French government agrees air tax

Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 16:50 GMT The French government has approved plans for a new tax on airline tickets to boost aid for the world's poor. The tax, which needs parliamentary approval, would range from one to 40 euros depending on the distance travelled and type of ticket. Levied on every passenger boarding a flight in France, it could raise up to 210m euros ($248m; £144m) a year. President Jacques Chirac has been campaigning for an international air tax to help fight global poverty. He first raised the idea during the Word Economic Forum in Switzerland last January, saying an international tax of one euro should be charged on the 3 billion airline tickets issued each year. He has the support of the UK government, which has agreed to divert revenues from its existing Air Passenger Duty. In Chile, a $2 surcharge will be added to tickets on all outgoing flights from January 1 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4463204.stm

House Cuts Food Stamps for More than 220,000 Vulnerable People While Poised to Cut Taxes for Wealthy

WASHINGTON - The House of Representatives passed a budget bill yesterday that changes eligibility requirements for the Food Stamp Program, cutting benefits for approximately 220,000 to 250,000 vulnerable people. The budget reconciliation bill aims to cut the Food Stamp Program by $675 million. "We are disappointed that the House made cuts to the Food Stamp Program and are poised to cut taxes for the wealthy. Their choice takes food from families struggling to make ends meet and puts more money in the pockets of those who need it the least," said Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. "This is morally wrong and will make Thanksgiving bleaker for hundreds of thousands of hard-working families." ..."With hunger on the rise and the forces of nature exposing poverty anew, plans to cut this vital, proven program make no sense. House leaders should be ashamed of trying to preserve tax cuts for our nation's wealthiest people at the expense of basic assistance for working families struggling to put food on the table," Rev. Beckmann said. Last month the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the statistics on hunger and food insecurity for 2004. The number of people living in food insecure households has risen by nearly 2 million people (from 36.3 million individuals in 2003 to 38.2 million in 2004). More than 13 million children live in food insecure households. The number of people who live in households that suffer from outright hunger rose from 9.6 million to 10.6 million. These increases in hunger and food insecurity are sharper than in previous years. http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/1118-01.htm

Redistributing the Land, Hugo Chavez Style

Published on Monday, November 14, 2005 by the Toronto Star Analysts say president's land-expropriation plan a world away from disastrous Zimbabwean program by Jens Erik Gould The privately owned, 1,200-hectare Santa Isabel farm has grown sugar cane for decades, but Antiaga says the Venezuelan government will help him use the land to grow pumpkins, beans and squash. Under a land redistribution campaign led by President Hugo Chavez, thousands of rural poor like Antiaga are being granted rights to farm arable land traditionally concentrated in the hands of wealthy landowners. But Artiaga isn't waiting for the government to take the lead. He and other farmers are slashing the Santa Isabel cane with machetes and laying claim to land they say is rightfully theirs. "We're obligated to take this land because it is state land," says Antiaga, clad in a torn shirt dirtied by the rich soil. "Commander Chavez is with our movement." Venezuela's land-reform campaign has won support from the rural poor but has sparked criticism that it could infringe on private property rights. "In Yaracuy, there is no rule of law," says Santa Isabel owner Vicente Lecuna, who accuses state officials of encouraging peasants to settle on his property. He says farming co-operatives like Antiaga's have destroyed 40 per cent of his sugar cane. Chavez insists his government respects private property rights and contends that the land expropriations are being carried out only for public use or for social necessity in a country where most non-state land is owned by a small elite. In the latest stage of what he calls the "new socialism of the 21st century," Chavez has called on state officials to take over private land deemed "idle" or lacking property titles dating back to 1848. Soldiers have enforced some of the takeovers, at times denying owners and workers access to the land. In recent months, the government has extended its campaign to corporate-owned land. One state government expropriated an idle tomato processing plant from U.S.-based H.J. Heinz Co. and another seized a silo installation from Empresas Polar, Venezuela's largest food company. The state government paid Heinz $256,000 (U.S.) for its seized plant, distinguishing Venezuela's reform from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's massive land redistribution effort, which has not reimbursed thousands of white landowners for their seized farms. While critics say both the Venezuelan and Zimbabwean governments are giving land to peasants with little agricultural experience, Venezuela offers farming loans while Zimbabwean farmers severely lack resources to develop their land. With agriculture a small player in Venezuela's oil-dependent economy, it is unlikely that a fall in food production would cause the kind of food shortages and other crises it has in Zimbabwe, notes Orlando Ochoa, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas. Mugabe's reform also seized farms on the basis of race, targeting land owned by white farmers, while Caracas focuses on productivity and property titles, Ochoa says. Critics argue that the Venezuelan expropriations are concentrating more power in the government by giving peasants farming licences for — rather than ownership of — the land they farm. But Carlos Escarra, a constitutional lawyer and professor at the Central University of Venezuela, rejects this common criticism, saying peasants actually become property owners who lack only the right to sell their land. Chavez says that having co-operatives like Antiaga's farming on expropriated land will lessen Venezuela's dependence on imports by satisfying domestic deficits in food. And the government has launched a campaign to plant more than 200,000 hectares of new sugar cane and cassava to produce sugar-based ethanol gasoline. Yet Yaracuy farm owner Vladimir Rodriguez says it is ironic that the same government has not prevented co-operatives and extortionists from destroying more than $15 million worth of sugar cane on 33 farms in his state alone, according to his statistics. A state-run agrarian fund known as Fondafa also grants loans for farming machinery to co-operatives that have taken over private property without state permission and uprooted sugar cane crops. In one case of extortion, local delinquents — who farm owners say posed as landless peasants — murdered sugar cane farm owner Antonio Vieira after he refused to pay them to not destroy his crop. Yaracuy state secretary-general Col. Angel Yarza, who called on the government to take over 48 ranches, denied in an interview that he had seen large quantities of destroyed sugar cane. He assured that the state does not encourage land invasions, but will not intervene to protect privately owned farms. Antiaga says Yarza and other state officials are helping his group's long fight to take land away from owners like Lecuna, who for him represent a system of traditional land ownership that prevent the rural poor from acquiring farms or landing sustainable jobs. "We're human beings, too, and we have to eat," he says. But for farm owners, seizing private property and issuing loans to poor farmers is no solution to poverty and unemployment. "(The co-operatives) just want credits that they won't pay back," says Lecuna. "They're not going to produce." Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

