| @lpha |
16 maart 2012 20:59 |
Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Klarekijk
(Bericht 6033064)
Geen communisme maar een Europa met veel individuele vrijheid , goede levenskwaliteit en sociale zekerheid . weinig profitariaat , milieu vriendelijke energie en wonen , veel creativiteit en ontwikkeling .
Leren spreken over het bruto nationaal geluk .
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Geen communisme, geen socialisme, ook geen kapitalisme en zeker geen monopolie kapitalisme maar wel zuiver liberalisme ...:
http://ndimension.nielsch.be/index.p...cles&Itemid=60
Citaat:
Geoism (or geonomics, or (neo-)georgism) is a political ideology started by Henry George in the 19th century that combines moral values with economic reasoning. The core idea of Geoism is that the earth and its natural resources belong equally to all people, while the fruit of one's labour belongs completely to the individual. Though anyone can easily understand this principle, the practical implications are harder to grasp. To profoundly understand Geonomics, you need to know a few of the fundamentals of economics. This is where I will start.
The fundamentals of economics
1. The three production factors: labour, natural resources and capital.
Labour is the work of humans. Natural resources includes land and everything that is provided by nature (energy, materials, etc.. but also the capacity of the earth to absorb pollution). Capital is a concept that might cause some confusion. Most people think of capital as large amounts of money, shares, and so on. These, however, are only symbols that represent capital. Capital itself is wealth (the output of an economic process) that is used to produce more wealth (as input in a new economic process). In other words, these are the tools people use to increase productiveness (machines, instruments, land improvements, buildings, etc..). Modern society uses capital very intensively, and it is a sign of welfare. Capital is not an original production factor, because it is a product of the other two. In the economy as a whole, labour and natural resources are the only two inputs.
2. The law of supply and demand
One individual salesman uses his free will to choose his own prices, but in the end he is bound by what people are willing to pay in order to maximise his profits. This means that on a wider scale, the prices of goods and services are defined by the market. The higher the supply of a good, the lower its value. The higher the demand of a good, the higher its value. This is the reason that gold is worth a lot and sand isn't.
3. Competition versus monopoly
In a free market system where different companies compete with each other, the law of supply and demand has its best benefits. The price mechanism will ensure that the supply is in an optimal relation to the demand, for both consumers and producers. Because of competition, products and services will tend to be cheaper and better, and production will be more efficient because more efficient production means a cheaper price. On the contrary, where there is a monopolistic situation one company is the sole provider of a good or service. Therefore, depending on the demand of the product, the company has a great deal of power in manipulating the prices (and absolute power in the case of a necessary good). Free market and monopoly are two extremes, but there is more in between. We speak of oligopoly when there is centralisation of economic power within a small group of players, leaning on to monopoly (duopoly, etcetera). When the demand for a new product or service grows the first one to supply it will have a temporary monopolistic position and make lots of profit. In a free market new competitors will soon make the price decrease and the production more efficient. In this way the market automatically responds to changes in society ('the invisible hand'). Therefore free initiative and free trade stimulates creativity. Monopolistic companies (state or private) tend to work more static and inefficient, and provide consumers often with a non-commercial, unmotivated service.
False assumptions
One of the biggest flaws in economic thinking, is the idea that all economic value originates in economic activity. Politicians for example often state that for all money spent, people need to work or something needs to be sacrificed (“there is no such thing as a free lunch”). That is a fundamentally flawed concept. Let us give an example. Consider that you find a new oil source in your back yard. This would make you extraordinary rich. That new income wouldn't be just a consequence of the labour of exploiting it (in fact, you'll probably let others work for you). It would simply be a consequence of your privilege of owning this natural resource that everybody wants to use. Because natural resources, like everything, follow the rules of supply and demand, they have a certain economic value even though nobody worked to produce them. Value of land is partly defined by natural wealth (because of its resources, productiveness or even natural beauty) but also by the work of humans in its surroundings. For example, a land that is surrounded by good infrastructure and employment is of a higher value than land that isn't, because more people want to live there. The financial gains that arise from owning land we call land rent. We must conclude that economic value is not only actively created by useful work, but exists also passively from privileges that people enjoy, such as owning land. That is why we call this value unearned value.
The Value of Land
We call the value of land without its improvements (like buildings, agricultural modifications and aesthetic changes) the site value. The site value of land is thus not defined by what happens on the land, but entirely on its location. Three factors give land value:
Natural wealth: fertility, minerals, energy, natural beauty, and so on.
