With the federal election campaign today seeing Opposition Leader Tony Abbot promoting Infrastructure bonds with a 10% tax concession for investors, there is an urgent need for better understanding of infrastructure financing.

Abbot’s plan should be written off as the interest rate spread between Australia and the rest of the world is significant enough not to need any incentives. Such a 3 – 4 % interest rate advantage does not require another handout to the top end.

Presumably these same investors would also snap up land in prime locations and benefit two-fold.

The following is a document I prepared for a contact at Infrastructure Australia.

Land Value Capture
Infrastructure adds enormous value to land in prime locations according to proximity and serviceability.

Land Value Capture (LVC) is a simple technique to recycle the publicly funded windfall gains that accrue to land owners.

Importantly, these windfalls are captured over the life-cycle of the infrastructure, such that one generation is not hit with the total infrastructure costs (ie Developer charges).

How it works:
Macro:

• Government bonds finance the infrastructure project.
• Government bonds + infrastructure = windfall gains for nearby landowners
• Yearly land valuations quantify the windfall gain.
• Council Rates and Land Taxes capture a share of the increase.
• Over time (20 years) this higher government income repays the government bonds.

Micro:

• Fixed costs are covered by LVC.
• Marginal costs are covered by marginal revenue (ticket sales).

Political machinations:
A Metropolitan Regional Improvement Tax, similar to Perth’s, could be included in the Federal tax mix. However, it must be set at a higher rate than the 0.14% Perth has used to provide Australia’s most modern PT system.

Revenue from this Betterment Levy type charge could be used to fund the abolition of payroll tax and stamp duties at the state level. We propose a change in the tax mix so that future infrastructure pays for itself by expanding the tax base without increasing the tax burden. A number of submissions to the Henry Review have been made with this in focus.

Examples:

• MTRC – Hong Kong: has returned dividends for the last decade, dispelling the myth that PT can never be profitable.
• Japanese Railway East – the efficiencies of LVC have enhanced profitability such that ticket prices have remained at 1987 prices.

We should take stock of how past generations financed public transport:

• Glen Waverly Station (Vic): How did they do it? Residents were asked and agreed to donate £30,000 worth of land (1925) to build the train station and rail line. Additionally, they were asked to pay a Betterment Levy of £10,000 per annum to cover the first five years operational costs.
• Sydney Harbour Bridge – 30% financed by council rates on the land only component.

What we are asking:
Windfall gains from infrastructure add up to several times the cost of the infrastructure to surrounding properties. We propose that a sufficient contribution from this windfall be recycled back to the government so that other infrastructure projects can be funded without substantially burdening one generation over another.

At present land speculators baulk at paying barely 10% of the land bounty (windfall gain) back to the community via government’s Land Tax, Council Rates, Stamp Duties and Capital Gains. This abstinence from the public good is limiting government at all levels from funding infrastructure. The LVC rate can be set so that landowners still receive the majority of gains.

Consider:
Northbridge railway redevelopment in central Perth – 50,000 square metres of prime commercial land will be made available by the Rudd government’s recent Federal Budget infrastructure initiative (and local WA government efforts). At present it seems that the plan is to sell this prime location to private interests by moving the station underground. It would be in the community’s best interests if the government could lease the land so they capture the upkick in land values over future years.

For example, the Northbridge railway station tunnel development has a Federal budget of $236 million. Conservatively estimated at $3000 p/square metre, this would see the site worth $150m in today’s figures. With an average 6% growth rate in land values, this would see all such site holders pay the majority of the $236m back in just 7 years. Land values would no doubt have grown by more than 6% p.a since the infrastructure announcement.

Seven years is perhaps too much, over a 20 year lifetime the costs would be shared amongst multiple owners.

Bonds finance the initial investment. Land owners pay the community back for the new services over the lifetime of the asset.

Such an LVC would also keep a lid on land prices (the extent reliant upon the rate set at). With land comprising over 70% of a mortgage, the reduced land-based interest payments would assist the creative small business Perth needs to compete with Fremantle.

By widening the tax base, more Infrastructure Australia proposals could get off the ground.

Advantages:

• Common sense: Those that benefit, pay
• Can be revenue neutral
• Cheaper public transport ticket prices
• Widens tax base
• Expands public transport and public services as financed with minimum leakage
• Spreads load over the entire community, rather than slugging commerce (ie trucks on tollways)
• Encourages walkable communities by providing a dis-incentive for land speculation
• Can prevent future GFC’s by deterring land speculation

Resources:

• Wheels of Fortune – Fred Harrison (available in our bookshop or free download)
• Scottish governments LVC review
• Scottish list of global LVC report references
• Taken for a Ride (Jubilee Train line)
• Adequacy of Land Value Capture for the funding of infrastructure – Gavin Putland
• Betterment Levy – Steven Spadijer
• Wiki page on LVC
• Property Takes Us there
• Developers Map of Sydney

Today I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Joseph Stiglitz speak on the topic of From Measuring Production to Measuring Well-Being, courtesy of the Economic Society of Australia.

