The conference will explore a wide range of topics relating to Land Value Tax (LVT) and global economic justice including:

• Land and Geo-Justice
• Critique of Current Financial Policies
• Claiming Water, Fish & Oil Commons
• Why Socializing Rent & Untaxing Production is Good for Labour
• Climate Change and New Economics
• Inequality: Cause and Cure

The objectives of the conference are to highlight key principles and policies for the emerging economics paradigm, showing how economics can align with and support the conscious evolution of human and other life on earth.

We will explore a path beyond both left and right, one that meets the needs of both the individual and the community. Conference participants will design a cohesive strategy for next steps as individuals and as leaders of organizations.

The conference includes an evening Public Forum titled Inequality, Climate Change and New Economics . Saturday, 27th July will be our London Tour Day. The tour will look at the economic history of London as a hub of commerce, government, finance, culture and power. At Speakers’ Corner we will reaffirm the International Declaration of Individual and Common Rights to Land. This is a chartered bus, river and museum tour with picnic lunch included.

The IU Executive Committee also welcomes you to contribute to the Barbara Sobrielo Fund that was established to give financial assistance to Georgists worldwide who otherwise would not be able to come to our conference. There are several young people in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Togo and Kenya who would very much like to participate in the conference if we were able to pay for their round-trip plane ticket to London.

The full conference Program, Registration Form and Payment Options Form are all now posted on the IU website.

Please join us in July for Economics for Conscious Evolution – A Geo-Justice Conference!

If you have any questions or suggestions please contact Alanna Hartzok, the IU General Secretary by email: alanna@earthrights.net or skype: alanna.hartzok

“You could have more progressive income tax… you could tax rents. These are incomes that are earned by people who are basically not putting in any extra effort to make that money.”

He urges the experts on taxation theory to think about these questions intelligently to improve the macro economic stability.

Michael Kumhof is the Deputy Division Chief of the Modeling Division, IMF Research Department.

Watch the interview posted on YouTube:

We’re launched TheIU View, a quarterly journal packed with great articles about land tax and related issues from around the world. We hope you enjoy it and encourage you to share.

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But for the awesome skill and untiring work of two simultaneous translators, the just-past 28th conference of the International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade would not have been the success it was. All sessions were completely comprehensible — Spanish presentations were audible in English, and English ones were accessible in Spanish; we needed only to put on our earphones as called for. The two translators were just fantastic, ably swapping off their responsibilities every twenty minutes for the duration, every day. Almost all the sessions, as recorded in video and audio, may soon be available online at www.asap.org.ar, and powerpoint or text versions are there now. Check this page for updates.

Thanks to Hector Sandler for making this conference possible by introducing three organizations based in the City of Buenos Aires as joint host with The IU and arranging for the Faculty of Law, Buenos Aires University, kindly providing the conference venue. The IU itself was able to enjoy a passive role this time because the Argentine Association of Budget and Public Financial Administration (ASAP) and the Institute of Economic Training (ICE) were co-sponsors. ASAP is the Argentine affiliate of the International Association of Public Budgeting (ASIP), which also collaborated in the conference’s planning.

The May 15 to 18 conference theme was “Housing, Land and Social Inclusion: A Taxation System to Achieve it.” Some 91 people were registered for the three-day-long sessions held at the University of Buenos Aires School of Law. Thirteen attendees were non-Latin-Americans and well known to the International Union membership. They were Peter Meakin (South Africa), Fred Harrison (UK), Dave and Heather Wetzel (UK), Roger Sandilands (UK), Frank Peddle and his son Liam (Canada), Jacob Schwartz-Lucas (US), Jesper Raundall Christensen (Denmark) and yours truly, Bill Batt (US).  Three others are dual citizens: Wendy Rockwell, an American in Costa Rica, Quizia Gonzales, Honduran in New York, and IU President Fernando Skornik-Gerstein, Argentine, but now in Madrid.

Challenges in China

The subject matter of the conference was wide-ranging. There were three presentations on contemporary challenges in China. Roger Sandilands, an economist at University of Strathclyde, presented a paper on “Housing Policies and Urban Land Values in China: Lessons from Latin America and Singapore.” A later session allowed Fernando and Dave Wetzel to exchange their differing opinions on China’s future, both based on their personal observations. Dave is far less optimistic, due to Fernando’s interpretation of Chinese law as against Dave’s appreciation of how leasing land for new developments fails to collect the economic rent on ALL sites and fails to capture future land value increases during the period of the lease.  For example, when one new metro/subway/underground railway was built in a locality, no plans were made to capture the land gains when the 70 year lease was originally negotiated or auctioned.

Fred Harrison’s first paper explored the looming prospect of world conflict, based on the specter of increased debt, depression, and growing contradictions of capitalism. His thesis will be spelled out more fully in his next book.

