Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania state capital, did a similar measure in 1977. Other Pennsylvania cities that have adopted modified Georgist tax systems include Scranton, Aliquippa, New Castle, Titusville, McKeesport and Clairton.

Then to add to that there was a study published in “Social Science and Medicine” if I recall the name correctly that noted that when the doctors went on strike in L.A. some years ago, maybe about 1960s, the death rate declined.

My thoughts are that we get more medical intervention than needed and no one is doing anything about that.

I thought Pittsburgh had a land value tax at one time and some other places in the U.S. I’m not sure of all the details and don’t have time to research them.

I know some cities, or town don’t tax property. It would be interesting to do some comparitive work.

As Jefferson said, to secure the unalienable rights of individuals, governments are instituted. They are not instituted to implement the moral will of the majority.

Many medical conditions requiring treatment stem from a lack of proper nutrition. Is it a moral imperative that government provide three square meals to everyone everyday? Is it moral to forcibly take money away from households trying to provide good nutrition for their children in order to treat others?

The very instruments and materials used to save lives, through their manufacturing and distribution processes, contribute to exposures that result in additional medical conditions and death. Is it moral to cause harm in the course of trying to treat others?

If you isolate one factor and say it is a moral imperative without considering the totality of the action is not trying to address an issue of morality as much as it is using a moral claim to try to promote a specific public policy position. That is not fair dinkum.

1) I don’t disagree with your assessment of statism. However, I don’t believe the use of force is bad in all instances (one of the main reasons I’m not a Green). There is a sort of force that large corporations can exert against the powerless that the market is not designed to protect, and that does not operate along any societally-agreed lines. Given the choice between the unregulated, amoral force of large corporations and the regulated, societally-determined, democratically-controlled force of government, I prefer the latter — even when the first does not involve physical prisons and the second does.

2) I don’t know enough about the health care system in France to know whether the Cato description is accurate, but let’s assume for argument’s sake that it is. If so, I would dispute the notion that the French system “works” because of the U.S.-style limitations on coverage and private opt-out option. These are choices that were made somewhere down the line by the French government, and I disagree with those choices, even if doing so means increasing the cost to taxpayers.

3) I would say 44,000 people dying every year from a lack of coverage is a market failure — but to a great degree that is beside the point. The issue is a moral one, not a market-based one. Each society has to determine what type of system is morally acceptable. I would argue the current one is not.

4) I disagree with Jefferson’s analysis and would replace it instead with the analysis that Madison hints at in Federalist #10 and #51, something I think most commentators fail to understand. Madison’s argument is that the danger to society is not a powerful government, but a powerful person gaining control of government. The Jeffersonian position is to keep government weak so that even if a bad person gains control of it, they can’t do very much damage. The Madisonian position (in the Federalist; he changed his mind later) is more sophisticated. Madison argues that you can design a system whereby government is compartmentalized in such a way that wicked men are trapped in small compartments with small possibilities of advancement, and whereby their ambition and wickedness actually drives the proper functioning of government. This is an argument for separation of powers and bureaucratization of government (and Madison was vehemently against a too-powerful executive), but it is not an argument for a weak government.

5) Your “safety net for the truly indigent” doesn’t go far enough because the “truly indigent” aren’t the only ones who need financial security; if they were, private charities would be able to do the job. The problem isn’t a bunch of war veterans with broken legs (although those are a problem too) but perfectly able-bodied people who are being worked too hard for too little, or who aren’t able to get jobs at all. Your system wouldn’t be able to provide for those people.

6) The Supreme Court has not upheld your reasoning with regard to Medicare. If they do so at some future date, I would support a constitutional amendment to Constitutionally mandate universal health care.

7) Medicare imposes unfunded liabilities on your kids so it can pay for their health care when they grow old, because society has decided that is the morally right thing to do. It is a problem that the liabilities are unfunded, and we need to raise taxes, a lot, so we can fund them. People want to have it both ways, and politicians are too cowardly to point out that it just can’t be done — either you cut services or you raise the taxes necessary to fund them. You support the former; I support the latter.

Morally, it doesn’t matter. Morals are allowed to trump the cost-benefit analysis. In my view, we want to be a society that doesn’t let people die for lack of health care that could have saved them. If that costs more in tax dollars, so be it.