I became a fan of his following his timely defection from the World Bank as outlined in Greg Palast’s The Globalizer Who Came in from the Cold. I read this article in my formative days of studying geonomics. Palast writes –

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of “landlordism,” on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant’s crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn’t the Bank follow your advice?

“If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That’s not high on their agenda.” Apparently not.

The other quote of note from Stiglitz is “Rent is a Secret Tax the Wealthy Charge the Poor.” You’ll find that in his book Globalisation and its Discontents.

Back to today’s talk.

Stiglitz framed the discussion around the importance of accurate information, following his specialty of asymmetrical information. The core focus was the need for a Green GDP measure. Paraphrasing his speech, he mentioned:

“What is measured, affects what we do. The distortion created by price (what you can con the market in to paying for a piece of land, for example) rather than value (what can be realistically earnt from that location) causes multiple problems. This lured 40% of all US investment to be channeled into real estate, delivering phony profits. 40% of all corporate profits in the years running up to the GFC bust were in finance. Again these were phony profits, not based on any form of productive value, and so were wiped out by the subsequent market correction.

This was an example of the economics of information. Measurements like GDP included phony profits, making countries look better than what life actually is for those on the ground. ‘Bad accounting leads to bad decisions.’”

Stiglitz segwayed onto the UN’s Human Development Index. He gave the tentative thumbs up to such measurements of the quality of life, saying that incorporating both health and education with GDP per capita was a more rounded measure. Eyebrows were raised when he commented that more weighting should be given to the health and education sectors of the UN HDI than economic growth.

He went on: “It would be negligent of a business not to depreciate it’s capital. This is a key component that all investors consider. Why then do we not incorporate a measure on natural resource depletion?”

Other statistical discrepancies of note included the predominance of mean measures for analysing incomes. The tremendous increase in the ultra wealthy over the last 30 years has dragged the mean upwards. Stiglitz was adamant that ‘more than all the growth in wealth was going to the top, none to the bottom tiers of society’. Far more accurate was to look at medians – measuring the income of those people half way between rich and poor.

As he has throughout the tour, Joseph threw his support behind the mining tax.

“Why does America return such poor results for the 16 – 17% of GDP spent on health? We spend a lot for so little in return. Infant mortality rates are comparable to the Developing World.”

Thoughts flowed to Alanna Hartzok’s 2006 tour when she discussed the Health Olympics (the greater the wealth gap, the poorer the health).

“But yet GDP was pushed higher by poor health outcomes (requiring even more spending).” Why not a similar Defence Spending Olympics as Joseph ridiculed how some US states spent more on new prisons than schools, despite the police and war efforts.

Professor Stiglitz concluded with the need for distinction between what society says makes it happy and what we end up doing. Families not eating together in the main was anathema to the common belief of the family first.

Measurements must reflect what we care about.

This brought me back to the MC’s opening remarks – ‘what doesn’t get measured doesn’t matter’. Why aren’t economic rents measured? Have we learnt anything from the land bubble – the giant black hole of economic analysis – that led to the GFC? Two income earners are working so many hours to cover the mortgage, no wonder they don’t eat together. How extensively would the Riches of Oz be unlocked if we captured the rents for all?

The question I would have asked if I had the chance was, ‘with price to value such an issue in a world of resource scarcity, when are we going to look beyond Reactive Economics (like struggling to find health finance) and look towards Preventative Economics (where our behaviour is influenced before the act)?’

Having sat directly behind Stiglitz pre-talk, I reminded my neighbour that I might have missed out on asking a question, but it was all about location, location. Soon Stiglitz had a copy of Hudson’s Counter-Enlightenment in the post talk rush to speak to him.

A quick prompt of him got the desired response – ‘I’m a huge fan of Henry George’.

With that I encourage you to read this insightful interview with Joesph Stiglitz (h/t – Geophilos & Wealth and Want:

Joseph Stiglitz: October 2002 Interview
with Christopher Williams, of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation,
published in Geophilos, Spring, 2003

Q: I want to follow-up on what you had said some months ago about land reform:

JES: “The main, underlying idea of Henry George is the taxation of land and other natural resources. At the time, people thought, “not really that too,” but what was underlying his ideas is rent associated with things that are inelastically supplied, which are land and natural resources. And using natural resource extraction and using land rents as the basis of taxation is an argument that I think makes an awful lot of sense because it is a non-distortionary source of income and wealth.

