It's Good To Own Land

I am incredibly thankful to my parents for giving me the firm grounding of taking me to a national park camping year after year. It’s given me a sense of grounding that would have been lost when my parents sold up in Ballarat. If I hadn’t decided already to be marinated in rosemary and garlic and lemon and then roasted on a rotisserie at my funeral I would have my ashes scattered there at the park which shall remain nameless namely to keep other people from going there. Nothing personal but that’s the way parks work.
National parks provide a wonderful counterpoint to development. To remove a hotel in a national park and undo the development that takes place there is more expensive (if not also impossible) to replace what has been lost. If you take a long term perspective neiche resort opportunities like raw bushland make economic sense to preserve in the long term. If you take a truly long-term perspective of course it doesn’t matter because the earth is incredibly good at restoring itself. Even if we were to scarify the earth’s entire surface with nuclear weapons it would be a lush green planet again within 100,000 years or so I’m told. But why be fatalistic? Fact is the contribution of parkland and public spaces in the city aren’t recognised in economic terms. Infact due to speculation (my most hated business practice, ruining the stock market for everyone) it is entirely possible to make money simply by buying an empty concrete lot with weeds poking through, fencing it off and sitting on it as the land appreciates.
Your parents are fucking you over because they think land values never go down, a mentality that brought ruination on the Japanese. This is simply because the property market is a financial horserace that moves slow enough for the stupid masses to understand (as masses increase in stupidity the more massive it get’s refer fundamental theory of stupidity). Due to massive superannuation payouts and this general stupidity more and more retirees are choosing to finance their retirement through investment. Buying investment properties that don’t even need to be leased because people who are just receiving their superannuation payout are going to appreciate the land value because property is the only investment strategy they perceive as zero risk. Which is bullshit and homeless people keep asking me for change while rental properties go unfilled. They go unfilled because you don’t have to fill them because you feel like you’re still making money.
Enter earthsharing (go on enter it http://www.earthsharing.org.au ) just another way of thinking about taxation really and beautiful in it’s simplicity. Tax people for owning land, or charge them rent. You wouldn’t lease a shop in a department store and just leave it vacant growing weeds through cracks in concrete would you? No because you can’t afford it. If people were taxed rent to the point they had to make use of the land they owned land would be more accessible for one thing because Baby boomers couldn’t afford to sit on so much and you wouldn’t see closed vacant extinct petrol franchises fenced off in the middle of the suburb you and 12 mates from college are looking for rental properties near public transport.
Furthermore you get rid of income tax. Which is what we want because while my parents are spending my inheritance in Tuscany I’m being taxed 70c in the dollar of my mediocre wage to pay pentions to the Australian majority of bankrupt baby boomers, who blew their super money in bum property deals. That’s one huge tax burden for the working population. Some G8 nations will be bankrupted by it. Why scrap income tax? (I must point out again having studied marketing people should generally just be taxed to shit so they can’t spend money on the crappy consumer goods they want) because if the majority of government revenues is drawn from land tax then the only way to raise revenues is increase land values through investing in infrastructure and services.
Why won’t it happen? (A good devils advocate always makes this assumption and plows on) because there isn’t any incentive of the current voting majority to bring about such a tax reform. They own all the land and want us to pay for their retirement (indirectly). It will happen though if enough of our generation develop a positive attitude towards it because eventually our generation will be paying for everything and I’m sure nobody in our generation looked at the old growth logging policy in Tasmania of John Howard and thought ‘There’s an investment for the future another generation of structural unemployment’ there needs to be a general attitude change. The good thing is you can choose your attitude, if incentive exists and a good way to motivate people is to force them, ‘Aussies’ wouldn’t give a shit about recycling if we weren’t first given smaller wheelie bins that forced us to cut down our waste and then yellow bins for recyclables, we were forced and our attitude shifts. Attitude effects behaviour, behaviour dictates attitude. The tendancy of people is to justify what they do rather than change. So legislate! The GST is good, because it taxes people for consumption and it’s simple. Income tax is good because it (slightly) holds the disparity of classes in check though it’s weakening. Land tax is good because it pushes speculators out of the property market and makes a government that will always want more revenues have to look beyond the three years between elections.
Of course there are limitations to earth-sharing that I must admit haven’t really thought about much, like how do you economically value park land? The masses are so stupid that economic theories that say ‘A ghost gum increase the value of the land surrounding it’ results in some dude planting neat rows upon rows of Ghostgums and other such stupidity. Nor myself believing life isn’t fair is everyone entitled to own land, because we are at the end of the day dumb animals who don’t own the land and need to encourage (through legislation) a value of restraint in trying to control the natural environment. (While camping I saw kids trying to redirect the river mouth) an ignoble moral (read Nietzsche’s – ‘Genealogy of Morals’ just don’t get excited about bashing Jews that’s not the point) add deepecology (a form of meditation based on the theory that in order to control successfully the natural world we have to understand how we are connected to leaves, insects, everything) I did a lot of this while camping. Just force people to appreciate these things that’s all culture really is. I love AFL because I’m bombarded with it, I couldn’t avoid it.
There we guy, I’ve leant my shady name to a cause, but I like it. I said to some smelly hairy girl who talked to me about Goolengook (I never said I wasn’t an arsehole) that you could do more for Old growth forests if you were CEO of a logging company than if you chained yourself to a tree. Lastly read Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton I strongly recommend it to understand the danger in trying to economically evaluate things that really should only be appreciated and valued in spiritual terms, places like my National Park produced by a chaotic and random set of geographical coincidence which is the only way diversity ever truly occurs. Can’t be done by design. Be patient, we’ll be able to vote in a charismatic crazy of our own in 20 years or so. In the meantime tell your friends.
http://www.earthsharing.org.au – I could probably write more, but there’s shite loads here/there.