Materials sent prior to our arrival made clear that Argentina once had a very strong Georgist movement, and in fact was able to enact a land value tax for a short time. It failed to take hold, however, due to changes in government administrations and lack of popular understanding, proving that essential to a policy’s success is education and support of the public.  Guillermo Andreau, by early training an agricultural engineer but whose current focus is the right of access to land spoke about the deprivations resulting from that denial. His explanation for the corruption of economic, moral, and policy sciences in Argentine nation’s history echoed much of what we know from Mason Gaffney’s account.

Conference was a tribute to Hector Sandler

Credit should go especially to Dr./ Professor Hector Sandler, Argentina’s venerable and charismatic Georgist, who was responsible for arranging the program, chairing many of the panels, and bringing our philosophy to his countrymen.  Now well into his 80s, he was nonetheless always unfailingly clear and persuasive. His younger brother Guillermo, his son Ernesto, and granddaughters, Georgists all, were recruited for presentations in what was at times a family affair. This conference was thus very much a tribute to Hector, who was fully deserving of this commendation.

Brother Guillermo Sandler, an economist in his own right, directs a Program for the Study of Economics of the Public Sector in Argentina.  Granddaughters Natalia Arbelo and Patricia Abelenda offered compelling graphical presentations that demonstrated how much empirical data exists in support of Georgist claims. Their land value maps and economic rent estimates were all supported by solid numbers. It was a highlight of the conference, to my thinking worthy of their presenting at other conferences. Ernesto’s other obligations meant his paper was read for him. His book, Toward an Economy Without Barriers, will soon be published in English, and the summary we were privileged to receive suggests that it is well warranted.

Presentations from those coming from afar were also well received. Besides those mentioned above, Quisia Gonzales talked about the treatment of minorities in Honduras, on which she was able to speak first hand. Wendy Rockwell, who has made Costa Rica her home for years, created a powerpoint based on graphics collected from many sources illustrating the merits of land value taxation. Peter Meakin’s paper on South Africa argued that land taxes would be employed if that nation’s constitution were followed. He’s been thinking about a lawsuit to challenge this contradiction. Frank Peddle looked at land rights from an international perspective, the paper to be online shortly.

Two of the Argentine presenters were American-trained economists.  Professor Raul Cuello studied years ago at Columbia with Georgists Carl Shoup, Lowell Harriss, and Bill Vickrey. His paper, titled “Economic Thinking and the Tax Structure,” traced lots of early economics, emphasizing the importance of William Petty, a British economist, scientist and philosopher in the time of Cromwell. Petty’s ideas, argued Professor Cuello, were influenced by Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon, and antedated Adam Smith by half a century. In my post conference correspondence with him, he again urged me to look at the work of Petty more closely. Claudio Lutzky, the second American trained economist at the conference, received his graduate education at George Mason University. Lutzky’s talk was on climate change solutions, particularly a carbon tax, and would be attending the Rio conference on Sustainable Development a month later.  I was able to refer him to Peter Barnes’ book, Who Owns the Sky (1991), a book he hadn’t known, and which provides the most elegant Georgist solution of any: auction rent of the air-pollution sink for what revenue it can provide.

Dave Wetzel’s final paper, Land Rent for the People, started by showing how investments in transportation infrastructure raised the market value of proximate land sites. His examples were taken from actual cases: first from the redevelopment of London’s East End Canary Wharf area where vacant and derelict sites were soon transformed into high-rise employment centers. The second instance was the redevelopment of the Jubilee Line which has increased values by £13 bn when the line itself only cost £3.5 bn to rebuild. By extension Dave was able to show that all capital investments in a locale, not just transportation, generate increased site values that arguably should be returned to the public that created it all. The slides in his presentation contrasted the wasted opportunities in some areas with the prosperity generated in others.

Lessons for the future

Like all conferences, this one offered lessons for the future: publicity could have improved the sporadic attendance, and a registration list of those present, distributed to all, would have allowed better networking than was possible during the breakout sessions. Name tags, with affiliations, and written in large letters would also have helped, as well as providing better security against pickpockets and theft. A coat and hat check service would have served. There might have been greater opportunity to see a bit more of Buenos Aires than what time was budgeted. The city of 15 million offered far more opportunities for Georgists than we saw. And the websites showing the land value maps for all the provinces in the country could have been given us to see what gains have been made to date. I refer others to them here. These land value maps and economic rent estimates all support solid simulations. (Or, for another sample, see ESRI.com: “City of Cordoba, Argentina, Modernizes its Land Registry Administration;” and http://mapa.buenosaires.gob.ar/)

Additional information

The best land value maps are in Costa Rica.  Take a look at this site where almost the whole country has been valued.

