Land is a Natural Commons

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Discussion

Land is a Natural Commons

Alastair Parvin:

"So, if we were to go back to the drawing board and redesign a new 21st century land economy from scratch. What might it look like?

Well, the good news is that pretty much every major economist and philosopher who has looked seriously at this question, from Marx to Milton Friedman, from Martin Luther King to Mariana Mazzucato from Adam Smith to Abraham Lincoln, from the the ancient Israelites to Elinor Ostrom, has always come back with the same basic principle: that Land is a natural commons — it belongs to everyone, and that land value (rents) should be recaptured by the community, who create the value in the first place.

So, as a landowner, you shouldn’t be a Lord over anyone, you should be a steward; you are effectively renting a piece of land from Everyone for as long as you want it, and in return you should pay a proportionate ground rent — or ‘Land Value Tax’ (though I don’t like that term) — back to the community for its use.

What we might then use those rents to pay for is a matter for debate. If you’re towards the centre-right of the political spectrum, you might want to use it to cut other taxes on income, employment, or productive enterprise. And certainly I’d say there would be a clear case for getting rid of council taxes immediately. Essentially rent is a tax you’re paying anyway, so the moment it goes to the treasury instead of to landlords, government can afford to cut other taxes.

Or you could even pay some of it out directly as a citizens’ dividend to every single person. And I think even if it’s only a small symbolic amount, this might be a good thing to do. It would serve as a monthly reminder that the land belongs to all of us — and that we all have a stake in society.

Or, most obviously, you could reinvest that money into community services and infrastructure — including using the land revenues from overheated locations like London to invest in creating new location value in the rest of the country — to reverse this corrosive, unnecessary North / South divide that is perpetuated by our current land system.

But there’s an obvious problem.

Remember that the inflated value of property rights represent 83% of Britain’s ‘wealth’ — and that is propped up by banks’ mortgage loans. Introducing a Community Land Rent might well involve a write-off (or buy-out) of money (debt) on a scale probably not seen since the abolition of slavery.

A reform of this scale, however morally and economically justified, would require a government of extraordinary vision, courage and skill, to design the transition in a way that is fair to everyone. And you’d have to win a mandate to do it from the British public in the face of an unprecedented campaign of disinformation and misinformation. In reality, almost everyone is losing out in our current system (even homeowners, who think they’re wealthy, but aren’t really). But let’s not be naive: a very small number of very powerful vested interests would unleash a misinformation machine on the British public that would make Brexit look like a picnic.

So I’m not holding my breath." (https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/a-new-land-contract-684c3ba1f1b3)