Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Evening Standard (19 Feb 2014, page 47):

We were delighted by Danny Dorling's endorsement of a land value tax.

The Holy Grail of high wages/low house prices can be achieved by collecting taxes from the rental value of land instead of from earnings and output. Our calculations show that replacing council tax, VAT and National Insurance with a fiscally neutral Land Value Tax would leave most young couples £10,000 a year better off.

As well as reversing the rising tide of wealth inequality, such a measure would dampen the boom-bust cycle and lead to more efficient use of existing buildings.

Land Value Tax was supported by figures as diverse as Marx, Churchill and Milton Friedman. Now that corporations can shift profits between jurisdictions at the touch of a button it has ore relevance that ever as land cannot be hidden abroad.

Mark Wadsworth, Young People's Party.

Satire Copies Life

From The Guardian 7th Oct 2013:

Perhaps reassured by Max Weber's claim that their Protestantism justifies their obsessive work ethics, Anglo-Saxons have long embraced work as a religion for contemporary times. As with any religion, it is not a matter of dealing with it in any effective or functional way, but rather of engaging in it with blind enthusiasm.

In an age struggling between crises of economic overproduction, environmental catastrophe, falling salaries and increasing robotisation, there cannot be any other explanation for the current culture of "hard work" than that of a burgeoning religious cult. 

From The Daily Mash 14th Oct 2013:

BRITNEY Spears has admitted her latest single Work Bitch is inspired by the writings of Karl Marx.

The star has based her latest hit on a lifetime’s study of the father of communism, and a strong desire to champion the cause of the proletariat.

Intellectual Mental Masturbation

I added an o/t comment to another thread that MW asked me to summarize. Here is the summary, courtesy of the RSA. Personally I reckon the speaker is a complete tosser, but you may think different....

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (120)

Something that the Faux Libertarians like to do is to assume that Land Value Taxers are somehow anti-capitalists (far from it!) and hence that they are socialists (in a bad way). They then triumphantly announce that even Karl Marx spoke out against LVT. Well, neither the FLs nor I pay too much attention to what Marx said, so I fail to see why that is relevant, but as ever, it turns out that this wasn't even true, as the article on Appraiser10.com points out:

Karl Marx

Marx's criticism of land tax (as anything more than one of the measures to be imposed during a transition to communism) was relatively influential - he argued that "The whole thing is...simply an attempt, decked out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one."

He also criticized the way land value tax theory emphasises the value of land - arguing that "Theoretically the man is utterly backward! He understands nothing about the nature of surplus value and so wanders about in speculations which follow the English model but have now been superseded even among the English, about the different portions of surplus value to which independent existence is attributed--about the relations of profit, rent, interest, etc. His fundamental dogma is that everything would be all right if ground rent were paid to the state."

However, in 1875 Marx changed his opinion on land taxation. In a letter, he wrote: "In present-day society the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the landowners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital) and the capitalists... the capitalist is usually not even the owner of the land on which his factory stands.

No doubt the FL's will now turn on a dime and say "We told you! Karl Marx was actually in favour of LVT, and as he was wrong on most things he was wrong about this as well, ergo LVT is a bad tax." I still don't really see why it's relevant, but hey, if Karl Marx had said the earth was round would the FL's then claim it was in fact flat?