Land and Taxation

Taxation as a Political Choice

Fred Harrison

Something is fundamentally wrong with life in the democracies. Given the level of discontent, we may assume that people are generally dissatisfied with the policies of the governments they elect. Yet our communities of intellectuals continue to think from within the neoclassical paradigm to address the pathologies (like poverty and inequality) as if there was no structural remedy. When US President Joe Biden proclaimed a contest between democracy and autocracy, we could not be optimistic about the outcome; success of the democratic form of governance would mean a continuation of involuntary unemployment and the other pathologies that persisted throughout the age of universal suffrage.

            The authors of Land and Taxation explain that the major cause of society’s problems is located in the system for funding public services. The biases in tax policies favour the owners of rent-yielding assets. Most people, as homeowners, find themselves co-opted into that system: the plots of land beneath their homes appreciate to yield unearned capital gains. Others are net losers in the distribution of the nation’s income. This is an outcome of history, of four centuries of finessing fiscal policy to accommodate the appropriation of the commons by the medieval aristocracy. The facts are on the historical record; but those who advise governments on how to solve contemporary problems never discuss them.

            One outcome is the pontification of Treasury ministers who seek popularity by insisting that economic growth will be shared equally; distributed fairly; through tax policies that reward growth. At the same time, however, they acknowledge something is not working. Poor levels of productivity and inadequate capital formation compromise economic activity. [1] This bewildering state of affairs is incomprehensible to taxpayers who face increasing rates of taxation and inflation funded out of wages that, in real terms, are decreasing in value.

            Politicians also confuse themselves with the language they employ to convince electorates that they know what they are doing. Michael Gove, government minister charged with levelling up life chances across the UK, provided an example. Given the myriad problems located in the housing sector, he accused building companies of operating like a cartel. Housebuilders expressed their outrage in a letter of protest. They were baffled by the accusation, the implication being that some developers were akin to a criminal organisation.[2]

            At the heart of the confusion and misdiagnosis is one simple reality: a dynamic that operates in the land market called zero elasticity. What does that mean?

Compare the supply of labour (which is flexible, or elastic: it can be increased through migration, for example), to resources that are in fixed, or very short, supply (inelastic). Land situated in desirable locations commands premium prices because its supply is fixed. When bargaining in the marketplace, landowners hold the whip hand.

Property rights grant owners the near absolute freedom to withhold land from use. For long periods, building companies hold vast tracts in their land banks rather than erecting houses on those sites. They shrink the supply of land and push up the price, which is why homes are unaffordable for many working families.

Governments complement the zero elasticity of land by favouring the owners of rent-generating assets with their fiscal policies. They place the tax burden on wages and consumption, rather than on the imputed rent of locations. This generates upward twists to land prices, which drives many working people into poverty.

House builders take advantage of their opportunities – as do home owners – but if the outcome is cartel-like, the fault lies with those who enact the laws of the land. Tax policy is the domain of governments. If politicians frame revenue policies in ways that burden the people who work to add value to the wealth of the nation, who can blame investors for directing their money towards relatively risk-free/high return assets like land and natural resources?

            Equal outcomes are structurally impossible when governments administer this patently unlevel playing field. To achieve equality, the first and biggest step is for government to anchor its revenue policies in ways that fulfil the norms of responsibility and integrity. That means they ought to draw their revenue from the rents of locations and natural resources. By doing so, they would be able to abolish what are called the deadweight taxes on earned incomes.

Privatised rent as transfer income

Disruptions caused by the tax regime are not a state secret. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development defines taxes as compulsory, unrequited payments to general government. They are unrequited in the sense that benefits provided by government to taxpayers are not normally in proportion to their payments.[3] This offends the sense of fairness. Low-income people receive less in public services than they pay for in taxes; while high-income people receive more in public services than they pay for. This means that low-income people subsidise high-income property owners![4] This is not a surprising outcome. In the economic literature, rent in its privatised form is defined as a transfer income. Owners collect the rent of locations and of nature’s resources without exchanging anything of equivalent value in return.

            Compare this state of affairs with what would happen if government collected revenue directly from the nation’s rents. Payments into the public purse would be proportionate to the benefits received. We may call such rental payments a price, a fee, a royalty – anything but a tax, as defined by the OECD. Furthermore, such payments would not be compulsory. Citizens would exercise the power to determine how much they individually paid, because they decide where to locate their homes or situate their enterprises. Unrequited compulsion is absent when individuals negotiate the rents they pay for exclusive possession of a given location.

            It is wrong, therefore, to characterise rents pooled into the public purse as taxes. People do not like paying taxes, for good reasons – taxes discriminate between payers, they are arbitrary exactions, and they distort economic enterprise in a thousand and one ways (in jargon terms, the distortions result from the excess burden of taxes).