Government services: infrastructure (railways, roads, etcetera), schools, health care, and so on.
The community as a whole: employment, productivity (for example the availability of technology for automation of work) and so on.
The site value is never created by the owner but by nature and the community as a whole and increases as economy grows, society progresses or the government improves its services. Those who possess the resources will become richer, not because of their contribution but because of their privilege - and the contribution of everyone else. This is why land property is the wet dream of the speculator. There is no easier way of “making money” than investing in land and passively waiting as its value increases. Free lunches are enjoyed by the wealthy and powerful on a large scale. The consequences are dramatic.
It is not always the best economic choice to actually use land productively. As a consequence, houses are empty while some people are homeless, there are dilapidated neighbourhoods while there is urban sprawl, and so on. The massive speculation on property (read: land) pushes up the value more than it would naturally, creating a huge air bubble that is bound to explode. In the meantime, the increasing cost of housing and the inflation in the prices of products (who all need land to be produced) seriously decreases the buying power of people. Private property of land is a form of monopoly.
Some people claim that the property of land is not a major factor of privilege any more in a capitalistic economy where economic power seems to be rather concentrated in symbols of wealth like shares and bonds and land is divided in little pieces. However, underneath this surface of complicated capitalistic mechanisms land and natural resources still cause the greatest flow from poor to rich. In the end all our wealth only has two sources: labour and nature. All wars are related to land and natural resources. Consider everything that is going on in Africa, and how this is all related to land politics and natural resources. Even in a small region like Flanders, which is very wealthy financially but poor in resources, one can see that the heart of its economic power is in the port of Antwerp, its most valuable piece of land.
The application of Geonomics
Governments could capture the community-created value of land, simply by taxing it and using land rent as a public revenue. This tax would be only dependant on the location of the land, and not on its improvements (like the value of the building) and is called “land value taxation” (LVT). This tax is the only tax (as all economists in history agree) that cannot be passed on (to renters or consumers). The reason is that prices of goods and services in a free market system are not really chosen by individual traders, they are set by demand and supply on the market. When governments tax products, labour, incomes, capital, and so on, they decrease the supply by increasing the cost. This increases the prices, putting pretty much all taxes on the consumer. In the case of land, the supply is fixed and cannot change. In other words, the owner of land cannot increase his prices as a consequence of more taxes because as a monopolist he is already asking as much as he can. If he could in fact increase the price he would have already done so.
This tax has multiple benefits:
Stability of the Economy: This tax would make land speculation impossible (as the profits of owning land are paid to the government) stabilising the economy, preventing house bubbles and lowering the cost of living. In fact, if the whole annual value of land is paid to the government, the purchasing price of land equals zero (because the land has become profit-less). That means someone buys a home he will only pay the price of the building to the previous owner (needing a much smaller loan), and pay the community for his privilege of owning the land in annual taxes.
Stimulation of the Economy: This tax would raise an enormous amount of revenue. This would make governments able to decrease the same amount of taxes that do have a negative effect on the economy (on wages, capital, production and so on). When other important revenues are included (from other natural resources and monopolies), taxes on productive work and trade could be completely abolished, resulting in the end of illicit work and black markets. The exchange of work and goods would be a private interaction with no interference from the state. Prices will drop, administration will be simplified. This would give a huge boost to the economy, especially the local economy that seeks profit in productive work.
Better use of Resources: This tax makes it necessary for land owners to use their land productively, because they always pay the same tax whether they are productive or not. The non-productive land owner is therefore better off selling his land to someone who needs to use it. Also, land will be used for what is best used. This means there will be an end to empty houses, dilapidation of neighbourhoods, urban sprawl (which threatens rural areas) and rural sprawl (which threatens natural areas).
Social Justice: The ownership of land currently causes a flow of money from poor to rich. However, when using this tax people will need to be work to make money and great amounts of money will only be made by great amounts of work. This will spread capital, which will be good for small businesses and bad for big corporations.
Back-flowing effect: This tax will cause government spending to flow back, because investments in the wealth and the well-being of the community (infrastructure, research, health, education, etcetera) will result in higher site value of the land, and a higher tax revenue. The expended value will therefore flow back to the government in the long run. More automation of production because of better technology will also lead to higher revenue. In other words, the whole community and not just the land owners benefit from a level of higher productivity.
LVT is not so much a real tax as it is a compensation for enjoyed privileges to the real owner of all land: the whole community.
