2. Taxing “preemptive” capital.
Some capital serves its owner to preempt common lands. An
example is a large, fast, noisy, dangerous, polluting
motorboat on a small lake. Thousands of small lakes would
in effect be made larger, in terms of satisfying human
wants, by taxing or banning such craft.
A more common example is the
preemption of space on streets and highways by
vehicles. Many modern Georgists have a blind spot
here.
- They recognize the wisdom of parking meters, and
see them as an example of applied Georgism.
- They have more trouble seeing that moving vehicles
also occupy scarce, valuable public space, and should
pay for it. The Georgist tradition is to see things
that move as productive, and to avoid hindering them.
It is a good reflex, a needed antidote to the more
general bias of our tax systems and other institutions
to “shoot anything that moves.”
In this case, though, the moving vehicle actually
preempts even more space than the parked one, and needs
to be constrained.
The problems are formidable of
designing optimal taxes on and controls over moving
vehicles; and even moreso when we see them in
holistic terms, as part of recasting our whole approach
to mass transportation, and integrating it with massive
reforms of land settlement patterns. Those are, however,
the modern problems we should address. In doing so, we
can do no better than think of ourselves as applying
George’s principle that land – space on the
surface of the earth – is common property.
Offroad vehicles are another obvious
example. Part of our great secular superstition
about property is the notion that a
piece of capital equipment is as sacred as, or more
sacred than persons themselves: that the vehicle endows
its owner with more rights to public space than the
simple possession of two legs. This may hark back
to centuries of deference to mounted warriors, but is
also encouraged today by merchants who see motorists as
bearing more cash than pedestrians. Above all, those who
foster this attitude are the makers and sellers of
vehicles, fuels, and paving materials.
Surfboards make another example, but once one gets the
basic idea, one can furnish scores of additional examples
of preemptive capital. To tax such capital is, in effect,
to tax the grabbing of common lands by the owners of the
capital. Sometimes regulation or banning is the better
choice, depending on particulars, but the principle is
Georgist: recognize land as common property, and take
measures to assert that common ownership. ... read the whole article