Q: In Globalization and its Discontents, you write (p. 81): “But land reform represents a fundamental change in the structure of society, one that those in the elite that populates the finance ministries, those with whom the international financial institutions interact, do not necessarily like.”

JES: Yes. Let me try to approach the question a little more systematically. Once you take the perspective I just gave, that means the management should be done in such a way that it maximizes the amount of money available to the US government from natural resources because they are within its domain and control. So, looking at the United States, one of the implications of this is that a foundation such as yours [the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, created to promote the ideas of Henry George, as expressed in Progress & Poverty] ought to be very much against the policies of the US government of giving away our natural resources. Here is a case where we not only are not taxing it much, we’re actually giving it away.

Q: I assume you’re speaking in particular of oil and mineral rights, but would not Broadband Spectrum rights also be included in that category?

JES: Yes, Broadband Spectrum rights as well. Now, giving away rights such as those would be anathema to the spirit of Henry George. And the second part is that when you sell them, you want to do so in such a way as to maximize the revenues. And whether you decide to sell it or whether you decide to rent it, would be the question of what is the way that maximizes the extraction of public revenues.

Q: And those revenues go to the people. Not to private concerns.

JES: Exactly. So you’re trying to say, from the perspective of public management, how can we take this inelastic supply of public resources and maximize the rents that we can extract from it, consistent with other public objectives? That is a very deep philosophical approach, and requires a re-thinking of how we manage all aspects of those public resources. However, much of what we do is inconsistent with that. Now, the issue of land reform is a little bit different. There, it’s a two-step analysis. My concern that I expressed about land is that in many developing countries, you have most land owned by a few rich people, and the land is relatively little taxed. But the land is worked in a system of sharecropping in which workers have to pay the landlord 50% of their output. In a way, you can look at that 50% as a tax. The sharecroppers are paying a 50% tax to the landlord. But it’s worse than a tax. Because it’s not a land tax, it’s a tax on their labor. And it’s a tax that goes to the landlord rather than to society. So the notion is that land reform could take a variety of different forms. For instance, the government could take over the land and rent it to the people. Or give it to the people and have a land tax that would not have the distortionary effect of land reform. So, in a way, these systems of share-cropping are worse even than anything that Henry George was worried about in terms of misuse of land.

Q: However, when you speak of land reform, do you have concerns about compensation as an issue in its implementation?

JES: That is one of the key issues. And there’s a program at the World Bank that’s been started in Brazil, which is called “Market-Based Land Reform” where they buy the land and give it or sell it to the workers. They use government power to obtain the right to buy it.

Q: Has President Mugabe of Zimbabwe’s misuse of government power to return land to its so-called “rightful owners” given land reform a bad name?

JES: That’s true, but it doesn’t have to be done that way. Now, one of the things that is again in the spirit of Henry George is that, if you have land taxes, then the market value of land goes down. What you’re willing to pay for land is the difference between what you pay and what you get to keep after paying your land taxes. So, in a Henry George world, the amount of compensation would be very low. So one could argue that moving toward a land tax would facilitate that reform. Once we raise rates on land taxes, the market value will have to go down. The government can buy the land and redistribute it to the workers, and they then would be able to keep the fruits of their labor. They will continue to pay the land tax, but the product of their own efforts — their labor — will be their own, as opposed to sharing fifty percent with the landlord.

Q: Do you think land reform could possibly find a way onto the political agenda in the United States?

JES: No. Land reform is not a big issue in the United States because we don’t have a lot of sharecropping. There’s some, but it’s very limited.

Q: What countries do you regard as the most politically open to tax reform as a means of achieving meaningful land reform?

JES: I think some countries in South America are moving in that direction. They’re beginning to do this form of taxation because they want the land to be utilized. Some people own land but make no use of it.

Q: You mentioned the World Bank’s program titled “Market-Based Land Reform.” Is that the only international forum in which there is a chance of gaining politically-effective support for “land value taxation” as an instrument for land reform?

JES: There’s not a lot [of] discussion going on in those circles about land reform. The World Bank is still talking about it, as in the program I was talking about. And certain countries are continuing to talk about it within themselves. But the IMF is not, and I don’t know of any NGO (nongovernmental organization) that is.

Q: What are the greatest political obstacles confronting developing countries to the extraction of economic “rent” for public purposes? Is it simply a matter of “vested interests?”

JES: Yes, it’s not very complicated. You know, in the Clinton Administration, we tried to reform the disposition of natural resources — mineral rights — by saying the US Government should not be giving this away to a few wealthy people. But the mining interests were adamant in opposing this reform.

Q: In your opinion, would it be more effective to attempt to achieve support from economists about the need for such reform, or to bypass them in seeking to build popular support independently from them, in that the views of mainstream economists on the topic of land reform might fairly be characterized as an “intransigent”?

