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Financing WP with land and resource rents
Alanna HARTZOK
Friday, 7 February 2003 23:03:00
Marie Martin-Pécheux has addressed the issue of monetary policy and financing WP. The translation from French to English left something to be desired so I cannot say that I understand all her proposed details.
(n. f. for the features and conditions of translation in this forum, please look the forum rules from the address at the header of the message)
I do concur, that our monetary policy local to global needs to be democratized. But we must keep in mind that money is not wealth, it is just a symbol of wealth. All tangible wealth stems originally from the earth.
At this time, great amounts of wealth of the earth is owned and controlled by a very few people and corporations. A WP must democratize rights to the wealth of the earth and can finance itself in such a way as to solve this problem.
Since land and natural resources are now quantified in monetary terms, this symbol of wealth - money - can be collected to finance WP in such a way as to democratize the ownership of earth resources.
For a government to function on any level it requires material resources.
The unearned wealth coming to those who profit from land and resource ownership should be collected by government as * pay for use of OUR earth * fees (instead of taxes on labor) and put to good purposes by government (we the people as a whole).
Here is an example that the WP should follow: The Constitution of the State of Alaska states that all the natural resources of the state belong to the people. <http://www.gov.state.ak.us/ltgov/akcon/table.html> The Alaska Permanent Fund collects the royalties from oil and other resources, distributes a large amount back to individual citizens as citizen dividends, and the rest to public benefits. There are no sales and income taxes in Alaska, so the labor of the citizens are untaxed.
The World Parliament should clearly affirm that the land and natural resources of the earth belong equally to all people as their birthright.
Then, a percentage of land values and oil and mineral royalties should be collected by the WP and distributed back out to the people of the world in services or direct dividends.
This same form of taxation (taking taxes off of labor and productivity and collecting land and resource rents for the people) would be on the local government levels (collecting land value taxes on surface land) and regional (collecting resource rents of oil and mineral wealth) while the global (deep sea resources, use of Antartica, satellite orbital zone rents, air pollution by airplanes and such) would be collected by the WP via a Global Resource Agency.
So many of our current world problems are due to the fact that so few now own and control so much of the earth. Building an economic democracy from the ground up with democratic equal rights to the earth policies in place is one of the best services that could be performed by a WP.
It would in and of itself promote a world of peace and justice, as the lack of peace is due to resource wars and the lack of justice is due to systems that allow a few to monopolize and profit from the gifts of nature.
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