The Challenge
The emerging worldwide movement to fairly share the commons – the gifts of nature, of land, air, water, minerals, and space itself – has ancient roots in societies that held deep respect for the sacredness of life. The economic laws of jubilee “clean slate” debt cancellations and fair land tenure systems were the underpinning guidelines for both freedom and fairness in human affairs and enabled the creative unfoldment of each member society.
How strange that there is a public finance (yes tax) approach based on this knowing that can be traced back thousands of years to the Indus River Valley of Vedic India. Henry George discovered these fundamental truths in his own time and wrote about them in his masterwork Progress and Poverty published in 1879.
His inspiration and (at)practical policy approach is very much alive today. Some “Georgist” organizations are The Center for the Study of Economics, The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, The International Union for Land Value Taxation, The Henry George Institute, Earth Rights Institute, Prosper and EarthSharing in Australia, and many others in several countries worldwide.
The United Nations Habitat Agency has recommended this “beyond left and right” tax approach that removes taxes from labor and productive capital and instead charges a “commons rent” fee to fund socially useful goods and services.
This eliminates land hoarding and land speculation and keeps land affordable in the developed areas and essentially free for use in the most rural areas. To read the International Declaration of Individual and Commons Rights to Earth go to: http://www.theiu.org/international-declaration
