I am an advocate of both land taxes and monetary reform and have started a political party in 2008 to support this idea.

I live in Hamilton and am struggling to get this idea out there but I will do my best. have a read of the website http://www.landtaxandmonetaryreform.weebly.com to see what my policies are.

Cheers
Owen McCaffrey

I think there was a question about pensioners who no longer worked. Well they would still be receiving some form of superannuation or universal income. They would also probably be living in a smaller unit rather than a large home and their tax burden would be more manageable.

It’s great to see such interest in this. It’s so hard to get a debate at the political level because it usually gets shot down immediately by one party or another.

Let’s keep the ideas flowing.

If they own property that’s not earning an income then they are speculating. Property speculation leads to the ridiculous housing prices we are facing today. I wonder if Cullen didn’t comment any further because the penny dropped…

Modeling the potential effects will be important and I’m not sure how far Arthur has gone on this but I will ask him to comment or at least provide us with any further information on the work.

Clearly it’s not something that could be introduced overnight but it at least sparks a debate and something to work on.

The land-owners are bound to object for a start and the best approach is to introduce the changes slowly, over a period of perhaps 10 years before they are complete.

One aspect that deserves more attention is the simulation of what happens as the tax burden is gradually transferred from earnings and goods to land rent. As far as I can tell there is nowhere in the world a proper macroeconomic program for the simulation of these changes. The reason is simply that all the existing programmes don’t properly include land value as a separate quantity that is distinct from from capital investment in buildings etc. nor do they recognize the nature of ground-rent.

So I would suggest (and would even like to help the Bank with) the building of such a computer macroeconomic simulation method. I already have done some preliminary work along the lines of structural definition of a general model. I should add that as an engineer who has worked in the subject of simulation of the motion of impacting landing-gears (no pun intended), I have some related qualifications for assisting in this work.

I guess that begs the question as to the purpose of life? If people eat well and look after themselves then the burden on the health system will be lower and so therefore will taxes and therefore people may not need to work as hard as before.

The point is that we need to keep challenging ourselves and our governments to justify the status quo. Elections are a good example of preserving this as we are presented with tweedle dum and tweedle dee with a few extras thrown in via MMP.

But just like we wouldn’t see turkeys voting for Xmas, we are unlikely to see politicians or bureaucrats voting for more efficient systems of governance or finance.

Keeping peoples’ noses to the grindstone and dangling the carrot of “lotto” in front of them just makes sure people don’t have time to question the whole point of it.

We’ve cracked it! But our old systems prevent us from enjoying the bounty and considering the next stage of our evolution as humans.

And organized labour is definitely opposed to taxing land instead of labour. Where would they be if non-union jobs were highly paid, and working people got to keep all the money they earned? Same as if people didn’t get sick, all the doctors would be out of work!

OK, so maybe economists have proved that all the benefit of government spending on services and infrastructure goes to landowners because they can charge everyone else full market value for access to them. So? Just because they get it, that doesn’t mean they should be required to pay for any of it.

Working people just aren’t intelligent enough to have had parents and grandparents who bought land, or took it when it was there for the taking. They can afford to pay the taxes for the people who are smart enough to own land. Face it, most people would not work as hard if they were not kept under financial stress paying high taxes and big mortgages.

– Roy Langston