Category Archive

Christopher M. Hussey 1997

There are three inseparable components of a lasting settlement to Ulster’s and Ireland’s travail: land, peace, and freedom. Like interconnected chain links, these three come as a job lot, together or not at all.

All wars, fair or foul, are ultimately land wars, and, unless a stalemate ensues, all war settlements, fair or foul, involve land transfers. Ireland’s case is no exception. Indeed, everywhere on Ulster’s fraught socio-political landscape, past and present, you will see land.

Ascendancy and Descendancy

The plantation of Ulster involved the dispossession of the gaelic clans and the privatisation by planters of the previously free common lands. This was in a natural environment (rainy, uneven terrain, mild winters) that favoured a pastoralist economy and a mutualist tribalist civil society.

Investor’s Business Daily Feb 27, 1998 reports:

“Asia’s largest economy is in trouble

A long-awaited stimulus package announced last Friday (Feb 20) showed once again why Japan’s model of government-business collusion cannot thrive in a free market.

The package did not cut taxes or try to ease the burden of regulations on the Japanese. Instead, the govt proposes letting Japanese financial institutions package bad loans and sell them as securities. The govt might then buy them up in a bid to stimulate the economy…

A January estimate pegged the amount of bad loans at Japanese banks as worth about 15% of GDP…”

by Knud Tholstrup, University of Bergen 1974

Sensational practical experience in taxation of land values was gained in Denmark in the years 1957-60 when the Danish Justice Party, promulgating land value taxation, free trade and equal rights, formed a so-called ‘land tax’ government, together with the Social Democrats (Labour) and the Radicals (Liberals). The three parties made an agreement based on the following:

1. Collection of land rent
2. Liberalisation of trade: including closing the Department of Supply and Import Control
3. A tax freeze

Although the Justice Party was the only member of the triumvirate of parties forming government to have agitated and worked for the introduction of land value taxation, the election programs of all three parties did include a land tax on the growth in land values.