Henry George (1839-1897):

For justice to be done between men it is not necessary for the State to take the land; it is only necessary to take its rent...Our primary social adjustment is a denial of justice. In allowing one man to own the land on which and from which other men must live, we have made them his bondsmen in a degree which increases as material progress goes on. Introduction: Protection or Free Trade A tax on land values is of all taxes that which best fulfils every requirement of a perfect tax. As land cannot be hidden or carried off, a tax on land values can be assessed with more certainty and can be collected with greater ease and less expense than any other tax, while it does not in the slightest degree check production or lessen its incentive. It is, in fact, a tax only in form, being in nature a rent - a taking for the use of the community of a value that arises not from individual exertion but from the growth of the community. For it is not anything that the individual owner or user does that gives value to land. The value that he creates is a value that attaches to improvements. This, being the the result of individual exertion, properly belongs to the individual, and cannot be taxed without lessening the incentive to production. But the value that attaches to land itself is a value arising from the growth of the community and increasing with social growth. It therefore properly belongs to the community, and can be taken to the last penny without in the slightest degree lessening the incentive to production. Progress and Poverty The way taxes raise prices is by increasing the cost of production and checking supply. But land is not a thing of human production, and taxes upon rent cannot check supply. Therefore, though a tax upon rent compels owners to pay more, it gives them no power to obtain more for the use of their land, as it in no way tends to reduce the supply of land. On the contrary, by compelling those who hold land for speculation to sell or let for what they can get, a tax on land values tends to increase the competition between owners, and thus to reduce the price of land. Book 8, Chapter 3.

11,000 Brazilians Keep US$ 93 Billion Abroad, Mainly in Tax Paradises

Written by Stênio Ribeiro Friday, 04 November 2005 A survey by the Central Bank found that 11,245 Brazilians possessed US$ 93.243 billion in foreign deposits, investments, and business assets as of December 31, 2004. This amount represents an increase of 12.8% over the US$ 82.692 billion declared a year earlier. This information was provided Thursday, November 3, by the head of the Department in charge of Combating Illegal Financial Assets and the Supervision of Exchange and International Capital, Ricardo Liao. Liao attributed the increment to the increased global insertion of the Brazilian economy, stimulated by the growth in exports in recent years and the variation in the number of individuals and firms that filed declarations of Brazilian Foreign Capital Assets (CBE). The number of declarations this year, referring to calendar year 2004, rose by 623 in relation to the number filed in 2004, referring to calendar year 2003. According to Liao, the US$ 10.6 billion increase in this year's declarations was heavily influenced by mergers between domestic and foreign firms, as well as a US$ 5 billion increase in inter-company loans and the enhanced market value of Brazilian companies abroad. Liao said that, as in previous years, the greatest concentration of Brazilian assets was detected in the so-called tax paradises, due to the "facility offered by these countries for movements of capital." The largest sums of Brazilian capital have traditionally transited through the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, and Luxembourg.

Soldiers are the state

anti-state.com by Joel Wilcox "I find it strange, to say the least, that among those who call themselves anarchists, anti-statists, radicals and individualists, there are so many who are quick to defend soldiers who fight for the state while condemning those who take joy in the soldier's demise. The most common arguments are that we cannot blame the soldiers for the wars they fight because most of them are young and impressionable, brainwashed, impoverished or otherwise well-intentioned. It is demanded that the state is squarely to blame and, in fact, the soldiers themselves are additional victims. For this, we should compassionately give our sympathy and support to those who fight while reproaching that which they fight for. Now, I would expect these arguments from a dyed-in-the-wool statist or even a minarchist but again, from a self-described enemy of the state, such arguments are bizarre." http://tinyurl.com/bbskb

The myth of a social contract

Strike the Root by Jim Davies "Ever since monarchs first felt the rumblings of discontent, they reached for a way to justify their miserable existences in the eyes of those upon the product of whose labor they lived in luxury; for many centuries the 'Divine Right' theory did the job. ... The entire establishments of both State and Church did very nicely out of this scam for centuries. It began to unravel when a few bright minds began to wonder whether the underlying myth was supported by rational fact, and found it wanting; that enlightening process began in the 18th Century and came to full fruit in the 20th, by when few monarchies remained and none of those are more than figureheads (observe Charles and Camilla, currently on a US visit.) Alas, however, the dictators were replaced by an even more insidious myth: that of the 'Social Contract,' the idea that all members of a society have in some way agreed to bind themselves to certain standards and laws for the common good." http://www.strike-the-root.com/52/davies/davies7.html

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

If I were to re-write this book, I would offer a third alternative - the possibility of sanity - Economics would be decentralist and Henry Georgian. foreword to Brave New World

Samuel Gompers (1850-1924)

I believe in Land Value Taxation. I count it a great privilege to have been a friend of Henry George: First President American Federation of Labor:

Confucius 551-479 BC

Once, natural resources were fully used for the benefit of all, and not appropriated for selfish ends. This was the age of the Great Commonwealth of peace and prosperity.

William Blackstone: 1723-1780

The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, from the immediate gift of the creator. ...there is no foundation in nature or in natural law why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land. Commentaries