappointing 3% vote in the 2016 presidential election (after sustaining 5-9% polling averages, and even registering as high as 13% in one poll, all still short of the 15% threshold to get into the debates), party members themselves might be ready to move on to better tax policies as well.

      Given the misinformation and contentiousness surrounding Johnson's candidacy and surrounding the FairTax, it might behoove the party to consider tax policies that are different from the FairTax, but which still retain its intent and spirit. A new tax policy should ask the same question that inspired the FairTax: “Which behaviors ought to be taxed in the first place?”

2. Libertarian Tax Principles

      The tax-skeptical party that we are, we go back to first principles. Our members might be likely to advocate funding government entirely from voluntary contributions, others from user fees, perhaps others want to keep income taxes but allow individuals to choose which spending items to pay for.

      Others simply want whichever tax policy will place the lowest burden on people who engage in productive economic behavior. We understand that income taxes and sales taxes are really taxes on earning money and taxes on buying and selling (respectively). We also understand that when you tax an activity, you risk discouraging that behavior if you impose too high a tax rate. This is because high tax rates can deter people from engaging in the activity that is being taxed.

Hence, each kind of tax has the effect of penalizing and deterring the activity that it taxes. The result is that when you tax income and sales, less people are working and earning money, and less trade is taking place because fewer things are being bought and sold.

Art Laffer, former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, theorized what is called the “Laffer curve”. The Laffer curve is essentially a bell curve, plotted on a graph; a graph in which the X-axis depicts rates of income or productivity, while the Y-axis depicts tax rate percentages.

Laffer hypothesized that some nominal tax rate might exist, which, if applied, would allow the government to take as much revenue as possible from our paychecks, without risking making us quit our jobs altogether because we can't afford to pay taxes at rates any higher than they already are.
       The pervasiveness of the sentiment that we're “taxed enough already” - and a new political environment that firmly believes that too much regulation and taxation stymies production and growth - suggest that Laffer's concern is valid. Some among us might even believe that the Laffer curve peaks at zero; which is to say that any percentage tax rate - even 1% - at least somewhat deters a person from engaging in taxed behaviors.

      That's why it's important for us to ask ourselves how to ow do we adopt a tax policy that satisfies the concerns of all members of the party, while making sure that the people who actually deserve to be “punished” (with these punitive taxes) are the ones that will bear the burden of federal taxes?

3. Georgist Tax Principles

If taxes do punish, then they should be levied with intent to punish. Understanding this could lead to a society where the people who pay for government, are criminals - those who destroy lands, restrict access to vast areas, rob us of our natural rights, waste our tax dollars, and enrich themselves through cronyism - while the people who reap the rewards are, by large, innocent civilians who engage in little or no economic activity which harms anybody else.

      The key to achieving that kind of society is to “tax bads, not goods”; that is, fund government through imposing intentionally deterrent, quasi-punitive fines on wasteful behaviors, not through imposing “taxes” on productive economic behavior that harms nobody and steals nobody's property.

      But taxing waste is precisely the issue; the FairTax taxes consumption. And so, we must ask, do we want to tax consumption? Do we risk discouraging people from buying things; from using the products they want to buy, including eating the foods they want to buy? Why should we be taxing economic activity at all? Shouldn't we tax luxury items before we tax ordinary consumer goods? Isn't conspicious (excessive) consumption a more waste-like activity to tax instead of taxing all sales nationwide?

      That's why “tax bads, not goods” and “tax land, not man” are some of the slogans of the Georgists (also called Geoists). Georgists are students of 19th-century American economist Henry George, whose 1871 book Progress and Poverty influenced the development of philosophy and policy concerning property rights, taxation, environment, economics, and other topics.

      Some of George's modern-day admirers have created a hybrid “geo-libertarianism”, integrating George's libertarian communalist philosophy into the broader ethics and politics of libertarianism, bringing George's “Single Tax” (or Land Value Taxation) together with a die-hard support for civil liberties, and a desire to decentralize government towards local communities.

4. The Basics of Georgism

      While adherents to the Libertarian Party's platform are, for the most part, known as strong supporters of private property, Georgists want most land held in common (with open access), but with communally recognized private property rights. However, Georgists and geo-libertarians want intentionally deterrent fines to be imposed on people who have full private property ownership rights, including the right to exclude others from their land.

       Henry George's philosophy is known by many names: Georgism, Geonomics, Land Value Taxation or location value taxation (L.V.T.), split-rate taxation, two-rate taxation, two-tier taxation, or "the Single Tax". The Single Tax is a policy that funds government entirely through taxes on land; specifically, through taxes on the non-improvement of land, collected as land rents. Despite the "Single Tax" term, taxes on the non-improvement of land actually include multiple different types of taxation. This is because the full economic definition of land includes space, air, water, raw materials, mineral deposits, parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and other natural resources that exist in fixed supply.

The more libertarian among the geo-libertarians might argue in favor of limiting the types of behavior which the perhaps deceptively-named Single Tax might apply, but to fail to fully tax all behaviors, goods, and services which fall under the full economic definition of land (which includes raw materials, and does not include land not yet capitalized) would likely mean deserting George's vision to some degree.

A full “Single Tax” could potentially involve imposing monetary penalties upon: 1) the hoarding of landed property; 2) the enclosure of common lands; 3) emission of pollutants, potentially including the emission of carbon; 4) the extraction of natural resources without compensating neighbors or the community; 5) allowing land to become unusable and fall into disuse, disrepair, or blight; and / or 6) failure to homestead, otherwise sustainably develop, and demonstrate sufficiently frequent and active use of the land.

      The main revenue sources of a hybrid geo-libertarian tax policy would most likely be: 1) (as much revenue as possible from) voluntary contributions (from whatever sources); 2) (most of the remaining revenue) from user fees (through running as many government services as possible on fee-for-service models); and 3) taxes on land (funding whatever constitutional and necessary programs cannot be funded through donations and user fees.

      It's important to keep in mind that not all Georgists want to abolish the individual income tax, corporate income and capital gains taxes, and sales taxes. Of course, neither Georgists nor libertarians could rationally argue against abolishing voluntary donations to government from any of these sources. Despite those facts, it's not unreasonable to suggest that taxing solely land should logically involve eliminating (mandatory) personal income taxes, sales taxes, luxury taxes, capital gains and corporate income, estate taxes, and gift taxes. However, personal or corporate income from land sales, and gifts and bequeathing of land, might also be taxed. These provisos should provide plenty of room for negotiation with parties representing a host of different ideologies.

5. Georgism, Advanced

      An extensive application of Georgism might even include something like a carbon tax, but if each community could develop its own method of taxing pollution, then these communities could have a chance to convince urban and suburban communities not to adopt the United Nations carbon taxation plan.

      While this might sound unusual or risky - maybe to the more conservative members of the L.P. - taxing non-improvement of land could turn property taxes on their head, making it unnecessary to tax property value, freeing people to make unlimited improvements to their own property without paying taxes to the community (as long as the improvements are sustainable).

As a side note, in addition to George's demands, adherents of the property philosophies of John Locke and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would likely promote punitive measures against property owners who do nothing to physically protect and secure their land, and instead rely on government to do it for them instead.

