SLRG’s Professor Roger Sandilands answers the question of how we’d be invited to invest in productive enterprise once unproductive land speculation is cancelled with AGR/LVT.
Share certificates pretty much as today?
Answer: Yes; why not? Investors’ prospective returns would
(a) be reduced by AGR and its consequential effect on the value of the firm’s “capital” (i.e., land) values.
(b) be enhanced, we must assume, by a corresponding (at least) reduction in corporate taxes and by the general boost to the economy as deadweight effects disappear.
It is vital that AGR replaces taxes rather than supplements them.
As taxes fall, so the underlying AGR would be revealed (the ATCOR principle). But the higher AGR would be its new market-clearing value, a value that would be voluntarily paid by those who successfully bid for space. Thereafter, the wealth they produce through their work and enterprise would no longer be penalised by the high marginal tax rates they currently bear.
In short, AGR, as a genuine fiscal revolution, would incentivise investment instead of penalising it.
Entrepreneurs can issue shares or borrow from banks, but investors in the new regime would do so to produce wealth rather than engage in Rent-seeking.