In the beginning, there was nature. No person made it, but people got everything they needed (food, water, and shelter) from it. Some people decided that certain parts of nature belonged to them, and that people needed to pay them for it. As more and more nature got claimed, there were eventually no more good places left to use. Now, most people have to pay someone for a piece of nature to eat, sleep, or work on.
140 years ago, an economist named Henry George pointed out that it was unfair to for some people to claim ownership of nature, which no person made. Henry George suggested that to fix this, we make people pay for the nature that they use, then give it back equally to society. People should still get money for their work, though, and for stuff that they make. That way, people can only benefit from nature if they are actually doing something useful with it.
Henry George called this payment for nature the “Land Value Tax.” It has a few benefits:
- By giving the value of nature back to society, everybody gets to share in the earth’s bounty. Even by giving just a little bit of nature’s value to everybody, we could eliminate starvation.
- The Land Value Tax doesn’t punish people for working, or for trading. It only punishes people for being wasteful or lazy with their land.
- Land Value Taxes are easy to understand, and don’t require people prying into your personal life.
- People can keep the money they make for building and maintaining houses under a Land Value Tax. So landlords who do good things for their communities will still be rewarded for those things.