Imagine a Scotland in which buying ‘property’ meant you didn’t pay for the site up front.
Just for the building and for transferring the deed.
Instead you’d pay the annual rental value of the site to the state in place of current taxes on wages and trade (which repress enterprise and reduce Scotland’s wealth) and Council charges.
AGR/LVT
Scotland would simply be collecting the stream of wealth we all produce together. This social wealth is today allocated to site owners who receive it as unearned income for doing nothing. That the rest of us get none explains social dislocation and unequal life chances across Scotland.
Worse, the sum is over half the gross income of Scotland: its absence from the public purse explains our starved public services.
Thinking a little further, the range of site rental values from the economic centre to the periphery builds automatic progressivity into AGR/LVT, permitting life and work to exist again at the margin.
For those intent on addressing Scotland’s housing crisis, starved public services, land speculation and banking, personal and government debt, premature deaths by zone, depopulation, cyclical recessions and perpetual deficits, AGR/LVT is where to look for the solutions.