In the 44 months since the first post to this blog, there have been about four or five comments.
If you agree that a society that respects public AND private property rights could mean an end to grinding poverty in the world and bring human impacts on the environment into line with what most people feel is acceptable, then I hope you will put a comment to voice your support of the idea. You could tell how you can help to spread the idea. Or tell how this paradigm shift might help to alleviate a particular problem.
If you see that this proposal, (charge a fee to polluters and those who take natural resources - give the proceeds to the people), could not work because it contains serious flaws or invalid assumptions, please share your critique in a comment.
When Kevin Hickey and Demetri Kantarelis said that they would not publish this proposal to a wider audience as part of the Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Association conference, (after inviting me to share the proposal at the conference), they did not explain their objection other than to say that this paradigm shift would require "changes in human nature".
(The reviewer of the paper did say that the paper was a "radical proposal" with "leftist tendencies", but they knew that when they invited me to attend and present, so it hardly seems fair that they would reject it for publication on those grounds.)
Only if someone other than the author of the proposal asks them to explain will they know that anyone other than the author actually cares.
Kevin Hickey (khickey@assumption.edu)
Demetri Kantarelis (dkantar@assumption.edu)
(If you want to communicate to those professors, I hope you will cc: or bcc: to me, or cut and paste to my comments section. Thanks!)
John
P.S.: Is it a fair assumption that, if no one objects when professors say "We won't publish this", that the goals that might be achieved are not really that important, or that the proposal has fatal flaws? If you see flaws, please tell me. If the goals are important, in your mind, please speak up. Thank you.
Hello, John Champagne. My name is Joshua. You asked for comments, so here is one.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with your premise. I think the Geoists are correct: land - in the economic sense, meaning all natural resources not the product of labor, including space itself - is fundamentally different than labor or capital, and ought to be treated as such. It is the one factor of production that is both fixed in supply and required for the exercise of any other rights (because those rights must be exercised somewhere). In a country where all land is claimed, those born without it must pay others for the right to exist.
Shifting taxes from productive activity (work and investment) onto speculative activity (hording, flooding, and rent) has created economic prosperity wherever tried, with less income disparity than capitalist nations and less bureaucracy and graft than socialist ones.
I'm less concerned with mass democracy limit development than I am with making developers pay the real costs of what they do. Geoist economists I've read seem to think this will naturally work for the environment by removing the perverse incentives in our current systems.
I'm also a fan of the Golden Rule. Glad to know there are others on the same wavelength. Let's hope it's something in the air today.
A belated thank you, Joshua, for sharing your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI'm interpreting "I'm less concerned with mass democracy limit development..." as "I'm less concerned that mass democracy might limit development..."
Thanks!