Picture this: A huge banquet hall with many tables, enough places for all who have been invited. Now, suppose the first few guests to arrive, instead of choosing their places at the tables, lay claim to whole tables or groups of tables, telling the later arrivals, "You may not sit here unless you buy one or more places at the table from me for a vast sum of money, or else you have to give me all the food off your plate." So these first few arrivals finish the banquet overstuffed to the point of illness with lots of food left on their plates while many others go away hungry.

Ridiculous, you say? Of course it is. No such thing would ever happen at a banquet. But this is exactly what's happening at the Banquet of Life here on earth. The fortunate folks born into privileged positions get to "own" all the land and make the rest of us toil miserably to muster the big bucks being extracted from us for the privilege of just living on earth. All human activities, without exception, have one thing in common: they require a location, a place to be while you are doing it. It doesn't require a high powered economist to tell you that the value of land is its location. Real estate dealers tell you that. The value of my location is created primarily by what's happening on surrounding locations and not by anything I'm doing, therefore it rightfully belongs to the community and ought to be taken from me in the form of a tax, leaving my house, business, income, etc. untaxed, or at least less taxed. Sounds fair to me, how about you?

The idea that people can achieve greater happiness by sharing the earth instead of fighting over it has been around since the dawn of recorded history, if not indeed earlier. In modern times, the eighteenth century French medical doctor Francois Quesnay, in his book Tableau Economique, set forth a fairly systematic way by which sharing the earth could be achieved. He became the generally acknowledged leader of a French revolutionary group known as the Physiocrats. Unfortunately, Quesnay's ideas were not completely formed and were somewhat impractical. It remained for the nineteenth century American social philosopher Henry George, in his book Progress and Poverty first published in 1879, to come up with a well-formed idea that can probably be implemented within almost any reasonable form of government. Progress and Poverty is available today from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. Henry George's idea, sometimes referred to in a derogatory manner as "the Single Tax, it won't work" by detractors, has been tried in a small way in parts of Australia and in a few cities in the United States with spectacularly good results.

A city requires the ultimate level of sharing. But what should we share? Under Communism an attempt is made to share everything. Communism has ignominiously collapsed and a mere shadow if it is hanging on in a few totalitarian regimes. Under Capitalism, nothing is shared, under the presumption that The Invisible Hand postulated by Adam Smith will magically solve everything. This Invisible Hand doesn't seem to be very effective. Under Socialism, wealth is shared but the earth is not. Socialism is proving burdensome and ineffective. But what if we were to share the earth itself without trying to share the wealth we make upon the earth? What would that be called, and why don't we try it? This principle has sometimes been called Georgism in honor of Henry George, who proposed that the earth can be shared not by confiscating everyone's land, but simply by taxing it, thus allowing the landowners to retain secure places for their homes and businesses but taking the value of the land for public use, leaving the homes and businesses less taxed or perhaps entirely untaxed. The cities in which this principle has been applied to a small degree have been experiencing building booms and a decrease in urban sprawl, inner city slums, and unemployment. What if we should apply this principle to the degree Henry George envisioned? Well, I think it's worth a try.

So taxing land more heavily and buildings more lightly is great for cities, but wouldn't it be burdensome for farms, especially the smaller farms? Well, you'd think so, but actual data shows that the opposite is true. With land taxed more heavily, large corporate farms find the land too expensive to continue to own for speculation. Urban sprawl is reduced, thus allowing the farming of land closer to urban centers, which decreases transportation costs for products from farm to market and supplies from market to farm. With tax breaks on buildings and equipment, small farmers find it more economically feasible to invest more heavily in the kinds of buildings and equipment that will help them increase productivity of smaller plots. A recent speech by an observant and astute farmer named Artie Yeatman is scheduled to appear soon on the Internet, and I shall link to his speech as soon as I learn that it's up.

On September 11, 2001, a terrorist suicide mission destroyed three of our nation's finest buildings. For this, we're going to war. Every year, dozens of our buildings are "destroyed" by the fact of having never been built because of our perverted tax system that rewards land speculation interests for holding prime building locations out of action and penalizes the potential profitability of much-needed unbuilt buildings. An enemy has done unto us only a small fraction of what we're doing unto ourselves. If we're going to win this war I think we'd better start right here at home.