(cross posted at The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice’s Blog)

I’ve come across Geoism a few times before in a few different conversations with people involved in the Geoist movement. It’s an idea that really interests me but that I disagree with.

Geoism is an idea put forward by Henry George. He argued that we should not be taxed on our wage but on our resource use - specifically land. If land is part of the commons then why should people profit from land speculation. So you tax the increase in land value thereby reducing the cost of land and making it afordable for people to own but prohibitively expencive for land speculation to happen. Land is not the only resource that is taxed however, the idea being that we are much more efficient and concious of our resource use which has obvious ecological benefits. The hope it to create a fairly localised community which is based on small businesses. There is plenty of individual incentive but also plenty of support for the community.

It’s important to note that I have completely bastardised this idea in the previous paragraph so if you do want to know more about Geoism read something else. Moreover, I’m happy to accept critisims in the comments. Most importantly though, the ideas are a lot more complex than I have said. So if you want to know more a couple of good places to start are here and here.

So, keeping in mind that I’m particularly under schooled on the topic I have the following critisms of it. Firstly it concerns me that a resource based tax then makes these resources more expensive. There is the potential to make basic food stuffs unaffordable for low income households. I think its reasonable to say that if we actually paid the full cost of our food - taking into account the environmental cost then food would quickly become unaffordable. Moreover, there is then the issue of calculating that cost and I’d suggest that we couldn’t reasonably do this if we acnoledge the high level of interconnectivity of the environment. That’s not to say we don’t need to readdress the way we get our food and the increased localisation of our foods needs to be encourgaged.

I’d also suggest that the idea places too much faith in the market. The market can be a good distributor of resources in some instances but it is generally a rather poor distributor when it comes to environmental issues. Of course it’s also a poor distributor of health and education resourse as well but this is hopefully overcome in Geoist theory through the creation of a fairly large tax pool based on this new resource tax.

The next key critism is that it is a very resource-based understanding of the world. It’s simply too dualistic to me and views the environment as an exploitable resource for human consumption. This is understandable considering it’s a 19th Centrury idea but I can’t help feeling that Geoism’s environmental credentials are perhaps overstated. Along similar lines, it’s a dated concept of land and wealth generation.

The finally issue I’d like to mention here is that of economies of scale. In short, economies of scale are desirable because they allow for a high level of specialisation which in turn means that highly specialised needs can be catered for. Disability is always the example I think of here where the needs of the disable simply can’t be accomodated on a small highly localised scale.