JES: There are some economists who are interested in this. I think most economists would like the idea, and would support it. But, economists spend their time on things that they think have marketability. So it isn’t that they don’t think it’s a good idea; they don’t think there’s any resonance in it. President Bush is still talking about the inheritance tax, and income tax, and they want to get involved in what other people are talking about. It’s a social phenomenon, I think. So, if you get a lot of other people talking about it, then they’ll join the fray.

Q: You are aware that Henry George was a critic of the moral foundations of our economic institutions. What do you think of reform efforts toward land value taxation based on an appeal to morality?

JES: What it fits into is that there is a wide view today that we should tax environmental “bads” such as pollution and the like. And switch from taxing good things like labor. So, in a way, that’s where it comes in: let’s stop taxing good things like labor, and tax things that are resources. So the argument is, “why tax things that are contributing to society?”

Q: I’d like to move to topics related to globalization because I read your book, Globalization and its Discontents, and, like many other people, found it fascinating. What has happened to the idealism that was supposed to make institutions such as the World Bank and IMF serve the inclusive interests of everyone in what was then called the Third World? You make the point that these have become institutions that serve the interests of wealthy nations almost to the detriment of poorer ones.

JES: The problem is that they believe that by helping the rich you help the poor.

Q: The old “trickle down” theory?

JES: Yes, “trickle down.”

Q: But that’s been fairly discredited, hasn’t it?

JES: Yes, it has. But as a general phenomenon, nobody likes to think badly of themselves. They always end up in arguments about why it’s in the “General Good.” But, on the other hand, I think that self-interest is a very strong force. That’s what Adam Smith said, and I see it all the time.

Q: But haven’t these institutions detached themselves from the grass-root interests of land-less people around the world?

JES: The IMF never thought of itself in that way. It began as a club of the rich countries to help each other out. And when the colonies got released, and the developed countries managed their own economies better, they went in and became the new imperialist power. That’s an over-simplification, but they then became the agents of the advanced industrialized countries.

Q: You criticized “The Washington Consensus.” From reading your book, I see that you summarize that set of doctrines as “1) Fiscal Austerity, 2) Privatization, and 3) Market Liberalization.” What are, in your view, the central weaknesses of the policies that flow from the Consensus?

JES: It didn’t work. I mean, the weaknesses are not that these are necessarily bad in their own right, but it’s the balance. Fiscal prudence is a good thing. But they pushed it beyond where it ought to have been. Market Liberalization is a good thing, but not if it’s done too fast.

Q: Would you say, then, that there is a structural flaw in the market system?

JES: There are many limitations. We all know that there are lots of examples where markets fail, and you need a role for government. So where the structural problem is, it’s their belief that there’s not a role for government to play. And that markets can solve every problem. That’s the structural failure: “Markets are perfect, and can solve every problem.”

Q: For this interview, I also read George Soros’ book, On Globalization, which I know you reviewed in the New York Review of Books. In it he states, “It is market fundamentalism, which holds that the social good is best served by allowing people to pursue their self-interest without any thought for the social good — the two being identical — that is a perversion of human nature” (p.179).

JES: Yes, George and I are very similar in our views.

Q: Don’t you think we need to go deeper and look at the rules that govern the unequal bargaining power between the rich and the poor? Isn’t that what really has to be attacked?

JES: Yes, that’s what I’m saying in the book. The underlying problem is the way the rules are made. If the rules are bad, you need to ask the question, “how did those rules get established?” And it’s the processes by which the rules get made that is the underlying source of the problem.

Q: Do you think that changing the rules is possible?

JES: I wrote the book because I believe that, in a democratic society, pressure can be brought to bear on the rule-making process. As you become aware of who’s at the table, why things are biased, they’re responding, criticizing. Even if it doesn’t quickly change, it circumscribes the ability to continue with self-interest. The World Bank is already changing enormously. That was relatively easy. President Clinton appointed someone who has a very different mind-set from previous World Bank presidents. The rest is very hard. The IMF has not made that kind of change. It’s still a long, hard road for both of them. In some ways the WTO [World Trade Organization] is in an even more difficult position. But that’s the great thing about democracy: we have so many critics. We have newspapers, and people like me and George Soros writing books.

Q: Aren’t you also saying that the real impetus will come from democratically-elected representatives with the political power to make changes?

JES: But they also respond to public pressure. In the last Presidential Debate between Bush and Gore, both sides said that we had to change the IMF. Clearly, the issue of the IMF had raised itself to a level — it’s still not in everyday talk in that it’s not what most Americans think about — that it got thirty seconds or a full minute in a Presidential Debate between Bush and Gore. Well, that’s a big achievement from where it was before. The IMF is a very important institution for developing countries and most Americans have never heard of it.