9) Not really. If we could actually guarantee that we could save everyone’s life if we just spent enough money, I’d be in favor of a Marxist system that would make it happen; of the Lockean inalienable rights, property should never be allowed to trump life. However, I do believe the capitalist system allows for more life-saving advancements than any other system, provided it is properly regulated and contained. I also believe that a system that doesn’t allow for free enterprise takes a tremendous hit in quality of life. So I do believe there’s a limit to how much money can and should be spent on saving lives. Universal health care is worth it. Vast unnecessary preventive care — things like giving universal vaccinations for exceedingly rare illnesses — maybe not.

10) Because we make a value judgment otherwise. Here’s how a society in my view decides what’s moral and necessary: we talk and think about it; we vote on it (directly or indirectly); and then we live by it. I don’t support nationalizing Greyhound because I don’t believe there’s a moral imperative behind it. I do believe we have a moral imperative for universal health care. You disagree, and that’s fine; we vote for President and Congress, and when we elect people who want a universal public option (as we have), we live by it. That is the societal consensus, even though it is not mine, or yours.

“Separation of church and state” FOR REAL in a system that taxes means “no special treatment for churches — they pony up like everyone else.”

I could even see some liberty-positive outcomes from such a change.

For one thing, the IRS would lose its leverage over churches (“stop making political speeches from the pulpit or we’ll yank your exemption,” etc.).

For another, churches might re-think their own support for this or that government function if they had to pick up part of the check for that program.

But, from both a practical and ideological point of view, getting rid of taxes makes more sense than extending or “equalizing” them. A lot of Americans attend church. Telling them that their churches will only get to keep a portion of the (already taxed) dollars they stick in the collection plates doesn’t strike me as a very good way to pick up votes.

Example: In the Silicon Valley suburb where I live, land is worth about $2 million per acre. There is a 20-acre monastery here (adjacent to the mansion recently sold by Barry Bonds, and down the street from Cisco’s CEO) where 16 cloistered elderly nuns sleep on straw mattresses, have no TV, and wake up in the middle of the night to pray. Their only “work” is “prayer”, and they live only on “alms”. I kid you not: http://www.poor-clares.org/losaltos/losaltosl.html.

Example: About a mile north of here are hundreds of acres of land owned by Stanford University in the hills above campus, with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. Nearly all of the land is off-limits to everyone but — wait for it — cows. The university grazes a handful of cows there, in order to comply with Leland Stanford’s requirement that a demonstration farm be maintained on a portion of the vast amount of land he used to create the university.

So we have nuns and cows, both sleeping on straw, keeping hundreds of acres of prime Silicon Valley residential-grade land off the market, thus propping up property values for me and my zillionaire CEO neighbors, and making sure that their gardeners and maids can’t afford to live anywhere near them.

For the market to be able to guide all land to its best use, all land has to be treated equally — even land owned by churches and governments. If people really value churches, they’ll either pay for them to occupy prime sites, or they’ll drive a little further to go pray.

Now how has it worked in the areas that have it today?

And if it was enacted nationwide in the U.S. today how about the seperation of church and state issue? Or any non-profit?

If that is so won’t they still be getting services without having to pay for them, assuming that the minor amount of government that does exist under the system will still provide some services.

It seems if you really want to promote freedom you would want to not have large areas where people can be excluded and not want to limit choices people can make about their health care.

The existing medicare system is unmanageable. It is estimated there is $60 billion a year in fraud, let alone other waste and inefficiency in the system. What is the cost in terms of human health and lives from those losses? Is there any reason to think a larger system will be managed any better?

There are more than 500 bacterial species present in the normal human gut and are generally beneficial: they synthesize vitamins such as folic acid, vitamin K and biotin, and they ferment complex indigestible carbohydrates.

So now we know a little more about what Susan thinks about viral rhinopharyngitis (i.e. the common cold), but are still in the dark about what she thinks about

• a St. Louis Accord;
• the five political-ethics questions I asked @60;
• whether any force-initiation is involved at all in a land-value “tax” enforced merely by withdrawing public services;
• whether it’s aggression to violate the Lockean provision to leave “as much and as good” when excluding people from unowned land;
• her secret list of neighbor-annexing totalitarians that America could depose right now;
• why (even anarchist) economists recognize that “public goods” is a positive concept rather than a normative one;
• whether it was “amusing” for her to hear that public goods also include jokes, hairstyles, the English language, lighthouses, open-source software, and streetlights;
• why even radicals like David Nolan consider it useful to apply triage to the problem of reducing our tax burden — you know, like doctors do when confronting various kinds of the “diseases” that Susan was snarking about.