An investigation has revealed that the international coffee chain Starbucks has paid just £8.6 million on its UK profits in corporation tax in 14 years, and not a bean for the last 3 years.

It is the latest in a long line of revelations of aggressive tax avoidance from companies and individuals – Barclays, Facebook, Google, the BBC, Jimmy Carr – which has seen tax compliance (or more often the lack of it) become a front page issue.

Tax avoidance is legal, but it usually involves highly dubious and artificial transactions that have no economic rationale other than outwitting the tax man. These involve loading the company up with debt, obfuscating where economic activity takes place, and using tax havens – depriving governments of much needed revenue (which they usually then get from the majority of honest taxpayers from whom the tax dodgers are free-riding.)

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society.” It is the means by which we pay for the armed forces that defend us, the laws and police officers that protect us, the schools that educate us, the doctors and hospitals that cure us, and much else besides. We decide democratically how much tax we are expected to pay for these public goods we receive in return. Egregious tax avoidance is therefore rather like buying an Espresso Frappuccino in a Venti cup with 16 shots of espresso, a shot of soy milk, caramel flavouring, vanilla beans and a drizzle of caramel and mocha and only giving the Barista a penny to pay for it. You get the benefits without paying the full costs.

Worse than that, most ordinary people, who do pay their full taxes, end up paying more to compensate for the tax gap. Everyone who is seeing their child benefit being taken away, their salaries frozen, their local services being closed should ask angrily why they are being made to pay, when others are paying nowhere near their fair share. The small high street coffee shop does not have the ability to dodge its taxes like Starbucks and should be allowed a level playing field.

Dealing with tax avoidance requires a comprehensive response. A General Anti-Avoidance Rule should be adopted. We should come down hard on tax havens – especially the many that are British dependencies. HMRC should be well staffed and resourced. We should require country-by-country reporting, so we know where economic activity takes place and so developing nations can get the revenues from multinationals to pay for much-needed health and education programs.

Can we also suggest that changing the tax base could help. Land cannot be moved – Philip Green cannot airlift the sites his stores sit upon over to Monaco. Apart from its many other excellent economic and equitable qualities, an annual Land Value Tax could provide a large and stable source of tax revenues that can’t be avoided. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

(This news article is submitted by the UK Labour Land Campaign. For more details visit www.labourland.org)

Seminar 5 – 11 May 2012
Property, Value and Commons
Convened by Henry George Foundation

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As Alanna explains: ”The course is not only a great educational venue, it is also a way of organizing action oriented Research for Policy Implementation Projects.”

“Upon completion of the course you are eligible to partner with us on policy research and implementation projects for your city/country.

Alanna says there are currently 890 people enrolled from more than 95 countries. Many of those enrolled are either professionals in an area of land management, are affiliated with NGOs, or are university students.

“Those with full course access, which is the majority, receive individual responses to their course assignments, recorded on the website. We keep in touch with the entire student body via occasional emails,” she says. The course is offered in English and Spanish.

The course includes:

• Five modules: Land Rights and Poverty, Land Prices and the Law of Rent, Land Value Capture, Economics of War and Peace, and Policy Implementation.
• An overall analysis and analyses for 12 countries.
• A Land Value Capture Calculator which can illustrate the taxable capacity of land for a particular city or locality.
• A discussion forum covering major categories including Thematic, Classes and Geographic.

So, for those of you who know you will benefit by an expanded understanding of land markets and land policies, Alanna invites you to enroll and become a
participant in the effort to create a worldwide network of knowledgeable and devoted supporters of just systems of land tenure and taxation.

The enrollment form can be found at: http://www.course.earthrights.net

Argentina has a somewhat fascinating history in connection with land value taxation. Many of the founding fathers of Argentina were physiocrats. Actually Argentina gained its independence from Spain under the influence of free-masons and physiocrats. The creator of the Argentinean flag, General Manuel Belgrano, one of the most revered heroes of its history was a physiocrat and so it was the first Argentinean President, Bernardino Rivadavia.

In 1826 under Rivadavia’s rule a law was passed forbidding the sale of all public land (90% of the country in those days) that was only to be leased on a system called “emphyteusis”. The law provided for twenty year leases. During the first ten years, the lessee would pay into the Public Treasury an annual fee amounting to 8% of the assessed value in the case of land use for cattle raising land and 4% in the case of smaller parcels used for agriculture. The valuation was to be made by a jury of neighbours and at the end of the ten years, the legislature was to determine the rents to be paid thereafter according to new appraisals. According to what Dr. Ignacio Nuñez, Rivadavia’s diplomatic envoy to London at the time said to the British Government “the spirit of the project is that publicly owned land should never be held in any other way than by leaseholds… The present taxes bear harmfully upon the people and hinder the country’s development… The rent of land is the most solid and definite source of revenue on which the state must count”. It was confidently believed, according to Nuñez, that the public collection of land rent would make it possible to do away with tariffs and all other taxes.

