[p2p-research] Taxing Improvements Hinders Small and Local Production (was: Scientific American on the coming Malthusian Crisis)

[Patrick Anderson]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Paul D. Fernhout
<pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> I met several people in NJ who wanted to run small farms bout could not
> because of high land prices.

High land prices and sprawl (and therefore excessive transportation)
are caused by improperly taxing property improvements instead of
taxing the excessive holding of the finite resources required to
'host' those improvements.

Cities are strewn with patches of undeveloped land that large owners
use to 'speculate' on the land market.

Punishing improvements instead of hoarding allows owners to hold these
plots with almost no consequence - just so they do NOT improve them.

This puts far more pressure on land prices within a city than would
occur 'naturally', since these large holders are keeping the rest of
the community from enjoying the benefits of proximity that might
otherwise occur.

A famous (but not the first) explanation comes from Henry George and
his Land Value Tax (LVT) or "Single Tax" as described in his book
"Progress and Poverty".

----

We cannot realistically change this in currently established cities,
but we could start *new* cities that are structured this way from the
beginning.