Additionally, these property owners - "absentee property owners" - rely on government to make land artificially scarce, resulting in takings of common lands that drive populations into urban centers, conscripting the people into the reserve army of labor, so that they are artificially impoverished through deprivation of natural rights, and are forced to compete for artificially scarce resources. This competition in the job market is not limited to the profession of working as a security guard to protect and defend someone's private property.

6. The Geo-Libertarian Synthesis

      But the geo-libertarians simply want to realize George's vision of ending taxes on all forms of labor (like personal income taxes), ending taxes on all forms of capital (like sales, capital gains, and taxes on profits), and taxing the waste and destruction of landed property, instead of taxing productive and sustainable improvements to landed property.

      Such a policy would render about 90% of current revenue sources obsolete. It would shrink the tax burden of renters, low-income workers, and ordinary consumers to practically zero; causing the burden of funding government to fall mainly upon the wealthiest of landed property owners, and the companies that release the most pollutants into common land, water, and air.

      This policy would ensure that the people who deserve to be punished by taxes - the beneficiaries of government protection of landed property (in addition to other artificial, taxpayer-funded privileges which destroy true free market conditions) – are the ones being punished. Additionally, this policy would minimally interrupt ordinary production and trade (aside from land); like sales, the earning of income, the earning of dividends through investment, and sustainable improvements to one's landed property (however, as one small possible downside, community governments' roles in mediating the sale and transfer of landed property would increase).

      The Land Value Taxation rate could even be set at a fixed number – maybe the same 23% as the FairTax; or maybe another number, maybe reflecting a very different budget – so Georgism would likely satisfy those in the L.P. who desire flat tax rates.

7. Georgism as Libertarian

      Without government taxing the income and purchases of ordinary people, prosperity would likely rapidly increase among low-income people. Social welfare programs could become unnecessary, making it possible to eliminate the majority of the activities of the Internal Revenue Service, focusing it on the taxation of non-improvement to landed property.

      Aside from simplifying the tax code and scaling back the affairs of the I.R.S., Georgists and Libertarian Party members might also choose to embark upon any or all of the following: 1) scale down the affairs of the Department of the Interior and bureaus of land management; 2) loosen requirements to claim homesteading, such as demonstration of exclusion and duration of occupancy; 3) pass homesteading tax credits at all levels of government, credits which are applicable to apartments, trailers, and small homes; 4) urge the federal and state governments to sell and grant public lands to local governments, potentiating more land sales to citizens; and 5) passing a new Homestead Act, allowing each resident to claim up to 7 or 8 acres of land.

      But perhaps the most important way to test the viability of a geo-libertarian alliance will be to see where libertarians and Georgists agree about what to tax, why we should be taxing it, and how much it should be taxed.

8. Thomas Paine's Citizens' Dividend

      In 1998, a group of libertarian Georgists called the Thomas Paine Caucus hosted a booth at that year's Libertarian Party convention in Washington, D.C.. Some members of the caucus were also members of the Libertarian Party, while others were not.¹ The caucus's efforts to get the L.P. to accept its land rights platform were derailed, so as a result, the party has perhaps paid less attention to Paine - and to George - than it should.

In Common Sense, Paine explained that each of us deserves compensation for being deprived of the natural right to inherit and fully own landed private property, we begin to understand that if we want our government to perform basic functions like zoning and recognizing exclusive property titles, then we should be free to have private property; we should be free to claim an area of land commensurate with world land divided by world population.

      But we should also be free to choose monetary compensation instead of landed private property. Paine advocates a citizens' dividend; similar plans are called residents' dividends, sovereign wealth funds (such as the Alaska Permanent Fund), and the kind of universal basic income guarantees advocated by libertarian Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute (and many on the left, and in Europe).

      If you think about it, the idea of cash payouts to citizens, may not be too far off from the FairTax's “prebate”, which would compensate consumers up to several thousands of dollars for paying taxes on everything they buy in a given year.

9. Taxation and Social Welfare

Despite the suggestions of John Oliver and others, a “prebate” isn't exactly a social welfare program. Citizens' dividends and basic income guarantees don't have to be run like social welfare programs either.

As libertarians, we interpret the Constitution's General Welfare Clause, and the direct tax and capitation clauses, to suggest that taxes and spending should impact all citizens universally, and equally, with spending benefiting everyone.

Given these principles, a prebate, basic income, or citizens' dividend should only be passed if it leaves more money in the hands of ordinary people, so that they can buy in the market what those tax dollars previously paid for. The idea is to shrink spending and revenues, and return those revenues to everyone in the form of cash payouts.

      Truthfully, any basic income program, citizens' dividend, sovereign wealth fund, or Negative Income Tax -type program, could easily be implemented and administered in a way that ensures that as flat as possible tax rates - and the tax burden in general - fall equally upon those who can afford it (i.e., those above the poverty line); while ensuring that each citizen receive an equal share of the government's cash payout (and / or land-gift), as long as they are not a beneficiary of government land protection.

10. The Geo-Painean-Friedmanite Synthesis

      Out of the debate between FairTax and Negative Income Tax proponents, and basic income advocates, has come the suggestion of a “Geo-Painean-Friedmanite Caucus” in the party; one which unites the ideas of Henry George and Thomas Paine, with those of Milton Friedman.

      Friedman supported the Negative Income Tax, though he did not originate it. Daniel Moynihan and Sargent Shriver advocated for the passage of similar legislation, while presidents Johnson and Nixon considered similar measures.

      The Negative Income Tax aims to eliminate the "poverty trap" created by rules that cut people off from social welfare benefits when they start working, thus removing the monetary incentive to work rather than stay on welfare. The N.I.T.'s solution is to flatly tax people above the poverty line (or some nearby amount), while paying "negative taxes" (i.e., rebates) to people below the poverty line.

In a 1968 interview with William F. Buckley, Friedman defended the Negative Income Tax. He gave as an example a 50% negative tax for those below the poverty line; explaining that everyone below the poverty line would receive half of the difference between the poverty line and their annual income.

Friedman described it essentially as a flat tax which is not regressive, but which is effectively progressive because the “negative tax” (read: payout to people below the poverty line or some other income threshold) would be redistributed from the rich, who would pay the same flat tax rate on all the taxable productive behaviors in which they engage.

That would go regardless of whether that would involve keeping the current tax code, or whether the code were totally overhauled; this fact could allows some wiggle room for compromise on probably almost all forms of taxation.

      Additionally, to exempt low-income earners from having to pay the Negative Income Tax, and to relieve the tax burden of those who own the smallest areas of land, could both be described as plans to compensate ordinary residents for the taking of their property; both administered as flat taxes with exemptions for those below a certain level of property earning or ownership.

And there's nothing left or right about government compensating the people for the illegal theft of their property rights, whether you want to call that "redistribution" or a "welfare program" or just call it what it is, which is shrinking government and giving it back to the people (as money and/or land rights), while restoring reason to the tax code.

      Some of the more conservative members of the Libertarian Party might criticize such proposals as advocating “redistribution”, “bleeding-heart” policies, or “leftism”. But given our belief that most taxation resembles theft, and the fact that the First Amendment recognizes the natural right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, Libertarians shouldn't rule-out all proposals that would put cash directly in the hands of the people.

