There’s quite a bit of chatter about so called “Universal Basic Income” again in some of the circles I frequent. It’s a simplistic policy, easy to understand but difficult to sell to the people who will feel like they are funding something for nothing for others. And it can do more harm than good if not coupled with wholesale reform of the tax system to stop fining people from doing economically beneficial things – such as working or investing to produce goods and services, or trading: things we want to encourage.
Finally, a real Georgist!
Buried in my previous post I made a pretty shocking, for me at least, admission: after twenty or so years a fan of Henry George's "single tax" - the collection for public use of the rent of land instead of private appropriation and taxing incomes and capital and so on - I have finally managed…
A wrong step in the right direction
According to a "Guardian exclusive" the Labour party has plans to get land for housing on the cheap by making landowners sell it at a price before planning consent is given, eliminating most of the so-called "hope value" and enabling new council housing to be built at lower cost land: Labour plans to make landowners…
Ebeneezer, the Garden City Geezer
...as he was described by George Bernard Shaw, apparently. I missed his birthday the other day: Born #onthisday in 1850, our founder, Sir Ebenezer Howard, a true pioneer whose ideas on housing and social reform sparked a global movement which is still celebrated today. Read about his life's work here: https://t.co/jSsWDLbV6F Picture credit: Garden City…
Truth to power
Okay, so I make no bones about my disdain for the festival of rent-seeking and lobbying that is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos. The top of the worlds hierarchies, governments, their corporate whores and bastard children the lobbyists meet, and, as Adam Smith wrote nearly 250 years ago now: "People…
Geomutualism
The sharp eyed among you may have noticed that no sooner had I launched this blog as the "Voluntaryist Review" than I decided to change it to the "Geomutualist Review". In writing the indtroductory post on "voluntaryism" I decided I wasn't, in fact, what is known today as a "voluntaryist". But I don't know why I…
Creative Incentives Without Intellectual Property Protection
[It's been a while since I've written anything, which is not for the want of subjects to write about - Israel, Ukraine, Surveillance Laws, and I've been thinking about my community land trust project a lot too. Anyway, tonight I got into a discussion about intellectual property, and more specifically about copyright and patents. I…
Here it comes: the annual crisis of party conscience
I had sat down to write a piece trying to respond to Jonathan Calder's call for a stronger Liberal Democrat "ideology". But as, in the process, I was reading and rereading various ways in which people in the party had responded to last week's election results, I began once again to wonder whether I had…
Universities Challenged: There may be trouble aHEad
I pulled no punches at the time that the university fees decision was an awful one, satisfying nobody. With the results in and most universities deciding to charge at the top end of the artificially narrow window personally I think the trouble is only beginning. And it's going to be serious both for universities and…
The Machinery of Freedom
So, for a bit of R&R at the weekend, and prompted by a few requests from fellow students on the Mises Academy course I've been doing on Libertarian Legal Theory, I decided to sit down and do an audiobook version of David D Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom". Or at least of most of it.…
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Dominic Frisby. A simple guide to land value tax
Land Value Taxation and the Built Environment
ThatChannel com Interview 2011 06j 03 Frank de Jong: Economic Rent Best Way to Finance Government
The Taxing Question of Land
Fixing inequality 'just like that'
Joseph Stiglitz (2014) - Why Capitalism is Failing.
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