Slave Poverty To Wealth And Liberty
Well there was this guy long ago named Malthus. He derived the notion that the reason for poverty is that there are simply too dang many people. That's where you hear the expression a "Malthusian." In a nutshell, Malthus claimed that the wealth created by humans will always be less than the number of humans leading to poverty.
Henry George proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Malthus was an idiot. He proved it in his masterpiece "Progress and Poverty." He wrote it back in the 1800's and the ruling economic hierarchy has been trying to cover it up ever since. It's actually has been very easy for these elite selfish trash. That's because this great book is over 800 pages long which is usually quite enough of a challenge to keep most people from ever turning the cover to read the first page. True Henry George goes into great detail to explain his concept about the root cause of most poverty while Malthus needed very few words to explain his notion that too many people led to not enough stuff for everybody. Hell everybody was already ready to believe that they were poor because somebody else already grabbed their stuff and the elites were more than happy to light that fire whenever possible.
So Henry George over explained his brilliant concept of the actual root causes of poverty. I'll attempt to break the ideas down right here so you can understand them without reading Progress and Poverty.
Wealth is the result of humans using the land to make stuff that other humans find valuable. That valuable stuff is what we call wealth. For all of recorded history the elites have used one scam or another to swipe part of everybody's labor output in effect making us all to one degree or another slaves. Slave rarely are rich historically.
Okay that's the cause of poverty and here is the answer to eliminating the vast majority of it. Abolish all forms of labor taxes like on income which of course would outlaw fiat money from central banking plantations. I'll note here that the few hundred wealthiest families own the vast majority of the earth tax free. The Queen of England owns 1/6 of the land herself but she's concerned about poverty so that's okay right?
So it's obvious why there is so much poverty. Most people pay rent to live on the planet while the few hundred elite family's pay zip. Change that to nobody pays any income tax or labor based taxes no matter how damn rich they get. Houses and other improvements to the land are at their root built with labor and must be tax free as well. Replace these with a tax based on the location value of the land itself. Naturally downtown city land would be the priciest and then drop the farther out from the urban areas where it is zero in the rural farm lands. Farms have horrible location values being out in the boonies and all.
For the billion of humans on the planet the taxes they pay now would plummet but for the few hundred elite families who currently own the planet and pay nothing, well their taxes would be astronomical. Take the Queen of England for example. How in the hell could she afford to continue to own 1/6 of the land on this planet? She and the few hundred elite families couldn't and would have to sell off their holdings at bargain prices to the rest of us. We would immediately put that land to productive use creating more wealth and to store our wealth.
There are too many positive results from this simple idea that I totally support to discuss here and now. But take just one result of changing to this Georgist economic system. Fixing your house would be tax free. Same thing for commercial buildings. The tax on buildings would be zero so no matter how valuable the building got the tax would be zero. Can you imagine the building expansion and improvements this policy would cause and the resulting boom in employment in the building industry?
It's a no-brainer!
Labels: Henry George, Progress and Poverty, tax land location value