Q: I was at a conference recently on the French concept of “mondialization” as opposed to “globalization.” The French consider the spirit of “mondialization” to be more “generous” towards less developed countries, in contrast to the American idea of pursuing our national interest without regard to theirs. Would you call yourself a proponent of “mondialization” rather than of “globalization”?

JES: It is interesting that my book has been selling fantastically in France, so they obviously sense the commonality on our views.

Q: Let me ask you about Russia. President Putin has been a prominent advocate of the need to shift the fiscal base away from people’s wages and savings and on to the rents of natural resources. But this strategy flew in the face of conventional tax wisdom, which favored a “broad tax base” that included the use of “stealth” taxes. The IMF, by its actions (if not its public declarations), strenuously opposed the Putin strategy. What might President Putin do to remain engaged in the process of pro-market reforms while retaining the support of foreign investors and at the same time shifting the tax base on to the rents to be derived from Russia’s natural resources?

JES: Russia provides another good example of what I’ve been talking about. The fact is that their economy has been imploding. And it’s become nothing more than a natural resource economy as a percentage of the GDP — about 60 to 70%. At that point, natural resources become the only major source of revenue. So they’ve been forced to move in that direction by necessity. And, obviously there’s a political economy tension: the rich guys don’t want to give it up. But that’s the distinction they’re going to move in because there’s no alternative.

Q: Your academic work led you to formulate what you called “The Henry George Theorem.” This demonstrated that public spending — where this was efficient — generated additional rental value that surfaced in the land market. Other distinguished scholars, such as the late Nobel prize winner, William Vickrey, confirmed your findings. You also noted in one of your books, co-written with Anthony Atkinson, that the Henry George Theorem was attractive both because it was the revenue-raiser that did not distort private incentives and because “it is the ‘single tax’ required to finance the public good.” [Anthony B. Atkinson & Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lectures on Public Economics, London: McGraw-Hill, 1980, p. 525] Now, public investment, unless of the wasteful kind designed to serve the privileged interests of rent seekers (the classic type being a land speculator), should be viewed as working in partnership with the private sector and not a drain on the community. How can the reputation of publicly provided services and investments be rescued?

JES: That’s a very good question. What we did when I was at the Council of Economic Advisors was some studies to try to show what the social returns would be to public investment in R&D, etc. And we became convinced that the rates of return of those investments are very high. So you ask the question, “what can we do to restore confidence in public investment?” We need to realize how much we depend on them. I keep telling people, “The Internet.” That’s one example. It was publicly funded. It’s now a public-private partnership. The government did the basic research, and the private sector ran off with it. But, arguably, we would never have had the Internet if it were not for government expenditure. So I think a major industry in the United States — biotech — is based on NIH (National Institutes of Health). NIH does all the basic research.

Q: From the conference on “mondialization,” I saw a major difference in attitude among the French with regard to public investment. The French believe strongly in public funds for public works, whereas Americans believe they shouldn’t be taxed more in order to support public projects. Which view do you agree with?

JES: There’s been a lot of so-called “bad rhetoric” in this whole area. The real point is that we need to recognize that there are some things in the area of “the public sphere.” We’re not having investment in basic research; we need to have the government do it. And that’s what I’ve consistently been arguing; you don’t want the government building steel factories. But you do want the government doing certain research, and the relative size of that depends on the society. Right now, we should be spending far more on basic research. So what is the message. I think how much we depend on the government. And the new economy, we take it for granted, but it is the public sector. I think you’re right that we have the wrong view. But I keep saying, “The Internet.” How much as it changed our lives? And it’s [the result of] the government.

Q: And yet, in American society, the idea is instilled that one ought to take for one’s own benefit, so as to have the big cars and houses, etc., that will impress other people, rather than to give in order to promote a public benefit. Aren’t those the actual values of American society?

JES: We need to realize that our livelihood today depends on our innovation, and our innovation depends on our sciences. Our livelihood depends on our global position. For example, we have to be able to fly, to go to the airports.

Q: I wanted to ask your view on the adequacy of land as a tax base. At one time, as you know, there was a “Single Tax” movement, for the purpose of deriving revenues sufficient to run the government solely from land value taxation. In your view, how feasible is that today?

JES: Most economists would say that you cannot run the US economy on the “Single Tax.” In my mind, the “Single Tax” is the wrong way to think about it. The question is: “Would it be better if we had more taxation of land and natural resource, and more revenue from natural resource management, and I would include atmosphere and spectrum.” And less tax on income and savings. And I would say, “Yeah.” And I think many economists would agree with that. So, if you want to sell it as a “Single Tax,” then, no, you won’t get anyone to agree that there’s enough revenue there. If you look at is a more “central” tax, then, yes, you will get most economists to agree with you.