      We the People have no duty to forgive the federal government for the self-defeating, unjustly punitive tax policies which it has administered since the Founding. Government and its cronies should be found guilty of legitimized unconstitutional mass-scale theft of wealth and property rights; and the rewards should go to every resident under federal jurisdiction.

      That's why we should continue to consider sales tax prebates, negative income tax payouts, basic income proposals, the citizens' dividend, and the sovereign wealth fund; that's because any one of these proposals could result in payouts that are parts of a long-overdue civil settlement between the people and their government.

      Many L.P. members and Georgists would probably agree that the federal government should pay compensatory damages to its victims (We the People). We might argue about how much we can trust the states on land issues, and about whether people should have a choice between receiving land and money. But what is clear is that, if all “social welfare programs” keep people in poverty, then none of the reforms mentioned herein are social welfare programs.

11. Conclusion

      A new synthesis is emerging. It is a synthesis that wants decentralized community control over land, environment, and tax policy; that wants to simplify the tax code and avoid deterring economic growth; and that recognizes that government largesse has enriched its cronies with taxpayer funds through artificially limiting the ability to buy and afford land, and that due to the injustice which maintaining these institutional, market-distorting privileges perpetuates, residents are owed reparations: reparations in the form of increased personal liberty, more localized control, and choice between free land and free money.

      Libertarians would do well to draw inspiration from Paine, Friedman, and George, in order to formulate new, innovative proposals of sweeping reforms to (and overhauls and simplifications of) the existing tax code. They must be proposals that face modern economic realities, and plan to do something about the artificial scarcity and artificially inflated prices and taxes of landed property. Thus, followers of the teachings of Henry George should remain forever welcome in the Libertarian Party, and their advice and concerns on taxation and environmental policies should always be heeded.

      Given the attraction of some Green Party members to Georgism and similar proposals, convergence upon geo-libertarianism may even prove to be a strategy for aligning many of the goals of the Libertarian Party and the Green Party; and with them, Debbie Dooley's Green Tea Party, the Tea Party movement of the American right, the Constitution Party, socialist parties, and other independent parties and activist movements.

      The Libertarian Party must be careful to avoid embracing the capitalism and mercantilism of the traditional American right, and instead embrace true free enterprise, heterodox economics, and a critique of capitalism from a position that values property rights. That's why Georgism, the ideas of John Locke, and the influence of Proudhon, Friedman, Paine, and many modern libertarian authors concerned about welfare matters (such as Charles Murray) will and should remain important influences on the party for generations to come.

      We should also keep our minds open to new ways to put into full practice all of our principles on taxes; aiming to craft a tax policy that is fair and equal, and one that affords as much freedom to the taxpayer as possible. Most importantly, we must craft a tax policy that holds government, and its largest polluting and land-hoarding beneficiaries, responsible, for shouldering the burden of funding government. We must levy fines that punish crime, not fees and taxes that deter people from working, trading, and engaging in productive activities that harm nobody.

      To do the opposite is to continue to grow government; to enrich cronies; to make land more expensive; and to keep the poor in poverty. It is to continue down the same path that has given innumerable unsustainable budget deals and irrational forms of taxation.

      Without access to land, and the ability to derive productive value through the use of natural resources, productivity is difficult for most people. As a result, trade, currency, and competition for resources, are all prevalent, when they would most likely not exist if each person were capable of sustaining himself. Poverty and dependence go hand-in-hand; this is what libertarians, conservatives, and Georgists all want to address.

      That's why the Libertarian Party should not shy away from making tentative alliances with those slightly to the party's left, nor should the L.P. shy away from the party of free land and free money.

Sources

1. "Libertarian Outreach Successful" (about the Thomas Paine Caucus at the 1998 L.P. convention):

http://commonground-usa.net/gagnon-paul_libertarian-outreach-successful-1998-jul-aug.pdf

Written on January 22^nd, 2017

Edited on January 23^rd, 24^th, and 29th, 2017

Edited and Expanded on January 25^th and February 18th, 2017

See other articles on this blog about Geolibertarianism here:
http://www.lclp.org/articles/geolibertarianism/
http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/what-is-geolibertarianism-abbreviated.html

Conservatives for Georgism and a Social Market Economy

Conservatives for Georgism and a Social Market Economy:

On Attracting Conservatives and Libertarians to the Philosophy of Henry George

Addressed to the West Coast tax reform organization Common Ground OR-WA

Written April 10^th-15^th, 2014

   Introduction

   Classical liberals, conservatives, libertarians of the left and right, and students of Austrian and Chicago School economics in the State of Oregon could be convinced of amending the Oregon State Constitution to allow communities to experiment with increasing property taxes by over 3% per year (while decreasing the tax rate on improvements to land and keeping taxes on land itself steady), by being shown arguments in favor of other things Georgists support which have been made by classical liberals, conservatives, libertarians of the left and right, and students of Austrian and Chicago School economics.

  Such individuals include classical liberals Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson; Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek; Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson; conservative columnists Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, and Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute; libertarian columnists Matthew Feeney and professor Matt Zwolinski; former Reagan advisers Bruce Bartlett, Art Laffer, and Milton Friedman (and his son David D. Friedman); economist Ed Dolan, Alberto Mingardi of EconLog, Don Arthur of Club Troppo, classical liberal Josh McCabe, and libertarian Guinevere Liberty Nell.

   Arguments favorable to the Georgist view include arguments supporting proposals for a (flat) negative income tax; statements made by the nation's ideological founders criticizing unlimited taxation and landed property; and proposals for a Universal or Unconditional Basic Income / Basic Income Guarantee / Guaranteed Minimum Income, and/or Citizens' Income / Citizens' Dividend / Sovereign Wealth Fund.

   Matthew Feeney of the libertarian magazine Reason wrote favorably of the Swiss proposal for a social dividend. Feeney wrote, “Instead of treating those who, often through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times, like children who are incapable of making the rights choices about the food they eat or the drugs they may or may not choose to take, why not just give them cash?”

   Classical Liberals

   But America's history of classical liberal support of limited taxation and limited private property in land dates back to before Henry George was even born; back to the very foundings and foundations of the United States and modern Western theory of political economy. President Thomas Jefferson said, “Wherever, in any country, there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.” Economist Adam Smith said, “As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce.”

   Thomas Paine said, “Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community, a ground rent for the land which he holds.” In his 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice”, Paine advocated financing a social insurance system for people of all ages, financed by a 10 percent tax on inherited property. In today's terms, Paine's proposal would give some unspecified amount to each individual each year before the age of 21, $17,500 annually to each individual at the age of 21, and $11,800 annually to everyone over 50.

   David D. Friedman and Matt Zwolinski have expressed agreement with Thomas Paine's idea that each individual living today suffers from past injustices relating to the inequities of the property rights system. In December 2013, former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett wrote that, for Friedman and Zwolinski, a universal income might be an appropriate reparations payment, giving a grant to young people in “compensation for the loss of their natural inheritance in land”, which was “seized by the state and given or sold to particular individuals for their exclusive [private] use.”

