A legal duty of care for the Earth
Fifteen years ago Polly Higgins abandoned her career as a barrister to campaign for an international crime of ecocide. Sadly she died of cancer on Easter Sunday at the early age of 50.
Her aim in making ecocide an international crime was to enable people like company chief executives and government ministers to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague for causing or contributing to large-scale ecosystem destruction.
In her research on the subject she discovered that the Rome Statute, which set up the ICC, had originally included the crime of ecocide, but that it had been dropped at the final drafting stage. She set out to see that this “missing” crime was reinstated alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression, and submitted a proposal to the UN Law Commission in 2010 that defined ecocide as “extensive loss, damage to or destruction of ecosystems of a given territory, such that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants has been or will be severely diminished”.
Polly’s first book, Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet (2010), won the 2010-11 People’s Book Prize and set out her full proposal, while her second book, Earth Is Our Business (2012), included a draft Ecocide Act and indictments that had been used in a mock trial in the UK Supreme Court with Michael Mansfield QC prosecuting. Read the full obituary in the Guardian.
Is a better tax system possible?
This question was posed in a review of Our Land, Our Rent, Our Jobs in Moneyweb, on a Johannesburg-based website. The reviewer, Ciaran Ryan, acknowledges the difficulty: ‘There is so much invested in the current tax system that it is hard to imagine an alternative. The cost of administering SA revenue systems is about R10 billion a year, and there are an estimated 2 000 registered tax professionals lumping another R1 billion on top of that as fees. A far greater cost is the combined hours and expense incurred by companies, executives, lawyers and the courts dealing with tax matters. That’s a stubborn oak to cut down.’
The housing crisis and land development
In his recent article “How to Fix the Housing Crisis” in Prospect Magazine, Andrew Adonis argues that the public sector must use its underdeveloped land to provide new housing which is badly needed. He concludes his article: “It is bold state action—central and local government leading development in partnership with the private and voluntary sectors, not abdicating its responsibilities to them—which will resolve the housing crisis. With its vast ownership of land, and its powers to plan, develop and finance, government can get the job done, and it has no one else to blame for inaction. It’s simple, really.”
Is economic rent sufficient to fund a modern state?
Just how substantial that is, is indicated by the fact that the Hong Kong government is able to fund major infrastructure projects, such as its underground railway and new airport, and education (free from 6-16, with subsidies for Nursery Schools, and higher education through a system of loans/grants for those who cannot afford it) without incurring the high levels of debt burdening most modern economies.
The case for taxing land
The case for taxing land has been raised in a number of articles recently. For example, The Economist leader (4th April) argued that ‘governments should impose higher taxes on the value of land’, pointing out that ‘land taxes are efficient’ and ‘difficult to dodge’. It also noted the important distinction between property taxes, such as the Council Tax, which values the building and the land on which it stands, whereas a land-value tax values the land only. The former discourages investment because it would push up the tax payable. A land-value tax does not have that negative effect, on the contrary a land-value tax ‘creates an incentive to develop unused sites’. A land-value tax is also a means of automatically recovering for the public purse expenditure on infrastructure through the uplift in land values consequent upon the investment.
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How Our Economy Really Works
– Why are so many trapped in poverty, when others are grossly well-off?
– Why are house prices continuously rising faster than inflation?
– Why do people so often find themselves in jobs that give them little sense of fulfilment?
– Why is a multi-national coffee shop franchise not actually making its money from coffee?
These questions have confronted the UK economy for decades without resolution by governments of the right or left. It is the failure of economics, the author argues.
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