Q: A former Director of Robert Schalkenbach Foundation was given a grant recently to research the adequacy of land as a tax base. He’s a professor at the University of California, Riverside, named Mason Gaffney, and he wrote a book titled, “The Corruption of Economics.” Are you familiar with his work?

JES: No.

Q: I’ll send you a copy of the book. Basically, he argues that the founders of neo-classical economics, which, as you know, is the paradigm taught in schools such as the University of Chicago, distorted the science of economics to protect vested interests. For example, Rockefeller money was spent to hire professors of economics with a view to their discrediting the ideas of Henry George. Did that happen?

JES: My general impression is that most donors that give money to universities don’t take a very strong view of [who should be on] the faculty. Sometimes it ends up on one side, sometimes on the other. It would have been unusual [at Chicago], but it could have happened there. What is striking about Chicago as a school of economic theory is that it’s very conservative. One would have thought that Henry George was someone who would have been liked by “Conservatives.”

Q: In that George wanted to reduce tax on the fruits of one’s own labor?

JES: Exactly. And you want non-distortionary taxes, so I would have thought that every “Conservative” would be in Henry George’s camp. Now, as far as I know, I’m one of the few people who keeps emphasizing that you ought to view Henry George in a broader way, to include natural resources. I didn’t think that people thought about that a hundred years ago. But if they had, and maybe Rockefeller was smart — he realized that he obviously didn’t want a tax on natural resources.

Q: He wouldn’t have wanted rents flowing from natural resources to go to the people rather than to him.

JES: Yes, he obviously wouldn’t like that perspective. But I don’t know if that view was at that time recognized, and I just don’t know whether he actively intervened at Chicago.

www.wealthandwant.com

… because democracy alone hasn’t yet led to a society in which all can prosper

photo credit: SvenDowideit

Respected Ecological Economists Herman Daly writes in Modernizing Henry George:

Economists have traditionally considered nature to be infinite relative to the economy, and therefore not scarce, and therefore properly priced at zero. But the biosphere is now scarce, and becoming more so every day as a result of growth of its large and dependent subsystem, the macro-economy.

As the macro-economy expands into the ecosystem it displaces what was there before, namely habitat of other species (and of indigenous and poor members of our own species). Consequently, biodiversity decline is a salient index of the increasing scarcity of nature, as is involuntary resettlement of people to make way for dams, mines, soybeans, and cattle; and of course increasing depletion and pollution.

Sacrifice of nature’s scarce services constitutes an increasing opportunity cost of growth, and that in turn means that nature must be priced, either explicitly or implicitly. But to whom should this price be paid? Nature would prefer not to sell herself, but if forced to it by growth, would at least like to divide equally among her children the revenue from the forced sale of her previous gifts. From the point of view of efficiency it does not matter who receives the price, as long as it is counted and paid by the users. But from the point of view of equity it matters a great deal who receives the price for nature’s increasingly scarce services. Such payment is the ideal source of funds with which to finance public goods, and to redistribute to the poor.

“Value added” belongs to whoever added it. But the original value of that to which further value is added by labor and capital, the value of scarce natural resources and natural services, should belong to everyone. It is the original commonwealth. These “payments to nature” should be the focus of redistributive efforts.

Payment for what is now too scarce to be treated as a free gift is measured and appropriated by markets as a rent (payment in excess of necessary supply price). Rent is unearned income to the recipient, but allocative efficiency requires that it be paid by the user of the resource. Taxation of value added by labor and capital is certainly legitimate. But it is both more legitimate and less necessary after we have, as much as possible, captured natural resource rents for public revenue.

The above seems to be the basic insight of early American economist Henry George (1839-1897) who applied it specifically to rent on the scarcity of desirable locations of land rather than to rents on natural resource scarcity in general. Could we not extend Henry George’s logic to resources in general? For resources the necessary supply price is the cost of extraction — so any payment above cost of extraction is rent. Since land has no cost of extraction all payment for land is rent. If no rent is paid, land does not cease to exist. Neoclassical economists accept this definition of rent but resist Henry George’s ethical emphasis on rent as unearned income.

The modern form of the Georgist insight is to tax the rent from land, and by extension from natural resources and services of nature, and to use these funds for fighting poverty and for financing public goods. Or we could simply create a trust fund from these rents, and disburse the earnings from it to all citizens, as in the Alaska Permanent Fund. Our present practice of taxing away a lot of the value added by individuals from applying their own labor and capital creates resentment, and discourages the supply of labor and capital.

