…. ABOLISH TAXES

We tax workers, reducing their salaries.

We tax manufacturing, checking production.

We tax products, raising their cost and reducing sales.

We fail to capture sufficient publicly-generated land rent–the public surplus, the “non-tax”– thereby creating repetitive land price bubbles which burst into recessions.

Were we to increase public capture of land rent, land won’t diminish, workers’ salaries, manufacturing and commerce will rise, and capital’s profits will increase.

Unused land would be brought into production and urban sprawl will tend to be replaced by decentralisation.

The Henry Tax Review recommended abolishing 120 taxes.  Neither of the political parties liked it.

It aint rocket science.  So what’s the problem? Why do we continue to tax, rather than to un-tax?  Maybe these two factors:-

• Powerful vested interests favour existing pathological tax regimes which deliver wealth, via economic rent, to the top 0.1%?  Hence we have a clamour to increase the GST.
• Public ignorance of the vast difference between taxing productivity and capturing community-created land rents – the non-tax?

“It has long been a crying injustice that publicly-created land values should be appropriated for private interests.” – Sir Archibald Sinclair, 1938.