The following was posted as an online petition with MoveOn.Org
Link to the petition: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/national-land-value-tax?source=c.em&r_by=4957548
Text of the Change.Org petition:
The public deserves economic (ecological) justice. Most of us are struggling financially and our natural resources are being pointlessly destroyed due to the tax system, which systemically encourages land price speculation (sprawl and downtown vacancy) and keeps everyone drained of our profits. Reversing that will release us from rent desperation and allow us to demand higher wages and enable us to make more conscientious purchasing decisions.
The relationship between nature and society hinges on how government treats access to private land ownership. Will we have equal opportunity or allow land to be profitably hoarded? We should tax people only for the value of the land they are personally monopolizing and stop taxing people for making each other happy (tax resource, not production). When we correct our relationship with nature, society will evolve.
Petition:
Dear President, Donald J. Trump,
Please, advocate for a national land value tax to replace personal income tax.
Taxing income is anti-human. Taxing land value ownership is fair and efficient.
America’s founders believed in land value tax as evidenced by America’s original Constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which based our entire revenue system on land value taxation.
Many great minds and respected thinkers within the field of political economy have expressed the fact that land value tax is superior to all others and should replace them, but, for obvious reasons, this information is not popularized by professional academicians (because of who pays them).
Adam Smith: “Ground rents are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.”
Karl Marx: “Monopoly of land is the basis of monopoly in capital”.
Tom Paine: “Men did not make the earth…. It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property…. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.”
Milton Friedman: “The least bad tax is … on the unimproved value of land, …”
Joseph E. Stiglitz: “Rent is the secret tax the wealthy charge the poor”.
William F. Buckley, Jr.: “Henry George said that the rent of all land ought to be public. … I am sympathetic with that particular analysis.”
Leo Tolstoy: “Solving the land question means the solving of all social questions”.
John Locke: “Whenever, in any country, the proprietor ceases to be the improver, political economy has nothing to say in defence of landed property. When the “sacredness” of property is talked of, it should be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one.”
Pliny, the elder (principal historian of the Roman Empire): “Latifundia (unlimited land speculation) ruined Rome”.
And the “l ‘aissez faire” economists were, in fact, petitioning the monarchy for the same thing as I am petitioning you now, “l ‘impot unique” (the single tax, to abolish all taxes except on land value ownership).
Their wise words were not heeded, with disastrous effect. Please, consider using your powerful influence to voice your approval for this evolutionary idea so that humanity can move forward instead of declining again as so many civilizations before which failed to allow the citizenry natural justice (freedom to labor and equal access to land).
Thank you very much for your consideration of this crucial issue.
Sincerely,
Adam Jon Monroe, Jr.
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Please, sign to show your support the single tax on land!
Link to the Change.org petition: http://chng.it/XqHq2mXRZV
Also, sign the OTHER petition at MoveOn.Org: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/national-land-value-tax?source=c.em&r_by=4957548
Petition Name: National Land Value Tax (LVT Petition)
General Description (at MoveOn.Org):
This is a petition that law be written to enact a national land value tax on behalf of the poor, the environment and the preservation of our country as the great bastion and vanguard of liberty and light in the world, the inspiration for peace.
Land value taxation discourages land price speculation, the profitability of which raises the cost of living to the maximum amount society can bear, but produces zero goods or services, causing the increasing wealth and income disparities plaguing our country and the unnecessary destruction of our environment.
Actual Petition:
This is a petition that law be written to enact a national land value tax on behalf of the poor, the environment and the preservation of our country as the great bastion and vanguard of liberty and light in the world, the inspiration for peace.
Potential pillars of justice and logic for the enactment of such a law are as follows:
Whereas the federal government of the United States of America, by virtue of its establishment and maintenance of peace and order by military protection and various other means not only secures all, but is responsible for the creation of at least 1% of the value of all privately owned land, taxing all private interests officially owning land at 1% of its value will be fair and non-confiscatory, and
Whereas the history and current condition of the United States and other nations, empires and societies previous and current, the most rigorously scientific adherence to the field of economics, the clearest and most obvious logic such as that taxation for the use of natural resource is preferable to taxation of the production of wealth and the consistent and great number of public statements and writings of America’s founding fathers and a great many other of the most respected minds throughout history and today concur on and prove these points, and
Whereas such a tax will discourage land speculation and the subsequent but ultimately unproductive rise of rents, home prices and farmland prices, and whereas such increasing land prices do not add any goods or services or in any way add any real wealth to the economy, but merely add unnecessary costs to workers, investors, renters, home buyers, home owners and every creative part of our economy, and
Whereas the repeated drastic fluctuations in the growth and decline in the price of land throughout the history of our nation and the variant erratic subsequent results thereof, which repeatedly threaten the strength of our economy and the general well-being of our citizenry, such as by the foreclosures on the homes of our citizens by private banks, massive layoffs of workers by companies rightfully fearful about the future of the economy and a myriad of other forms of societal detriment are the direct result of the attempt, by landed interests, to maintain the profitability of land speculation despite these facts, and
Whereas, discouraging land speculation will curb unnecessary sprawl and the many and various economically and ecologically wasteful and destructive effects thereof, which are increasing to the growing detriment of society and the natural world that sustains our very existence, and
Whereas taxing people according to how productive their labor is or how wise their investments may be does not directly improve the quality of life for them or anyone else, and
Whereas the reduction of crime, poverty and homelessness that will result from such a tax shift will reduce the burdens of government generally and greatly promote communal harmony and good will, and
Whereas equalizing access to land, the ultimate source of life and the first necessity of labor in the production of wealth and whereas allowing individuals the most free and fullest possible access to the fruits of their own labor, both, help realize the first and fondest goals of America’s establishment by Nature and by Constitution,
We, the undersigned, urge our United States Senate, to adopt law requiring each of the 50 states (and however appropriately, her provinces and protectorates) to collect land value tax of 1% of the total of privately owned land value therein as assessed by those already employed thereby and therewith (or appointees where necessary) and to forward that revenue to the federal government to offset the elimination of income tax for every individual or business making less than $1,000,000 per year, the excess revenue from which to be used to pay down, in the most expedient manner possible, our national debt, and to continue to do so in perpetuity until such time as it shall be deemed to be in the best interests of the greatest number of citizens to adjust the numeric parameters of this reform and, to then, do so accordingly.
To guarantee the security of the landed property of every individual, it should be attached to this law that no person shall be deprived of any part thereof and that it shall be the duty of local government under state supervision to secure this national revenue stream while addressing any grievance therewith for any and every individual having such without depriving any of them of any part of their land for the sake of compliance with this law.
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Please, sign to show your support the single tax on land!
Link to the MoveOn.Org petition: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/national-land-value-tax?source=c.em&r_by=4957548
Also, sign the OTHER petition at Change.Org: http://chng.it/XqHq2mXRZV
2 Responses to Petition I (at MoveOn.Org)