Arthur, Let me first define economic rent. It is " the extrinsic community created value that attaches to a location".
Economic rent is a consequence of the surrounding community. Collecting and giving it back to the community that produced it seems to be a perfectly fair proposition. The Danish system of land valuation assessment and collection is by far the best. A prominent assessor told me that this method of valuation is now used "everywhere". Land values are not arbitrary, they relate to each other. Unlike improvements, two adjoining lots are likely to have the same value. This led to the Danish system of street valuation. Individual lots were not valued. Rather, the whole street was given the same value. This value is expressed in Krone per meter (in Copenhagen, for a standard 20 m deep lot). Once this value is established, the values of individual lots can be arithmetically calculated (I think they get high school kids to do it). You know the front of a lot is more valuable than the back. In other words, the wide shallow lot would be worth more than a narrow deep lot. Arithmetic takes care of such differences, including peculiar shapes and corner influence. When the assessment was finished, the assessments of every street in Denmark were published as land-value maps in the book about the size of a thin magazine. These could be bought or checked at libraries. Every citizen of Denmark could see not only his own assessment, but could compare it with every other assessment in the country. I knew the Chief Valuer of Denmark. He told me that after a general valuation, they expected about 2% of the assessments to produce questions. Of these, about 0.1% would go to arbitration. He laughed and said, if we get more than 2% questions, we know we've been a bit harder on everybody that year. Less than 2% questions and we have been a bit easy. (Rather like a market check!) Experience is perhaps the most important asset of an appraiser. When they have been doing this for a while, the result can be surprisingly accurate. The important point is the square meter valuation. You can compare your 20 Krone per meter valuation with the 10 Krone per meter valuation in the next street. For that matter, you can compare it with every valuation across the country if you are really interested. Graft is impossible, or at least not easy. Rent would be collected the way property taxes are collected now. Except that fewer appraisers would be needed. In the average assessor's office there are nine improvement appraisers for every land appraiser. Land is much easier to appraise than improvements. Economic rent (land-value) is intimately related to infrastructure. For example, if you have land on one side of the river and on the other side there is a large community of people, the people would not provide your land with rent. If a bridge were built, the rent of your land would soar. Probably more than enough to pay for the bridge. I rather think that in Georgist cities, new roads, sewers, bridges, would not be built unless they pay for themselves in increased rent collection. As Gilbert Tucker wrote several decades ago we could enter an era of "self-supporting cities". The other day I mentioned Georgist possibilities in South Korea. Something interesting is happening closer to home. Philadelphia is an absolute mess. There are umpteen thousands of tumbledown houses and empty lots. (A Plan is afoot to clean up 31,000 vacant lots across the city, "encapsulate" 2,500 vacant buildings and demolish 14,000 buildings. But a study indicates there are 23,000 lots with abandoned buildings on them. To that can be added the tens of thousands of occupied slums.) Few people want to invest in Philadelphia and people have been leaving the city in droves. City population has dropped by a third since 1950. There is a strong move to rescue Philadelphia by instituting a higher tax on land. The move is led by the City Controller, and is supported even by the Real Estate Association. Unfortunately, the pro land-value tax candidate was defeated by the incumbent Mayor, who is anti. Old Philadelphia, which owns the city, wants no tax on land. When land is taxed, the empty lots begin to fill and the slum houses are torn down and replaced with new buildings. They have local evidence. There are at least 15 cities in Pennsylvania with lowered improvement taxes and heavier land taxes. All of them have experienced a boom after the change to land value taxation - they call it the "two rate tax". Building permits have risen dramatically. The downtowns begin to clean up. In every way things are better -- even in formerly depressed areas. This could happen to Philadelphia if the power of big landholders and politicians can be broken. We'll see. Harry --------------------------------------------------------------- Harry P. The revenue for basic government services (police, fire, infrastructure) would be provided by a collection of economic rent. Rent measures the advantages given to locations by the surrounding community. Collecting it and using it for basic services is simply giving it back to the community that created it. arthur How would consensus take place on the amount of rent to be charged? Who would collect this rent? How would decisions get take when new infrastructure is needed(say expanding the sewer system). --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.541 / Virus Database: 335 - Release Date: 11/14/2003 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
