🚀 go-pugleaf

"sinister" <sinister@nospam.invalid> wrote in message news:<edc9d.9061$x65.7649@trnddc06>...
> "Fabrizio J. Bonsignore" <fbonsignore@beethoven.com> wrote in message 
> news:768f7623.0410070553.346b0d71@posting.google.com...
> > Latinamerican countries follow all 'recipes' of academia and yet fail
> > to achieve sustained development. Could it be that people actually
> 
> Therein lies the problem.  As poster "royls" points out repeatedly on this 
> list, economics (academic and otherwise) has become corrupted insofar as 
> they have obscured the "Georgist" critique of taxation---to wit, in its 
> broadest form, that Ricardian land rents should be mostly taxed away, and 
> other taxes that are both more distortionary (less efficient) and less 
> equitable should be reduced.
>
> I haven't researched what those in favor of land value taxation have to say 
> about tax structures in Latin America, but given the penury in places like 
> Brazil, I can't imagine it's good.  Not to mention all that anecdotal stuff 
> about huge landholdings in there.
> 
But I don`t think a particular tax structure would solve
underdevelopent.

> In case you're not familiar with it, LVT proponents wouldn't necessarily 
> advocate breaking up large estates and then making land grants (though Latin 
> America might be so screwed up that that might be a necessary initial step). 
> Rather, they advocate taxing away (at least much or most of) Ricardian land 
> rents---that is, the income on land due to the land itself (its location, 
> fertility, etc, as opposed to improvements on the land).  This allows a 
> market solution that promotes *both* efficiency and equity.  One of the few 
> win-wins in economics.  One interesting point is how modern economists have 
> gone out of their way to obscure it; Georgists and their allies argue that 
> it's because they're in the pockets of the wealthy, many/most of whom are 
> (big) landholders.
> 

Even if taxation were able to absorb Ricardian rent, we would then
have the problem to distribute that G income. The budget is subject to
a political process and there are no guarantees that the assignment
will be spent in such a way that it will promote development, even if
it is totally absorbed by public works (infrastructure) or bureaucracy
(labor), which most certainly won`t be the case. It is not a pure
market solution. There is no easy way to solve underdevelopment.

I proposed a policy to handle land ownership with the purpose of
evening out wealth distribution, on the assumption that for families
owning a place to live is better than renting.

> Good links, from a "geo-" libertarian point of view (which I don't agree 
> with in its entirety, but these are really well written):
> 
> http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/tma68/geo-faq.htm
> http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
> 
> Finally, note that there's nothing "socialist" about LVT schemes.  Nor 
> anything remotely Marxist---the person who did the most to push LVT (Henry 
> George) had substantial disagreements with Marx.
>