This act provoked the reaction of the owners of large estates and the greatest of them all, Don Juan Manuel de Rosas, overthrew the government and ruled as dictator until 1852. His cruel tyranny divided the political class into “unitarios” (the liberals expelled) and the “federales” (landowners of each province). However, the law of 1826 was not abolished. It was used to grab more land by the few landowners. Rosas was expelled, the “unitarios” returned and began to rule. However, they also took advantage of the 1826 Law for themselves. In 1857 this law was abolished and branded as a “communist law”.

In 1869 with the landlord class in the government (unitarios and federales) approved the Civil Code and implanted in Argentina the ancient Roman law of land tenure.

An important lesson emerges from this story: the law is not sufficient to establish a good economic order. It needs to be sustained by the culture of society.

This historical background has always been in the back of the mind of Argentinians. But it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the extraordinary ideas of Rivadavia were brought again to light by some Argentinean politicians and the Uruguayan historian Andrés Lamas.

Since then many distinguished Argentinian politicians have tried to introduce land value taxation. There was a Georgist political party in the 1920s that gained some local elections but disappeared within a few years. There were tentative moves to introduce land value taxation in the City of Buenos Aires under several governments but they always met the opposition of the powerful ruling oligarchy. In the Province of Córdoba, one of the must important of the Country, a progressive government of the Civil Radical Union introduced successfully a land value tax, although the rate of the tax was curtailed by the Supreme Court. Other provinces followed Córdoba.

In any case the collection of land rent was never a source of fundamental revenue for governments. Argentina was one of the largest exporters of grains and meat. Governments preferred to raise money for public spending by taxing the export of agricultural production. However, this source fell sharply by the 1914-18 war and protectionism adopted by Europe in 1930. It was a crucial moment for Argentina. It had to choose between ground rent or create taxes on labor, production, and consumption. In 1932 it chose the latter. This is the regime that has ruined Argentina.

General Juan Perón who won the Presidency in 1946 had a team of prominent Georgists around him, but he dismissed them rather quickly. Peron could not accept the proposals of these few Georgists because of a clear reason. He preferred a centrally directed economic order planned by the national government. Thus the tax system established in 1932 remained. This regime obtained the money for the government by taxing wages, corporate profits and all economic activity.

He engaged in a policy of inflation and protectionism, but he was clever enough to keep the rent of land – both urban and rural – under strict control. Inflation pulverized rents that were frozen in favour of the tenants and this – together with social legislation – was one of the reasons for the extraordinary popular support for Peron´s system. He did not collect rents as public revenue: he gave them to the tenants.

The Georgist thinkers Antonio Manuel Molinari, Mauricio Birabent, Victorino de la Riega were the teachers of the actual Argentinian Georgists. Some of their pupils acquired political influence in the country: Héctor Sandler, member of parliament and President of the Instituto de Capacitación Económica, a Georgist organization chairing the IU 2012 Conference; Fernando Scornik Gerstein, actual President of the International Union who as adviser to the Argentinian Minister of Economy produced in 1973 a project to introduce land value taxation; Saul Martinez, Director of Public Highways under the government of Raul Alfonsin; Antonio César Copello, under-Secretary of Agriculture, and many others.

Actually there are three Georgists organizations in Argentina that cover the capital city of Buenos Aires, the Province of Buenos Aires and the Province of San Luis.

In addition, the Georgists in Argentina have three websites. The economist Guillermo Sandler has his own website profguillermosandler.blogspot.com. The engineer Guillermo Andreau has the blog “The Legal Relativism” with connection to Facebook and Twitter. And the ICE (Economic Development Institute) directed by Dr. Hector Sandler has www.icepal.com.ar

For the coming IU 2012 Conference, Dr. Sandler as a member of The Executive Committee of the IU, has obtained the collaboration of a leading NGO dedicated to the study of Argentina’s state budget problems. This NGO was founded in 1983 and is called ASAP (Argentine Association for Budget and Financial Administration). The ASAP is collaborating now in the organization of the International Union 2012 Conference. ASAP has applied for membership of The IU. ASAP has more than 300 affiliates nationwide. Most of them are accountants and economists

Further good news: ASAP is a member of another NGO called ASIP (International Association of Public Budget and Finance). ASIP is an international organization that brings together a large number of Latin American countries. At its last meeting decided to support the International Conference of the IU in Buenos Aires.

All the Georgists of Argentina hope that a plethora of Georgist from around the world will join them in Buenos Aires.

Those interests in assisting to the Conference should contact Héctor Sandler at the e-mail: hsandler@speedy.com.ar with copy to the accountant Gonzalo Lecuona (Secretary General of the ASAP) gonzalo_lecuona@me.com

Go to the course here