Taxing away value that no one added, scarcity rents on nature’s contribution, does not create as much resentment, and the resentment it does cause is less justified. In fact, failing to tax away the scarcity rents to nature and letting them accrue as unearned income to a landlord class has long been a primary source of resentment and social conflict. Furthermore, taxing land and resource rent does not diminish their quantity. Soviet communists tried for a while to abolish the category of rent because it represented unearned income — a part of “surplus value” like profit and interest. They jumped to the conclusion that therefore resources and land must be free. But that makes it impossible to allocate resources efficiently.

Better to follow Henry George and retain rent as a necessary price for measuring opportunity cost, but to then tax it away as unearned income to the landlords. The more we tax away rent the less we have to tax the value added by human labor and capital.

Charging scarcity rents on natural resources and redistributing them to the commonwealth can be effected either by ecological tax reform, or by quantitative cap-auction-trade systems. In differing ways each would limit expansion of the scale of the economy into the biosphere, thereby preserving biodiversity and also providing revenue to run the commonwealth. I will not discuss their relative merits here, but rather emphasize the advantage that both have over the currently favored strategy. The currently favored strategy might be called “efficiency first” in distinction to the “frugality first” principle embodied in each of the policies mentioned above.

“Efficiency first” sounds good, especially when referred to as “win-win” strategies, or more picturesquely as “picking the low-hanging fruit.” But the problem of “efficiency first” is with what comes second. An improvement in efficiency by itself is equivalent to having an increased supply of the resource whose efficiency increased. The price of that resource will decline. More uses for the now cheaper resource will be made. We will end up consuming perhaps as much or more of the resource than before, albeit more efficiently, as pointed out in the nineteenth century words of economist William Stanley Jevons:

“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical [efficient] use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” (The Coal Question, 1866, p. 123)

We need frugality (diminished consumption) more than efficiency. “Frugality first” induces efficiency as a secondary consequence, an adaptation; efficiency first does not induce frugality — it makes frugality less necessary, and it does not give rise to a scarcity rent that can be redistributed. Let us put frugality first by reducing physical throughput with ecological tax reform and/or cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources, and by so doing both avoid the Jevons effect and collect the scarcity rents on nature for the commonwealth rather than the elite.

If we could directly limit population and per capita resource use (scale of the macro-economy) to a level that nature could easily sustain, then nature’s services could remain free. But if we insist that population and per capita consumption must be free to grow, then the rising cost of natural resources must indirectly limit growth, and the question of who receives the increasing rent (who owns nature) will become ever more pressing, and Henry George’s thinking ever more relevant. Alternatively, our increasing takeover of nature will, beyond some point, render moot the question of distribution of rents by eliminating all potential claimants! When an overloaded ship sinks all aboard drown — even if the overload is justly distributed and efficiently allocated!

Interesting facts – no unemployment in squatter cities! With free access to land we can always keep busy helping someone. Read more on population.

Read read, plead plead

At least land gets one mention! How are people to envisage that the most important commons created resource is not immediately visible or apparent? Land values must be the anchor to this new commons based future.

Bryan Kavanagh says

Although publicly-generated land rent was $325 billion, we chose to fine labour and capital to the extent of some $285 billion for daring to work, allowing eighty-six percent of Australia’s land rent to be privately capitalised into the bubble – and thereby establishing the conditions necessary for an extraordinary financial collapse.

photo credit: cdsessums

Daniel Kocieniewski reports in the NY Times on how the US oil industry is using tax havens to avoid repaying the community for the privilege of mining the earth for all it’s worth.

Kocieniewski reports that the oil and natural gas industry has spent US $340 million on lobbyists since 2008 for a $4 billion annual saving in tax liabilities. An investment of just 2.8% of the sum subsidy reflects for how cheaply our democracy has been sold off. If we also added the lost economic rents to this $12bn total, the investment return on lobbyists would be astronomical.

The recent ousting of Kevin Rudd from office was undoubtedly linked to his determination for the public to capture some of the mining rents

Please read Daniel’s excellent piece:

WHEN the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform set off the worst oil spill in American history, it was flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. Registering there allowed the rig’s owner to reduce significantly its American taxes.

The owner, Transocean, moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, manoeuvres that also helped it avoid taxes.

At the same time, BP was reaping sizeable tax benefits from leasing the rig. According to a letter sent in June to a US Senate committee, the company used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 per cent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon – a deduction of more than $US225,000 a day since the lease began.
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With US officials considering a new tax on petroleum production to pay for the clean-up, the industry is fighting the measure, warning it will lead to job losses and higher petrol prices, and a greater dependence on foreign oil.

But an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidised businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.

Read more

photo credit: JosephLeonardo

Renegade Economists podcast

Professor Michael Hudson discusses the G20 plans (austerity for prosperity), natural monopolies as wealth extracting machines and China’s possible isolationist future in light of its increasingly useless trade surplus.