   Professor Matt Zwolinski, writing for Bleeding Heart Libertarians, commented on the “quasi-Nozickian” argument “that a BIG [Basic Income Guarantee] could serve as a mind of rough-and-ready compensation for past injustice”. Zwolinski wrote that “David Friedman and David Henderson both took issue with this argument … [b]ut … The federal government was directly responsible and/or culpably complicit in the commission of a long series of gross injustices, and many currently existing Americans continue to suffer the effects of those injustices. The government owes those who were harmed by its wrongdoing some form of redress, and I think there are plausible grounds for using a BIG to make that redress.”

   Friedrich Hayek

   In his book “Law, Legislation and Liberty”, economist Friedrich A. Hayek endorsed a minimum income, writing that “The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.”

   Matt Zwolinski wrote that “Don Arthur has a[n] … essay casting doubt on whether Hayek actually supported a basic income at all … Arthur claims that Hayek's minimum income was conditional in two ways: first, it was a means-tested policy intended only for people who lack the financial resources to support themselves, and second, it was conditional on a willingness to work.” However, Arthur notes that Hayek quoted approvingly a passage which read in part “no man, whatever be his vices or even his crimes, shall die of hunger or cold … because the gift of mere subsistence may be subjected to conditions which no one will voluntarily accept”.

   On the other hand, Hayek has called securing “an adequate and uniform minimum standard for all human beings everywhere” “impossible”, and has argued that the Great Society dream of guaranteed minimum income for all goes against the classical liberal notion of the purpose of government [but of course the statements of Smith, Paine, and Jefferson might show that idea to be faulty]. Hayek also wrote that “[i]t is unfortunate that the endeavor to secure a uniform minimum for all who cannot provide for themselves has become connected with the wholly different aims of securing a 'just' distribution of incomes”.

   Kevin Vallier explores Hayek's views more deeply in a May 2012 article for Bleeding Heart Libertarians entitled “F.A. Hayek: Enemy of Social Justice and Friend of Universal Basic Income?”

   Richard Nixon

   In an August 1969 proposal called the family assistance plan, which had been developed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, President Richard Nixon revived the negative income tax, which had been recommended by a commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson. Unfortunately, Nixon favored enacting the negative income tax on top of the existing welfare system, rather than in order to replace it as Milton Friedman desired, which resulted in Friedman abandoning the plan as altered by the Nixon administration.

   The family assistance plan proposal was opposed by liberals and conservatives alike in the Senate Finance Committee in April 1970. The plan was killed by liberals because “they didn't believe it was liberal enough”, according to Bruce Bartlett, even though it was originally Democrat Sargent Shriver who originally suggested the proposal to President Johnson. Bartlett wrote that Moynihan was forced to admit the plan's failure in 1978.

   Milton Friedman

   Milton Friedman, later an advisor for President Ronald Reagan, said “[i]n my opinion, the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago”.

   In Friedman's 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom”, he advanced an argument for a “negative income tax”. Bruce Bartlett wrote in “Rethinking the Idea of a Basic Income for All” that in Friedman's proposal, “if the standard deduction and personal exemption exceeded one's gross income, one would receive a subsidy equal to what would have been paid if one had comparable positive taxable income.” In 1968, Milton Friedman appeared on PBS's “Firing Line with William F. Buckley” to defend the negative income tax against Buckley's concerns about non-working poor taking advantage of guaranteed income.

   According to Bruce Bartlett, Friedman's view was that “the concept of progressivity ought to work in both directions”, and that the negative income tax should be “based in the existing tax code”. Former New Mexico Governor and 2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson gas spoken in favor of the negative income tax. Johnson has also spoken in favor of a national value-added general sales tax, arguing that it is not regressive.

   Art Laffer

   Art Laffer, yet another former economics advisor for President Reagan, said that “all taxes are bad”. He became well-known for the Laffer curve; for observing that taxes on an action tend to discourage the very action which is being taxed, and that earning and keeping money are effectively discouraged by taxes on income and earnings. It would benefit Georgists to make the concession that Laffer was right, acknowledge that “all taxes are bad”, and concede this point to conservatives, libertarians, etc..

   However, it might also help to explain to conservatives that there is a difference between a tax as a taking of wealth versus a so-called tax as a collection of urban land rent, which is not earned wealth resulting from human labor, but an intangible value which is, to a large degree, created and protected by government. [Thanks to Chicago Single Tax proponent Adam Jon Monroe for this point.]

   Charles Murray

   Libertarian conservative social science scholar Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in favor of a universal grant of $10,000 per year; both as a complete replacement for the existing welfare system, including Medicare and Social Security. Murray wrote a book called “In Our Hands”, proposing having the federal government give $10,000 to every non-incarcerated adult over 21. Murray was buiding on work done by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Jonah Goldberg, writing about Charles Murray's proposal, wrote in “Escaping the Rat's Maze of the Welfare State” that “[o]n n the left, the idea has been popular for generations as a way to instantaneously alleviate poverty and to defeat … income inequality.”

   Goldberg continued, “The libertarians want to liquidate much of the welfare state and convert it into cash payments. The left's version is that the money would, for the most part, augment the welfare state.” Goldberg noted two obvious potential libertarian objections to the UBI / GMI: 1) “cost”, and 2) the “competence assumption” problem (the lack of belief that 'the intended beneficiaries of government anti-poverty programs always “behave rationally enough to advance their own self-interest.'”). Additionally, Goldberg wrote that “some anti-poverty programs create incentives that make bad decisions seem rational … [b]ut many poor people have just had rotten luck. There's good reason to believe that, with a little help, they can work their way up the economic ladder.”

   Conclusions About Taxation

   Georgists seeking to convert conservatives to supporting Sovereign Wealth Funds and Citizens' Income or Citizens' Dividend would do well to argue that transitioning to a system of taxing land only (and not the improvements to it, which include income and earnings; trade, consumption, and sales; and savings, which is taxed through inflation and excessive Quantitative Easing) would involve gradually decreasing taxes on individual income. [This is in regards to Oregon only, which has eliminated the general sales tax, but whose state and local government are based more on individual income than any other state in the country, as of 2007. Most states have not have abolished the general sales tax.].

   Georgists seeking to convince libertarians, conservatives, classical liberals, and capitalists in Oregon that amending the Oregon State Constitution to allow for communities to experiment with increasing property taxes by over 3% per year (while decreasing the tax rate on improvements to land and keeping taxes on land itself steady) would benefit taxpayers in rural areas, should emphasize conservatives', libertarians', and classical liberals' support for income guarantees.

   These income guarantees should be promoted based on the fact that the State - being by its very nature monopolistic, coercive, territorial institution which always abuses its tremendous purchasing power - owes everyone some compensation; specifically for losing their right to equal inheritance of land as a means for potential socioeconomic equality through the production and trade which they perform on that land (or at least they would, if such behavior were only taxed less, or not at all).

   Georgists might have success converting the aforementioned types of ideologues by advocating for the implementation of a negative income tax in concert with a Universal Basic Income or Guaranteed Minimum Income, creating revenue pools for Sovereign Wealth Funds and Citizens' Dividend / Citizens' Income programs, from which to draw funds for the disbursement of the difference between the income of a person living below the poverty level and the standard minimum deduction (or 50% of that figure, as Milton Friedman proposed), thereby giving people no net incentive to stay on welfare if and when they find opportunities to become capable to work their way off welfare.

