Doug Mackenzie wrote: >I do not agree with Georgist arguments for the single >tax, but the idea that the single tax is unworkable >because government is necessarily 'too big', is not >supported by any established facts. Modern governments >are arguably too large, and could possibly be >downsized to fit with the single tax, assuming that >the single tax is itself desirable. I think it clear that the LVT would not fund all the government we have today. It is less clear that this is a disadvantage. If gov't were on a fixed and more or less knowable revenue stream, it might be an improvement worth the tax itself. The rental value of all the land in the US is an enormous sum of money, even if smaller than the current spending of local, state, and national gov't. However, this doesn't mean that any essential gov't service needs to be cut back. The road network, for example, can be funded by user fees, and likely ought to be. the retirement accounts ought to be true accounts, not spent for the ordinary expenses of gov't. Disaster relief can be funded by a surtax on insurance premiums used to build a national emergency fund. And while the ordinary expenses of defense should be funded from ordinary taxes, actual wars (being, one hopes, extraordinary events) ought to be funded by extraordinary taxes, such as luxury or consumption taxes. Would we still have the same appetite for Iraq if we actually had to pay for it, rather than pass the cost on to our children and grandchildren? What if to declare war were simultaneously, and by the same act, to raise taxes? Would we be more pacific? Would we not reserve the use of force for those times when our freedom really is at stake? Many things cited as a disadvantage of the LVT strike me as an advantage. Nevertheless, I believe there are practical problems with the LVT, the major one being the computation of the tax. While it may be true that in a pure free market, it may be easy enough to figure the value of any given parcel of land, this is not true when the tax depends on that value. At that point, the process becomes politicized, and there are any number of ways of placing as much value as possible on the improvements and as little on the land. It seems to me that the LVT can only be imposed, as a practical matter, in situations where land is well-divided in ownership. In cases where it is concentrated, those with the largest concentrations will have both the incentive and the means to cheat the system, or work it to their advantage. Power follows the money, and where property is concentrated, so too will power be concentrated. This power will find a way to defeat the system. This, I believe is the actual history of Georgist states, which end up with fixed and arbitrary ratios for dividing value between land and improvements, Schemes which at best approximate the land value and at worst completely understate it. Therefore, I think Georgism itself is dependent on other reforms which lead to better divided property. Since such a division is anathema both to certain abstract formulations of capitalism and to the capitalism as it actually exists, we are unlikely to see any Georgist states in the current situation. John C. M?daille