An Alternative to Tax
In every community there will be some shared expenses. Every government around the world seems to have settled on collecting these funds through taxes. This method has its advantages but requires violating people’s privacy about the nature and quantity of their money; information that is extremely personal which we tend not to share with anyone else except for our lovers. The surveillance required to achieve this is an incredible technological feat requiring the cooperation of the banks, producing a local currency, voluntary participation of the larger community and tight border restrictions.
I’m surprised how universal this method of revenue generation is considering its technical difficulty and leakiness. Many alternatives exist but one I’m interested in is leasing land.
Say a jurisdiction leases land on an annual, decade or century basis. Effectively no private ownership of land and everyone pays rent with this rent being the jurisdiction’s sole source of income. Every time a lease is up there is an auction on the open market and it goes to the highest bidder. There would be fines to lessees who use practices that damage or devalue the land. Buildings aren’t typically built to last one hundred years so property development would still occur. Eminent domain doesn’t have to be a thing because the government can just decide not to renew leases if they want the land back. It would also stop real estate being an investment which would then likely direct those funds into productive industries instead.
Leasing land like this requires considerable ability in cadastral surveying and keeping land lessees records. This is non-trivial and has been identified by Bjørn Lomborg as one of the twelve highest return solutions to develop impoverished countries. However, it is orders of magnitude easier and leak proof than collecting revenue from taxes. If a country implemented this alternative form of revenue generation I predict that their global influence would increase dramatically within a twenty year timeframe.
A version of this idea almost became reality. Google ‘Georgism’ if you are interested.