   Georgists should explain to conservatives that the Single Tax would provide for a tax on the extraction of natural resources, as Alaska has done with the Alaska Permanent Fund (which has been running for 50 years, and which has survived numerous Republican administrations). The negative income tax could be used for the same purpose as the Single Tax (during the transition away from taxing income in general); that is, creating a pool of general funds for use by any and all individuals in the general public (whether by everyone, or by everyone who requests such funds).

   A combination sovereign wealth fund / community land trust based on prevention of clear-cutting in Oregon's logging industry might be a way to create these funds, and perhaps even to secure state protection of what are now federal lands.

   I would urge Common Ground OR-WA to explain to rural Republicans in Oregon that changing the State Constitution to abolish limits on tax increases on total land value to allow property taxes to increase by more than 3% per year (while decreasing the tax rate on improvements to land and keeping taxes on land itself steady) by additionally explaining that the intent of lifting this cap is to raise taxes on land in order to de-necessitate individual income taxes and replace the entire welfare state with an efficient, viable, trustworthy voucher system (and perhaps also an online social credit network). This proposal would certainly be palatable to rural Republicans in the state, whom are known to demand the abolition of one tax as a concession for introducing a new tax or augmenting an existing tax.

   If Common Ground OR-WA does not favor the negative income tax, then I would urge the organization to support raising overall revenues from land taxation in order to approximate its effects, and then to eventually eliminate the general income tax. I believe that this should be done while retaining whatever existing corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes, and gift and estate taxes are on the books in the state. I would recommend that this be done as a temporary experiment, which will hopefully help demonstrate that taxing land more than income is generally beneficial to the effective progressivity and fiscal solvency of the tax structure.

   But eventually, all of those taxes should be eliminated - in a gradual, across-the-board manner - rather than allowing various factions to bicker about which of these taxes (in addition to luxury taxes, licensing fees, and interest, the tax on saving money) should be lowered, and when, and which first, and which in which order, and whether to even eliminate them at all.

   Corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes, and the estate and gift taxes should not be targeted as the first tax to cut for the same reason that states which eliminate the general sales tax often retain luxury taxes / sales taxes on expensive items. This is because the conservative proponents of corporate income, capital gains, estate, and gift taxes argue that these taxes are “duplicative”, being that they are taxes on income which has already been earned and taxed. How “duplicative” would these taxes be if general income outside of these taxes were not taxed at all (at least in the first stage of eliminating income taxes altogether)?

   However, declining to unyieldingly advocate for the eventual abolition of taxes on luxury items, gifts, estates, corporate income, and capital gains could risk ignoring several important possibilities. The first is that strategic collective purchasing may help make luxury items available to large quantities of people (thus rendering them not exactly luxury items.

   The second possibility is that taxing gifts and estates at too high a rate could make it financially difficult for parents to share with dependent children, and ensure that they have a place to live, without the State or some collective or company getting involved. The third possibility is that taxing corporate income could negatively affect cooperative corporations and corporations in which unions have been awarded large quantities of shares and control.

   More Recommendations and Suggestions

   It is important to understand the conservative and libertarian mindsets: the State, centralized government, and monopolies all tend to concentrate political and economic power towards themselves and intervene in the market, picking winners and losers, and sometimes even enacting price controls.

   Conservatives and libertarians believe that corporations - but also importantly other enterprises, business associations, trust funds, non-profit charities, religious organizations, and other non-governmental organizations - should be considered when government needs to save resources by outsourcing responsibilities to outside of the public sector, rather than public-private partnerships.

   They believe that these types of organizations should be given the opportunity to serve their purposes, and not hindered from doing so by bureaucracy, replacing the government's role in providing services for free and goods at affordable prices, and providing goods and services to people more directly and efficiently than public agencies like state and federal departments (which are customarily run by elected officials, and by appointed officials who are appointed by elected officials).

   I would urge Georgists in general – and the members of Common Ground OR-WA in particular - to accept that this kind of thinking is valid, rather than worthy of antipathy, ridicule, or fear. After all, cooperative corporations are corporations too, and they are outside the public sector. Social purpose venture enterprises; mutual, cooperative, and fair trade enterprises; and green and environmentally sustainable businesses are enterprises too; and the alliances they create are business associations too.

   Furthermore, community land trusts are trust funds too, and they are also non-profit corporations. Charities that actually help their intended recipients are charities too. And interfaith organizations are religious organizations too.

   Non-governmental and quasi-governmental agencies of all the aforementioned varieties should be considered in seeking common ground between Georgists and conservatives. But non-political agencies should also be considered. In the United Kingdom, the government has created non-ministerial government departments (NGMDs), deeming certain policy matters inappropriate for direct political oversight.

   The British government has taken steps to de-politicize that oversight by protecting the status of the agencies from political interference. In so doing, it has sought to de-politicize standards regulation of the following policy matters:

• statistics, the treasury, cartography, qualifications and examinations, and charity;
• land registry, rail regulation, education, and children's services;
• food safety, water services regulation, forestry, gas and electricity;
• trade, savings, investment. competition and markets, serious fraud; and
• crime, prosecution, and the judiciary.

   I would also urge Georgists and conservatives alike to consider the possibility that such standardization and regulation could be performed by independent entrepreneurs' alliances like the American Independent Business Alliance (A.M.I.B.A.), the anarchist syndicate and autonomous union I.W.W., the International Organization for Standardization (I.S.O.), and/or confederations of mutuals, cooperatives, non-profits, and freelancers' unions.

   Additionally, I would urge Georgists to explain to libertarians and conservatives that tripartism - the government's supervision of negotiation and/or the joint creation of policy by organized labor and capital - is not necessarily undesirable. Communities may be governed voluntarily – and be reconciled with individual liberty and consent - insofar as people come to communities voluntarily, the freedom of travel is not unnecessarily inihibited, and society promotes collaboration on regulation of industrial policy by all sectors of industrial relations (workers, consumers, taxpayers, distributors, shareholders, non-associating but nonetheless affected stakeholders, etc.).

   I would urge Georgists to concede to conservatives and libertarians that the monopolistic State cannot compete on the market without destroying it, and also to concede – and also remind conservatives and libertarians, if they have forgotten - that the State's being monopolistic means that it cannot be trusted to act against the interests of monopoly. This is not just in regards to government, but to assist in the monopolization, oligarchy, and concentration of power within the corporate world, and even within the organized labor movement (as in State-recognized union monopoly on the representation of organized labor within a workplace and/or territory).

   Since the State cannot be trusted to abolish itself in the interest of creating a society of diverse and independent persons, peoples, and companies, those very people and companies must perform that antitrust themselves; they must compel economies of scale (actors with enormous purchasing power) to play by the rules of the market. Economies of scale - whether sellers or buyers - must only participate in trade only if their purchasing power is not so great that it distorts the natural calculation of price and upsets the equilibrium of supply and demand, through diminishing other actors' abilities to influence the evaluation of goods and services.

   However, Georgists should convince conservatives that economies of scale have to be allowed to exist with large enough purchasing power so as to be able to utilize purchasing or selling power in order to diminish the power of monopolies and oligarchies in purchasing and sales. But once again, Georgists should always concede to libertarians that if done by government, this must be done via the most minimally monopolistic, oligarchical, territorialistic, geographically centralized, hierarchical, coercive, aggressive, and violent manners necessary to defeat and prevent the concentration of political and economic power.