Listen here

Music by Lucky Dragon

Pi-O delighted us with two awesome poems while I donned the magnificent Tote carpet dress crafted by Kathryn Jamieson

The festival sparked a fair bit of media attention, most objective and/or supportive such as our interviews with 3CR’s DIY Arts show, ABC 774’s Derek Guilles & Radio National’s Life Matters program and Dewi Clarke’s piece ‘Fitzroyalty snubs gentrification’ in The Age, some rather less than positive like Marcus Westbury’s article ‘Artists kick-start gentrification’, also in The Age, & some down-right hostile such as this blog post by a bloke called Brian.

We were happy with all of these responses,  feeling quite proud that our festival has given the media a chance to address the issues of housing affordability and community displacement WITHOUT causing mass nap-attacks. We would have liked to have discussed the fest with Marcus first, though, & because this didn’t happen, we asked The Age if we could write a response piece. They turned us down, but we’ve decided to just publish it here anyway.

Here it is:

Artists sick of living on borrowed time & borrowed land

The cycle of artists moving into areas, establishing desirable communities and then being displaced by the wealthy repeats like a stuck record and most people are familiar with it. So depressingly familiar that we’ve grown used to meekly following its flow and moving further & further out into the ‘burbs with hardly a complaint.

Many will tell you this process is unavoidable, but in fact, it doesn’t have to be this way!

It’s true that we’re not the first artists to complain about being kicked from our stomping grounds. We’re quite pissed off about it. It may come as a shock, but as crafters and activists we’re poor (in Aussie terms). Generally this is okay as there’s not much we want for that we can’t craft but we have yet to devise a way to craft land and we’re getting pretty sick of the rich not wanting to share it with us and of the Government facilitating their greed.

This does not mean that we want our communities ‘preserved’. Artists by definition are creative and the prospect of living in static suburbs is unbearably restrictive. We don’t want our homes and communities to stagnate; we want the right to be involved in their evolution.

Artistic communities aren’t the only ones being displaced, of course. Even in a world with no artists (visualise Perth if you find this concept hard to imagine…) the gentrification process rolls on. Under a system that encourages inflated land prices in prime areas, all low income groups are eventually pushed out to the fringes of society. The problem isn’t about individual landlords and wealthy people acting like bad guys – it’s about the Government tax policies encouraging this behaviour.

As a centrepiece for the festival we ripped up the old Tote carpet, chopped it into doormats and branded them, ciggie-style, with a branding iron of the pub logo. The carpet reeks of community history (literally), so yes, the festival has elements of nostalgia, but the point is, people didn’t collect pieces of the Berlin Wall because they wished it still stood, they collected them because the falling of the wall marked a seminal time in their history.

The carpet itself is stinky and revolting. We’d much prefer some deep plush pile, thank you very much. But it is symbolic of a seminal time in the history of Melbourne’s artistic community, when thousands marched in the streets to protest the closure of yet another inner city artistic venue, displaced by gentrification.

There’s nothing wrong with reflecting on times gone by and getting a bit nostalgic now and then but the thing we find sad is not the loss of our past in these areas – it’s the loss of our future. We are aware that there is only one Earth and we’re going to have to share it. We don’t want to close the good bits off to others; we just don’t want to be pushed out of them ourselves.

Many will say that resisting the gentrification cycle is futile because government policy is set up to encourage it. This is true but whatever happened to system overhaul big picture thinking? We’ve gotta stop being wussy and start lobbying for some real reform.

After thousands marched the Tote is once again opening as a band venue – a welcome stall in the process of the displacement of a community but, unless government tax policy is changed to encourage the opening up of land in prime areas to people of all economic levels, there will very soon be no locals of the type it caters for (low income artists) to visit it.

The truth is that there is a lot of underutilised land in the inner-city. A recent Earthsharing report showed that the vacancy rate was 6.9% overall and as high as 29% in Carlton South! Housing supply and affordability in the inner-suburbs is a problem because our tax structure encourages speculative land vacancies. Land transactions and developments are taxed (stamp duty etc.) but land holding is not. There is no motivation for landlords to make their properties available for rent or development so supply falls behind demand, prices rise and less people are able to live in communities than could be easily accommodated.

If land value was taxed, the profits from community resources we create would return to our communities, speculative land hoarding would be discouraged, more properties would come onto the market, land prices would fall and more people would be able to afford to live where they want to and where the infrastructure is best. Challenges relating to how the denser communities could co-exist harmoniously would inevitably arise and ideas flagged for discussion at our festival to cope with these challenges include the introduction of art zoning and increased social support services.

We’re holding this festival to encourage the community to brainstorm practical solutions like these. Gentrification is by no means unavoidable and we’ve decided to stand our ground. Because it is our ground too.

Check out upcoming festival events at The Workers Club