Michael, I confess that I don’t understand your point @66.

The common cold is arguably among the ‘least harmful’ human diseases. I still don’t want to be out there campaigning for it, and it still causes great misery.

Yeah, the makers of benedryl get rich because of it. I guess some people benefit from taxes, too.

And yes I do know a bit about this I was on a panel at one of the conventions some years ago.

I don’t accept that a you’ve adequately answered my question “How much of other people’s money are you willing to spend to save one more life?”  All you said was “blah blah blah x < 100% blah blah blah”.  The Single Payer law you ask for would have actual numbers in it, not just “x < 100%”.  So are you OK with 99%?  75%?  50%?  Again: tell me what your limit is, and how you justify it.  And remember: my X is not 0%, because I favor nature’s safety net (a citizen’s dividend financed by a land-value tax).  So if there is even one life that you wouldn’t save by raising the tax rate to 100%, then you are guilty of the same charge being leveled against me, and the difference is only in degree.

Your answer about savings Africans shows that you are no more immune from facile charges of wishful policy-making than I am. It was your side that here played the card of “you see nothing wrong with a system that kills more of your fellow Xs every year”.  If you’re willing to let more African children die every year so that middle-class Americans can get “free” health care, then how is that any less monstrous than what I allegedly am proposing to allow happen?

You claim: “to say something like single-payer health care is wrong in principle is to really tie your hands as to what you can do to help people.”  No, it simply ties your hands as to what you can do to help people with the stolen money of other people.  Your expanding-Medicare proposal is especially perverse, because Medicare is straightforward intergenerational larceny, and many of its beneficiaries are far wealthier than the working poor whose payroll taxes finance Medicare.  Unless you’re willing to means-test every social program you propose, you can’t even claim the dubious moral status of being a Robin Hood.

You, Preston, are still free to “help people” as much as you want. And if you claim that I’m not trying to “help people”, then you simply haven’t grappled with my proposal. As far as I can tell, none of you Medicare advocates here have said a single word about why it’s not better than yours.

I’m not “shifting back and forth” between principle and utility; I’m just saying that both are on my side.

As it happens, I just addressed the topic of gun rights this morning.

1. The “tax” would only be on site value, never on improvements or structures or any other product of labor.
2. The “tax” would be zero on land at the margin of production — think Ted Kaczynski’s shack in the woods. Ground rent is the excess product/benefit from a site compared to unused sites.
3. The tax basis could be self-assessed. Your basis is what you’d be willing to sell for, and if given a real offer for that much, you either sell or raise your tax basis.
4. The “tax” could be deferred until you transfer ownership of the site, so nobody is ever taxed off the land they hold. When a site that is in arrears is attempted to be sold, it would be forfeited for auction if an attempted sale would not cover the back taxes plus interest (no penalties). Thus you can hold your land as long as you want, but you can’t reap a speculative profit from the accumulated ground rent (site value) created by surrounding development.
5. As I mentioned, an alternative way to encourage paying the “tax” is to deny the landholder, to the extent feasible, the benefits of the community goods and services that create the ground rent (i.e. extra site value) in the first place.

Land value “taxes”, along with pollution fees and resource depletion fees, are the only kind of “taxes” I know of that are arguably not force-initiating. Thomas, I’m curious what kind of taxes your minarchist Constitutional republic would collect, and how you defend them from charges of force-initiation.

Land-value taxes are defended as the least harmful kind of tax by LP founder David Nolan and by many prominent libertarian economists: Friedman, Buchanan, Solow, Modigliani, Samuelson, Simon, Tobin, Vickrey, Cowan. This is because land-value taxes

• have no deadweight loss, unlike taxes on exchanges/income/production
• are trivial and non-intrusive to assess and collect: no need for tax forms, IRS, audits, or even site visits
• are naturally local, and so encourage Tiebout Sorting (voting with your feet)
• can only extract the extra value actually created by public services, creating pressure to defund public services that do not actually add value in the free market for land.