   Georgists should convince libertarians and conservatives that the reason government needs to tax income and everything else it taxes is because it needs to increase purchasing power against the power of large sellers. Specifically, government needs to increase its power to obtain and distribute goods and services cheaply and efficiently to taxpayers/consumers, such as education, health services, etc..

   In order to “compete on the markets” with the multinational corporations which wield enormous selling power in those markets, purchasing organizations must become large and powerful enough to sufficiently counteract sellers' demand for high prices so as to distribute goods and services to those who need them.

   When minimal-government libertarians and conservatives make arguments in favor of corporate power, Georgists should remind libertarians and conservatives that corporations would not exist in the first place without the State's monopoly power to grant limited liability, and to charter, license, permit, zone, and protect through policing or through the licensure of private security guards.

   I would hope that Georgists would understand, and concede to conservatives and libertarians, that the State inserted its monopoly power into these practices. However, this does not mean that business and private property owners owe something back, and owe it to the State; rather, it means that they should, as Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “pay it forward to the next guy who comes along.” [emphasis mine].

   “Paying it forward” might make entail giving tax incentives to private, corporate, and foreign interests which own firms; incentives which are conditional upon them planning and allowing for the ownership and management of their companies to pass into the hands of some combination of workers, consumers, shareholders, and other affected people. [Here, “companies” includes governments, which according to the U.S. Code are legally regarded as corporations.]

   Whether through competition, collaboration, or some tenuous and tentative combination thereof, government should foster a political environment featuring a diverse array of viewpoints on how standards should be made, and how regulation should be performed, and by whom (i.e., regulatory collaboration and regulatory competition). This way, what is common ground versus what inspires conflict and diffidence, may be discerned without the presence of power and finance oligarchy to demand compromise through concessions of each party's most valued principles and goals.

   An alliance between Single Tax proponents and fiscal conservatives must bring together – and focus coordination of efforts between - alienated and forgotten segments of economic society and industrial relations, such as:

• taxpayers, shareholders, and non-owner managers;
• independent entrepreneurs, workers, and artisans;
• social purpose ventures and fair trade enterprises;
• employee-owned businesses and egalitarian labor-managed firms (E.L.M.F.s);
• purchasing and distributors' cooperatives;
• consumer cooperatives, and consumer protection, interest, and advocacy agencies;
• autonomous unions, syndicates, freelancers' unions, and guilds;
• mutuals / worker-consumer cooperatives (including credit unions)
• mutual aid societies, charity organizations and non-profits and not-for-profits;
• voluntary local community government and agencies thereof;
• non-governmental and quasi-governmental organizations;
• affected stakeholders whom society perceives as outcastes;
• coalitions of all of these aforementioned organizations;

and many others.

   These types of organizations must focus their efforts on achieving formal political representation for the Third Sector - the sector of non-profits, volunteerism, cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity, and balance in economic and political power - as an alternative to the collusion of the public and private sector to sponsor the outsourcing of responsibilities to provide public goods and services to limited liability corporate entities that serve private (ostensibly “independent”) interests.

   In doing this, it will be crucial to emphasize the principle “cost the limit of price”; that is, the idea that mutuals, cooperatives, and ELMFs are non-profit (and therefore fiscally sustainable models for governmental agencies) because they reinvest all would-be profits back into the companies in order to provide for better benefits for workers, better deals for consumers, and the elimination and internalization of unjustifiable costs of transacting with the firm.

   Such enterprises should be run on worker-consumer purchasing cooperative models. This would serve to prevent the diminution of the needs of working people - in all stages of production and distribution - to be compensated, in comparison with the needs of consumers to pay at low prices and the needs of sellers to sell high. Within these firms, privatization, corporatization, limited liability, external investment, and externalization and outsourcing of responsibilities must be kept to a minimum or eliminated completely.

   Such enterprises should be run by boards designed to balance the interests of organized labor and organized capital, but they should also promote the involvement and formal representation of people who are now politically uninvolved but whom are affected by decisions made in government; namely, mutualist anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, leftists disillusioned by the Democratic Party, and market-anarchists and libertarians.

   I believe that all of this can and should be done within the context of a market system rather than a socialist one; specifically, a left-wing market-anarchist system (and a system of completed, perfected markets liberated and freed from oligarchy) or a social-purpose-oriented market economy, with the intent of abolishing income and sales taxes, the welfare State, and the State erection of corporate power and privilege.

   I favor this market system - a system of ubiquitous markets, competition in search of best practices, and enterprise - as an alternative to a State socialist system featuring price controls. However, experimentation with artificial markets would not be out of the picture in the quest for the perfection and completion of the market system. Neither would achieving community-wide collaboration - from all sectors of economic and industrial society - on standardization and regulation, in order to make price recommendations on goods and services.

   Additionally, I support focusing on markets and decentralized government because rural Republicans would seek to maximize their degree of influence on their own local government. Understanding how Statism is intrinsically destructive to the market is crucial for understanding the relationships between central government and power monopoly, and between local government and the power of many. Georgists would do well to emphasize their support of local community government in order to build common ground with conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals who resent imperialism and distant political control.

   I would also recommend local control because I would warn Georgists that perceiving the economy in an all-encompassing state-wide manner could obscure the differences between urban and suburban vs. rural economies: a policy that works in a major city will often not work in the rural areas of the state, and it will usually be greeted with antipathy, even if it claims to achieve some higher standard of quality of life for rural people.

   This is sometimes because such people achieve higher standards than those set by the State all by themselves, and other times alternative standards because they see other standards they can't achieve as unrealistic expectations of unnecessary material comforts of modern life, which they would have made the conscious choice to forsake by continuing to live in the country instead of moving to a more urban environment. When such rural denizens have valid points on these matters, it would benefit Georgists to concede those points to them.

   Georgists would do best finding common ground with conservatives and libertarians by promoting citizens' dividends deriving from shares in community sovereign wealth funds, in connection with the negative income tax (as part of a transition out of individual income taxes entirely, and towards the Single Tax system).

   I would recommend that Georgists do so within a framework of a completed and perfected competitive market system that requires social purpose of enterprise and incorporation as a condition of receiving business and corporate charters (as well as permits, licenses, zoning, and of course subsidies). Such a system would feature a greater number and a wider variety of organizations and firms buying and selling in markets for public and market goods alike. This includes the markets for the regulation of standards in socioeconomic justice and fairness themselves (i.e., standards regarding quality of government-provided goods and services), standards regarding taxation, et cetera.

   It would be beneficial for Georgists to emphasize, before recommending any political solution, the necessity of ensuring that there is evidence for consumer demand for such a solution (i.e., taxpayer demand, since we are talking about the consumers of goods and services customarily provided by government, but also demand by non-contributing recipients of such services). Partnering with people and firms interested and involved in the fair trade and conscious consumer movements will be essential; as will convincing conservatives that exploitation of people, environment, and resources is economically inefficient and harmful, especially if and when there is money in the solution.