As an extension to site value taxation, there can be no other form of economic privileges in a geonomic society. The government should be in control of all natural monopolies. Besides natural resources this also means that infrastructure (of traffic, energy, telecommunication, etc...) should be the property of the community. Because companies that provide customer care should be in the hands of the free market as much as possible, the government could simply rent out the usage of these infrastructures out to the companies that sell the services that operate on them. The common ownership is the way to ensure real competition.
For similar reasons geoists are opposed to patents because they support monopolies (but not author rights: while author rights protect the ownership of what someone created, patents prevents others from creating the same product). This means that governments should invest more in research. (This would not necessarily involve extra costs, for example for medications it would replace the payments that governments currently make to provide the people with patented medication. )
Ecology and modern geoism
In the time of Henry George there was no ecological question whatsoever. He thought that the limited amount of land in the world was the only boundary of nature. We have learned now that there are more boundaries to nature. This made modern geoists conclude that:
other natural spaces besides land give monopolistic power and provide unearned value (the ocean, the air, the electro-magnetic spectrum, and so on).
governments should specify the boundaries of the amount of waste and pollution the earth or the society can handle (CO2 emission, fishing quota, manure production, noise, and so on). Then it should spread licenses representing these boundaries on the free market, and collect taxes from these licenses.
This way sustainability is guaranteed by law and for reasons explained earlier, these natural resources will be used in the most productive manner. This means that people will rather use productive work than environmental damage to increase their wealth for reasons of free market, which is much more efficient than using subsidies. Repairing will often be more economically beneficial than replacing. The long-term effects will become more crucial in production.
The introduction of these taxed licenses will have a different effect on the prices of goods than the LVT. By introducing a boundary for these natural resources that didn't used to exist before (to this extent), supply is restricted and the average price of products damaging the environment and the community will increase. However, the over all amount of prices will still decrease because of all the unearned value that now will be collected by the state. There will however be a change in how the prices relate to each other. Organic and local products will become cheaper than mass-produced products. People will pay the actual cost of the products they buy (including to society), changing their behaviour as consumer. It should be easily understood that for every product sold there will still be a portion paid to the community. But instead of paying a contribution with respect to the productive value you added to society, you pay a contribution with respect to the value you subtracted from society and nature. This will hugely benefit the smaller economy. For example, the combination of a state-owned energy network with a free market on energy production and a tax on pollution (and no tax on work) would very much stimulate investments in solar power, much more than is happening now. Solar power means environmental sustainability and economic independence.
Considering the vision of Geoists towards the tasks of free market and state, they also want to restore the creation of (digital) money to the power of the state. Now banks are in fact allowed to lend out money they do not have, pumping a great amount of money in to the system (about 97%) through digital accounts. This is money that only represents a debt and bears interest, which puts unbearable pressure on the economy to grow infinitely. A crucial step in economic liberation would occur if governments were the creators of digital money and prevented banks from doing this. This would in fact prevent inflation and economic crises (by restricting the money supply to what is desired, and ending debt-based money). Similar to site value taxation it would also bring value that was created by society as a whole back to the community instead of corporations, because new money can only be created inflation-free when the economy grows. It would however still keep the real task of banks (lending out saved money and providing services to customers) on the free market, supporting real financial competition instead of centralised financial power. Because Geoists believe in ultimate economic freedom that allows any amount of production and consumption, they reject infinite economic growth and replace it with economic balance.
The expenses of the government
The value created from land and other resources is the surplus of the economy, and when it is used as public revenue the people will be really free to determine its use in the best interest of the community, depending on culture and democratic tendencies. Governments on all levels should be controlled by the people using real democracy (by fully proportional representation and binding referendums on citizens' initiative). The principle of ending special privileges should also be practised in spending. Therefore subsidies must no longer be paid to profit-gaining corporations (like banks, car manufacturers and mass-producing agriculture). The first task of the government is to invest in the community in the areas of infrastructure, justice, research, education and health, or any form of public services. These will all be easily financed, as they create extra revenue.
Because everyone owns a part of the natural wealth, geoists also argue that a citizen's dividend or basic income should be given to the people that enables them to consuming a share. The main argument against a basic income is that working people would be taxed for the benefit of lazy individuals. Obviously this doesn't stand in a geonomic system (as work and savings are not taxed). A basic income would open the path to a liberated labour market, freeing people of the tight rules of society in terms of how work is organised, and giving them the liberty to organise their lives in accordance with their personal needs. It would lower work pressure, make unpleasant work more expensive and give people the chance to work more for themselves and for free (at home, community work, art, open source software, and so on). As much as geoists defend free trade (as a servant and not a master), they support free non-commercial initiative in society equally. The basic income would replace the largest part of financial social security, subsidies and government organised work and administration. All other social work - to specific groups with extra needs – could then be aimed at the emancipation of the individual rather than providing financial dependence. The new system would obviously imply a huge administrative simplification and a great shift to meaningful expenses.