            Taxes divide populations. Rent, when pooled in the public purse, unites populations. If people want public services, they pay for them. There is no question of demanding that government intercede with solutions to problems while remaining silent on the funding of the associated costs. Beneficiaries must pay. This kind of society is one in which people meet their social responsibilities. Furthermore, eliminating tax-induced barriers to freedom removes the scope for rent-seeking (as understood by post-classical economists): the corporate accumulation of super profits through the manipulation of governments for private benefit (known as state capture).

            Is this alternative social paradigm a pipe dream? I do not think so. Three decades have elapsed since I wrote about the death rattle of the post-classical model of economics. Those 30 years saw the housing boom/bust that led to a decade of austerity, the onset of a deadly global pandemic and the appalling atrocities of Russia’s assault on Ukraine. These events serve to harden the view that we need a fundamentally different kind of governance. The authors of this book offer a deep interrogation of the alternative way of financing society. In an authentic democracy, the choice on whether to adopt this reform must rest with the people.

London

September 2022

[1] These words were uttered by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Richi Sunak in his Spring Statement, March 23, 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/spring-statement-2022-speech

[2] Ben Gartside (2022), Housebuilders hammer Gove over ‘unfounded’ claims industry is a cartel, Daily Telegraph, March 23.

[3] 4. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/tax-revenue/indicator/english_d98b8cf5-en

[4] I elucidate the economics of this tax scam in Ricardo’s Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam, London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2006.

Prologue:

Taxation as a Political Choice

Fred Harrison

Table 1

15 midwest cities before and after Pittsburgh’s major land tax increase. Average annual value of building permits.

Constant 1982 dollars: millions

SOURCE: Gates and Schwab (1992), Table 3.

It would be incorrect to limit the explanation to a conspiracy of landowners, however, for successive Labour governments in postwar Britain enj oyed the freedom to implement legislation designed to capture at least a part of the value that is created by the community. The failure of these laws had less to do with retribution from the landowning class, and - as Vic Blundell explains in his contribution to this volume - more to do with the clumsy drafting of the structure of the taxes themselves. That clumsiness, however, was not wilful. It was, as we shall see, the result of confusion injected into economics.

The theory of poverty

Few countries in the world can claim that their finances are not in a mess.

Governments cannot keep abreast of the demands made upon them for more money: social problems keep escalating beyond the capacity to finance the social obligations that are deemed to be necessary for their solution.

The impact of the present structure of taxation on the fabric of society has not yet been evaluated. That influence extends from the criminalisation of people who simply want to be free to earn a decent living, to the creation of a state of dependency as the hold of the bureaucracy and the taxavoidance professionals is deepened in people’s private affairs.

If there is one subject that unites practically everyone, today, it is hostility to taxation. This hostility is not based on irrationality; people know that society needs the resources to meet communal obligations. But there is something that rankles them about the tax system. Despite all the talk of fairness with which fiscal policy is hedged, citizens intuitively believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system of public finance. Their instincts are correct. Public finance is based on principles of arbitrariness and oppression. That is why citizens woJd just as soon avoid paying taxes if they can get away with it; and many of them do just that, with the black (i.e., criminal - because tax-evading) economy in Britain officially estimated to be around £40 billion.

There can be no doubt that society is in urgent need of reform of the system of public finance. The authors of this book are united by the vision of what could be achieved by an enlightened policy: fairness in the payments to the community; a heightened level ofpersonal prosperity; and a liberation of the community of a kind that would constitute a social renaissance. Is this pie-in-the-sky? There is one approach to public finance that could deliver this result. There is no secret about the policy: it is the most ancient of approaches to paying for the services that are collectively required by the community. The policy focuses on the surplus income generated by the economy, the economic rent of land.

Rent can be measured very precisely. It is what is left over, after paying the labour and capital costs of production in a competitive market. If, on a particular site, the weekly costs of producing a product for sale was £4,500 - paying all wages, interest on bank loans, a profit for the owner of the building and equipment on which the article was manufactured; and if the price of the product in the marketplace yielded a weekly revenue of £5,000, then the economic rent of the site, in its bare condition, is £500. That is the sum that would be claimed by the owner of the land on which the enterprise was built. And if people decided, through the democratic process, to restructure the tax system in favour of revenue from the economic rent of land - and untaxing their wages and profits - they would be creating the optimum conditions for the welfare of both the private and public sectors.

During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the classical economists proved theoretically that our ancestors, from tribal peoples to the folk of the archaic and classical civilisations right through to the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman conquerors, were correct: the most efficient way to raise public revenue was from the surplus generated by activity on land.

In the 1880s the case was convincingly restated by Henry George, so why, over the past 100 years, have governments avoided this reform? Before reflecting on the role of economists in the distortion of economic policy, we first need to confront the question of whether we can, indeed, take for granted, that the Georgist approach to taxation would deliver the benefits we want. Let us reflect on the problem of poverty.