   It will also be necessary to emphasize that a business with sufficient social purpose should not be expected to pay taxes, nor expect its consumers to pay taxes on sales. Additionally, mutuality and reciprocity between ownership / management and workers / consumers should feature each of these parties being invested in one another's success. This is to say that firms should view purchasing as an investment, and reward devoted consumers appropriately with savings, special deals, consumer protection rights, company stock, and/or some other form of consumer credit.

   I would suggest that as long as Georgists are open to the idea that all income taxes are improvements to land (and, moreover, earnings, rather than the property of the State, to be taxed away as much as it pleases) which should therefore be protected to taxation - and continue to maintain and show that land taxation is a viable replacement - then they will be capable of convincing conservatives and leftists alike of the benefits of transitioning towards the Single Tax on the unimproved value of land.

   To a leftist, abolition of individual income taxes would ensure that working people keep “the full product of their labor”, and to a conservative it would ensure that working people keep “all the fruits of their labor”.

Georgists would do best to pitch the citizens' dividend / sovereign wealth fund in connection with the negative income tax in a transition to the Single Tax, in the context of the ideas that the welfare State is broken; that it should be completely replaced with an efficient, fiscally solvent voucher system that we can trust; that individual liberty, autonomy and prosperity are maximized when individuals (acting independently and/or collectively), acting in their own interests, are allowed to make their own decisions in the marketplace; and that this alone is what results in the common good being achieved.

   Now, during a time of Democratic Party dominance, is the perfect time to build an alliance between conservatives and libertarians, and leftists, progressives, and liberals, disillusioned by Democrats. We should wonder how Democrats – who are now promoting minimum wage increases and emphasizing the problem of income inequality – would react if they saw former Reagan advisers and libertarians of the left and right alike getting together to demand more than the Democrats claim to want.

   Wouldn't Democrats be confounded and appalled to see Noam Chomsky praising Adam Smith (as he has done), Gary Johnson and Ralph Nader coming together to endorse the Single Tax and to educate the public on the philosophy of Henry George, and the Tea Party coming around those ideas of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson (ideas on landed property and taxation) which are reminiscent of George's?

   By demanding a citizens' dividend, sovereign wealth funds, a flatter yet more effectively progressive tax on income, and a guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income – and demanding it of the people themselves, not from the State – conservatives and leftists could reclaim the the moral high ground from the Democratic Party, working together to achieve a more equitable, fiscally efficient, effective form of government and economic system.

   Health Care, Housing, and Homelessness

   Finally, Georgists should seek to convince conservatives of the viability and practicality of the Single Tax (and the other proposals endorsed herein) by arguing that it would help diminish the power of all kinds of monopolies and oligopolies to participate and intervene in markets, thereby distorting price calculation and denying buyers and consumers the right to communicate price signals in an equitably influential manner. These markets include the markets for land ownership, speculation in land, and mortgage-backed securities.

   They also include markets for the distribution of goods and services customarily provided by government (or at least when provided to the poor), such as health services, as well as housing and other forms of relief from homelesness. Focusing on this could help tap into the conservative resentment of the State's destruction of private charity and its monopoly over “welfare” (i.e., well-being).

   However, in order to consistently oppose monopoly, I would urge members of Common Ground OR-WA who support single-payer universal health care to rethink their position, and consider that it is impractical and unlikely to occur. Not only that, but I would remind them that single-payer is a monopoly on purchasing - i.e., a monopsony – and that it is the abolition of the private market for health insurance. This practice is known as “market abolitionism”; or “anagorism”, meaning “without open marketplaces”.

   I would caution single payer proponents them that to give the State a monopoly over health insurance purchase could only serve to further increase costs, politicize health policy, and risk corruption in the health industry as soon as political administration falls into the hands of another party.

   Keeping in mind that, in a social market economy, “private” would have a very different meaning, I would caution single-payer proponents that abolishing the market for private health insurance would politicize health policy and corrupt the health industry, because Republican control of a health insurance monopsony might be catastrophic and result in cuts justified as “austerity measures”. It would also increase the health costs incurred by taxpayers, because some people might demand that medically unnecessary and/or cosmetic procedures which they do not need are their natural rights, and demand others to pay for such procedures and insurance coverage thereof.

   Instead of using the State and its monopsony to balance the immense selling power of large health insurance sellers, I would recommend that Common Ground members build alliances with and between consumer-driven health care cooperatives (while such cooperatives remain technically separate entities), and focus on tightly coordinating their efforts with the public.

   This would be done in order to concentrate purchasing power in the hands of non-profit, voluntary non-governmental or quasi-governmental agencies; so as to reduce health costs for their paying customers and non-paying impoverished beneficiaries (without necessitating a welfare State) while also ensuring that prices stay high enough to ensure that health workers are sufficiently compensated. It would also be done in order to streamline distribution and to promote collaboration on industry policy across all stages of production and all sectors of industrial relations.

   This model, if successful, might also prove to be an effective solution for other goods and services typically provided with the help of the welfare State, such as housing, and public utilities like energy.

   Keeping in mind that the State of Oregon is currently number one in the nation for homelessness and residential foreclosures, I believe that homelessness and the issues surrounding land, mortgages, and housing should be dealt with as a single issue. Georgists must (ahem) capitalize on public awareness (resulting from the Occupy Wall Street movement) of the fact that empty houses outnumber homeless people in America by more than 20-to-1.

   From the perspective of rural Republicans who are being asked to foot the bill for tax increases and tolerate the expansion of public infrastructure into their communities (raising their property values but also their property taxes), a downtown Portland full of non-working homeless people, undeveloped property, and unoccupied buildings is no signal of good things to come from modernizing the quality of life in the rest of the state.

   Georgists seeking to attract conservatives to their cause in the State of Oregon must show rural Republicans a Portland full of homeless people who are willing to work (at least, those whom are neither disabled nor sick), and can earn and spend their own money responsibly, in order to render moot any questions about whether such homeless people are incompetent (or at least any more incompetent than rural Republicans, who have denied themselves the local government they so badly need, know themselves to be).

   I would recommend that Georgists seek to solve the housing and homelessness problem by allowing homeless people (rather than requiring them, as in “work-for-welfare” or “workfare”) to work in exchange for goods and services. For homeless families, this might involve having the most physically able member of the family perform labor (while learning some valuable skill) while his or her family receives whatever food, clothing, non-emergency health care and supplies, and temporary child care for the day, that they urgently need.

   This could be accomplished through coordinating with charities coalitions, homeless advocacy groups (such as Join and Transition Projects, Inc. in Portland); veterans' groups; retirees' groups, and retirement homes, communities, and villages (such as Foster Village in Portland); community gardening organizations; university gardening apprenticeship programs (such as the Oregon State University Extension's Beginning Urban Farming Apprenticeship Program in Portland); fraternal organizations for senior citizens (such as the Masons, Shriners, Kiwanis, and Elks clubs); and staffing / consulting / human resources and job training firms that are willing to consider employing people without testing their bodily fluids for marijuana use.

   The purpose of all these organizations coordinating would be to teach homeless people about how to maintain and improve land, and could include education about homesteading and Oregon's laws regarding homesteading. One important objective would be teaching the homeless a marketable skill, building World War II -style “Victory Gardens” (this time celebrating victory in the “War on Poverty” as a war on poor people).

