[diggers350] Liz's allotments in Canden Town

[james armstrong]

Hello Liz,

You ask, 'Should we redistribute land?'

Not 'redistributing' land,  but decommercialising land.

When I was sixteen and wondering how on earth anyone could afford such an awesome thing as a 'house', Building Societies seemed like kind uncles.  They gave you a loan to make the impossible possible.

Since then house supply has been hijacked by highwaymen, by buying up all the available land and not building houses on it, they can sit back and as the population goes up, and the  output of new houses goes down , and the life giving flow of council houses is switched off. Presto! they can trickle out new houses at any price they like.  The thieving bankers got wise too. They bought up the building societies (turned them into banks) and sloshed out as much money as house hungry people needed / wanted to 'buy' the overpriced houses.

People (taken all together) little realised that this system is a no win situation for  the house needy.   The, by now grossly overpriced houses, are no less than twice as pricey again as the buyer realised. By taking out a mortgage you commit to pay back two and a half times the price of the already overpriced house! 

The solution is to take away the opportunity from the banks and the shysters to manipulate the housing market.  (Speculators and two and three- home owners can unconsciously make matters worse) 

Land determines the price of farms, food and houses. Once you remove land from the 'market' , prices cannot be manipulated. (#120,000 is the asking price to-day for a so-so `plot)

'Redistributing' land assumes you need to own it to be secure.  You dont. You just need to know that your need for land for whatever purpose, will no longer be exploited.

We dont need to redistribute it, but to make it available to use at a commercial rent - call it a lease.  So you will not be exploited. No one can hoard it and jack up the price of the 

houses you build on it or the food you grown on it.

The biggest potential builder of new houses are presently handcuffed by the price of land.

When the speculation is removed they can  lease sites on a long lease to self-build on , on an equal basis with the corporate builders. Production wil go up and  Wimpey and frinds will no longer be able to charge what they like.   

It needs an effective Land registry to hold the land and regulate transfers of the use (not the sale) of land.

A Land tax paid in land will gradually accumulate all the land of UK to lease it out without artificially penalising people's needs.

This system bids to democratise, or popularise democracy itself,  by removing the ability of one section of the community to penalise the other, by removing the division, landownership, which has formed the basis of class which ion turn is the basis of the division between the governed and the governed.    

 James.

 

 

 

 

 


 


From: liz at unionservices.co.nz
To: james36armstrong at hotmail.com
Subject: RE: [diggers350] allotments in Canden Town
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:17:03 +1200


Thanks James - dead hand disease? So you do you mean getting rid of mortgages? Is your proposal, simply put-redistribute the land instead of the money? The money system which is of course run by the banks not the state needs to be scrapped as well. See vid on You tube - Money as debt 
kind regards 
Liz 

-----Original Message-----
From: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com [mailto:diggers350 at yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of james armstrong
Sent: Friday, 21 August 2009 23:51
To: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [diggers350] allotments in Canden Town


  




I want a banana, I want a banana,

Bring me back a banana sailor boy.
You can tell the captain,
You can tell the crew,
I don’t want a monkey or a kangaroo,
I want ….
First point
This popular ditty expressed the feeling of people deprived of bananas during WW2.
But, to my knowledge not many died of banana deprivation, we thrived on apple ingestation. Someone suggested the alternative to importing the fruit is homegrowing in greenhouses. Absurd scenarios are not helpful to debate.
  Some comments  Indigenous  tropical  farmers are reduced to wage slavery by two of the giant US fruit canners and importers, and UK apple growers need to get the state and the corporations off their backs.
Second
Land tax was the largest revenue earner in England from  the Restoration  until 1789 when Pitt introduced the more efficient income tax to pay for the Napoleonic wars. 
LT  was (in)effectively a tax on assessed incomes from land, at between  20p and 40p in the pound . Another variation was county quotas collected inefficiently (31% of quota at the best in 1785.)  It was always a political hot potato to the unreformed  governments.
…( The English Land Tax, WR Ward)
Third, The law of unintended consequences applies.  e.g. If land was taxed, renting farmers would pay higher rents, and owner farmers would bear a higher tax burden than landowner non farmers.  Some renting farmers would go out of business, and perhaps the demand for land would fall relatively, leading to relatively cheaper land offsetting the rent plus tax increase, but fewer and bigger farms? And lower rent incomes and therefore lower LT returns?...  For  those house builders benefiting from landbanks, it is not clear. Would the basis of assessment  be the present low value use of the land even when cows still graze on land which has pp but which is not scheduled for development ( for sometimes ten years)? ( pp is usually renewable after it lapses)   Unintended consequences might lead to landowners withholding eligible available land for development – it happened in 1946 when the need for the land for  houses was  extreme.
Fourth   We already have a Land Tax - levied on agricultural land. It is called Single Farm Payment  It is a negative tax,  paid out to landowners and collected  (obliviously) mostly from non-landowning taxpayers who pay land tax  again as Council Tax. 
Fifth    There is for some a quasi religious belief that it is morally wrong to commodify  what is a natural resource.  
Finally  The Cure for what I call,  ‘ History’s Dead Hand Disease.’
“The Crown Land”  was snatched in the 900’s , “Duchy of Cornwall” land snaffled in 1300’s by Edward first, and the  biggest estates ‘bought’ privately from the torturer,  mass  murderer and tyrant Henry Vlll who stole title from the monasteries who had  in turn tithed  and enslaved working people -all this ages before non-landowners had the vote.  Taxing land owners – in land, not cash – is  the once and for all and up to date cure, the  “Dissolution of the Monetarist landowners.”  
‘Land Land Tax ‘ should  appeal  to all reformers –landtaxers and anti-taxers  since  this tax would, in a few years,  make itself automatically obsolete.    James, Dorchester.
. 


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