One of the key difficulties in dealing with the UK's wide range of problems from the #NHScrisis to #productivity stagnation, from the #housingcrisis to the #costoflivingcrisis, is that for the moment every crisis is refracted through the psycho-drama of internal #Tory party politics.
Until we have a less self-serving, solipsistic, entitled & corrupt generation of politicians in power we will never get to grip with what ails this country!
the idea of a country that is patterned by a form of rentier #captalism focussing its #taxation on economic rents, is interesting, but also unlikely - as you said, this potential solution has been off the agenda for over a century, precisely due to the character of the UK's governing elite!
@ChrisMayLA6 Then, as a few people once put it..."whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it" :)
It's really the opposite of #rentier capitalism, surely: it is the principle that as much of the rent of the community as possible should flow to all equally rather and not be collected by the owners of capital.
Yes, a taxation system based on economic rents would be a sort of people's rentierism, but of course a better solution would be to squeeze the possibility of the corrosive economic rents out of the system altogether....
@ChrisMayLA6 In land at least I don't see how that is possible...as Adam Smith and David Ricardo suggested.
Even if you were to have some kind of universal allotment, which is not practical if even possible, the relative rents between different locations would still arise. Collecting/distributing them is necessary to achieve "occupancy and use" standard of tenure, for instance.
For other forms of rent - occupational privilege, intellectual property, etc, it's possible to eradicate them.
I used to research/analyse IPRs & one of the most striking things was that even a 'radical' anti-statist like Robert Nozick has a section in Anarchy State & Utopia where he defends (specifically) #patents.... When I started work on IPRs I was of the all (intellectual) property is theft persuasion. but after 15 or so years, I'd either been co-opted or refined my position to regards some(!) IPRs as actually socially beneficial... likewise, for other forms of property (sometimes!)
To summarise; I concluded after reflecting & developing my position was that the key issue was the public benefit & the information conveyed;
so Trademarks seemed to (provided not abused) have significant public utility as information devices, patents (narrowly defined) also had some logic (here the framing of what is covered is key), while copyright was often (but not always) problematic - more due to its transferability than anything else; aspects rooted in moral rights were OK
I think the value of TMs (rather than dealing with passing off & other ills by tort & fraud) is that a well policed TM system can convey information in advance, rather than waiting for subsequent rectification... patents, where the public good & private benefits are carefully balanced does (in my view) offer some (as claimed) incentive to innovation & subsequent investment for commercialisation; but there must be more closely defined limits than under current (TRIPS compliant) law(s)
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Jock Coats 🔰•🏴•🌍•Ⓐ