Geolibertarianism
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Geolibertarianism is a political and economic ideology particularly committed to tax reform that integrates libertarianism with Georgism (alternatively geoism or geonomics). It is most often associated with left-libertarianism or the radical center.
Geolibertarians hold that geographical space and raw natural resources—any assets that qualify as land by economic definition—are rivalrous goods to be considered common property or more accurately unowned, which all individuals share an equal human right to access, not capital wealth to be privatized fully and absolutely. Therefore, landholders must pay compensation according to the rental value decided by the free market, absent any improvements, to the community for the civil right of usufruct (that is, legally recognized exclusive possession with restrictions on property abuse) or otherwise fee simple title with no such restrictions. Ideally, the taxing of a site would be administered only after it has been determined that the privately captured economic rent from the land exceeds the title-holder's equal share of total land value in the jurisdiction. On this proposal, rent is collected not for the mere occupancy or use of land, as neither the community nor the state rightfully owns the commons, but rather as an objectively assessed indemnity due for the legal right to exclude others from that land. Some geolibertarians also support Pigovian taxes on pollution and severance taxes to regulate natural resource depletion, taxes with ancillary positive environmental effects on activities which negatively impact land values.
They endorse the standard right-libertarian view that each individual is naturally entitled to the fruits of his or her labor as exclusive private property, as opposed to produced goods being owned collectively by society or by the government acting to represent society, and that a person's "labor, wages, and the products of labor" should not be taxed. Also, along with non-Georgists in the libertarian movement, they advocate "full civil liberties, with no crimes unless there are victims who have been invaded." (see also Law of equal liberty)
Geolibertarians are generally influenced by the Georgist "Single Tax" movement of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, but the ideas behind it pre-date Henry George, and can be found in different forms in the writings of John Locke, the English "True Levellers" or Diggers such as Gerrard Winstanley, the French Physiocrats (particularly Quesnay and Turgot), Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Spence. Prominent geolibertarians since George have included Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and United States Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan.
See also
- Bleeding-heart libertarianism
- Citizen's dividend
- Classical economics
- Classical liberalism
- Commons
- Free-market environmentalism
- Freiwirtschaft
- Green libertarianism
- Jeffersonian democracy
- Land value tax
- Left-libertarianism
- Natural and legal rights
- Night-watchman state
- Physiocracy
- Radical centrism
- Single tax
- Tax reform / shift