Geoism is also a pacifistic ideology that rejects all wars and calls for strong cooperation between all cultures in the world without loss of their identity.
Geoism, globalism and technology
As geoists believe in free trade between all people, they also support globalisation as an enrichment of society. However it must be a decentralised, multi-leveled market. Multi-leveled means local markets for local needs (for example basic foods and basic services) and global markets for global needs (for example speciality foods and technology). This is not in contradiction with modernity. As financial capital will decentralise, the demand for smaller capital goods (tools, machines, etc..) will rise, which will introduce a shift to small-scale but high-technological post-industrial technology. A great example of decentralised globalisation is the information web on the Internet (which can be attributed to the shift from industrial mainframes to personal computers). In the same way our energy network should evolve to a decentralised network of many small providers (solar, wind, etc...). In a global economy there will be a need for global application of geonomics: sharing the value of natural resources between all communities and people around the earth - the only possible way to world peace.
Geoism vs other ideologies
Geoism is a non-materialistic ideology. Its core ideal is the emancipation of individuals and communities, in order to allow every individual to live a life that is meaningful and joyful with respect to his or her unique personality, and to support strong cooperation and interaction between people as equals. Based on the basic principle of the enlightenment – the equal rights of all citizens – it aims for the end of corporate welfare and centralisation of economic power. It can be called “true liberalism”. Geoism is considered opposite to both traditional capitalism (the idea that everything must be privately owned) and socialism (the tendency to centralise economic power to the state). Traditional capitalism is extremely destructive towards the earth, cultures and the well-being and health of the people. Socialists claim that the private property of capital is the cause of inequality and abuse, which is not the case as capital is only the product of labour. They deny the right of the people to free organisation of work, and discourage initiative and creativity.
Geonomics shares a goal with the social-liberal model of West-Europe: to combine economic efficiency with social justice. The problem of the social-liberal model however is that it only helps the symptoms rather than the causes of social injustice. Its system of taxes and huge administration is very counter-productive. Many fail to recognise that all taxes on production, including on income, are for the largest part shifted to the consumer. Progressive taxes and replacement incomes directly enforce poverty traps, because people can be financially punished for working and contributing in this system. All taxes are mainly imposed on the middle class, because the real rich are easily able to hide their capital and wealth and avoid paying the taxes. Nobody however is able to hide the site value of land. The current “middle-way” view says that the “free market” must be ethically “corrected”. This is a contradictory statement by itself, because the word “free” implies a form of ethics. The absence of ethical rules would lead to monopoly, not free markets. Of course, the government needs to specify what the market can do and cannot do. Nobody would disagree with the principle that the freedom of all individuals can only be secured if the state enforces everyone to respect the freedom of others, for example in the laws against violence and theft. In the same way, the laws of the economy should consider freedom and justice as synonyms. As a geoist smilingly says: “Free markets? A good system. Perhaps we should try it some time.” Geoists reject the idea that political philosophy can be represented as a one dimensional spectrum, as it does not fit in the classic left-wing/right-wing division.
The geoist movement was particularly big at end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, with followers like Winston Churchill, Lev Tolstoy, Mark Twain and Albert Einstein. Political parties around the world putting LVT on their agenda. The game “monopoly” was designed by a geoist to demonstrate the effect of private land property. Rich and powerful men however financed the academic world to develop the theory of “neo-classical economics”, which simply removed land as a production factor (including it in capital) in order to ignore any moral or political questions. These theories have only produced mathematical models that seem to fail again and again in bad times because of their fundamentally wrong assumptions. The labour movement on the other hand was possessed by Marxism and derivatives, which as a simplistic ideology was easier to capture in slogans. These evolutions pushed Geoism out of the mainstream.
A serious reform is urgently needed considering the pile of crises we are dealing with. In the 19th century, Lev Tolstoy wrote letters to Russian politicians and powerful men to inform them about the geonomic system. The answer was basically always the same: no chance it would ever be discussed. Tolstoy concluded that “they are blind, and what is worse: they think they can see.” Sadly enough two centuries later this still holds very true.
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