LVT were also advocated by many famous classical liberals:

• Adam Smith
• Thomas Jefferson
• Tom Paine
• William Penn
• Ben Franklin
• Frederic Bastiat
• John Stuart Mill
• David Ricardo
• Henry George
• John Locke
• William Lloyd Garrison
• John Dewey
• Lysander Spooner
• Benjamin Tucker
• Robert LeFevre
• Frank Chodorov
• Albert J. Nock

But this “ground rent” sounds like a “property tax.”

and while he’s in arrears we’d publish his name, address, and photo as someone whose property and person are excluded from the protections of our land-value-tax-financed police and courts

Sounds like if someone can’t pay her property taxes, your system would publicly declare open season on that person. “Hey, this woman hasn’t paid her property tax! Feel free to rob, rape, or murder her.”

As a minarchist, I prefer our limited Constitutional republic (as properly conceived, not as currently practiced), in which even people who can’t pay taxes have their fundamental liberties protected.

I repeat: as a geolibertarian, I’m not “forcing you to pay for Project X for your own good or the greater good”. I’m just asking you not to violate people’s right of access to something that human labor never made: the surface area of the Earth. And I already said I wouldn’t even use “force” to stop such aggression: “If the holder of a parcel declines to return to the community the ground rent he appropriates from them, then we’d simply disconnect him from our wires and pipes, and while he’s in arrears we’d publish his name, address, and photo as someone whose property and person are excluded from the protections of our land-value-tax-financed police and courts.”

So yes, the fundamental issue here is that we don’t agree on precisely what constitutes aggression. That’s why the draft St. Louis Accord says: “Principled libertarians can disagree about how best to reduce aggression or even about precisely what constitutes aggression, but we are united in defending the full rights of each person to his body, labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges.” I’m curious if you find anything in the accord to object to.

You know, we use the same symbols strung together in similar ways, so that it often seems as if we’re speaking the same language, but sometimes I really wonder.

You can define ‘protection’ as a taxworthy public good, describe whatever you think necessary to accomplish as ‘protection’ of someone or other, and define ‘collection of ground rent’ as non-aggression. And that little trick of defining the innocents trampled on the way to getting whatever ‘protection’ you deem necessary as an overall reduction in aggression is really handy. But that’s just not the way I understand aggression, and your assuring me that forcing me to pay for Project X is for my own good (or at least for someone’s own good, or for the greatest good for the greatest number, or whatever) is, I’m sorry to say, somewhat less than reassuring.

I’m quite surprised by your implicit concession that if public goods actually exist, then the argument for government is irrefutable.

I’d be too, if I had made such an ‘implicit concession’.

What aggression? I guess now I have repeat the sentence that came right after the one I just had to repeat to you (and that you have now ignored as you’ve skated on to your next throwaway snark):

(Some of us go further, and say that even those protection public goods should only be financed by the return to the community of the appropriated ground rent that those public goods create.)

See Appropriating Ground Rent Is Aggression.

The “social contract” is a normative concept; “public goods” is a positive concept. It’s simply a straightforward application of its component ideas of rivalry and excludability.

I’m quite surprised by your implicit concession that if public goods actually exist, then the argument for government is irrefutable. However, I think you (implicitly) concede too much, and that we libertarians should oppose tax financing of public goods that are not for protecting life, liberty, and property from aggression.

But let’s test your need for metaphysical certitude that you never ever are involved in force initiation against an innocent:

1) Do you support the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to subpoena innocent third-party witnesses? That’s initiation of force, but it’s for the purpose of protecting individual rights.

2) Do you support the arrest, detention, and compulsory trial of those accused — but not yet convicted — of violent crime? That’s a sometimes-force-initiating policy unless you magically know that innocents will never be arrested.

3) Do you support enforcement of a positive obligation on parents to not let their children starve to death?

4) Do you support class-action tort rulings that apply a uniform default penalty to a broad category of micro-aggression (such as tailpipe pollution) without a jury-determined calibration of the penalty to the circumstances of each aggressor?

5) In a just defensive war against an aggressor army, would you approve of the use of weapons that have a non-zero chance of killing innocents (artillery, bombs, mines, heck even repeating rifles when used in urban areas)?

Can you really answer “no” to all such questions? Would you really prioritize your clean hands over the protection of individual rights — and by so wide a margin?