   This would allow the young and old alike to work together on the problems of homelessness, housing, and land reform, taxation, and improvement; allow seniors to pass on what they have learned; and allow working and non-working young people to come together to demand more opportunity in hiring (potentially calling for boycotts of staffing agencies with unreasonably high expectations of the disadvantaged).

   I would recommend that when dealing with homelessness, Georgists consistently emphasize the “hobo” as a traveling, working person; one who needs freedom of travel, realistic opportunities to work, the ability to affordably learn marketable skills, and satisfaction of their most urgent needs (without which they would not be able to work comfortably).

   Additionally, Georgists should coordinate with homeless charities and coalitions thereof to revive the defunct organization I.B.W.A. (the International Brotherhood Welfare Association), the mutual aid society which until 1922 was affiliated with the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) and offered education, job training, and religious services to traveling workers through “hobo colleges”.

   In the State of Utah, the Republican Party has given up on homelessness, deciding to simply give houses to homeless people, because they observed that the expenses of caring for homeless people's emergency needs are lesser than the costs of providing them with taxpayer-subsidized housing. Meanwhile, a Democrat in the State of Hawaii recently sponsored a bill to provide all-expense-paid plane tickets to homeless people in order to deport them to the United States mainland.

   Leftists in Oregon and elsewhere must not allow the far-right Republicans of Utah out-compete them in solving homelessness. Oregonians should look towards not only the classical liberals of old and Reagan conservatives; but to market-anarchists, libertarian, and Agorists; for inspiration regarding finding and developing new models for urban development, taxation, residential property protection, and provision of welfare. The Free Detroit Project is just one example.

   In closing, I would like to ask: “Is it any wonder that a state that has no sales tax - but the most government revenue deriving from individual income in the country - has so much poverty, and homelessness (as well as prostitution)? What do you expect to happen when you impose such high barriers to earning and keeping money, and almost completely knock down barriers to selling?”

   The result is that people will be effectively discouraged from working through high income taxes, so they won't earn any money (at least in any legitimate way where they would report it, and moreover not be monetarily penalized for doing so). The only thing left for them do – due to there being few barriers to selling – is to sell whatever little they have left (and to, once again, not report the resulting income). Once they have sold all their material possessions, all they will have left to sell will be themselves.

   We must remove financial barriers to transitioning from welfare to work, promoting the various workers' organizations which are unique to Portland (including artisans' enterprises, independent tech meetups, and freelancers' unions), and provide better standards of living for the public. The Single Tax, negative income tax, social market economy, sovereign wealth fund, citizens' dividend, and guaranteed minimum income accomplish this.

   Happy Tax Day!

For more entries on enterprise, business, business alliance, and markets, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/enlightened-catallaxy-reciprocally.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/loss-of-public-planning-department.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-konkin-schulman-bastiat-and-agorism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-is-social-libertarianism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/comparative-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/agorism-summary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/panarchist-welfare-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-market-anarchism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/new-institutional-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/agorism-and-mutualism-summaries-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/is-ron-paul-wrong.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-panarchy-without-adjectives.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/anarchist-kindergarten-open-letter-to.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/proposal-for-cooperative-party-of-oregon.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/nonapartism-in-social-market-economy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/twenty-five-reasons-why-political.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/my-criticism-of-ron-paul.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/municipal-services-fifth-amendment-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/using-profit-incentive-to-promote.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/labor-protectionism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/agorist-protection-agencies-and.html

For more entries on natural resources, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/case-examination-of-policy-for-natural.html

For more entries on the social market economy and the third (voluntary) sector, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/proposal-for-cooperative-party-of-oregon.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/nonapartism-in-social-market-economy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/diagram-of-public-private-and-third.html

For more entries on social services, public planning, and welfare, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/loss-of-public-planning-department.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/11/jurisdictional-aterritorialism-bastiat.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-konkin-schulman-bastiat-and-agorism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/agorism-summary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/panarchist-welfare-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-market-anarchism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-anarchism-economists-vs.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/annual-net-contribution-to-us-federal.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/anarchist-kindergarten-open-letter-to.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/proposal-for-cooperative-party-of-oregon.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/nonapartism-in-social-market-economy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/initial-reaction-to-scott-walkers.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/initial-reaction-to-scott-walkers_20.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/municipal-services-fifth-amendment-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-proper-role-of-government.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-general-welfare-clause.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/taxpayer-funded-benefits-for.html

For more entries on taxation, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/taxes-and-unemployment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/top-marginal-tax-rate-1913-2011.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/pay-gap-tax.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/annual-net-contribution-to-us-federal.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/proposed-us-federal-government-budget.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-philosophy-of-taxation-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/viewing-legislation-through-economic.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/taxes-and-unemployment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/2011-new-york-times-budget-puzzle.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/conversation-with-liberal-on-taxing.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/using-profit-incentive-to-promote.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/john-locke-roderick-long-and-voluntary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/economic-policy-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/sources-of-federal-revenue.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/taxpayer-funded-benefits-for.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/tax-increases.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/tax-cuts.html

For more entries on theory of government, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/aristotle-and-rousseau-on-natural.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/thrasymachus-support-for-justice-being.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-is-social-libertarianism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-konkin-schulman-bastiat-and-agorism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/04/materialism-stirner-vs-marx.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/04/feudalism-and-class-war.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/08/population-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-scott-walker-and-government-secrecy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/03/defense-policy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/03/political-compound.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/two-competing-class-theories.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-market-anarchism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/agorism-and-mutualism-summaries-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-panarchy-without-adjectives.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-anarchism-economists-vs.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/anarchist-kindergarten-open-letter-to.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/10/map-of-contiguous-united-states-in.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/nonapartism-in-social-market-economy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/twenty-five-reasons-why-political.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/monopoly-and-property-rights.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/statism-to-anarchy-staircase-model.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/02/political-theory-flow-chart.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/illustration-of-lange-model.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-partisans-in-us-federal-government.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-philosophy-of-taxation-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/viewing-legislation-through-economic.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-i-am-not-liberal.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/military-industrial-socialism-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/general-philosophy-on-government-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/on-social-corporatism-and-tripartism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-is-political-radicalism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/questions-about-ayn-rand.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/using-profit-incentive-to-promote.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/thoughts-on-statism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/alliance-against-tripartism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/john-locke-roderick-long-and-voluntary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/summary-of-my-political-views.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/economic-policy-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-policies-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/response-to-campaign-for-liberty.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/agorist-protection-agencies-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-proper-role-of-government.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-general-welfare-clause.html

For more entries on unions and collective bargaining, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/04/feudalism-and-class-war.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/05/scott-walker-vs-unions.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/04/private-sector-labor-policy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/04/what-didnt-unions-do.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/proposal-for-cooperative-party-of-oregon.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/wisconsin-and-collective-bargaining-my.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-critics-of-wisconsin-governor-scott.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/initial-reaction-to-scott-walkers.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/initial-reaction-to-scott-walkers_20.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/compulsory-unionism-vs-right-to-work.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/on-labor-offering-tax-incentives-to.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/right-to-work-laws-and-union-security.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/labor-protectionism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-policies-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/on-monopoly-and-scott-walker-recall.html