Henry George saw that, if people were not taxed on their wages and the returns to their capital, there would be no involuntary unemployment; and incomes would be good enough for everyone, such that poverty would be a historical curiosity. The legitimate financial needs of the community, he argued, would be adequately catered for out of the economic rent of land; a policy that was dubbed the Single Tax.

His book, Progress and Poverty, when it was published in 1879, explained the mechanisms by which this result would be achieved. People throughout the world, having turned the book into the most popular text on economics ever to be published, decided that they, too, accepted the blindingly obvious. ⁵ So Henry George had to be stopped. Before considering one way in which this was accomplished, let us ask the question: were the millions of people who accepted George’s analysis - throughout America, the British Isles, down to the Antipodes, they bought his book and packed his public meetings - wrong? Was he misleading them, in arguing that he had perceived the way to abolish poverty through a reform of the tax system?

Conventional economists believe him to be wrong, but can we respect their conclusion? Unlike Henry George, they do not provide an alternative theory of poverty. Furthermore, they decline to engage his propositions in debate. They dismiss his case on the basis of assertion rather than rigorous argument. That may explain, of course, why the world continues to suffer from an escalation in poverty, despite the break through the barriers that once obstructed us from a state of generalised material prosperity.

To provide the reader with an overview of the controversy we shall recall the work of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), a finance minister in Austria after the first world war before becoming a professor of economics in Bonn, from whence he moved to Harvard in 1932.

In his History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter stressed that, although self-taught, Henry George was an economist. Indeed, Schumpeter notes that the way in which George acquired his knowledge was to his advantage. He had held a variety of jobs before finally settling down as a journalist in San Francisco, acquiring his economic knowledge from real life rather than by academic training.

Schumpeter characterises the Single Tax as a panacea. Nonetheless, Henry George was careful to frame his ’remedy’ in such a manner as to cause the minimum injury to the efficiency of the private-enterprise economy. ⁶ On what basis was the proposal denigrated as a panacea? Well, wrote Schumpeter, the policy was vitiated by association with the untenable theory that the phenomenon of poverty is entirely due to the absorption of all surpluses by the rent of land. He then proceeds to concede that George’s fiscal proposal "is not economically unsound (Schumpeter’s emphasis). The problem, in his view, related to one specific issue: the proposal involves an unwarranted optimism concerning the yield of such a tax".

Here we have one of the crunch tests. Schumpeter, like all the other major economists of the 20th century, transgressed the basic principles of science. He resorted to assertion - w 1 thout theoretical discourse, let alone reference to empirical evidence - to claim that the rent of land would not provide sufficient revenue to finance the needs of the modem nation.

In any case, it should not be put down as nonsense. If Ricardo’s vision of economic evolution had been correct, it would even have been obvious wisdom. And obvious wisdom is in fact what George said in Progress and Poverty (Ch. 1, Book IX) about the economic effects to be expected from a removal of fiscal burdens - if such a removal were feasible. ⁷

In his discussion, Schumpeter lists what he postulates as the two problems with the tax policy that is the only radical alternative available to society. First, the proposal is disgraced by its association with the claim about the origins ofpoverty. Second, that land-rent constitutes an insufficient tax base for modem needs.

The books in this series on the Georgist paradigm re-examine the proposition that the major social problems would be resolved by the reform of the tax system along the lines prescribed by, among others, Henry George. The authors have compared the alternatives and cannot find serious competitors for the hypotheses that flow from the Georgist paradigm. Here, we can only consider the tantalising issues that touch on Schumpeter’s two concerns.

On poverty: as Schumpeter noted, Henry George’s economic analysis was so transparently clear that millions of citizens accepted the truth of what he wrote. Were they wrong? It is possible, of course. But among those readers was a nuclear physicist, Albert Einstein. In a letter dated October 8, 1931, Einstein wrote:

I read the largest part of the book by Henry George with extraordinary interest, and I believe that in the main points the book takes a stand which cannot be fought, especially as far as the cause of poverty is concerned.⁸

Would it not be extraordinary for a mind such as Einstein’s to draw such an emphatic conclusion on poverty, if he was in any way dubious about the analysis? Einstein concluded that, ifwe wanted to deal with poverty, we had to pursue the line of reasoning displayed in Progress and Poverty.

This is a view shared by Dr. Fred Foldvary, who in his contribution to this volume re-examines the theory of wages. He finds that progress towards a solution on poverty is contingent on policy initiatives that must include a unique combination of reforms to the structure of both public finance and the markets, reforms that flow from the principles of the Georgist paradigm. Dr. Foldvary, while substantially agreeing with Schumpeter’s analysis ofhow other theorists treated wages, was disappointed to find that Schumpeter afforded Henry George’s theory of wages an incomplete treatment compared with the weight he gave to other economists.

What of Schumpeter’s second concern - the revenue-yielding capacity of land? Was it really insufficient